KingMike

Though with how Sega was able to patent the pointer arrow in Crazy Taxt... I suppose it should be said the Crazy Taxi idea seems to be one that Data East had done in a game probably almost nobody has heard of called "Kamikaze Cabbie" or Yellow Cab... and it was made in 1984. Obviously a two-dimensional game but I do recall it a similar idea when I watched LordBBH set out years ago to play all the games nobody's heard of in MAME in chronological order.

@JackGYarwood @Martin_H I think the far more plausible reason for such a short availability was the two-player mode.
From what I heard, its programming was dependent on some "undocumented" behavior of the PPU (video chip). Meaning that the operation of their code was in no way assured reliable on different models of the SNES hardware. It's possible Nintendo found out and didn't want to put out more copies a game they could foresee complaints about not working.
(Short: the programmers did a thing they were likely advised not to do, and dependent on what their particular console in the office did when they did it anyways.)

I can't recall if the North American SNES version of Wizardry V did more changes than simply remove the Japanese language options from the Japanese release a year and a half earlier (yes, it originally had Japanese or English options for various parts of the text, like dialogue, menus or spells, I believe). With those removed "Select switch" sure sounds like an odd way to say "Options menu".
(Well, I know one change was the publisher change. ASCII did all the FC, SFC and GB Wizardry releases in Japan, while Capcom published this version of the game. I recall one magazine review complaining as they pulled both Wizardry V and Eye of the Beholder out of their mail in 1994 at how "ancient" the two games they had just received were. I think they said they would've been like three and four years at that point or something.)

Ah, that sort of HUD that is great is for streamers but surely far too busy to be of use to the person actually playing the game.

@Sketcz I remember that even in the Resident Evil era, EGM or someone else saying that while getting many hours of entertainment out of a $60 game would sound like good value, is it really if the hours become repetitive?
Though the fact that many 8-bit-era games used punishing difficulty with very limited forgiveness for errors to keep you playing, when making a very long game wasn't really feasible, seems to be a design choice lost on younger audiences that I can imagine being raised on endless length games than arcade quarter-muncher mentality. I've heard so much "man, why these old games so brutal!" type comments.

@NoirConceit Feels like Putty Moon was maybe also a region variant title of the SNES game (maybe Japanese?).

I recall playing the SNES game only as far as watching the putty just swallow a baby for points or something and being like "LOL, what is this game about?"

@axelhander I don't know about that, reading your posts sounds like work so maybe there should be an AI solution for that too.

My only knowledge of the comic is from watching a streamer read through the comics on stream a few years ago, one issue per stream.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't attention from someone else over the Marxio Brothers villians.

Though streamer was certainly interested in their game reviews and scores that sometimes didn't make sense. Super Street Fighter II. "Don't waste your money on this game." 94%.
Or low graphics, sounds, and controls (or whichever criteria they rated) equals out to a high overall score. Somehow.

I do remember he eventually played Taz-Mania on the Master System after seeing that game on the Top 10 charts for a surprisingly long time. It... seemed decent... At least better than the Game Gear game which doesn't seem well-regarded, less than Genesis. I recall streamer finding SMS Taz having a few blind falls... but the impression of seeing ZX Spectrum and C64 games is they like that sort of game design over there in the UK?

I don't understand why reprint a game I recall being common to find an original cartridge.

What I've heard about "Super Turbot" and "fairness" depends on which version of the game you're playing.

I've heard tournaments regularly use the Japanese version because the US version is broken as ****. Reportedly it had issues besides that on single player, it reportedly only lets you play the first opponent at the actual machine difficulty then it jacks up to max (and the difficulty scale is reportedly even higher than the Japanese version).
Though unfortunate for tournament use, the Japanese version reportedly doesn't have a freeplay option, so admins would have to regularly recycle quarters in the machine.

@rob7979 Most of the chips Sega used were standardized and anyone could buy them, I recall.
Maybe the VDP might have been custom.

I remember learning about the Bandai relation when I had purchased a copy of Batman for the Game Boy online, and I was surprised to receive a UK copy of the game, which I had only known was because it included the manual and I had noticed the Bandai UK address on the back.

