@RupeeClock If the English version added a Bruce Lee reference, that would be nothing compared to what I've heard of the Japanese version. Reportedly Mallow's "Psychopath" skill had a lot of Japanese pop culture references in it in the Japanese text. Whether or not Ted Woolsey would've been capable of identifying them in 1996, especially when he was surely under a time crunch, a lot of them probably would've been lost on an American audience. A Sailor Moon reference might've been recognizable but not likely stuff more obscure than that.
Sometimes putting in a better understood reference gives the audience a better FEELING for the intended reaction to the line, than was a literal translation would've done.
@slider1983 I don't think Battletoads was released on the SMS, unless there's a Game Gear port I'm aware of. To my knowledge the SMS only got a port of Battlemaniacs (for which it could be argued was likely an unfinished port for the UK/EU market, that was still finished enough to meet TecToy's quality standards). Battlemanics was the SNES sequel/reimagining, whichever you prefer.
@Gs69 The BIOS thing is the least of the issues with this joke. If these people surprise us all and actually produce a working device, they could simply ask the user to provide the BIOS ROM file themselves, putting the device makers off the hook for that one.
Asking a team that made an ice hockey game to make an adventure game doesn't sound like it would end up well. So the reverse of Cinemaware, who had a vision of games more video than game (at least a respectable thought for the '80s) but got indebited to NEC to make sports games. And ICOM Simulations, who made the MacVenture series but eventually got stuck making platformers as they got bought out by Viacom and them probably disbanded by them when its short-lived interest in games fizzled (maybe them thinking Zoop! was going to challenge Tetris for puzzle supremacy was a fitting example).
I remember there was a time when the European NES version was considering one of the rarest and most valuable NES games. I think it's been surpassed in value these days.
I can recall the struggle BBH had when he streamed the arcade game for Retro Achievements, just on how much leeching he had to do to get the cheevo for beating the high score on THE GAME'S DEFAULT high score table.
ToeJam and Earl is most interesting. Admittedly the rest were probably just going to be rather underwhelming Game Gear ports.
Fantasy Zone 1 might not have been released on cartridge, but surely has since been seen on the many x-in-1 consoles TecToy has put out in later years.
Interesting, as I've heard the game TECHNICALLY wasn't a light gun shooter. It was a game with a joystick disguised as a light gun, which reportedly was enough to matter as far as 1CC-ability is concerned. I've read it has been TAS'd but the comparative lag of joystick-based input is enough to make it not possible realtime.
I still remember the pinchies I got as a kid from playing Centipede on an actual cabinet. I don't think I'd need to imagine playing it on a touchscreen.
@Damo Games weren't downloaded through a dial-up connection. Games were encoded through an analog cable TV broadcast signal decoded by a special cartridge that subscribers would rent (or buy? but probably the former) from the cable company. I don't know how long download times compared. But with 56k dialup, you'd be lucky to download 10MB in an hour. And I'd imagine most popular had even slower modems then. I just imagine the cable signal was MUCH faster.
@Zenszulu "criminal conviction" Well, at least in the US, when children become 18, they get their record wiped of most convictions (only the most serious stuff gets left on).
I would imagine other countries hopefully have some forgiveness for children doing dumb things.
@Sebidix And physically. I have a few aftermarket SNES games. Aftermarket published games of original era games. Someone cracked how to fake the SNES lockout chip in the early 2010s. Nightmare Busters, Socks the Cat, Undercover Cops and Ghoul Patrol. UC was Retro-Bit and GP was LRG but you can bet that if Nintendo could sue them, they would've and we'd have heard about it. (the last game being Disney-owned now, another litigious company)
The Wii VC release didn't make it to the American Wii Shop.
I believe it was also renamed Smash Table Tennis, for trademark reasons.
That hardware is some very MSX1 (or SG1000 or Colecovision, nearly the same) hardware in the arcade, isn't it?
@JackGYarwood The battery is not any more removable than any other cartridge games. Funny thing is that not only is the "battery door" on the Taito-produced cartridge entirely fake (I own a complete-in-box copy of the game), but from photos I've seen on a NES/Famicom cartridge documentation website, the real battery is not even on the same side of the circuit board inside. It's worse with Famicom cartridges because nearly all of them cannot be opened without forceably prying apart the plastic trying to find the hidden seams, risking very possible damage to our valuable retro games.
