@Damo 3DO was for chumps. Now if you bought the LaserActive in 1993, you were really rolling. Not only did it cost over $700 for the LaserDisc base unit, but depending on which game you wanted to play, you'd have to spend another $500 each for a Genesis or TurboGrafx add-on.
I've watched a streamer a few months ago play the Japanese 3DO port of Pyramid Patrol and he was lamenting he couldn't play the LA original, but merely watch a video. Over $1,200 to play Pyramid Patrol in 1993 was surely worth it!
Funny thing about Sony sound chips. It's thought part of the reason Nintendo kept Sony around as the SNES CD partner as long as they did was because of Sony's development of the SNES sound chip.
@REAVERZINE I had considered it buying it just to see if it's as bad as people said. But I was REALLY into RPGs and was buying most of those. Wasn't really forward thinking (though I imagine at least some of those RPGs have to be rarities of their own these days).
Ogre Battle seems like a pretty cool game, but one you really have to want to make a time investment in. I only rented it once as a kid and quickly learned it was too big-brained for me. But also that the OST is awesome, almost enough to entice learning the game.
The more pressing concern with Quest is that they did make games without "Ogre" in the title. Where's Conquest of the Crystal Palace or the infamously expensive game Magical Chase? Famicom RPGs Dungeon Kid (a dungeon crawler with a creation mode) or The Adventures of Musashi might be cool (a VERY late DQ1 clone but it's got some charm).
Thirty years later and the game is still not on CD-ROM or any 32X adapters. With the latest trend of porting everything to the Genesis, I wonder if any fan has dared to attempt the latter (Nintendo lawyers unafraid).
@Deuteros I wonder if the "compatibility with older Windows" thing is similar to what was wrong with the S3K port (or at least the original 1997 boxed PC version. I still have my disc but no longer the box or comic.) That is, for whatever reason, Sega limited the framerate in fullscreen mode (which I've heard used a low resolution only supported by old video cards and probably also 4:3 CRT monitors) but didn't limit the framerate in windowed mode WITH NO USER OPTION to change those. Only decades later have I read that someone found settings that could be typed in to the settings file to manually change that framerate setting. Why Sega didn't put that in the GUI in the first place, who knows!
@Nischenliebhaber Its reputation as the worst came about before it became more widespread knowledge that Konami arcade games usually had more reasonable difficulty in the Japanese versions. Though they did make changes to console games, reportedly the most common reason Konami liked to inflate the difficulty for the US market was to make the machines more favorable to arcade owners. 25 cents a game in the US was a much lower cost than 100 yen a game in Japan, so they needed to put pressure on Americans to put more coins in the machine.
I'm told Crime Fighters is another game Konami did brutal things to do in the localization (not the least taking out one of the attack buttons to encourage arcade owners to put their game in former Gauntlet cabinets).
@Damo LordBBH has shown the Japanese version is much fairer. The game's horrible reputation is because of the two English versions of the game. Presumably the more offensive of those two is the US version. Konami in that era especially really jacked up the difficulty in their arcade games (and to very degrees on their console games) especially for the US market.
@Deuteros The '90s PC port was definitely sold at retail. It was even at some point bundled with the PC port of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, during the multiple years that S3K was sold as budget PC software.
Sega also created the Activator, which did get released. About 10 years before EyeToy and like 15 years before Kinect. Though I hear it didn't work very well.
@-wc- I think one game copier device for the N64 DID use CDs. Funny that one such device (not the CD one, the one I saw was a Zip drive device) actually got ads run in GamePro, even going so far as to promote the piracy usage in addition to the legitimate "amateur developer" usage.
Quite surprising GamePro ran that ad. Did they not care about Nintendo objecting?
@Zenszulu Now I remember that back in the day, EGM ran a rumor of Capcom considering a chip+CD combination for the PC-Engine version of Street Fighter II. One problem then is that Capcom would've had to bake in their own CD firmware into the game, as the standard firmware takes up the chip game slot.
And even as it was, SFII needed its own unique card as it exceeded the (roughly) 16 megabit (2MB) chip ROM maximum (minus some space occupied by RAM and IO) the PCE CPU's built-in mapper was designed to support. (I think the 20mbit SFII was the only released PCE or SuperGrafx HuCard/TurboChip game over 8 megabit).
Just realizing that launch date will also be the 20th anniversary of the DS.
But also, 720p for ZX Spectrum games sound crazy. I think it was kind of the thing is that Spectrum graphics were low-tech even for 1982. But it needed to be to deliver a low-cost home computer to the masses at a time when most of those were crazy expensive. (on the opposite end of the...uh... spectrum... in that time frame, I was watching this promotional video for the Apple Lisa and Apple was promising what an "affordable" computer was... only like 10k 1983 US dollars, wasn't it?)
