KingMike

@GameGear1991 Only supporting a single game is exactly what "old school" flashcarts are.

So does this mean there's a good chance the planned US version Bio Senshi Dan, Bashi Bazook: Morphoid Master, will finally get an official release, 35 years later?
I do like my plutonium-colored Famicom Dan cartridge.

Hope at some point we see Game Boy games. Banishing Racer would be excellent.

I suppose it probably doesn't help Nottingham that those of us who don't live in the UK have probably only heard of the place through Robin Hood, such as the Disney movie.

Lesson that is in fact a real place and, no the entire town has not arrested by a giant wolf.

Don't put the Nintendo name on it, or Nintendo will sue you!

@SuperKMx That first part was a lot less obvious than the second.

Transforming a FPS into a 2D game is exactly what happened with Daikatana (in Europe, and possibly Japan) and, more widespread, Rainbow Six (I do remember renting that from Blockbuster and not getting very far).

Though the second game came out in Japan only, I don't know how internationally it can be said it's a good thing they decided to just call it "Tobal 2".

Checking that auction listing "Some intrepid hunters have even reached out to the 26 winners with the intent of tracing the journey of these discarded relics."
So, did they stalk and maybe even annoy the potential owners trying to get a sale?
Also good job doxxing the one-time owner of the cart listed, thanks auction lister, that's really considerate.

@KitsuneNight More like, the notable thing about it is the context surrounding its existence, rather than the game itself.
(Though that's something the gray copies represent more, now that I recall the difference. Gray: given to people who actually competed in the event and won. Gold: given to some lucky people who mailed a survey card to Nintendo.)

Of course with only 26 gold carts in existence, naturally none are going to be sold for awhile.
At least this one isn't inconsiderate enough to open and expose its EEPROMs. "UV resistant", the case makers say! I don't understand how resistant it can be if I can see through it.
(though it probably matters less now, in that if light hasn't corrupted the data on that copy already, time is likely to)

@HalBailman I guess people just never came up with a better term then.
There was a time when FPS games were called "Doom clones" until a term to describe them was invented.

@UK_Kev Jack didn't just attack Rockstar. There was also aggression against Midway.
I remember at one point Midway mocked him with a create-a-player feature in one Mortal Kombat game.
And of course, the one that got the Internet to take him down: when he refused to pay up after his bet nobody would make his one extremely appalling game idea. Which afterwards he was like "it was a joke and gamers are too stupid to know the reference".

I'm guessing one major deterrent to Bully was Jack Thompson.
The controversial game-hating lawyer (yes, I know he recently said he doesn't hate games as much as people say).
Behind GTA, Bully was the game he was second most vocal about.
(I do recall it was enough that Rockstar had to get some kind of order to stop him from pretty much campaigning against the company. I've wondered if the E-rated table tennis game they made was some kind of response to that.)

So you don't have to win them from Konami's pachinko parlors?

(someone had to say it after gasha is mentioned)

@Steel76 "looks and plays like crap" How can it be judged when it isn't even mentioned how far along in development it was?
Every game is going to have that "problem" at some point in its lifespan.

True about Sony's pre-PlayStation reputation.
Their Famicom catalog was pretty awful but at least a funny kind of awful (Paris-Dekar Rally Special has become a kusoge classic these days, I think.) Though the US version of NES Dragon's Lair still repulses me thinking it was okay to release that.
The 16-bit era though, a lot of movie-licensed stuff (I assume from Sony's movie department) that seemed rather unintersting and I hear not very good usually. Though I've heard SNES Hook was pretty decent (and its spiritual followup Skyblazer), though comments I've seen watching a recentish stream commented it might be given out extra lives like candy to balance out some design blemishes.

@Bunkerneath What was weird about Equinox is that it somehow had a really lengthy release delay.
Nintendo Power reviewed the game in January 1993 (suggesting they had played the game in late 1992), yet the game didn't actually make it to stores until nearly two years later. I wonder if there were some kind of business issues.
I know Lost Vikings II had a similar delay, but reportedly that was because the SNES version was the first made but Interplay wanted the game out on the next generation hardware and wanted to wait until all versions of the game were done to release simultaneously.

This is the first I'm hearing about this Equinox followup.

It's true that it probably was meant to have more of an RPG element.
The story text actually exists inside the ROM data (the game's text was written in both Japanese and English, as both language variants contain all of it, though not user-selectable)!

I can't be the only one to see that screenshot and only have two words...

I'M FRANCESCA!

@SlangWon Long ago, somehow 28 years was determined ideal copyright length.
Until someone like Disney came along.

