KingMike

Double Dragon II lacking the NES version sounds like a sore point for the Technos unit.
I hear that version specifically was like the definitive DD experience.
It sounds like the arcade wasn't as good, and the PCE-CD version at least had some wonderfully awful cutscenes to watch.

The title opinion was definitely from something not thinking very rationally.
Sega was struggling against Nintendo and Sony for the latter part of the '90s. For various reasons of Sega's doing.
Did the author think they could win making Microsoft's seemingly infinite cash another adversary? (despite that Microsoft I recall did have some involvement in the DC)

@nocdaes Analog is priced catering towards an enthusiast market who knows what they're doing with old games.

Nintendo or Sega releasing a console that plays thirty year old cartridges would have to be ready for a flood of questions from people who don't know the maintenance issues.
It's why the Atari Flashback 2 released in like 2005 was designed to be modded to add a cartridge port to play 2600 carts. It was presumed one who had the technical knowledge to add a cartridge slot would know to deal with the old tech issues on their own (ie, they don't need to be told hold to clean their games). Users who don't would only be playing it stock with the onboard games.

@solarwolf07 A game can't be "based on the engine of" another game that wouldn't exist for another three years. That just doesn't make any logical sense.
Also, what about Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver? "Based on the engine of BW" is acting as if those weren't made in the meantime.

They're giving us all of that for under 250 bucks?

(I don't know how many people here will follow where I'm going with this?)

Do they mean Diamond and Pearl?
How can a game believed to have been developed in 2007 believed to have been developed on the source code from a 2010 game?

It has to have been a decade ago I've seen someone do a NES tech demo of "the Axelay effect". Possibly there was even a ROM release. Solely a graphics demo, no actual gameplay.

Sadly I'm not expecting we'll ever see a rerelease of Smart Ball or its mostly- if not fully- completed sequel (credits music crashing bug aside) that went unreleased almost certainly due to its proximity to the PlayStation launch.

Its one thing to leak out unreleased games.

But doxxing the developers is not okay. The leaker should've taken the time to scrub that information.

The New Elves have been updated to look more hideous than they ever have!

@BulkSlash Block 4-3 might've been completely forgettable gameplay-wise, but it was either Displaced Gamers or (more likely) Retro Game Mechanics who managed to do an entire video explaining just how its visuals were executed.

I remember when bsnes was in development, byuu held out on added savestates for a long time because he wasn't sure how to add them in a way that wouldn't jeopardize accuracy.

I do recall how very early emulators didn't keep a copy of cartridge RAM ("the save file") synced to the savestate and that broke some games (such as Torkeo's Mysterious Dungeon which constantly updated the save data so you couldn't savescum out of bad situations).

@Coolmusic I suppose the stranger characters were the dolphin or Rabio and Lepus (two rabbits from an earlier arcade horizontal shooter titled after them, I can only imagine my local rollerskating rink as a child was one of the few places to get the US version of that, Rabbit Punch).

@Daniel36 The market was big enough that many companies wanted in on the Famicom market.
Vic Tokai is/was a Japanese cable TV provider that got into international video game distribution for awhile.
Kemco is a subsidiary of a chemical company Kotobuki System.

How does "silence" get a sequel?

I feel like that Silence II might have been the track seen in a video I watched many years ago of some Japanese player's recording of an original broadcast, and they managed to make just the most spectacular F-Zero car crash I've seen!

Wouldn't be the only Yuji Horii game with secret NSFW content.
I recall reading the MSX port of Dragon Quest II also had a dirty secret.

Streamer LordBBH has spent the last couple years playing every "obscure" arcade game he can in rough chronological order, starting with 1980 and is now up to 1985 games. Or has series "Push to Reject" is, the motto is something like "the games that failed to make an impact on the industry".

He's stated that couple failed companies named Orca and Crux (from like 1982 to 1984) were basically Toaplan predecessors.

So this is sort of the third translation of the game.
There is an Enix America translation beta ROM out there (before the game was licensed to Nintendo) which had a pretty rough translation about in line with other Enix localizations.

@Whatareyouonabout Also, this man is producing a commodity for a global corporation. He should know what he's getting into.
The corporation has decided they have a choice between crotch skin or a preferable rating. The corporation has chosen the rating.

Nobody is stopping these people from drawing all the crotch skin they want. They just can't sell it in this manner. These people want to have their cake and eat it too, and upset they can't.
If they really don't like it that much, they can make their own companies and do whatever they want. Many game companies have been formed by employees who decided they weren't happy with their former employer.

Lots of video games get affected by ratings from different rating systems across the world.
It's not just America, man. I'm more upset that a significant cutscene in Final Fantasy VI Advance got censored because of CERO. The fourth wall is broken the first time Celes appears when now the characters all look they're just actors rehearsing the lines. They can't animate anything they're saying because Celes getting punched unconscious was considered too violent for an "A" rating.