@sdelfin Now I feel bad guessing Jaguar for that one. Now that I recall, I think Jaguar doesn't even HAVE a Start button. I think its buttons are PAUSE and OPTION.
@KitsuneNight Not only was that not the default NeoGeo controller (it does say that was for the CD) but I thought even the NeoGeo CD's standard controller was a SNES-like arrangement. Or was that just the Mini's extra controller (which I own one)?
Some of those are a bit of cheat. The Saturn is a non-default. It is also the Japanese controller. I remember the US controller is a black and gray scheme because I remember playing Nights on the demo kiosk at Target as a child and being overwhelmed by it. That "3DS" one is also not the OG 3DS but... either the XL, Lite or New or all of them. The OG 3DS Start and Select buttons are NOT good. They were front of the front panel and you had to really push to register them.
I guess at the least they didn't go to using any obscure third-party controllers.
At least the PC-FX pad gave us a hint with the "Run" button. (as I suppose the GBA SP's Triforce logo)
@Zenszulu I do remember the aftermarket game Pier Solar boasted it was a cartridge game which could optionally utilize the Sega CD for an alternate soundtrack. I recall they encouraged players with the hardware available to burn a CD and play with it.
@Zenszulu That's what I was thinking. Something of a sort similar to the Sega CD Backup RAM cart. I know that was an officially released cartridge which acted as a removable Sega CD memory card. It needed a certain pin on the cartridge connector set to tell the console that the cartridge is not an executable program, don't try to run it.
This is as bad of an idea as the guy who got the Akira IP in the 16-bit era, and then licensed it out to the lowest bidder. It ensures the worst developer gets rights to make a game, and you potentially locked out a better developer/publisher from getting a chance.
How is this connected to the Genesis? The Sega CD uses the expansion port while the 32X used the cartridge port, so how do you make an upgrade supporting both devices?
@Axelay71 Dragon's Lair, a mediocre platform game which in the US arguably isn't even a properly functional game almost certainly because Sony was too cheap to spring for a second ROM chip. I can at least get what they were attempting to do when playing the Europe version (Japanese was based on the latter but for some reason changed to Up To Jump control).
Doesn't someone else own the Dragon's Lair IP though?
If I assume Motivetime was their development team (they seem to have a connection), Elite would only own the NES game (maybe the ZX Spectrum platformer they reskinned as a Game Boy DL game).
@JackGYarwood Supposedly the CD32 got a NTSC release in Canada. I've heard Commodore had financial problems resulting in some legal issues distributing in the US. I do remember reading just one CD32 game review in EGM back in the day, James Pond: Operation Starfi5h, I believe it was. Makes me kind of wonder how popular Youtuber James Rolfe reviewed it. Did he get one of the elusive NTSC consoles (in pretty poor condition, as I recall) or did someone set him up with a PAL conversion?
@JackGYarwood "began to focus less" Sounds probably more like financial situation forcing them to accept contracted work.
I know Rocko came after Viacom bought them out and turned them into its own dev studio.
I recall something similar happened with Cinemaware, a company that pushed forward with games as interactive movies. That unlike Dragon's Lair where you had to push buttons to keep the movie on course to its predetermined "good" end, Cinemaware was working on games were like feature-length movies that followed a course determined by the player, to be experienced rather than "won". (I mean, for the mid 1980s, that was pretty novel.) So I've learned from streaming. But it cost them and they ended with NEC turning them a maker of (seemingly) pretty crappy TurboGrafx sports games. (I recall watching same streamer playing the football game and struggling how to even like, pass the ball or something.)
@smoreon Yeah, Nintendo had very different motives for creating the AV Famicom and the NES top-loader. The AV FC was made to update support to newer TVs while the newer NES was made to be sold cheaply (funny that it ended up being more desirable due to that cost-cutting meant also cutting out the lockout chip, which had the effect of removing the reset from a bad cart connection as well as allowing PAL carts to play).
Chuka Taisen seems like a neat game. I've played it but was never very good at it. A shame that for the Famicom port, I've been told when the translated the shopkeeper from English (in the arcade) to Japanese they inserted a racism into the translation. Can't play that version now.
@smoreon I had gotten my SNES the first Christmas it was available. I know it came with both the stereo AV cable and RF modulator. I know because I remember seeing the AV cable just lying around the house randomly, unused, until it just disappeared entirely. We had one TV with composite inputs, but it was the living room TV that I had never had any consoles connected to until the 2000s because my parents were nearly always using that TV so it didn't make much sense to me to make that effort to unplug the console from the other TV.
