KingMike

@bring_on_branstons There was another ad for the Game Gear in the US which compared Sonic 1 to Tetris.
Funny thing is is that while Sonic sure had presentation value, Tetris certainly had more staying power and surely was more of a comparison piece than the ad creators might've been thinking.
(Unfortunately, the other things Sega wrote in that specific ad would definitely not go down well if they were said today. That was true of some of Sega's marketing from that period in the US and I'm sure the UK had its own ads that couldn't be reposted.)

Virtual Boy had the first "twin stick" controller Nintendo produced, I think.

I believe one questionable design choice of the VB controller is that it also houses the battery pack for the console.
Had the VB lasted long enough, that probably could've been an expense for Nintendo if they were to make replacement controllers, they'd have needed to include replacement battery packs with them.

@Xerox1919 Original copies of Wild Guns went UP in value after the Wii Virtual Console release.
Though I doubt value change will happen in this case.

What... the Pokemon Mini was more powerful than the original Game Boy... enough to run a Game Boy emulator...?
The games sure didn't look like it, despite that Pokemon Mini came out 12 years after the original Game Boy (and the same year as Game Boy Advance).

Or is this much like running a SNES emulator on GBA (I recall one existed, even though the GBA had no technical chance of seriously running a properly functional SNES emu)? Like no way was FF6 running on that was going to challenge FF6 Advance for being a playable video game.

The name "Game Bub" though sounds too much like something Stuart Ashens would review.
(not the least that I recall he did make a movie about the Game Child, didn't he?)

My memory right be wrong, but even the arcade original didn't allow all three characters to be played at once, right?
You could still have only two humans controlling two of the three characters at once?

@Damo Rumors something about EA having some beef with Sega back in the day, possibly about being pushed to Dreamcast sooner than they would've wanted, so they said "no".

Then again, there was also the rumors about Yamauchi being so angry that Square wanted to make PS1 games that he banned him from their consoles, to the point that when Square applied for a GBA dev license (around the time they planned to remake the FC Final Fantasy trilogy on WSC and the SFC trilogy on GBA) it was rumored they had to send an apology letter with their application. I don't know if any of that was ever substantiated or just Internet fan theories.
Same situation.

@Tasuki Nester's Funky Bowling was the American-exclusive bowling game and Virtual Bowling was Japanese-exclusive.
Yes, it's weird that such a short lived console got two region-exclusive bowling games and two region-exclusive Tetris games.

In the case of Jack Bros., I've been told its specifically the English (North America) version that goes for crazy prices. I'm not certain of the Japanese value but I hear it's far less (enough that one of the AVGN's fans sent him a Japanese copy to do an updated version of his Virtual Boy showcase review).

I don't know if anyone has been trusting enough to send him a copy of Virtual Lab, another of the crazy expensive Japanese-exclusives but it would have to be seen, as it would be right up there for him to review in the way he was known (the box would absolutely add to his content, were someone kind enough to have lent him a copy).

I found that room once when I was playing A Link to the Past as a child in 1995, and wasn't until years later I got the reassurance that I hadn't made that up.
However, there's still a few other moments from my childhood gaming experiences that remain a mystery...

@Daniel36 No translation is better than AI garbage.
At least leaving it untranslated leaves the option that if you want a photo translation app and see if whatever it generates works, then good for you.
If I was set for it, I'd myself have sat with Google Translation and looked up words to figure it out myself. At least I'd have the option to put things together for myself.
I don't care if the original text "aren't exactly known for their literary prowess", I'm not trusting a bot.

Still though "worst console of all time" is always debatable.
Game.com is a high contender, not to mention the many low-end portables out of the Far East (like the Game King and its like).

@breach187 This article doesn't mention that, I think one of the things that really got the authorities' attention of the financial situation of this company was when one of the executives manage to crash their INCREDIBLY expensive car. I forget what it was precisely, but it was definitely something extremely valuable.

I absolutely wanted turn-based RPGs on my Game Boy as a kid.

Yet there was almost none released in America.
I can only think of the Final Fantasy Legend series and Great Greed otherwise. And I had only managed to obtain the former thanks to its rerelease before Pokemon launched.

Nice to see anything old get released, though given the list of games developed by that NES developer, I wouldn't get my expectations high of the game being good.
(Peter Pan doesn't look like a NES game from 1991.)

But as to Warrior of Rome III, it looks like it would've been a SNES-exclusive sequel to a Genesis-exclusive franchise.

Sounds like someone hasn't heard about gaming in Europe.

