GhaleonUnlimited

@Gryffin I've never understood anything that happened in FFT at all. I really enjoyed playing it though lol

The 64 Switch emu has a lot of problems , right ? (I've not used it myself ).

It could be a technical problem .

For all the ***** Nintendo gets about things like this , they've never had my passwords get hacked by pirates , try to kill/cheapen 2D gaming , make exploring batteries and electronics that catch on fire , make hardware they know will break in that console's lifetime , etc

@EarthboundBenjy it used to be very bad, not I'm not sure about modern ones. With checking into

@slider1983 MK2 and UMK3 are legit great, competitive games, esp UMK3. Different than SF but great in a totally different way , and def has its advantages over SF .

I set up both at my events and MK2 gets both asked for and played way way way more than any SF games . It nailed being a good competitive game with just being easy for anyone to put up and do cool ***** that looks cool and hits hard , with less skill needed at a base level .

Esp now that I've played a lot other competitive games from the era I really appreciate MK from a design perspective

I hope some folks who didn't play these initially try them and really enjoy them ! Good writing and characters are timeless.

I do wish the SEGA CD versions were included. I've read some Japanese publications declared TSS the best RPG yet made when it came out , and EB is peak 16-bit RPGing.

The remakes add much but lose plenty as well, and really weren't as impressive next to their peers comparatively when they finally came out in the West.

Regardless , if you like RPGs and good characters and dialog , give Lunar a go! TSS and EB are still my fav games ever along with MGS1 lol.

@Futureshark oh I guess so , last I read about these III never got ported. I guess pretty much every shooter is on PSN/steam/switch now

@NicolausCamp thx very much!

Nice, Strikers III has never been ported so unless you owned the board there was no legal way to play it .

Does anyone know if a physical release for Genesis/MD can be bought bypassing LRG? Like maybe a Japanese copy or something ?

@slider1983 Are you a hacker yourself and specifically know this would be an easy project to transfer the text into the game ?

I'm guessing not till but I try never to assume .

If you aren't , I guess you might not know that the "simplest" of script transfers can range from dozens of hours to hundreds of hours to nearly impossible .

@slider1983 no idea, I just hit reply . Apologies !

@slider1983 Are you saying that as an experienced Saturn hacker?

@RupeeClock @slider1983 Sony just made all that ***** about Lik-Sang. Sony employees used Lik-Sang themselves until they decided they just wanted to shut them down by burying them in legal fees , just like they did with bleem . They knew they weren't legally in the right .

You know it's an alternate-world dystopia when someone has a Jaguar poster on their wall

As usual SEGA innovated but found a way to get screwed. In this case it was not knowing that the license they had purchased for Tetris wasn't actually real, lol ;( think of Tetris on Game Gear and not Game Boy. Man.

But the rules for Tetris Grandmaster I guess originate from arcade SEGA Tetris so hey they contributed to the legacy of Tetris we have today still.

Great eduction here, thanks for the piece!

The Lynx is amazing hardware if you haven't tried one! Yeah, not a ton of top-tier games but most aren't terrible or anything. Some are extremely impressive technically. Chip's Challenge is a GREAT puzzle game.

The Jag is a pile of ass. Very appropriate to be paired up a toilet of a CD player. I always figured every major system would have at least 1 game every gamer should play. I got a free Jag last year and bought a Game Drive, and AvP is just a choppy Doom clone that looks like it was made specifically to be shown in screenshots for magazines, lol.

This all explains their games libraries very well. Lynx deserved much better.

This is a great interview, thank you for putting it together! Of course it's easy to say "I told you so" but this guy sounds like he had the right idea. Awesome to learn his story

I am NOT favor of what's happening in my country in any way but, I see a headline and I have to say 4K Retrotinks are not economical in normal times, haha.

This is awesome! Dead custom chips seem to be the biggest hurdle for console longevity. Most other stuff that goes bad can be repaired.

While most people will go to emulation, keeping the actual systems alive for future generations to see the real thing will be huge for the hobby and the medium.

I know emulators themselves are legal obviously, but does it change anything if you're making an emulator specifically just for one game?

@slider1983 I think the SNES port is great. A little chunkier/choppier to play but the gameplay of MK1 sucks even on the arcade version. MK1 was/is really all spectacle. SNES ver looks/sounds better. I love how colorful it is. (I liked the Genesis fatalities better obviously lol.)

It seems we ll need SEGA themselves to translate SEGA GAGA into English because it's such a pain to romhack.

I started learning Japanese years ago and I think it's faster for me to become fluent-ish in my spare time than wait for or contribute to a fan translation ;/

Maybe SEGA will continue to be powered by nostalgia and will eventually find it financially viable to translate it into EN!

Man, this would have been awesome. Even as a Genesis owner, I always was more impressed with the SNES port.

@mjparker77 I don't use emulators honestly, and as stated above there are perma downsides to emulators. It's great that 360 emulation is good then though!

@mjparker77 don't you have to pay to access their stuff? I have Sindem lightguns and was disappointed by that

Just popping in to say if you like MGS play Ghost Babel and MG2! They're amazing!