@RetroGames Most of my childhood SNES gaming was on crappy TVs that sure didn't have composite cable support (enough that I eventually lost my original SNES AV cable, luckily they are so abundant these days I have several). First was, I want to say my mom's old TV that was probably from like the '70s but I think it died a year or two after getting the SNES. Then we got some hotel liquidation TV that ran for a few years before dying as well. I want to estimate late '70s/early '80s was the vintage of that one. It had wood grain but also a channel number LED, though no on-screen adjustment menu.
@Deuteros Once online access became more widespread, print magazines surely had to struggle to get unique content. Once anybody and everybody could post their own tips and reviews online.
Fortunately there are websites dedicated to preserving out-of-print video game magazines. Won't link for obvious reasons but surely the fans of them know where to find them.
That is not counting the Video Game History Foundation which spent a good deal of time a few years at least making privately available high-quality scans.
@ZZalapski It's not really hyperbolic. In officially translated form, it is a one-of-a-kind item. Sure, this game can be played in Japanese. Or you could use a translation that was made by fans. Fans who can write whatever they want. But this translation would represent the official Enix take on this.
Sure the owner is free to do what they want with their possesesions. The rest of us are free to comment on the owner letting this become a video game that only one person on the planet can play. One person on the planet can play until the EEPROMs on the cartridge die, and then it becomes a video game nobody on the planet can play.
I'm not sure how this one-of-a-kind video game is different than "items of actual archeological value". It is because it's not centuries old? What are the "items of actual archeological value" anyways? Like old pottery found buried in the ground or something? I don't know, seems like clay is still around. You can make those too.
Once again, the owner has the right to sell it and we have the right to discuss what we think of the sale.
You're probably not going to find the "Elite Four" Virtual Boy game which reportedly sell for thousands of dollars at this point.
I can imagine the failure: Nintendo Power was reviewing upcoming Virtual Boy games well into 1996 (including the action-RPG Dragon Hopper. Very sad to know some collector is hording a copy of that game, undumped.) Yet not a single game was released in Japan at the end of 1995.
NP claimed Nintendo was planning for a "relaunch" in August 1996 (or somewhere about there) and that didn't happen. Happy 28th memorial, Virtual Boy! Your 3D games were sadly not for this 3D world.
@Damo Unfortunately, the N64 Controller Paks used battery-backup RAM to store data. The odds that data survived 23 years intact is probably low at this point.
@Poodlestargenerica The Controller Pak only had 32KB. You wouldn't be able to fit much on there if it did. Even if it did only support the "mapperless" first gen NES games, that wouldn't be enough to support the largest of those, which were 40KB.
The N64 Controller Pak had 32KB of storage. The Ice Climber ROM is 24KB. Are they suggesting Nintendo gave the winners a Controller Pak whose data was 75% consumed by this bonus? (Well, I suppose it wouldn't be the most data hungry. Why Puzzle Bobble 64/Bust-A-Move 3 wanted something like half that space... FOR A PUZZLE GAME? What does a puzzle game need that much space for... and supposedly it was some kind of DLC-ish content.)
I supposed most people wouldn't know that G-Zero was one of the two names (along with Zero Racers) for the planned Virtual Boy F-Zero game (would've been only the second game in the franchise). Nintendo Power previewed it but it was one of the many casualties of the short life of the Virtual Boy (reviewed in 1996, oddly realizing how many games were announced for the US that year, even though all released Japanese games were released before the end of 1995.)
Not sure how many have used an actual Amiga. I'm guessing more have experienced it through emulation. Computers were pretty expensive in the '80s and '90s and especially as I recall Amiga was a rather high-end one, wasn't it?
@gojiguy It wasn't a blowout difference. Not like owning a Sega Master System in the US probably was. If you had either a Genesis or a SNES in the US in the '90s in America, you could live happy with your console choice. You'd probably have developed a different taste in games, but you'd still have a good selection of games to choose from.
@killroy10 "The NES is celebrated as an unmatched 8-bit system... Yet, the NES itself - and several of its games - were inferior versions of the Famicom Disk System and its games because Nintendo decided to cut their costs for their North American market. Hence titles that lacked certain sound mappers, hence titles that were simply not brought to you because no one ended up localizing them, hence titles with atrocious password systems instead of save features. One can enjoy the NES, its games, and its quirks - but these are largely glossed over whenever its fandom speaks." How can the NES (and do you mean Famicom) be an inferior version of the Famicom Disk System, an add-on that was released two and a half years after the base console?
The FDS has 32KB of RAM, which might've been a decent amount in 1985, but that VERY quickly grew to be inadequate. Even by the end of 1986, cartridge games were already regularly up to at least double or quadruple that. Games on FDS had to be carefully designed to reduce the data needed or have loading times. It's why Zelda and Metroid had so many duplicate rooms.