@MysticX It had to do with how the original contracts to get the games made in the first place were made.
My understanding is that movies negotiated licensing and stuff to permanently own the rights to sell them.
Video games and TV shows were surely made on lower budgets and probably negotiated ownership to a time-limited deal to get a far cheaper rate, since they were usually made with a much more throwaway commodity mindset.

@N64-ROX That possibly was mentioned that like, 3D Realms wrote one thing officially and then the USA publisher exec decided to take their own liberties with the script while the EU publisher stuck to the official writing.

The Final Fantasy IV SNES fan-translation was a good example. Reportedly the actual translation was done pretty well but then another member of the team decided the writing would be improved by adding a bunch of memes and vulgar "humor" to the story. Stuff that really sounds like that editor was probably an edgy teenager at the time.

I'm guessing that means the Zapper, SuperScope, Menacer and Guncon are supported.

Probably not known is that on the Famicom, Bandai made their own gun which they supported with exactly the one game bundled with it. Some kind of machine gun looking gun. Crazy.

I've heard this game had fairly significant differences between different versions, at least between the NEC PCs, Sega CD and SFC.

I could've SWORN the game still gave passwords on Normal difficulty in the US version, and they just DIDN'T WORK (correctly) when you tried to enter them (they'd be accepted but still auto-switch to Children's difficulty). That is what I remember playing as a child.

@bring_on_branstons The train stage has a bug in most versions of the game (apparently the game got an official Spanish PAL release which fixed it). I read about it in Nintendo Power as a kid but they didn't specifically call it a bug. The cutscene engine specifically presses the R button when it wants to dash, instead of pushing the buttons assigned to Dash (they got Jump and Kick functions correctly programmed). I actually tracked down that bug and made patches the Japanese, US and English PAL versions, then when looking for the code in that Spanish version found it had already been fixed.

Konami pulled something similar with Babs' Big Break on Game Boy. It had a password feature in Japan that was removed in English, as well as having a two Continue limit imposed.
I looked at the code and it seems Konami and removed the password function in English (I played with bgb to figure out how I use RAM cheats to choose the new game option and cheat over to the password feature in Japanese, only to find that didn't work in English. Suggesting Konami didn't just do the easy hack of hiding the text/cursor and disabling its movement on the title screen).

@RetroGames The most bizarre Famicom cartridge I have is a baseball game by Sunsoft that almost looks like an obese Mega Drive cart because it itself had an expansion port, because Sunsoft actually released two update mini-cartridges for it.
Imagine DLC in a physical game from (about) 1990!

@RetroGames Famicom cartridges also had varying sizes, so it wasn't just Sega.
There were also some Super Famicom games which utilitized the Satellaview memory carts so they too had very Super Game Boy-like cartridge shells.

@Damo I remember that according to GamePro, Sega did charge $99 for the game in the USA.

@Dehnus "For most it was "good enough" for the time." is just as much of an opinion. True that it could be the GEMS sound driver as much as the chip itself but it nevertheless gives off rather specific impressions of the console. An average person asked what an average Genesis game sounds like, and that's what they will imagine.
Plus I understand that when the Genesis 2 came out, the variant of the sound chip was different enough that I've heard of some people wanting different consoles just to enjoy music optimized for either the earlier or later model consoles.

@Sketcz I remember watching an 8-Bit Guy video talking about some guy who, according to him, was able to for quite some time cheat landline telephone service providers by playing some cheap 1973 Captain Crunch giveaway whistle, by blowing the whistle into the phone whenever he wanted to make a long-distance phone call.
Apparently the whistle gave off the EXACT tone frequency needed for the phone system to think the user had paid for long-distance phone service.

This book cannot cover the game titled Run 'n Gun, which was a basketball game. (and understandably the NBA made them rename it once Konami wanted a license for the home version)

That same chain also wanted like $150 for a boxed copy of Dragon Warrior 1 for the NES.
Surely that can't be what a copy sells for these days!
That was the game that Nintendo had to literally give away to clear out inventory.

@Damo IT ALL STARTED IN '94.
But that first line says it started in '84.

@-wc- I guess there's technically three versions: arcade, Famicom Disk System, and NES.
Apparently the latter was an improvement over the middle, as cartridges didn't have to worry as much about conserving memory (taking up less space so they could be loaded into the FDS' RAM more easily so they didn't have to incur more loading time).

What I recall from LordBBH 1CC runs on this game, he said there are actually two arcade versions. One with a rotary joystick (I think) and another using a standard 8-way joystick (I think that was the one he finished). I wonder which will be supported on ACA.

I remember watching LordBBH 1CC the game.
He questioned if MAME was correct in setting the default lives to 2 rather than 3, but he eventually finished it anyways.