So, basically if America censors sex, Japan censors violence. Pretty sure there's been more than this example.
And rip Pokemon game corner because Europe and Australia censor fake gambling.
Every region (or at least their ratings boards) have their own thing they're worried about.

@gcunit Emulating a game doesn't change its value any more than buying a used copy or borrowing a friend's. Or rentals, if that is still an option anymore. In any of those situations, you are playing a game without paying Nintendo.

@Bakamoichigei When probably at least 15 different companies needed to put out a soccer game for World Cup '94, and whoever Mr. Zico is, his game was such the loser that even when it was new, it got discounted so cheap in stores that an unlicensed company bought them up in bulk to hack up into a porn game (despite Nintendo having considered that possibility when they designed the SFC cartridges).

@jamess That extra skin doesn't make any meaningful change to the character unless you play Dragon Quest III to get horny. In which case there's probably better choices for that satiation.

I don't see why it's necessary. It's already pretty T-rated to begin with?
Well, I at least know the GBC port was rated T, I'm guessing for having "Hell" enemies. (though the E10+ rating didn't exist at that time, so I don't know if "mild four letter words" are considered E10+ or T material)

Is this the end of the "puff puff"s too?

I do agree though that if you REALLY need to see just a bit more female skin, Dragon Quest III probably isn't the place you should be looking.

@Deuteros Another thing surprising about the Collection of Mana is that, for Final Fantasy Adventure (the original Mana game for the Game Boy), it has a few color palette options. I noticed one of them that would seem rather unfitting to the game for most people, but I recognized as the default Super Game Boy palette for third-party games. That made me wonder if M2 had any plans to support editing the palette SGB-style. That doesn't seem to be an available feature but M2 is probably the retro port developer most likely to do such a thing.

@Razieluigi Feels crazy to hear Virtual Boy hardware has become so expensive, to one who can remember seeing Target trying to get rid of unsold consoles for $30 in 1997.
Probably about as shocking to learn Best Buy had to go as low as $6 at some point trying to sell off EarthBounds. And I'm angry to learn I somehow missed that because EB was one of my favorite rental games as kid. How excited I'd have been as a teen to have finally owned an original copy with the book too!

@Deuteros Trials of Mana on Switch: that's two separate versions you're thinking of.
Collection of Mana is an emulation of the original games, with some bonus features such as additional "music player" ROMs.
The 3D remake was a separate game released like half a year after the international release of the collection.

@Bakamoichigei I've heard of them just throwing OG Famicoms in the trash. If they're basically garbage to the store, they should dump 'em on ebay to ship internationally for a deal. I'm sure they'd have enough foreigners willing to buy them up.

@Daniel36 Bio Warrior Dan was made by Atlus (possibly before they were an established game company), so while I recall it had some rough spots such as control, it's not too bad.
Cool idea though.
Also the music is by the same composer as the Megami Tensei games at least through the Saturn, so it sure has a similar sound to the original MT Famicom game (which released only a little over a week earlier).

Isn't Saiyuki World 1 just literally one of the multiple reskinned ports of Wonder Boy in Monster Land, not just "based on"?

I've heard Saiyuki World 2 (Whomp 'em!) is not considered a culturally sensitive game by modern standards. I wonder what is the issue and how that will be handled. I know we can probably guess by the fact it had a Native American player character.

@Deuteros But Trials of Mana IS "Secret of Mana 2". It might not be on actual SNES hardware but it is official.
And I would certainly support it when a company decided to at all give us a localization that was 24 years overdue when it launched.

@-wc- I've read in magazines of the time it was specifically for Pocket Printer support.
It was 1998 when the SGB2 and the Printer were released, and it sounds like Sega/Atlus' Print Club was trendy enough in Japanese arcades at the time that Nintendo would to push its own little knockoff.

I wonder why they didn't chose a new name.
I get that was the originally intended name, but now that the TurboCD game exists, it would be nice to have a distinguishing title. I don't like when newly-released games do that.

@UK_Kev The did publish some SNES games but I'm guessing they didn't do as much with Nintendo as Nintendo was a LOT more controlling in that era. Though it wasn't a whole lot, mostly sports ports, Rampart and B.O.B. are the ones I remember. Also the Strike series but the SNES ports came later.
Also, it has since been revealed in the years since, they were able to get a preferential license from Sega because EA had already cracked Sega's protection on the Genesis and was like "we don't really need a license but if you give us a good deal, we'll play along with your rules and not spoil it to everyone else". They couldn't do that with Nintendo.

@-wc- Was that getting your hopes of playing the PAL version of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six in the best quality you've ever seen?