As to not supporting sound mappers on the NES... well, I'd imagine that Nintendo thought only the FDS was going to be using that functionality of the console. You're complaining about a game console released in 1985 complaining about not supporting a feature that even in Japan wasn't used (by cartridge games) until at least 1988 (that's the earliest enhanced-sound cartridge game I'm aware of, Erika and Satoru's Dream Adventure). From what I've heard, Jackal was an example of a game which took advantage of being able to access larger amounts of memory (ROM) more easily to be better than its Japanese counterpart. Have you heard of Relics? A FDS game that wants to be a Metroid-like game but has to stop to load data every time you walk like five steps. Imagine if we had THQ-tier shovelware on the FDS, how much load times we'd get on that.
"Atrocious password systems instead of save features". Oh no, you may have to spend two minutes typing in a code (and maybe a minute verifying it when you write down the code)! What a horrible life to live in! It's only really a bad thing when it's done poorly, like, well it's a Famicom cartridge game but the idea still applies to this "oh no! Passwords!" argument The Maze of Galious (odd, Konami should know better) which makes you enter the code after EVERY Game Over (because for some reason the devs didn't put in a Continue option, despite this was the same year as Castlevania II which did), then it becomes a problem.
The advantages of the FDS (extra sound channel and disk writing functionality) were quickly overcome by cartridges, leaving it with its major downside of loading time as well as piracy (which still happened with cartridge games in Japan but I suppose was a fair point for the CIC outside Japan). It also failed because of Nintendo's licensing terms with third parties: Nintendo wanted partial ownership and the ability to sell whatever games it wants on its Disk Writer stations in Japan. Publisher thinks their game is worth more than Nintendo's flat five dollar rewrite price? Too bad!
Comments 821
Re: Think PS5 Pro Is Too Much At $700? The 3DO Would Like A Word
@Damo 3DO was for chumps. Now if you bought the LaserActive in 1993, you were really rolling.
Not only did it cost over $700 for the LaserDisc base unit, but depending on which game you wanted to play, you'd have to spend another $500 each for a Genesis or TurboGrafx add-on.
I've watched a streamer a few months ago play the Japanese 3DO port of Pyramid Patrol and he was lamenting he couldn't play the LA original, but merely watch a video.
Over $1,200 to play Pyramid Patrol in 1993 was surely worth it!
Re: An Embarrassed Sony Had To Beg Nvidia For PS2's Sound Chip, Says Former SCEE Boss
Funny thing about Sony sound chips.
It's thought part of the reason Nintendo kept Sony around as the SNES CD partner as long as they did was because of Sony's development of the SNES sound chip.
Re: One Of PS2's Rarest Games Just Dropped In Value
@REAVERZINE I had considered it buying it just to see if it's as bad as people said.
But I was REALLY into RPGs and was buying most of those.
Wasn't really forward thinking (though I imagine at least some of those RPGs have to be rarities of their own these days).
Re: 'Space Adventure Cobra - The Awakening' Is A New Sidescroller Based On The Retro Anime Series
All I know about this is that it got one game released in the west. On Sega CD, in 1995, so probably almost nobody bought it.
Re: "Please Let Us Remaster Ogre Battle," Says Atari And Infogrames Boss
Ogre Battle seems like a pretty cool game, but one you really have to want to make a time investment in.
I only rented it once as a kid and quickly learned it was too big-brained for me.
But also that the OST is awesome, almost enough to entice learning the game.
Re: "Please Let Us Remaster Ogre Battle," Says Atari And Infogrames Boss
The more pressing concern with Quest is that they did make games without "Ogre" in the title.
Where's Conquest of the Crystal Palace or the infamously expensive game Magical Chase?
Famicom RPGs Dungeon Kid (a dungeon crawler with a creation mode) or The Adventures of Musashi might be cool (a VERY late DQ1 clone but it's got some charm).
Re: Last Ninja Collection Will Bring The Classic Beat 'Em Up Series To PC & Switch
Hope they don't forget to check that the anti-piracy measures are working correctly this time.
Re: Donkey Kong Country's Developers Are Reuniting For An EGX Panel Later This Year
Thirty years later and the game is still not on CD-ROM or any 32X adapters.
With the latest trend of porting everything to the Genesis, I wonder if any fan has dared to attempt the latter (Nintendo lawyers unafraid).
Re: GameStop Announces Launch Of New "Retro GameStop" Stores
No Sega Master System and no TurboGrafx. Two consoles that weren't very popular when originally released but are surely more popular now?