The game sure got a lot of distribution at the height of Michael's career (unsurprisingly). Pretty sure I've even seen it in a hotel swimming pool arcade (not sure of the wisdom of putting arcade machines anywhere near water but okay).

@PopetheRev28 Eight controller ports (I'm guessing four Dreamcast ports, and four DE-9, since I've heard everything up to Saturn used those), three cartridge slots and an optical drive sound like almost as wild imagination as the Action GameMaster.
Action GameMaster was a console envisioned by the Action 52 developers that wanted to put NES, SNES and Genesis compatibility, along with its own CD-based console, into a portable device. In 1993. Needless to say that device surely didn't get very far into development.
(I mean, if Bandai couldn't pull off making a licensed portable SFC alone, probably for tech reasons, that same year, what chance did the ACTION 52 developers have? )

@KGRAMR Sorry to hear that. I hope things work out well for him.

@JackGYarwood It's fitting. Reportedly the famous "anti-piracy" in the original game (which would give a rather crushing end of the game to anyone found playing on a bootleg copy of the game, presumably with altered copyrights) wasn't even actually designed to punish the pirates but aimed at Sunsoft themselves: the creator wanted credit in the game and they wanted to make it a costly QA effort for Sunsoft to try and delete their name from the game.

Still though, I've heard FF did eventually get a RTS game with DS FFXII spinoff Revenant Wings.

"The strong jaggedness is due to the PlayStation's resolution at the time being 256x224."
That is an odd sentence. The PlayStation was a fixed piece of hardware. How did its resolution suddenly change?
(more like, how the developers frequently coded for it)

@KGRAMR They'd probably have to hire the BigP developer to work on it. That person is probably the only one who wants to emulate the Atari Jaguar!

@NinChocolate Well, I suppose one kind of significant thing is that the development team responsible for the first three games would later become Camelot Software Planning, making games for Nintendo.

@RetroGames You know Sunsoft themselves did that, just arguably not very well (and probably why it was never officially released, though who knows if it would've been tweaked if they did)?
The canceled port did have the NES soundtrack intact, which I guess depends on your opinion: whether it was good enough as it was, or if you wished to have seen whatever punch the SPC700 could've given to it.

@Damo Neptune gained more attention from EGM's annual April Fools joke where they plugged a website selling a supposed warehouse find of the console. I read when you attempted to checkout, the website would tell you you had been fooled.
They ran it in the same magazine with a couple other things that would've been much more believable pranks but were true: the Game Boy-based sewing machine sold in Japan, and the announcement Twelve Tales had turned into Conker's Bad Fur Day.

So Midnight Resistance is thus presumably the arcade game (which I recall was a different game than the Genesis game, yes)?
But the big difference is that the arcade version was one of those rotary joystick games. (that is, you could both move AND twist the joystick to move and fire in different directions)
Can the Evercade handle that?
I do remember playing Time Soldiers on PSP, and that used L and R to rotate which wasn't nearly as good as a proper solution.

@TheFlyingKick Someone posted what I've to ask... if it was a REAL Nintendo commercial (because I don't remember seeing it on TV): there's this guy, his wife is going into labor and he's sitting there playing an N64 golf game!
What a sick and twisted direction for a Nintendo commercial to go, even for the '90s!
(there was another one where a dad's son catches him crossdressing, and the dad asks to buy off his son's secrecy with a Player's Choice N64 game. Kind of shocking for Nintendo to even touch that subject, especially in a commercial from... was it like 2000?)

@GhaleonUnlimited The earliest according to GameFAQs is "Synthesizer" which it dates a week (9/18) before FDS Akumajo Dracula (9/26).
They date Gradius (KIONAMI logo) to July and Penguin Adventure: Yume Tairiku Adventure to October.

@Spider-Kev Indeed that was the reference of the joke.

Funny to learn that with the 16-bit Konami logo, they had a different laser color on each console. I know it was red on SNES games, I forget which was which but they used blue and green for Genesis and PC-Engine games. A nice touch.

Maybe it's fitting that, to my knowledge, the second game released to use that logo was Akumajo Dracula for the Famicom Disk System. Pretty much the one franchise they've stuck to the most.
(I think the first was an obscure MSX game.)

Replacing the prior logo that the retro gaming scene I've seen knows as "KJONAMI".

@bippity_bop I was in a certain retro game community that had heard of the unreleased Sega CD game Citizen X, and to us DLC meant "d-licking clown" after what one member described as their interpretation of one character in the game (and seen in screenshots in original development era coverage in magazines like EGM).
That was, a mime or clown or such seen in the FMV's, and this forum member gave their interpretation of what the clown was miming. And it stuck in the community.