I think about the bug in Buster Busts Loose on the SNES where Buster dies near the end of level 2 if you remap the R button in the options menu.
Nintendo Power reported on it (though of course they avoided saying it was a bug).
That is the sort of thing I wonder if it only got found because of people calling the Nintendo hotline to complain. I'd guess the testers could've forgotten to test the entire game with remapped controls (presumably the defaults were chosen for a reason) but once you have the entire public playing the game, someone is going to hit it.
(in that game's case, when Konami programmed the cutscenes to replace the player input with scripted button presses, they correctly programmed the Jump and Drop Kick functions to press the corresponding mapped buttons but for Dash, they gave it an explicit R Button input. From what I see, there was a PAL Spanish version which did fix the bug. But it was present in the three expected international releases.)

I also wonder if all those calls is what prompted the DX version of Link's Awakening to add more hints than what was present in the original monochrome version. I remember some of those puzzles took me quite some time to figure out as a child, as the first Zelda game I had finished.
I think some might have been designed just assuming every player had already played all the prior games. Good thing designers since have hopefully been careful to avoid doing that.

What's most infamous about Atlantis no Nazo is that it is so unkind to the player that there is an empty room that if you enter, you can do nothing but watch as it kills off all your extra lives one by one.
Well, someone has posted a video of Bubsy doing that because of the possibility of an enemy spawning on top of a checkpoint spawn location but the difference is that Bubsy was surely an error (my guess is that is why many platformers would grant momentary invincibility after starting a new life) while Atlantis no Nazo was deliberate.

@GlamReaper Atlantis no Nazo was once planned for a North American release by Activision under rebranding as Super Pitfall II.
That would be quite a thing to ponder how these two kusoge would stack up given an official relation.
(Activision also teased Zombie Master, a localization of Zombie Hunter that didn't come out. That's a good game but despite the short length, finishing it fairly without passwords or even continues supported is tough just because of how long it can trap you in RNG purgatory.)

A minor nitpick but Super Arabian on the Famicom was 1985. Hudson and Namco were the first third-party publishers on the console in 1984, and a ton first joined the console in 1985.

Sad I finally had to retire my old PC this last week.
I had to set up the new one. I was hoping I could transfer the Blu-Ray drive I had over but it looks like, despite what I thought when I bought it, I won't be able to swap the drive in. I'm sure I can probably get an enclosure to attach it as a USB device?
I probably need one anyways to attach my other old hard drive, after trying to puzzle for hours how I could attach it somewhere to the case without success. Just one designated (mechanical) HDD slot inside the case. At best I got them in the case but where the SATA cables couldn't coexist without obstruction or couldn't reach both.

I didn't know they made slot-loading drives on PCs, but I'm guessing that's what this case was designed for, not the tray drives that have been around since forever.

@Ristar24 Some earlier games actually used the region identification to provide localized game content based on the console rather the cartridge.
But of course, a few years in and it became more frequently used for lockout.
Though the most bizarre case is my Japanese copy of the 1991 game Rolling Thunder 2 (which has to be one of the earliest). So I read the "APPLICABLE TO JAPAN ONLY!!" region check is... applicable to Japan only. I've read the western releases are not region-locked.

@Zeebor15 So I read, Infogrames (aka modern Atari) had already bought out Ocean by the time Mission: Impossible for the N64 was finished (that game was famous back in the day for having a multi-year development) but they let them still put their name on it, as I think the last game they put out before the name was retired.

@WaveBoy I've been told that Johnny Turbo's emulator was fairly inaccurate, with one example being the lack of copy-protection emulation in Sly Spy (was that the name? The "not James Bond" game.) making the game easier than it's supposed to be (the idea with anti-piracy on console games was to make them harder, but in arcade games to make them easier, I guess to punish the arcade owners).

I do remember LordBBH getting a 1CC on the arcade version. Then naturally looking at both the Genesis and TurboGrafx versions, and I recall one of them was kind of BS difficult, somehow made even more difficult than the arcade game.

One must ask how much they are willing to go Megadriving down the Inter State Kaneko.

I had assumed the SNES game was a port of the DOS game since the same developer made it, but I know the NES game was a different game published by a different publisher (Bandai) than the SNES (the defunct Japanese IGS, though it surprises me the probably-unrelated Taiwanese IGS seems to be as known as it is).