I've played MGS dozens of times through, trying to find every obscure codec conversation I could in every scenario. Never seen this cos I never had to play in mono!

MGS1 is as famous as it is and yet I feel like it's actually underrated! Cool to see this story and remind people of the depth of what they thought of when making this game.

I wonder if the JP version has a line about the mono TV as well?

I completed a Phantasy Star IV retranslation and used the same boilerplate "don't use this without permission or for commercial use" but I was acutely aware I was working on a company copyrighted IP and there's nothing I can do if someone stole my writing or programming for commercial use.

IMO most of the carpet bagger, overpriced retro industry is BS lol.

Not surprised by this news at all but really what can you do about it if you did the work ;( I think you must have to resign yourself that you did it for the passion and people who actually will really appreciate it, and the work is available for free for anyone who wants to play it or make their own cartridge.

I really appreciate when companies license their repros though or do the work to credit people who did the real work though.

The FOMO ***** of LRE and the like is crap but licensing and rel releasing a super expensive game like Gley Lancer and owning it legally is pretty cool. I hope the backlash forces retro bit and others to pay more attention and not be lazy, money-grubbing dicks but I doubt the speculating ***** that but these up to sell them once they're sold out really care

@slider1983 All translations are all a series of choices. Great translations can and should read differently, simply because different people worked on them, especially with such wildly different languages as English and Japanese.

Really, it's only bad/basic translations that should read more closely because it'll mean the translator couldn't understand the nuances of the text.

I'm shocked, shocked to find these companies care much more about making a quick buck than a quality product that will last as long as these consoles have

I don't support any of these repro companies because their ***** is ridiculously expensive and pray upon FOMO addicts, but in fairness I think it's fair to ask what is the real-world chance of these damaging a console, and what might happen.

Like I know you shouldn't use AC adapters that have a much lower amperage than the OG power bricks, but I also don't know what the actual danger is

This is great news for retrogame fans. It's a dream that companies will localize games that never were released originally in English.

I hope it s written better than the description, though!

It's really academic because I don't think the average kid or parent can tell the difference.

I only play on real hardware but honestly when I play hardware or software emulation I'm hard-pressed to tell the difference in 99% of situations. People are welcome to argue and I'm all for best accuracy but to me it's kinda like people arguing about the resolution in Switch games or something.

I m not saying it's unimportant just because I don't get it. It's just my observation

Definitely whatever gets you to play a game instead of talking about them or watching someone else play them I think is good!

I needed to buy an MSX Turbo R and do a sound cap replacement because I just want to know what MSX Konami games most accurately play and sound like. Most people don't need to go to such lengths as we make them out to be.

Looks interesting!

I wish we got way more of these 2-D PSX games in the West. I will never forget that SoA tried to cheapen and kill 2-D gaming. ;p

@KingMike I put the EN ROM, corrected for NTSC, on my JP cart. Recommended!

I got an additional JP CIB copy for about $65 a year or two ago being patient on ebay so it's not ridiculously priced. Certainly would have preferred to get it for $10 tho lol.

My very longterm goal is to play it in JP eventually and tweak the EN script accordingly, but I might be doing that from the old folks' home at this rate.

@jesse_dylan I think he only did one track on PoR, the remix of Crucifix Held Close from Haunted Castle (happy to be corrected).

Terranigma is IMO the best SNES RPG and maybe SNES game period, so if this introduces you to Terranigma or reminds you of it, please play it through and see what you think of it! (A HG101 writer made this claim years ago, and I was skeptical, but then I played it and became a believer.)

Baruga's theme is kind of in a SoR style now that this connection had been made by the man himself. It's a really badass "villain lab/castle" theme.

@RetroGames only nerds still use Twitter or whatever it's called

@Cyber_Akuma for an extra price, on top of the way higher price of the unit itself

@slider1983 compatible with Mister cores, doesn't it say that? Pretty amazing if that's the deal

The SEGA 3D classics are one of the best, if not the best, reasons to have a 3DS! CFW your system if you haven't and take care of business!

You know what, I have bad news for anyone looking for real 16-bit music and that's your criteria.

The SNES still sounds like videogame music guys. It is not a live orchestra machine, even for the great ones. No one is listening to the SNES and thinking "Oh that's a real guitar on FFVI Epitaph."

I was honestly kind of disappointed hearing a lot of SNES games when I could get a system in 2001 because the chip had been built up for so many years.

If realism and max instruments playing at once is what you're after then SEGA CD/PCE CD/PC CD is the pinnacle of music from the era. The SNES does not sound real. Cmon guys.

"But that's not fair". OK, then why compare systems at all in the first place like you designed the things yourself?

No one is ever like "The NES sounds like crap compared to the Genesis or FM Sound on the SMS". Because you're comparing stuff instead of just enjoying them lol

@N64-ROX Just like with everything retrogaming, it's more like people decide to change increasing amounts for something and people keep paying it, regardless of how plentiful it is.