From what I've heard, in France at that time, home computers were the most popular devices for gaming, and of what was left for the console market, Sega was far more prevalent.
(It's not too much of a stretch then, that one of the most famous Master System fans in the world is French, yes? An extremely passionate fan who is quite generous with sharing his affection for the console.)

I've heard Scandinavia is the one part of Europe to have attracted a strong Nintendo crowd in the NES and SNES days.

Yet the DiC cartoons came up with their own names for all the Koopa Kids as well.

Slam City with Joe Hoops incoming? Will Piko go to the effort of editing a FMV game for legalities?

The "Phone Booth", she says, of Nintendo's voice recording.

Tales of Phantasia GBA dub sure is something.

The original Japanese release of Super Mario 64 lacked MANY voices, including the Peach line in question.
Those weren't heard over there until the Rumble Pak version was released a year later.

Gamestation is such a generic name.
Cannot hear it and not think of the King of the Hill episode. Will Atari offer us the best price they can?

@Lowdefal I guess then I was lucky to get a complete copy of Angelique Voice Fantasy then, over a decade ago.
I tried to submit the audio CD data to No-Intro as part of the game data (they are only interested in covering the cartridge data). But they didn't cover it since they don't cover optical media. I think they might've forwarded it to Redump as "Bad rip" since I've heard Redump has pretty specific standards which mine probably didn't qualify.

Nenson Dubois... I think they might be a hardcore GB physical collector (if I remember right), but I recall they were perhaps a little too enthusiastic to share their SGB findings with TCRF.

@PowerPandaMods I understand that blue color would drain the batteries a lot faster on original hardware. White backgrounds with black text was used most often because it was easier on the eyes and more power-efficient on OG hardware.
(the patterned windows actually makes the text in the WonderSwan games rather hard to read on a real WSC)

@no_donatello The SNES games did something similar. Most likely, the game could detect the controller by checking for the EXACT timing of the inputs.
More than likely, a different controller (or even crazier, attempting to manually input) would have a different input rate.

I recall Hudson had already made a Bomberman 3D, for the MSX in 1984, and it looked surprisingly creepy.

@Damo The SFC version is very notable as Koei found a way to effectively release the games on CD without the official CD drive (with an update on its visual novel Angelique as the only other game to utilize the function).
Koei included a special universal CD player remote (requiring the player to own a remote-controlled audio CD player) called "Voicer-kun" which attached to the player 2 controller part and let the game control their CD player.
Each of the four games utilizing the peripheral included an audio CD that was designed as a portion of the game audio (compared to a few other SFC games which included CDs as bonus items for separate listening experience).

@PowerPandaMods True, most of us (me included) would probably be like "it's a Go game" and not give much thought. Like mahjong, pachislot, baseball or soccer games. There's so many of those that we have to imagine it difficult for many of them to be doing something to stand out.

Though I'm probably one of the few to have heard of Madden '93 Championship Edition for the Genesis before resellers caught on. I remember when sellers had trouble moving copies at $20 sealed, then next I saw they were asking $40 loose and then I'd imagine it went up.
I did pick up Tecmo Super Bowl II SNES with the box when a local store had it priced at $10. If I am going to buy one Tecmo Bowl game, it might as well be the rarest, yes?

Though it is hard to imagine any commercially released Famicom game being "the rarest". Didn't Nintendo have a minimum production run? Do people just not want to exchange this Go game as much?

@Damo NES Sky Shark is a game that makes you learn all the patterns so you can live long enough to hear the Folin jams.
I recall M2's collection was the first time that version got a Japanese release officially.

All these effort to put into a game you have to play so you can GAME OVER YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHH!

Also, LONG LEFT TURN MAYBE. @retrophilion

@YANDMAN There was an official cart version PLANNED and indeed SNK had the ROMs in their archive, which is how the VC release happened.
I am aware the official cart release didn't happen and that bootlegs came to fill in that market. In fact, I even said exactly that in my first post.

I know Neo fans would love it if SNK could find it in them to release anymore canceled games they have in their archive, lest the few unreleased games known to exist in collectors' hands remain only playable to those collectors who do not wish to share the ROMs.

I've read one reason Konami games were so good, and the reason some of the developers left Konami to form other studios, is much more disappointing.
TMNT games made Konami a ton of money, so Konami gave the TMNT team preferential treatment, so the other teams put in so much effort to show they were valuable too, that they could still put out good games even if they weren't given anthropomorphic reptiles to work with. But it sounds like it was lost on them.

"One of the most expensive Saturn games" is a frightening comment.
From the GameFAQs reviews, I see even in 2003 it was already called that. No doubt there are many contenders to that.