@LowDefAl ebay even has a category for counterfeit instruction manuals (sorry "reproduction"). The ebay tech support rep nope'd out of that conversation as soon as they were asked if they were aware what "reproduction" means in common retrogaming parlance.
Sega Channel lasted into 1998? WOW! I mean, sure, you could still buy Genesis games in stores in 1998 but by that point there weren't many new games. Maybe just Frogger and some NFL games.
@WhensDinner That was the basis for the Dreamcast and I think the OG Xbox "Duke" controller. I just remember with the former playing once on a demo kiosk at Best Buy when it launched and it was the first time teenage me was ever barely able to operate a controller. It was as big as they say.
Quest of Ki is a game notorious for being soul-crushingly difficult to achieve a no-death completion on.
Can only imagine how much more difficult the VS. version! (the VS. games I know were NES games with subtle differences to make them more challenging than the home originals)
Sega did make a personal organizer in the '90s. (though I've heard it might've been a rebrand of another device) It had a very dull name like IR-7000 or something.
@Zenszulu It was still before the western launch of the PS1 and Saturn. That also didn't change that the Genesis was a console fairly lacking in RPGs, so surely the fans who were going to buy it were pretty starved for a new RPG anyways.
Even then, as to the new consoles, an RPG isn't usually the first time developers on a new console would want to make. Surely they'd want to try out something simpler to learn how to work with the hardware. That is in the case of Saturn. In the case of Sony, they'd have yet to prove themselves better in the game industry over the other fly-by-night hopefuls in the market. 3DO, Jaguar, CDi. Worse is how reportedly Sega turned down a PlayStation joint too because Sony had mostly been publishing third-party licensed garbage to that point. Not enough SmartBall and Equinox to overcome the Last Action Hero and Cliffhanger to convince us THEY were going to be the new leader in the console market.
@axelhander I'd like to be able to debate that with you but I haven't played PS4 yet because I haven't been able to sit through PS1 first to get to the rest of the games. (I've tried to play the SMS game on emulator, then I tried to play through the GBA port before my save got eaten. I may have impulsively pushed a button on the DON'T TURN OFF YOUR GBA screen, at most. Who'd have thought THQ could mess up an RPG. A port of an RPG. That they didn't originally create.)
It doesn't make sense to go through with releasing something just to want to see it flop.
It wasn't just the ROM prices but also the more text in the game, the more they have to pay translators. Also the more content that needs to be checked for localization QA.
I suppose $100 wasn't that absurd. Most SNES RPGs were priced in the $70-80 range (in early '90s US Dollars!). FFMQ was priced as a "budget" game at $40 in 1992, and that's about the same price as your modern full-priced "AAA" games. $70 TotK, included. Add that Genesis was a console pretty starved for RPGs, so I'd have imagined people were more willing to pay out for PSIV.
When they say "new mapper", I have to wonder if it's an FPGA or something. (something FAR more powerful than the base console) It does like nice, but using hardware too technologically removed from the original hardware does take a bit from the feel of the original game.
One stream I watch, has now called Edward Randy as just that, after too many jokes about another problem Data East had: reusing game titles. Data East made a LaserDisc game called Cliffhanger that you'll get DMCA'd if you stream/upload gameplay because the game used footage from a Lupin III move. Similarly Data East released two games called Cobra Command. A FMW game and then a side-scrolling shmup.
So much feeling of entitlement in the comments here.
The translation team has lives and they do it for free. They don't owe us anything in any sort of timely manner. I recall CyberWarriorX was also one of the few people working to just emulate the Saturn correctly, that one fanatic driving the scene forward. I do recall Saturn being in an even worse state than N64 emulation at the time. The PS1 absolutely got most of the emu dev attention of that era of consoles. I do recall the Princess Crown translation even being one of their motivators for the former.
Twelve years is long enough anyone really desperate to play could've probably learned Japanese and played this and other games. I do know you could probably even played along using Google Translator.
@sdelfin People with such discourtesy to the original patch team are likely to produce an awful result anyways, so it doesn't really matter.
I've read some Discord discussions this new patch translator has far less Japanese literacy qualifications than the original translator ("Absolutely no censorship!" claims tend to be a sign of the former) including some comparisons.
@nocdaes Really. This isn't the '90s any more where incomplete demo patches helped drive interest to the games, when it was harder to find Japanese games and check out if they are any good. These days, incomplete patches only serve the most impatient of gamers. Only they'd be satisfied with a patch that is very likely to crash horribly or simply not translate anything after an hour's worth of gameplay. And they probably wouldn't even sit through an RPG-length (I don't know how long this game is) if it was. People who want to devote time and effort to fully play a game aren't going to want their experience abruptly ended.