@NinChocolate So, don't help EA generate a return on their investment is the way to go.

Electronic Arts is the company who weaseled their way into a preferential license from Sega so they could self-manufacture a version of Populous for the Genesis they knew was incompatible with a number of consoles so they stuck a warning sticker on the box.
(It's because the game lacked a Sega-mandated header which TMSS consoles checked to see if the cartridge was licensed. Something Sega fixed when they published the Japanese version.)
EA, pulling scummy moves since at least 1991.

NUON was always very mysterious. When it was first announced as "Project X" in game magazines around 1997, it seemed like another vapor-console from a company we hadn't heard of.

It's too bad Sunsoft didn't think Gimmick! would sell in America.
It would have been about the same time the first Kirby game was released in the US.
Maybe they just needed to make Yumetarou more angry and '90s American!

Didn't help that, I think it was this but I could be mistaking for Ufouria, that one (or more?) of the EGM editors rated the game something like a 4/10 and said it was "too easy".
An opinion markedly different than what most others have said.
Do wonder if they had played or not (I mean, in the sense, I have seen other game reviews before that had sus gameplay statements that make you legitimately wonder if they had played? Not just because they disagree.)

@JackGYarwood In the case of Fester's Quest, it has become known that the North American version was very likely rushed to market while the European version was given more time for some polishing changes.
Being allowed to shoot through walls was change that alone probably improved the playability of the EU version but also the damage tables were adjusted to make enemies less bullet-spongey.
You know it's been when reportedly even the instruction manual recommended a turbo controller.

Funny that they pound them on shoddy manufacturing over software piracy. But I suppose that is an easier to stop them. I don't know how it works in Italy but I would guess copyright violation would be up to the individual IP owners to prosecute.

@Bonggon5 Well, the crypto and NFT markets have always been shady, so that's not much new.

I'd be wary of anything that makes it this easy to make games for older consoles.
It's going to have to be EXTREMELY limited.

@Scollurio Yes, Klik 'n Play. That sort of thing is probably fun to see what you can make within the software limitations but I wouldn't expect to rival the professional games. Well... maybe of the really crappy ones you could do better than...

@RetroGames The last percent is always the toughest. You have the most to check, and even then no game has ever been released that was completely bug-free.
Not to mention having the necessary hardware/software to compile such old code. I had many years ago made a couple debug assistance mods to an open-source Game Boy emulator. Years later, I wanted to fix up some of the glaring flaws in my code but multiple technical issues prevented being able to compile the code again. (Not just the compiler but also that the emulator had been written for an outdated version of DirectX as well. I couldn't get it all together so I had to leave it broken.)

@Damo "Ryu and Ken, arguably the two 'main' characters in the game." They WERE the only two playable characters in Street Fighter 1. As I understand, Ryu was the protagonist and Ken only appeared as the player 2 character for Vs. mode.
Sagat was also the only boss to not get their name swapped because he was the final opponent of the original and the only other returning character.

I remember the control was a little rough, but it was a very cool idea. It is Atlus game, so it's decent. The soundtrack sounds very Megami Tensei like as it is actually the same composer as the original MT game. (and originally released only a little over a week apart)

"Don't forget that Sega is pronounced 'SEYGA'"
I know the chat for Australian streamer Macaw45 is assumed whenever he takes about "SEE-GA". (which isn't nearly as often as Amiga barbarian/alien games and often-lewd Japanese computer games)

But was that pronunciation just a AU/NZ thing? I imagine stemming back to when Sega licensed their products, going back to the SC-3000 to local companies who did their own marketing.

I do know the Genesis version is somewhat known for sudden cartridge failure. I don't know if in the years since someone has figured out how to fix them. When it was brought up in collecting circles, I had only heard of fans who would transplant the ROM chip (which was still good) to a donor game PCB.

@Forgotten_Worlds I wonder if the game was more famous in Japan. 1993 seemed a little late to be releasing a home console port for such an old game (even if it did contain a remixed mode) though maybe Yuzo Koshiro's involvement adds to its value.

@no_donatello It's easier to say it retrospect where the 3DO probably went wrong.
It would be a couple years later Sony would establish the practice of selling the console at a loss initially to boost the ownership and drive software sales (the "razor and blade" model).
But still, 3DO's idea was to sell manufacturing licenses. Since I don't think Panasonic originally planned to sell software, where were did they expect to make money without charging a profit margin? (I think it was only a year or so after launch they started publishing games for it.)
They did sell MSX computers in Japan (maybe the closest comparison to how they expected to profit on hardware sales alone) but home computers had the benefit of being user programmable to get some value. With a home console, it's only as useful as the professionally-developed software offered.
But yeah, maybe those are just things easier to say thirty years of gaming later.