Re: An Early Sonic CD Prototype Has Been Ported To Sega Genesis
@Deuteros I wonder if the "compatibility with older Windows" thing is similar to what was wrong with the S3K port (or at least the original 1997 boxed PC version. I still have my disc but no longer the box or comic.) That is, for whatever reason, Sega limited the framerate in fullscreen mode (which I've heard used a low resolution only supported by old video cards and probably also 4:3 CRT monitors) but didn't limit the framerate in windowed mode WITH NO USER OPTION to change those.
Only decades later have I read that someone found settings that could be typed in to the settings file to manually change that framerate setting. Why Sega didn't put that in the GUI in the first place, who knows!
Re: The Worst Castlevania Game Is Getting Remade
@Nischenliebhaber Its reputation as the worst came about before it became more widespread knowledge that Konami arcade games usually had more reasonable difficulty in the Japanese versions.
Though they did make changes to console games, reportedly the most common reason Konami liked to inflate the difficulty for the US market was to make the machines more favorable to arcade owners. 25 cents a game in the US was a much lower cost than 100 yen a game in Japan, so they needed to put pressure on Americans to put more coins in the machine.
I'm told Crime Fighters is another game Konami did brutal things to do in the localization (not the least taking out one of the attack buttons to encourage arcade owners to put their game in former Gauntlet cabinets).
Re: The Worst Castlevania Game Is Getting Remade
@Damo LordBBH has shown the Japanese version is much fairer. The game's horrible reputation is because of the two English versions of the game.
Presumably the more offensive of those two is the US version. Konami in that era especially really jacked up the difficulty in their arcade games (and to very degrees on their console games) especially for the US market.
Re: An Early Sonic CD Prototype Has Been Ported To Sega Genesis
@Deuteros The '90s PC port was definitely sold at retail.
It was even at some point bundled with the PC port of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, during the multiple years that S3K was sold as budget PC software.
Re: Sega Almost Created A Wii Remote-Style Controller For Dreamcast And VR Headset For Saturn
Sega also created the Activator, which did get released. About 10 years before EyeToy and like 15 years before Kinect.
Though I hear it didn't work very well.
Re: Here's The "Hidden Meaning" Behind The Dreamcast's Start Button
@-wc- I think one game copier device for the N64 DID use CDs. Funny that one such device (not the CD one, the one I saw was a Zip drive device) actually got ads run in GamePro, even going so far as to promote the piracy usage in addition to the legitimate "amateur developer" usage.
Quite surprising GamePro ran that ad. Did they not care about Nintendo objecting?
Re: This Sega Genesis RAM Cart Could Take Homebrew Development To A New Level
@Zenszulu Now I remember that back in the day, EGM ran a rumor of Capcom considering a chip+CD combination for the PC-Engine version of Street Fighter II. One problem then is that Capcom would've had to bake in their own CD firmware into the game, as the standard firmware takes up the chip game slot.
And even as it was, SFII needed its own unique card as it exceeded the (roughly) 16 megabit (2MB) chip ROM maximum (minus some space occupied by RAM and IO) the PCE CPU's built-in mapper was designed to support. (I think the 20mbit SFII was the only released PCE or SuperGrafx HuCard/TurboChip game over 8 megabit).
Re: We're Getting (Another) New ZX Spectrum This November
Just realizing that launch date will also be the 20th anniversary of the DS.
But also, 720p for ZX Spectrum games sound crazy. I think it was kind of the thing is that Spectrum graphics were low-tech even for 1982. But it needed to be to deliver a low-cost home computer to the masses at a time when most of those were crazy expensive. (on the opposite end of the...uh... spectrum... in that time frame, I was watching this promotional video for the Apple Lisa and Apple was promising what an "affordable" computer was... only like 10k 1983 US dollars, wasn't it?)
Re: Can You Match These Start Buttons With Their Consoles?
@sdelfin Now I feel bad guessing Jaguar for that one. Now that I recall, I think Jaguar doesn't even HAVE a Start button.
I think its buttons are PAUSE and OPTION.
Re: Can You Match These Start Buttons With Their Consoles?
@KitsuneNight Not only was that not the default NeoGeo controller (it does say that was for the CD) but I thought even the NeoGeo CD's standard controller was a SNES-like arrangement. Or was that just the Mini's extra controller (which I own one)?
Re: Can You Match These Start Buttons With Their Consoles?
@carlos82 I probably wouldn't have guessed WonderSwan if I didn't own one (and know the SOUND button next to it as a giveaway).
Re: Can You Match These Start Buttons With Their Consoles?
Some of those are a bit of cheat.