If people are really desperate to play the game, they can seek out the unpatched game, or watch videos online. I have met many gamers on the Internet who have learned no Japanese beyond the kana charts. I've heard of Super Robot Wars fans who bothered to learn just the kanji needed for menu navigation. If it's really that important to play a game, people can make efforts to play them regardless of a patch. Buggy and incomplete patches do not have much more value for "playing" than just playing the original.
I'm not familiar with this game, but I have read above it is fairly playable without reading.
@Dr_Fresh Slap Fight it seems at least did get a remixed mode something more resemblent of a Genesis game (rather than just a port of the 1986 original which IMO graphically looked like 1982). Also, the remixed mode had Yuzo Koshiro tunes, which was probably enough for some people.
Twin Cobra for the Genesis is definitely cheaper to buy an original, especially if loose is good enough.
@RetroGames I haven't done so many things in my life, but conning 10,000 people out of 5 million bucks isn't something I've yet put on the to-do list.
I know sometimes game console plans don't work out, but no. I recall he had quite the mouth responding to his critics.
And his big launch game (Earthworm Jim 4) was something he announced without any sort of final licensing agreement. You just, don't do that kind of thing.
You can do many good things, but it all goes once you start scamming people.
@MARl0 @Cyber_Akuma Attempting to "finish" someone else's work is just asking for the result to be garbage anyways, on either the code or text side. I'd be worried about even reusing my own code from many years ago without relearning how the games work, let alone try to figure out someone else's. I mean, reprogramming a game is already a matter of trying to figure out how the original game programmer's brain work. It's like a game of telephone when you add other coders into the mix.
And on the translation side is much the same, the more people you have writing the text, the sloppier it's going to be. Aside from the original writer, different people are going to have different ideas of how the same things should be translated. There's probably a number of professional translations where you can it had different writers (inconsistent tone or even worse, things like the US version of Lufia II where even a few names were inconsistent between the dialogue and menus).
@slider1983 I'm fairly certain Virtua Racing on the Genesis was the only Sega cartridge to use a custom video chip.
It's been said by SMS Power forum that it's likely Codemaster tested/RE'd their games on a late model PAL SMS without realizing they were using a video mode only in certain consoles.
Checking GameFAQs, Codemasters' SMS games were all released in 1993! EXTREMELY late to enter that market! That would make sense.
I do believe limited emulated support would be because Codemasters were the only ones that mode. I'm going to guess it probably wasn't a documented feature, thus why it didn't get spread. These were the Game Genie people, breaking stuff is kind of what they did.
@bluemage1989 How are you going to play 3DS and Wii U eShop games if you haven't previously purchased them? Should every person that wants to play Dinosaur Peak being expected to pay $1,500 to experience it?
@N64-ROX I could go to a library and check out a book and make copies too. I would take a long time and I wouldn't do it but I could. Why hasn't the book industry shut down public libraries? (not like the book industry doesn't have its own evils: college textbooks are expensive because Wiley et all price them based on how much they think your country can afford to pay for them and would like that you not support gray market importers)
@slider1983 I don't know what is really different about Codemasters games other than using a video resolution only supported by certain PAL SMS video chips. Making them not even with all PAL SMS consoles at least.
@pomegran Simulate. Emulate. Potato. It's a different form of emulation. It's games that aren't running on the same (or even alike) hardware chips it was designed for, therefore it can't not be some form of emulation. Or whatever term you want to use for it.
The NES DuckTales producer Darlene Waddington, I believe her name was, revealed many years ago that there was a computer educational game that Disney had to ask the developer to alter, where Donald got electrocuted.
The GBA port of Magical Quest 3 I believe didn't arrive until 2005, which would explain how it remained in obscurity. That was fairly late in the GBA lifespan. I think the fan translation of the SNES version was released in like 2002, and I recall it was pretty distinctly written by a UK translator (might be a surprise for such a famous "American" IP).
Also, I recall trying the Hard difficulty in Magical Quest once, and I recall barely finishing stage 1. I remember on Hard the game definitely channeled Mega Man energy in its difficulty.