This time the action in New York will not include actual New Yorker Sigourney Weaver, will it?
(I'm not surprised they took the player names out when they released the Wii VC version.)

I do find this amusing as one of my old translation scene pals (that I know wouldn't appreciate being named) had cited this game as a bottom of the barrel SNES RPG for which they wish the scene of those days would've started covering other platforms with as much enthusiasm.
That's certainly a valid point. I myself had wanted to but couldn't move off the NES and SNES since the tools and docs weren't as robust. Then I found myself not as able to commit to sitting down with another platform to learn it. I still won't accept GenAI translations as "necessary" alternatives to hard manual work.

@metaphysician I know that AG does have a separate site he runs a business for formally licensed jobs (that is, completely legitimizing his skills), so he's not unapproachable if someone wanted to.
Though in that game's case, I think he would need to be able to reach out to the person who originally translated the text.

@Damo The Game Boy port of Battle of Olympus was only released in Europe.
I don't know if there was anything particularly wrong with it, but in the past few years I recall VGHF releasing a document of Activision's license prospects for North America and Battle of Olympus was among them but someone thought it was boring or dull or something.
Especially with Link's Awakening coming out that same year, you'd think they'd want something in that direction.

@Arcadia_Official How is the Amiga controller "a SNES controller for grown-ups"?
The SNES controller looks like a fine controller for everyone. The Amiga controller looks like an awfully uncomfortable variant.
When I played Super Metroid on my Japanese New 3DS, the extra bulk of the device was enough to throw off my playing (though obviously unavoidable since of course the 3DS needs a touchscreen in the middle). I was just feeling glad I wasn't playing a domestic unit, which would mean I'd have to be playing the even larger XL system (since standard-size USA consoles were limited to a couple special editions).

@Fallingshadow The SNES version is actually a unique game. From what I've seen, the arcade version is closer to a brawler (combat focus) while the SNES version takes the set designs and remixes them with levels much more focused on platforming.
I think the other ports (NES, GB, Genesis and maybe some home computers) are more direct adaptations.

@Moroboshi876 It wouldn't stop WB. They shot down an unrelated PSP game for making ever so slightly less blatant reference, putting it away until the publisher rereleased with the title reduced (which honestly was too long of a title anyways). The title was something like "Holy (something or other), Bad Man! What Have I Done to Deserve This, My Lord?". It was reissued with just the last half of the title. The publisher said it was due to a rights issue with "an unnamed party" but it's really obvious who that party was.

In my day most games were "trapped" on certain consoles. If you wanted to play the game that much, you bought the console. We didn't have ideas such as whining about games being "trapped" on a specific console.

He tried to strange a child to death about two seconds into Home Alone 2: Lost in New York on the Super Nintendo.

Thankfully he will be remembered for far better roles in video games...

@-wc- Then when they say "NES", I wonder if this will be the FDS (Japan) or "NES" (international). I haven't played enough to know whether this used the FDS sound channel or if there is more difference than that the FDS version allowed saving progress to disk while the NES used passwords.
Another difference from the arcade is, I understand the NES had more levels... incase 100 wasn't enough already.

Though the question is to how accurate the Arcade Archives version is to the actual arcade machine. I know Bubble Bobble is one of those games that wasn't emulated properly in MAME for many years because, like countless other games, used mysterious proprietary chips that were undocumented and I think in BB may have been tied to many obscure secrets probably almost nobody was going to find on their own.

@slider1983 Someone already took the Zool name for a completely unrelated Japanese-exclusive RPG on the N64.
Though I guess technically they didn't call it "Zool 64".
But that was the platform that people have most associated with Anything "64" titles.

@MontyCircus My knowledge of Little Samson in 1992/1993 was only because Nintendo Power covered it.
I didn't have a NES at the time so I couldn't actually play it, I could only look at the magazine article and wonder what I was missing.

@-wc- Oops. I mathed bad. 160x144 is a 10:9 ratio, I believe. I put those numbers together wrong.

From what I remember, what we had of Mega Drive Mr. Nutz 2 online was an incomplete source code.

It does surprise me that this game was one that someone decided needed to be released on every iteration of the Game Boy line.
But they weren't Nutz enough to make DS, 3DS and Switch versions. (though it wouldn't surprise me if someone said there was a DSi version. I mean, someone decided that the Amiga and SNES platformer Oscar needed to be split into a separate game for each level and released on DSiWare.)