The Saturn is a non-default. It is also the Japanese controller. I remember the US controller is a black and gray scheme because I remember playing Nights on the demo kiosk at Target as a child and being overwhelmed by it.
That "3DS" one is also not the OG 3DS but... either the XL, Lite or New or all of them. The OG 3DS Start and Select buttons are NOT good. They were front of the front panel and you had to really push to register them.
I guess at the least they didn't go to using any obscure third-party controllers.
At least the PC-FX pad gave us a hint with the "Run" button.
(as I suppose the GBA SP's Triforce logo)
Re: This Sega Genesis RAM Cart Could Take Homebrew Development To A New Level
@Zenszulu I do remember the aftermarket game Pier Solar boasted it was a cartridge game which could optionally utilize the Sega CD for an alternate soundtrack. I recall they encouraged players with the hardware available to burn a CD and play with it.
Re: This Sega Genesis RAM Cart Could Take Homebrew Development To A New Level
@Zenszulu That's what I was thinking. Something of a sort similar to the Sega CD Backup RAM cart. I know that was an officially released cartridge which acted as a removable Sega CD memory card. It needed a certain pin on the cartridge connector set to tell the console that the cartridge is not an executable program, don't try to run it.
Re: After 40 Years In The Industry, Elite Systems Launches "eBay For Game IP"
This is as bad of an idea as the guy who got the Akira IP in the 16-bit era, and then licensed it out to the lowest bidder.
It ensures the worst developer gets rights to make a game, and you potentially locked out a better developer/publisher from getting a chance.
Re: Snow Bros. Wonderland Gets Worldwide Release This November
But does it have newer elves?
Re: This Sega Genesis RAM Cart Could Take Homebrew Development To A New Level
How is this connected to the Genesis?
The Sega CD uses the expansion port while the 32X used the cartridge port, so how do you make an upgrade supporting both devices?
Re: After 40 Years In The Industry, Elite Systems Launches "eBay For Game IP"
@Axelay71 Dragon's Lair, a mediocre platform game which in the US arguably isn't even a properly functional game almost certainly because Sony was too cheap to spring for a second ROM chip.
I can at least get what they were attempting to do when playing the Europe version (Japanese was based on the latter but for some reason changed to Up To Jump control).
Re: After 40 Years In The Industry, Elite Systems Launches "eBay For Game IP"
Doesn't someone else own the Dragon's Lair IP though?
If I assume Motivetime was their development team (they seem to have a connection), Elite would only own the NES game (maybe the ZX Spectrum platformer they reskinned as a Game Boy DL game).
Re: Latest AmigaVision Update Adds Amiga CD32 Support For MiSTer
@JackGYarwood Supposedly the CD32 got a NTSC release in Canada. I've heard Commodore had financial problems resulting in some legal issues distributing in the US.
I do remember reading just one CD32 game review in EGM back in the day, James Pond: Operation Starfi5h, I believe it was.
Makes me kind of wonder how popular Youtuber James Rolfe reviewed it. Did he get one of the elusive NTSC consoles (in pretty poor condition, as I recall) or did someone set him up with a PAL conversion?
Re: SuperSega FPGA Team Understands Why You Think Its Console Is "Vapourware"
@Blofse Don't forget the Polymega. Apparently that came out, eventually. This is sounding similar on paper.
Re: 'Beyond Shadowgate' Is A Sequel To The NES Classic Based On A 34 Year Old Design
@JackGYarwood "began to focus less" Sounds probably more like financial situation forcing them to accept contracted work.
I know Rocko came after Viacom bought them out and turned them into its own dev studio.
I recall something similar happened with Cinemaware, a company that pushed forward with games as interactive movies. That unlike Dragon's Lair where you had to push buttons to keep the movie on course to its predetermined "good" end, Cinemaware was working on games were like feature-length movies that followed a course determined by the player, to be experienced rather than "won". (I mean, for the mid 1980s, that was pretty novel.) So I've learned from streaming. But it cost them and they ended with NEC turning them a maker of (seemingly) pretty crappy TurboGrafx sports games. (I recall watching same streamer playing the football game and struggling how to even like, pass the ball or something.)
Re: Star Fox Will Take Advantage Of The New Super FX 3 Chip, Will Feature Rumble Support
@LadyCharlie I played and enjoyed Stunt Race FX as a kid. I don't know what everyone else is thinking.
Re: The Ill-Fated Philips CD-i Is Getting Its Own MiSTer FPGA Core
Will the MiSTeR FPGA core be able to remember the '60s, is the burning question?
(that is such a specific reference...)
Re: This RetroArch Audio Filter Makes Your Games Sound Crappy, Just Like You Remember Them
@smoreon Yeah, Nintendo had very different motives for creating the AV Famicom and the NES top-loader.