@JackGYarwood A Genesis port of The Magical Quest was announced in early 1994 (I'm quite positive the magazine previews I read were 1994, not a more timely 1992/1993). I can only imagine it went unreleased because it was too close to the the sequel The Great Circus Mystery (for which a port was released).
Early 1993 was when Capcom had entered the Sega publishing scene (or at least when their licensee status was publicly revealed), and of course Street Fighter II: Champion Edition HAD to be its big entry game.
SG-1000 at least makes sense to emulate because it is practically identical in hardware components to the MSX1 (legality of software distribution is another matter). SG-1000 doesn't utilize a BIOS so there is nothing really that Sega could copyright claim on, assuming the user is left to the matter of obtaining the game ROMs.
@Hexapus "Whatever happened to the SNES port?" I WAS JUST DESTINED TO DIE. I wonder how accurate it will be? Funny to learn that if the arcade machine is set to max (level 8) difficulty, one boss is apparently literally impossible to defeat without credit-feeding to eventually beat it with the i-frames on each new life.
@RejectedAng3L Not released in America despite those had to have been in the works as their plan to rework the hardware into a home computer.
They had to have thought was going to be a better entry going into the 1984 US gaming market.
That and also cartridge hardware very quickly caught up to much of the FDS' advantages (aside from cheaper game prices, which was understandably a very divisive point for game publishers).
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Re: Saturn Cult Classic Princess Crown Is Getting An Uncensored Translation
@RupeeClock If the English version added a Bruce Lee reference, that would be nothing compared to what I've heard of the Japanese version.
Reportedly Mallow's "Psychopath" skill had a lot of Japanese pop culture references in it in the Japanese text. Whether or not Ted Woolsey would've been capable of identifying them in 1996, especially when he was surely under a time crunch, a lot of them probably would've been lost on an American audience. A Sailor Moon reference might've been recognizable but not likely stuff more obscure than that.
Sometimes putting in a better understood reference gives the audience a better FEELING for the intended reaction to the line, than was a literal translation would've done.
Re: Someone Compared All The Versions Of Battletoads So You Don't Have To
@slider1983 I don't think Battletoads was released on the SMS, unless there's a Game Gear port I'm aware of.
To my knowledge the SMS only got a port of Battlemaniacs (for which it could be argued was likely an unfinished port for the UK/EU market, that was still finished enough to meet TecToy's quality standards). Battlemanics was the SNES sequel/reimagining, whichever you prefer.
Re: If Nothing Else, SuperSega's Latest "Review" Should Convince You To Keep Your Wallet Shut
@Gs69 The BIOS thing is the least of the issues with this joke. If these people surprise us all and actually produce a working device, they could simply ask the user to provide the BIOS ROM file themselves, putting the device makers off the hook for that one.
Re: Feature: The Story Of The Indiana Jones Adventure We Never Got To Play, And The Comic It Inspired
Asking a team that made an ice hockey game to make an adventure game doesn't sound like it would end up well.
So the reverse of Cinemaware, who had a vision of games more video than game (at least a respectable thought for the '80s) but got indebited to NEC to make sports games.
And ICOM Simulations, who made the MacVenture series but eventually got stuck making platformers as they got bought out by Viacom and them probably disbanded by them when its short-lived interest in games fizzled (maybe them thinking Zoop! was going to challenge Tetris for puzzle supremacy was a fitting example).
Re: Accusations Of AI Art Deflate Archer Maclean's DropZone 40th Anniversary Announcement
@axelhander What else did they use the AI to generate?
It's reasonable to expect that if they're too cheap to hire a real artist, they're probably not going to stop at "a freaking title card".
"An artist was not shortchanged here." Yes there was, it's just not an identifiable person. If they didn't use AI then SOMEBODY would've been hired.
Re: We're Getting A New Magic Knight Game Next Year To Mark The Character's 40th Anniversary
I'm probably not the only one who was thinking Rayearth, but that's only approaching its 30th anniversary, isn't it?
Re: Gallery: Unboxing Retro-Bit's Rod Land Reissues For NES And Game Boy
I remember there was a time when the European NES version was considering one of the rarest and most valuable NES games. I think it's been surpassed in value these days.
Re: Irem Hit Vigilante Is Getting A Fan-Made Genesis Port
I can recall the struggle BBH had when he streamed the arcade game for Retro Achievements, just on how much leeching he had to do to get the cheevo for beating the high score on THE GAME'S DEFAULT high score table.