@Coalescence I had one of thee 3rd-party ones, and I didn't really realize the top weird grate thing was a heat sync. I removed it for asthetics and then the 64's picture gets randomly scrambled for a half-second, then rights itself, and seems ruined. RGB-modded too ;p

@GravyThief that's awesome!

I am not into the 3D Zeldas myself besides WW and BotW/TotK but there is something about all of them that's esp magical for kids.

My kids (5 and 2) are not super into playing or watching, but my younger randomly were interested in the 64 ones cos of the boxes apparently, and asked me to play them lol. I hope too theyll enjoy playing through some games with me as they get older!

@Sketcz someday :/

I still have a feeling in going to be fluent-ish in JP before a fan translation is done!

@bring_on_branstons This is all subjective but for me the Bloodlines version of Simon's Theme is one of my fav 16-bit tracks. I also really like that it's not a carbon-copy of the SNES version. It sacrifices a FEW elements but structures and arranges the song better IMO.

I think it's really underappreciated. I learned it on piano for my YT Videogame tutorials because I don't think it gets a lot of credit (for a variety of reasons, none of which are the track itself's fault).

I think a lot of SEGA fans have basically inferiority complexes because SEGA "lost the war" and winners write the history. I think all consoles from the era are great and have tons of games everyone should play. But you hear a lot more about Chrono Trigger than Lunar: Eternal Blue. You can say "well more people played CT" or "cos CT is better" but there should be more allowance in games criticism for opinion and subjectivity. Like Citizen Kane, Godfather, and Casablanca are each "best movies" but they're totally different experiences, and trying to rank one over the other comes down to preferences as a film critic.

People in games are less tolerant of diverging opinions. Like, people get mad over it.

So because Western retrogames criticism is pretty Nintendo-centric, a lot of SEGA fans and American PCE/TG16 fans feel the need to be like "hey, these really are just as good" because you don't hear people shut up about THEIR prefences, when this stuff is simply not ironclad.

I think people would be happier if we don't have the need to label "better", but instead just "great" on their own merits. A true games fan just tries to find great games I think.

@GravyThief The scan line thing is honestly ridiculous. I never even knew what scan lines were until the late '00s and I started learning shout RGB, and I've literally been playing retrogames exclusively on tubes since I was 3.

No kid noticed scanlines on a tube so it's unlikely nostalgia is a factor for anyone on the quest for scan lines.

I seriously think it's just become a nerd thing of "I must pay $$$$ to have the very best thing that I barely notice".

I play on a PC CRT with mainly XRGB linedoublers, and I change the sharpness depending on the system. You want a balance of RGB but also how the games were designed to be seen. Like, 64 games were designed to look smeary and be seen on a small TV. They look AWFUL to me otherwise.

Some of my arcade cabs have really sharp CRT monitors and I dull the sharpness so when you play TMNT or NBA Jam it looks how you remember it in arcades.

Bottom line I do think people should invest in a setup that allows them to actually play their games, so if it's a PVM or ultra-sharp picture, do it. Nothing makes me sadder in retrogames than someone who just compulsively buys stuff to be placed on a shelf like a museum piece. Play your games!

@CocktailCabinet I also really really hope Terranigma at least gets a text cleanup or some parts retranslated.

I've looked into it a little and I think tools exist to implement new text, I just have 2 small kids now and I know better than to take on something I'm not going to make proper time for lol.

But I'll do it someday if no one else does.

@Azuris Square sucks, is the answer. The only Enix game they seem to care about is DQ.

I know they did the Actraiser remake, but I didn't expect any other Quintet remakes personally since they don't seem as well-known as Actraiser

@KingMike it's even worse than the final IoG???

@RetroGames These are passion projects done for free (well, mostly, lot of patreons for these now); I don't think of it as anyone's obligation to work on more than they want to. Each one of these projects usually takes at minimum dozens but more likely hundreds of hours.

I'm not being snarky when I say to people if there s a game you want translated, see what work is out there already for it and see how you can get involved, or even jump start a project and (politely) ask for assistence as needed.

I was sick of PSIV having different planet names than the other games, set out to learn how to fix that, and ended up doing an entire retranslation because it turned out a disassembly was already out there for the ROMs, no one had just bothered to work on the dialog yet.

So the hacking part was relatively easy for me cos of work that had been done and made public, and being a writer/editor by trade with some JP study (and retranslation notes were also already completed) I was able to put in the time at what I like to do. For big programming problems I was fortunate to get help from real programmers!

So see what you can help with if there's anything you'd like to see worked on

The translator is adding graphics changes as well as translation (check out the title screen, which restores the 3 characters running on the planet like the JP box and end of game), and has a lot planned for a 2.0 release.

The writing is still a bit stilted/awkward for my taste but I know how hard it is to translate and then review the actual writing and editing.

It's a huge improvement over the bad localization we got, and I'm very excited to play it through! I'm just 45 min in. I hope some additional time will also result in increasingly naturalistic dialog.

It was clear playing through the stock translation that a lot was left out or translated poorly. IoG's scenario was written by a well-known JP novelist, so this is a game that REALLY needed someone willing to give it some TLC!