The AV FC was made to update support to newer TVs while the newer NES was made to be sold cheaply (funny that it ended up being more desirable due to that cost-cutting meant also cutting out the lockout chip, which had the effect of removing the reset from a bad cart connection as well as allowing PAL carts to play).
Re: Taito Egret II Mini Arcade Memories Vol. 3 Coming This December
Chuka Taisen seems like a neat game. I've played it but was never very good at it.
A shame that for the Famicom port, I've been told when the translated the shopkeeper from English (in the arcade) to Japanese they inserted a racism into the translation. Can't play that version now.
Re: This RetroArch Audio Filter Makes Your Games Sound Crappy, Just Like You Remember Them
@smoreon I had gotten my SNES the first Christmas it was available. I know it came with both the stereo AV cable and RF modulator. I know because I remember seeing the AV cable just lying around the house randomly, unused, until it just disappeared entirely.
We had one TV with composite inputs, but it was the living room TV that I had never had any consoles connected to until the 2000s because my parents were nearly always using that TV so it didn't make much sense to me to make that effort to unplug the console from the other TV.
Re: This RetroArch Audio Filter Makes Your Games Sound Crappy, Just Like You Remember Them
@RetroGames Most of my childhood SNES gaming was on crappy TVs that sure didn't have composite cable support (enough that I eventually lost my original SNES AV cable, luckily they are so abundant these days I have several).
First was, I want to say my mom's old TV that was probably from like the '70s but I think it died a year or two after getting the SNES.
Then we got some hotel liquidation TV that ran for a few years before dying as well. I want to estimate late '70s/early '80s was the vintage of that one. It had wood grain but also a channel number LED, though no on-screen adjustment menu.
Re: This RetroArch Audio Filter Makes Your Games Sound Crappy, Just Like You Remember Them
But does it also random screw up the imagine into random colored blobs? Maybe some screen jitter too?
Re: Game Informer Staff Tweet "Genuine Goodbye" Before Account Gets Deleted By GameStop
@Deuteros Once online access became more widespread, print magazines surely had to struggle to get unique content.
Once anybody and everybody could post their own tips and reviews online.
Re: Game Informer Staff Tweet "Genuine Goodbye" Before Account Gets Deleted By GameStop
Fortunately there are websites dedicated to preserving out-of-print video game magazines. Won't link for obvious reasons but surely the fans of them know where to find them.
That is not counting the Video Game History Foundation which spent a good deal of time a few years at least making privately available high-quality scans.
Re: Dragon Quest SNES Prototype Worth $50,000 "Lost For Good"
@ZZalapski It's not really hyperbolic. In officially translated form, it is a one-of-a-kind item. Sure, this game can be played in Japanese. Or you could use a translation that was made by fans. Fans who can write whatever they want.
But this translation would represent the official Enix take on this.
Sure the owner is free to do what they want with their possesesions.
The rest of us are free to comment on the owner letting this become a video game that only one person on the planet can play.
One person on the planet can play until the EEPROMs on the cartridge die, and then it becomes a video game nobody on the planet can play.
I'm not sure how this one-of-a-kind video game is different than "items of actual archeological value". It is because it's not centuries old?
What are the "items of actual archeological value" anyways? Like old pottery found buried in the ground or something? I don't know, seems like clay is still around. You can make those too.
Once again, the owner has the right to sell it and we have the right to discuss what we think of the sale.
Re: Want To Know The Real Scale Of The Virtual Boy's Failure? Visit A Japanese Game Shop
You're probably not going to find the "Elite Four" Virtual Boy game which reportedly sell for thousands of dollars at this point.
I can imagine the failure: Nintendo Power was reviewing upcoming Virtual Boy games well into 1996 (including the action-RPG Dragon Hopper. Very sad to know some collector is hording a copy of that game, undumped.)
Yet not a single game was released in Japan at the end of 1995.
NP claimed Nintendo was planning for a "relaunch" in August 1996 (or somewhere about there) and that didn't happen. Happy 28th memorial, Virtual Boy! Your 3D games were sadly not for this 3D world.
Re: Internet Sleuth Discovers Eighth NES Game In N64 Animal Crossing, But It's Now "Lost Media"
@Damo Unfortunately, the N64 Controller Paks used battery-backup RAM to store data. The odds that data survived 23 years intact is probably low at this point.
Re: Internet Sleuth Discovers Eighth NES Game In N64 Animal Crossing, But It's Now "Lost Media"
@Poodlestargenerica The Controller Pak only had 32KB. You wouldn't be able to fit much on there if it did.
Even if it did only support the "mapperless" first gen NES games, that wouldn't be enough to support the largest of those, which were 40KB.