Re: Master System Versions Of Power Rangers, Toe Jam & Earl And Beavis & Butthead All Were All Canned
ToeJam and Earl is most interesting.
Admittedly the rest were probably just going to be rather underwhelming Game Gear ports.
Fantasy Zone 1 might not have been released on cartridge, but surely has since been seen on the many x-in-1 consoles TecToy has put out in later years.
Re: Midway Coin-Op 'T2: Judgment Day' Is Coming To Analogue Pocket, With Gun4IR Support
Interesting, as I've heard the game TECHNICALLY wasn't a light gun shooter.
It was a game with a joystick disguised as a light gun, which reportedly was enough to matter as far as 1CC-ability is concerned.
I've read it has been TAS'd but the comparative lag of joystick-based input is enough to make it not possible realtime.
Re: Review: ModRetro Chromatic Is So Close To The Real Thing You'd Think Nintendo Made It
Six hours isn't as long of a battery life as the original GBC, and I've seen how expensive disposable batteries are these days. It's kind of shocking.
Re: "Still Haven't Forgiven Atari For This" - Remembering The Ill-Fated Gameband Smartwatch
I still remember the pinchies I got as a kid from playing Centipede on an actual cabinet. I don't think I'd need to imagine playing it on a touchscreen.
Re: Two Lost Sega Channel Games Have Been Found And Preserved
@Damo Games weren't downloaded through a dial-up connection. Games were encoded through an analog cable TV broadcast signal decoded by a special cartridge that subscribers would rent (or buy? but probably the former) from the cable company.
I don't know how long download times compared. But with 56k dialup, you'd be lucky to download 10MB in an hour. And I'd imagine most popular had even slower modems then.
I just imagine the cable signal was MUCH faster.
Re: Remember When Dragon Quest III's Launch Triggered Arrests In Japan?
@Zenszulu "criminal conviction" Well, at least in the US, when children become 18, they get their record wiped of most convictions (only the most serious stuff gets left on).
I would imagine other countries hopefully have some forgiveness for children doing dumb things.
Re: Etsy Accuses Game Boy Publisher Of Piracy For Selling Its Own Games
@Sebidix And physically. I have a few aftermarket SNES games. Aftermarket published games of original era games. Someone cracked how to fake the SNES lockout chip in the early 2010s.
Nightmare Busters, Socks the Cat, Undercover Cops and Ghoul Patrol.
UC was Retro-Bit and GP was LRG but you can bet that if Nintendo could sue them, they would've and we'd have heard about it. (the last game being Disney-owned now, another litigious company)
Re: You Can Now Rediscover A Forgotten Piece Of PlayStation History, Thanks To Antstream Arcade
"Relatively inexpensive". A hobbyist development console that could've been yours for just the cost of five retail consoles, as I recall!
Re: Another Konami Arcade Classic Is Coming To PS4 & Nintendo Switch
The Wii VC release didn't make it to the American Wii Shop.
I believe it was also renamed Smash Table Tennis, for trademark reasons.
That hardware is some very MSX1 (or SG1000 or Colecovision, nearly the same) hardware in the arcade, isn't it?
Re: One Of The Worst Famicom Action RPGs Has Just Got A Fanmade Overhaul
@JackGYarwood The battery is not any more removable than any other cartridge games. Funny thing is that not only is the "battery door" on the Taito-produced cartridge entirely fake (I own a complete-in-box copy of the game), but from photos I've seen on a NES/Famicom cartridge documentation website, the real battery is not even on the same side of the circuit board inside.
It's worse with Famicom cartridges because nearly all of them cannot be opened without forceably prying apart the plastic trying to find the hidden seams, risking very possible damage to our valuable retro games.
Re: Etsy Accuses Game Boy Publisher Of Piracy For Selling Its Own Games
@LowDefAl ebay even has a category for counterfeit instruction manuals (sorry "reproduction"). The ebay tech support rep nope'd out of that conversation as soon as they were asked if they were aware what "reproduction" means in common retrogaming parlance.
Re: Revisit Sega's Groundbreaking Sega Channel Service With These Newly-Preserved Videos
Sega Channel lasted into 1998? WOW!
I mean, sure, you could still buy Genesis games in stores in 1998 but by that point there weren't many new games.
Maybe just Frogger and some NFL games.
Re: To Celebrate 30 Years Of Saturn, Emulator Yaba Sanshiro Is Coming To Windows PCs
@WhensDinner That was the basis for the Dreamcast and I think the OG Xbox "Duke" controller.