@Damo I'm not certainly exactly what the difference but I understand the Wii Virtual Console release of Ironclad was actually the first public release of a cartridge version of Ironclad which was developed but not released in the original hardware's lifespan. My guess is later reissues of the game have probably used that.

The same year EA had to recall their Tiger Woods game because a dev hid a South Park cartoon on the CD.

@GravyThief Someone will use MSU to insert the TV show theme and call it done.

@timp29 It did have the Wii Virtual Console but it was far too late for most people to notice.
I'm guessing licensing could have been an issue, with UBI Soft holding the IP license while Arsys programmed the game and originally Konami published the port outside Japan.

Konami made some amazing USA version SNES boxarts, so how'd they drop the ball so bad on the US version of Prince of Persia?
Trying to squish the oddly-shaped portrait-orientation PC boxart onto the landscape-oriented western SNES boxart should've been considered the first step of design no-nos.

@smoreon Whatever framerate the game ran at, it still had trouble. I don't think it really matters if the game is 60 FPS or 30 when it still has graphical jitters like crazy.
I understand this is a game that doesn't even properly manage the parts of the screen that were outside of the expecting viewing area on NTSC CRT TVs.
I know I've read some suggestion the game itself could be recycled from a Japanese game called Getsufuumaden. It could explain some wonkiness.

But I know from a fan translation of another Konami Famicom game called Dragon Scroll that Konami didn't have the most optimized code. For that patch, the routine to load tile data to the PPU had to optimized to fix the issue that literally extending the text window two text characters broke the image stability like a house of cards.

"A lot of fans in the West had only played I, IV, VI, VII, and VIII. II, III, and V had never been localized."
That would be slightly off. The PS1 version of V (in Anthologies) was released in North America the prior year. (I don't recall when the EU version of FFA was released but I imagine it was quite later, considering it was even explicitly called the "European Version" in the title, as I believe it swapped out VI for IV, for which the PS version wasn't localized until like 2001, I think.)
Then again, maybe it was better if they forgot the PS1 version of V given I hear the translation itself was kind of iffy (even outside of the obviously machine-translated enemies).

Not a single one of those ports listed in the article made it to North America officially, so here we were all equal in missing out on it.

@Zeebor15 You have Neugier and The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne on the list. Those are the same game (the former the released Japanese version, the latter the unreleased US version).
(also Earnest Evans alone and then below it the trilogy)

@iacobus_magnus Yes, Whirlo was the rare European-exclusive localization of the SNES spinoff game Xandra's Adventure.

@Zeebor15 I don't know what your "sheet" is but Hiouden is listed as such on GameFAQs.
I'm curious to see the name Journey Home: Quest for the Throne spread because that is the name of the canceled North American version, rather than the released Japanese version title Neugier. (unless people are only saying that because it is certainly less likely to be misheard as something else)

@JackGYarwood I believe the Super Famicom game is a different game.
I know it got the retro gaming scene attention in the early 2000s when someone posted on a fan translation forum suggesting this "Sweet Home-like" game and it instantly got attention from a couple people already famous in that scene.

Yes, that first translation patch was pretty bad, even by 2001 standards especially for a patch author that had some pretty good quality standards.

I do remember Macaw playing Pyramid Patrol, though having to play the 3DO port since that was the only version on an emulatable console.
Still, acquiring the games and playing them through emulation has got to be a difficult task. LaserDisc ISOs have some crazy huge sizes.

I'd imagine the real challenge in designing a GBC shmup is designing one to be played on the awful GBC LCD.

I have seen video of the Tyrian port and I can only say it looks like it'd be really hard to play on an OG LCD.

@mjparker77 I don't think the modern owners of the Coleco and Intellivision brands are exactly comparable to the owners of the Atari brand.
Has anything been done with Coleco since the scammer that jammed a SNES Jr. PCB into a Jaguar case and called it a new console?

"£8.99 will get you 50 minutes of unlimited play."
I've wondered how well it works to tell people they have a limited time to play. How well is it to police?
And 50 minutes... I don't think there are PAL-hours. Pretty sure it's still 60 minutes to an hour there.

Unfortunately the PC original has reportedly become one of the poster child for copyright ownership issues getting in the way of people being able to buy the game on modern digital stores.

@Daniel36 I understand there's a lot of people that would contest the original 2600 was "tie-in cash grab".
I'm not familiar enough with the 2600 library to properly rate but it sounds like it wasn't a bad effort for a 2600 game in 1982, but people didn't read the manual to understand how to play it. "How does a console with a joystick and one button have games complex enough to need instructions?" I hear that was quite the case on some games.