KingMike

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.

@Nahhhtendo Well, when it is a "professional" magazine writing about a Japanese game and clearly not making any attempt at getting the game title correct, that is a different thing than Taz-speak.
Never seen such a thing out of EGM, who'd sometimes make up names but at least make up plausible names.

@Lovelime "Mr. Mister" That's not a very good name, this device seems to lack wings of any state.

I recall looking forward to that Mega Man collection as much as the PS2 Phantasy Star Collection. (reportedly Sega was going to bundle the PS2 remakes together, as Sony America would've dictated according to reports about their feelings about 2D gaming, but that would've entailed a desire for a Phantasy Star IV remake, which who knows if Sega was ever planning that)
I believe Sega did eventually release a collection on the Sega Ages line in Japan but I assume that was just emulation ports of the original four games. We sort of got that with the Sega Genesis Collection, yes?)

I seem to recall at one point Capcom even took preorders for the GBA game on their own online store. (I'm pretty sure my physical copy of Ultimate Ghouls 'n Ghosts on PSP came from them.)

Gauntlet was the first game I played emulated, before I even knew what emulators were. I had gone to a computer liquidation sale and I was not yet wise enough to consider some of the software sold on disks may not exactly be legally compliant.
So I bought a floppy disk with Neill Corlette's Gauntlet emulator with the ROMs included (despite including Neill's readme saying he couldn't legally include them).

Was Seven Sorrows released? I know there is a ROM going around for a DS Gauntlet game that reportedly was never officially released, and I thought it was that but maybe it was a different game.

Typing a bunch of random letters as the name doesn't sound particularly "hilarious". I understand people weren't so considerate in the '90s but it's not really "funny" to bring up again.
Also, is that GameFan, the same magazine that was previously reportedly to have had, like, a Madden review or something where the writer wrote a really racist thing to their friend as "filler" text then forgot to replace the text with the actual game review before it went to print? It could've been GamePro, but I've heard stories about the GameFan writers. I also heard reports that their review of Cybermorph for the Jaguar was written while under heavy narcotics influence, according to one of the streamers I watch who did a read through of that full issue once.

@snk2d4life As I understand the original Xbox had a problem with the clock battery exploding and damaging the components around it.

I remember reading about this and it seemed like a game that was never going to get released. Was shocked when it finally made it out on DS.

@bring_on_branstons I thought Sega released multiple Sonic themed children's attractions that were primarily ride with limited interactive element.
I know one streamer I watch his made part of his stream intro footage of playing a popcorn popper in MAME, though giving an error message when obviously MAME cannot replicate the FULL functionality of the device.

@ch37x From what I've seen, at most archive.org can block public access to the files, but identifying (through legal registration) as a preservation organization gives them the right to host the files.

This would have still been over a year before Secret of Mana.

But it's probably forgotten because Nintendo seems to have forgotten much of the HAL catalog that isn't Kirby. I think only Lolo has gotten rerelease.

Supposedly Nintendo took them as a second party after the visual novel Metal Slader Glory for the Famicom reportedly financially ruined them less than a year before this game.

I suppose people don't know at one point the PAL Rod-Land was considered the rarest and most valuable of the commercially released PAL NES games. Now I'm sure it's been overtaken in value easily.
Some people said the game was only released in Spain. I know a couple of the rarest PAL SNES games are, despite being English localizations of Japanese games, are said to have only received Spanish release.
The Famicom version was much easier to obtain though.

I'd be down for a Game Gear Mini that isn't the size of a postage stamp.

It could sit right there with the NBA Jam SNES "beta" (a joke version more than serious development) known as NBA Jam XXX to the fans where the announcer is like "He's on f***** fire!" and "Get that s*** out of here!".
In real life, he has to deny any involvement and claim it a fake game.

And yes, the only TurboForce I read is that issue above, which I believe was given away as a preview within one issue of... EGM?. As you might be able to tell by not having a UPC code on the front. (kind of a necessary thing so you could buy the magazine at the store.)

Kind of surprised at that relaunched Electronic Games, as it is at least from the same publisher as EGM (and even advertised by them). Seems kind of redundant?

EGM did produce two single-format publications which I think ran at least a couple years each. Super NES Buyer's Guide and Mega Play.
As you might guess the former was an all-SNES magazine and the latter devoted to Sega consoles (though I didn't have any so I didn't read it new, I'm going to guess it went over Genesis/Sega CD and Game Gear?)

@Sketcz Wow, what did those writers think to find that many of those "homegrown" English games were infact Japanese in origin?
Many license shovelware NES games could have as well been developed by Rare as by Atlus.
Or worse, by either Micronics or Imagineering. If you need two companies of different nationalities but about equal crappiness.

I don't know about the UK perspective, but I don't think VG&CE was that "forgotten" in the US.
It had a pretty long run, if you consider that in 1993 it was rebranded to just "VideoGames", focusing on console content and dropping the computer gaming stuff.
Then in 1994 it launched its successor publication Tips & Tricks, which like the name says focused on strategy guides and cheats, that magazine far outlasted the original publication.

Though I swear I've seen that exact battle UI in some licensed-based RPG probably by Bandai or one of its other brands (Shinsei, Angel, Yutaka).

@sdelfin I'm fairly certain a baseball game is the only thing Namco saw to release on the Famicom in 1993, to put that in comparison.
Splatterhouse 2 was 1990, though 3 was 1993. However, I can't remember if Splatterhouse 3 got international release or just North America (as Rolling Thunder 3 did that same year).

The Famicom was just too dead by 1993. Namco might have published the most games of any third-party (at least of favored companies, I hadn't the urge to look into how much slop Bandai, let alone Bandai plus its affliliates/alter egos, or Pony Canyon put out ).
But even Namco I believe saw to put out only one Famicom game in 1993, of course a Famista game (that's baseball for those who don't recognize it).

@MS7000 I wonder if people were bothering him too much to finish.
I heard him once speak of someone who attended a convention in order to annoy him in person.