I just remember with the former playing once on a demo kiosk at Best Buy when it launched and it was the first time teenage me was ever barely able to operate a controller. It was as big as they say.
Re: Random: This $13,000 Set Of Scales Plays King Of Fighters '98
But is $13k more expensive than an AES and a copy of the game?
I don't know the NeoGeo market these days, so I have no idea just how crazy of a comparison that is.
Re: Tower Of Druaga Prequel 'VS. The Quest Of Ki' Is Making The Journey To Switch & PS4
Quest of Ki is a game notorious for being soul-crushingly difficult to achieve a no-death completion on.
Can only imagine how much more difficult the VS. version!
(the VS. games I know were NES games with subtle differences to make them more challenging than the home originals)
Re: Sega Just Announced New Hardware, But Don't Get Too Excited – It's Not Dreamcast 2
Sega did make a personal organizer in the '90s. (though I've heard it might've been a rebrand of another device)
It had a very dull name like IR-7000 or something.
I think I recall seeing one kid who had one then.
Re: Sega Wanted Phantasy Star IV To Flop In The West, Hence The Sky-High $100 Price
@Zenszulu It was still before the western launch of the PS1 and Saturn.
That also didn't change that the Genesis was a console fairly lacking in RPGs, so surely the fans who were going to buy it were pretty starved for a new RPG anyways.
Even then, as to the new consoles, an RPG isn't usually the first time developers on a new console would want to make.
Surely they'd want to try out something simpler to learn how to work with the hardware.
That is in the case of Saturn.
In the case of Sony, they'd have yet to prove themselves better in the game industry over the other fly-by-night hopefuls in the market. 3DO, Jaguar, CDi.
Worse is how reportedly Sega turned down a PlayStation joint too because Sony had mostly been publishing third-party licensed garbage to that point. Not enough SmartBall and Equinox to overcome the Last Action Hero and Cliffhanger to convince us THEY were going to be the new leader in the console market.
Re: Sega Wanted Phantasy Star IV To Flop In The West, Hence The Sky-High $100 Price
@axelhander I'd like to be able to debate that with you but I haven't played PS4 yet because I haven't been able to sit through PS1 first to get to the rest of the games.
(I've tried to play the SMS game on emulator, then I tried to play through the GBA port before my save got eaten. I may have impulsively pushed a button on the DON'T TURN OFF YOUR GBA screen, at most. Who'd have thought THQ could mess up an RPG. A port of an RPG. That they didn't originally create.)
Re: Sega Wanted Phantasy Star IV To Flop In The West, Hence The Sky-High $100 Price
That sounds a little off.
It doesn't make sense to go through with releasing something just to want to see it flop.
It wasn't just the ROM prices but also the more text in the game, the more they have to pay translators. Also the more content that needs to be checked for localization QA.
I suppose $100 wasn't that absurd. Most SNES RPGs were priced in the $70-80 range (in early '90s US Dollars!). FFMQ was priced as a "budget" game at $40 in 1992, and that's about the same price as your modern full-priced "AAA" games. $70 TotK, included.
Add that Genesis was a console pretty starved for RPGs, so I'd have imagined people were more willing to pay out for PSIV.
Re: Remember When A Sega Genesis Got Fused With A Digital Camera? Yep, We'd Forgotten About It, Too
@X68000 The D button is my favorite button on a Genesis controller as well.
I think the button labels are Comic Sans as well.
Re: We Can't Quite Believe That Former Dawn Is Running On Real NES Hardware
When they say "new mapper", I have to wonder if it's an FPGA or something. (something FAR more powerful than the base console)
It does like nice, but using hardware too technologically removed from the original hardware does take a bit from the feel of the original game.
Re: Review: Data East Arcade 2 (Evercade) - A Weird And Wonderful Selection Of Coin-Ops
One stream I watch, has now called Edward Randy as just that, after too many jokes about another problem Data East had: reusing game titles.
Data East made a LaserDisc game called Cliffhanger that you'll get DMCA'd if you stream/upload gameplay because the game used footage from a Lupin III move.
Similarly Data East released two games called Cobra Command. A FMW game and then a side-scrolling shmup.
Re: "Ours Will Be The Translation Worth Playing" - Team Behind Decade-Old Princess Crown Localisation Speak Out
So much feeling of entitlement in the comments here.
The translation team has lives and they do it for free. They don't owe us anything in any sort of timely manner.