Re: Internet Sleuth Discovers Eighth NES Game In N64 Animal Crossing, But It's Now "Lost Media"
The N64 Controller Pak had 32KB of storage.
The Ice Climber ROM is 24KB.
Are they suggesting Nintendo gave the winners a Controller Pak whose data was 75% consumed by this bonus?
(Well, I suppose it wouldn't be the most data hungry. Why Puzzle Bobble 64/Bust-A-Move 3 wanted something like half that space... FOR A PUZZLE GAME? What does a puzzle game need that much space for... and supposedly it was some kind of DLC-ish content.)
Re: F-Zero-Inspired G-Zero World GP Is Now Available For Your Game Boy Color
I supposed most people wouldn't know that G-Zero was one of the two names (along with Zero Racers) for the planned Virtual Boy F-Zero game (would've been only the second game in the franchise).
Nintendo Power previewed it but it was one of the many casualties of the short life of the Virtual Boy (reviewed in 1996, oddly realizing how many games were announced for the US that year, even though all released Japanese games were released before the end of 1995.)
Re: The Bitmap Brothers Collection 2 Brings Amiga Classics To Evercade
Not sure how many have used an actual Amiga.
I'm guessing more have experienced it through emulation.
Computers were pretty expensive in the '80s and '90s and especially as I recall Amiga was a rather high-end one, wasn't it?
Re: BurgerTime Is The Latest Classic To Join The Quarter Arcades Range
BurgerTime is one of those games that has just beaten me up far too quickly to be able to enjoy it.
I did find the Game Boy sequel better.
Re: Talking Point: Does Video Game History Have A "Nintendo Problem"?
@gojiguy It wasn't a blowout difference. Not like owning a Sega Master System in the US probably was.
If you had either a Genesis or a SNES in the US in the '90s in America, you could live happy with your console choice. You'd probably have developed a different taste in games, but you'd still have a good selection of games to choose from.
Re: Talking Point: Does Video Game History Have A "Nintendo Problem"?
@killroy10 "The NES is celebrated as an unmatched 8-bit system... Yet, the NES itself - and several of its games - were inferior versions of the Famicom Disk System and its games because Nintendo decided to cut their costs for their North American market. Hence titles that lacked certain sound mappers, hence titles that were simply not brought to you because no one ended up localizing them, hence titles with atrocious password systems instead of save features. One can enjoy the NES, its games, and its quirks - but these are largely glossed over whenever its fandom speaks."
How can the NES (and do you mean Famicom) be an inferior version of the Famicom Disk System, an add-on that was released two and a half years after the base console?
The FDS has 32KB of RAM, which might've been a decent amount in 1985, but that VERY quickly grew to be inadequate.
Even by the end of 1986, cartridge games were already regularly up to at least double or quadruple that.
Games on FDS had to be carefully designed to reduce the data needed or have loading times. It's why Zelda and Metroid had so many duplicate rooms.
As to not supporting sound mappers on the NES... well, I'd imagine that Nintendo thought only the FDS was going to be using that functionality of the console.
You're complaining about a game console released in 1985 complaining about not supporting a feature that even in Japan wasn't used (by cartridge games) until at least 1988 (that's the earliest enhanced-sound cartridge game I'm aware of, Erika and Satoru's Dream Adventure).
From what I've heard, Jackal was an example of a game which took advantage of being able to access larger amounts of memory (ROM) more easily to be better than its Japanese counterpart.
Have you heard of Relics? A FDS game that wants to be a Metroid-like game but has to stop to load data every time you walk like five steps. Imagine if we had THQ-tier shovelware on the FDS, how much load times we'd get on that.
"Atrocious password systems instead of save features". Oh no, you may have to spend two minutes typing in a code (and maybe a minute verifying it when you write down the code)! What a horrible life to live in!
It's only really a bad thing when it's done poorly, like, well it's a Famicom cartridge game but the idea still applies to this "oh no! Passwords!" argument The Maze of Galious (odd, Konami should know better) which makes you enter the code after EVERY Game Over (because for some reason the devs didn't put in a Continue option, despite this was the same year as Castlevania II which did), then it becomes a problem.
The advantages of the FDS (extra sound channel and disk writing functionality) were quickly overcome by cartridges, leaving it with its major downside of loading time as well as piracy (which still happened with cartridge games in Japan but I suppose was a fair point for the CIC outside Japan). It also failed because of Nintendo's licensing terms with third parties: Nintendo wanted partial ownership and the ability to sell whatever games it wants on its Disk Writer stations in Japan. Publisher thinks their game is worth more than Nintendo's flat five dollar rewrite price? Too bad!