@JackGYarwood Would be nice to see the English version that Namco had prepared for a USA release in 1994, renamed Star Quest.
But as you might imagine, the 1990 Mega Drive game was probably suddenly looking a bit dated with the PlayStation half a year from Japanese launch. I imagine that's probably why its release was shelved, even though EGM reviewed a supposedly completed preview copy.

Well, Analogue is the company that got its start selling us a $500 NES.
(I don't know if I can even say clone, I've heard some say that first Analogue unit was basically a really fancy AV Famicom PCB mod at its core.)

Risk damaging a rare and valuable console when picking up a spare could do the job.

Though I can remember I'm not the only one that felt a little upset many years ago when Ben Heck took one apart to turn it into a Sega CD-only machine, as I recall. (I think those were the days he was largely known as the guy who portablizes all the home consoles.)

@-wc- 16:10 is the aspect ratio the GB/GBC and GG used. I don't know what other systems used that.
I haven't kept track of Evercade releases to know which games from those systems, if any, made it to the console.

@Lanmanna Well, the NES version Super Spike V'Ball did get promoted in Nintendo Power when Nintendo launched their 4-player adapters and they made a dual-cart with Nintendo World Cup that I think might have been a pack-in with the adapters or maybe even the console itself so the NES version isn't a very obscure game.

@MarkyVigoroth I feel like it's lesser known they did actually port the first DKC to the GBC in addition to the GBA.

I've seen videos of this game and there's only one thing I can think about: It has flip-screen scrolling. On the PLAYSTATION TWO.
Every version on far less powerful computers has proper scrolling. What the jank, Taito?

@Johnny_Arthur From what I've seen and heard, it wasn't a "bad" game to be "fixed" but it was a British-made game, at least from a time period, where I would get the impression they really liked absurdly difficult games. Seen by watching streamers play ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games, it's a rare sight to see games with fairness in the game design.

Love-de-lic, the people who made Moon: RPG Remix Adventure previously on A 32-Bit Home Console.

LGR Clint remembers POD and thus has made us all aware of it.

I seem to recall that when someone wrote a tool to automatically "colorize" Game Boy games so many years ago it broke games because what do you know, turns out porting even GB to GBC was something needing human effort to deal with.

SML is 64KB. Considering how much of that is probably graphics and sound and level data, that can't leave that much code left to disassemble and rewrite.
Can't be that much more than some of the NES code I've hand disassembled and analyzed for translations.
You might be able to rewrite the graphics and level data and such but I'm fairly certain chip sound is something you can't just expect a robot to rewrite for a different chip and it not sound like ****.

If Game Boy games are "so simple" then you don't need AI to write something "so simple" for you.

Or did the author need AI to write their post for them too because writing a post on the Internet seems like something "so simple" as well, but I don't know, I don't know anymore just how lazy the human race is to see how far down the "simple" rabbithole it goes that people need a robot to do things for them.

Now that I look closer at the Game Boy screens, I wonder how difficult it would be to see those on an actual OG (DMG-001) screen.

@Damo The game actually was originally designed for a battery-backup save feature. There is a pre-Costner prototype ROM online. It is, as mentioned, a pretty rough game (I'm not sure if there's even a way to restore health).
Other odd things about it is that the final game had a password feature which itself was hidden as a cheat code.
The game also had a Sega Master System version that was in development at one point but never finished. I do recall there is at least video footage online, surely from an old promotional video or TV show.

@Guru_Larry "male Samus" Someone got their lore solely from the NES instruction manual where "he" pronouns was their way of keeping it secret Samus was female (which only makes sense in the context of the era the original game out when games didn't often promote female human protagonists).
Though even the Japanese manual apparently called Samus "he" one or more times despite that you could much more easily hide the character gender in Japanese without resorting to very awkward-sounding writing like you would in English.

Though I've read the 1993 Mario movie writers called the blond princess "Daisy" because they pulled it out of the NES Open Tournament Golf manual because that was the only "Mario" game they played where, because of palette limits of the NES, "Daisy" (as Luigi's caddy canonically) was a dress-color swap of "Peach/Toadstool" (Mario's caddy).