I recall CyberWarriorX was also one of the few people working to just emulate the Saturn correctly, that one fanatic driving the scene forward. I do recall Saturn being in an even worse state than N64 emulation at the time. The PS1 absolutely got most of the emu dev attention of that era of consoles. I do recall the Princess Crown translation even being one of their motivators for the former.
Twelve years is long enough anyone really desperate to play could've probably learned Japanese and played this and other games.
I do know you could probably even played along using Google Translator.
Re: There's Some Drama Surrounding The New Princess Crown English Patch
@sdelfin People with such discourtesy to the original patch team are likely to produce an awful result anyways, so it doesn't really matter.
I've read some Discord discussions this new patch translator has far less Japanese literacy qualifications than the original translator ("Absolutely no censorship!" claims tend to be a sign of the former) including some comparisons.
Re: There's Some Drama Surrounding The New Princess Crown English Patch
@nocdaes Really. This isn't the '90s any more where incomplete demo patches helped drive interest to the games, when it was harder to find Japanese games and check out if they are any good.
These days, incomplete patches only serve the most impatient of gamers. Only they'd be satisfied with a patch that is very likely to crash horribly or simply not translate anything after an hour's worth of gameplay. And they probably wouldn't even sit through an RPG-length (I don't know how long this game is) if it was.
People who want to devote time and effort to fully play a game aren't going to want their experience abruptly ended.
If people are really desperate to play the game, they can seek out the unpatched game, or watch videos online.
I have met many gamers on the Internet who have learned no Japanese beyond the kana charts. I've heard of Super Robot Wars fans who bothered to learn just the kanji needed for menu navigation.
If it's really that important to play a game, people can make efforts to play them regardless of a patch.
Buggy and incomplete patches do not have much more value for "playing" than just playing the original.
I'm not familiar with this game, but I have read above it is fairly playable without reading.
Re: Three More Sought-After Toaplan Shmups Are Resurrected On Genesis / Mega Drive At Bargain Prices
@Dr_Fresh Slap Fight it seems at least did get a remixed mode something more resemblent of a Genesis game (rather than just a port of the 1986 original which IMO graphically looked like 1982). Also, the remixed mode had Yuzo Koshiro tunes, which was probably enough for some people.
Twin Cobra for the Genesis is definitely cheaper to buy an original, especially if loose is good enough.
Re: After The Epic Failure Of The Intellivision Amico, Tommy Tallarico's New Goal Is Becoming A Backgammon Legend
@RetroGames I haven't done so many things in my life, but conning 10,000 people out of 5 million bucks isn't something I've yet put on the to-do list.
I know sometimes game console plans don't work out, but no. I recall he had quite the mouth responding to his critics.
And his big launch game (Earthworm Jim 4) was something he announced without any sort of final licensing agreement. You just, don't do that kind of thing.
You can do many good things, but it all goes once you start scamming people.
Re: "The Project Is A Complete Scam" - The Internet Isn't Convinced By The SuperSega FPGA Console
@LowDefAl Maybe Sega themselves would like to see where this joke is going first?
Let it stew a bit then crush them when it's run its course.
Re: There's Some Drama Surrounding The New Princess Crown English Patch
@MARl0 @Cyber_Akuma Attempting to "finish" someone else's work is just asking for the result to be garbage anyways, on either the code or text side.
I'd be worried about even reusing my own code from many years ago without relearning how the games work, let alone try to figure out someone else's.
I mean, reprogramming a game is already a matter of trying to figure out how the original game programmer's brain work. It's like a game of telephone when you add other coders into the mix.
And on the translation side is much the same, the more people you have writing the text, the sloppier it's going to be. Aside from the original writer, different people are going to have different ideas of how the same things should be translated.
There's probably a number of professional translations where you can it had different writers (inconsistent tone or even worse, things like the US version of Lufia II where even a few names were inconsistent between the dialogue and menus).
Re: SuperSega FPGA Console Shown Running Master System, Genesis And Saturn Games
@slider1983 I'm fairly certain Virtua Racing on the Genesis was the only Sega cartridge to use a custom video chip.
It's been said by SMS Power forum that it's likely Codemaster tested/RE'd their games on a late model PAL SMS without realizing they were using a video mode only in certain consoles.
Checking GameFAQs, Codemasters' SMS games were all released in 1993! EXTREMELY late to enter that market! That would make sense.
I do believe limited emulated support would be because Codemasters were the only ones that mode. I'm going to guess it probably wasn't a documented feature, thus why it didn't get spread. These were the Game Genie people, breaking stuff is kind of what they did.
Re: The US Copyright Office Doesn't Want To Give You Access To Video Game History
@bluemage1989 How are you going to play 3DS and Wii U eShop games if you haven't previously purchased them?
Should every person that wants to play Dinosaur Peak being expected to pay $1,500 to experience it?
Re: The US Copyright Office Doesn't Want To Give You Access To Video Game History
@N64-ROX I could go to a library and check out a book and make copies too.
I would take a long time and I wouldn't do it but I could. Why hasn't the book industry shut down public libraries?
(not like the book industry doesn't have its own evils: college textbooks are expensive because Wiley et all price them based on how much they think your country can afford to pay for them and would like that you not support gray market importers)
Re: SuperSega FPGA Console Shown Running Master System, Genesis And Saturn Games
@slider1983 I don't know what is really different about Codemasters games other than using a video resolution only supported by certain PAL SMS video chips. Making them not even with all PAL SMS consoles at least.
Re: SuperSega FPGA Console Shown Running Master System, Genesis And Saturn Games
@pomegran Simulate. Emulate. Potato.
It's a different form of emulation.
It's games that aren't running on the same (or even alike) hardware chips it was designed for, therefore it can't not be some form of emulation. Or whatever term you want to use for it.
Re: Random: That Time Sega Got Donald Duck In Trouble With Disney For Animal Cruelty
The NES DuckTales producer Darlene Waddington, I believe her name was, revealed many years ago that there was a computer educational game that Disney had to ask the developer to alter, where Donald got electrocuted.
Re: The Making Of: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, Capcom's SNES Classic
The GBA port of Magical Quest 3 I believe didn't arrive until 2005, which would explain how it remained in obscurity. That was fairly late in the GBA lifespan.
I think the fan translation of the SNES version was released in like 2002, and I recall it was pretty distinctly written by a UK translator (might be a surprise for such a famous "American" IP).
Also, I recall trying the Hard difficulty in Magical Quest once, and I recall barely finishing stage 1.
I remember on Hard the game definitely channeled Mega Man energy in its difficulty.
Re: The Making Of: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, Capcom's SNES Classic
@JackGYarwood A Genesis port of The Magical Quest was announced in early 1994 (I'm quite positive the magazine previews I read were 1994, not a more timely 1992/1993). I can only imagine it went unreleased because it was too close to the the sequel The Great Circus Mystery (for which a port was released).
Early 1993 was when Capcom had entered the Sega publishing scene (or at least when their licensee status was publicly revealed), and of course Street Fighter II: Champion Edition HAD to be its big entry game.
Re: Evercade Reveals New Toaplan Arcade 4 Collection Featuring Six Classic Titles
I assume Pipi and Bibi has had the gratuitous and unnecessary sexually explicit cutscenes removed?
(I'm sure that's the game I'm thinking of.)
Re: The MSX0 May Be Getting Emulation Support For The Nintendo Famicom, PC Engine, And More
I've heard that loading cartridge ROMs through disk images is at least something period-accurate software pirates did.
Re: The MSX0 May Be Getting Emulation Support For The Nintendo Famicom, PC Engine, And More
SG-1000 at least makes sense to emulate because it is practically identical in hardware components to the MSX1 (legality of software distribution is another matter).
SG-1000 doesn't utilize a BIOS so there is nothing really that Sega could copyright claim on, assuming the user is left to the matter of obtaining the game ROMs.
Re: Neo Geo Classic Magician Lord Gets Tentative Fan Port To NEC SuperGrafx
@Hexapus "Whatever happened to the SNES port?" I WAS JUST DESTINED TO DIE.
I wonder how accurate it will be?
Funny to learn that if the arcade machine is set to max (level 8) difficulty, one boss is apparently literally impossible to defeat without credit-feeding to eventually beat it with the i-frames on each new life.
Re: "The Wrong Console Won" - Dreamcast Is Getting Its Own Rave Event "To Correct The Record"
@RejectedAng3L Not released in America despite those had to have been in the works as their plan to rework the hardware into a home computer.
They had to have thought was going to be a better entry going into the 1984 US gaming market.
That and also cartridge hardware very quickly caught up to much of the FDS' advantages (aside from cheaper game prices, which was understandably a very divisive point for game publishers).