Comments 979

Re: 30 Years On, A Bunch Of Cheat Codes Have Been Discovered For One Of Sega Saturn's Most "Notorious" Games

KingMike

I suppose it's more notorious for the SNES and Genesis games which were developed but not commercially released, but have since been leaked by the developers.

Particularly, there's a long story about the development of the SNES game. Apparently they went through three separate versions of the game after the publisher Viacom insisted on what they'd see as a sure-selling game rather than a particularly thoughtfully developed game, so the dev was increasingly pressured to push out something that'd get them paid, and then the game still got withheld after the film bombed.

Re: Talking Point: If You Think AI Can Make SNES Games, We Have Some Magic Beans We'd Love To Sell You

KingMike

@RextheSheep I wasn't too surprised when I learned the SNES game was a port from MS-DOS (which explains why they called the game "Volume 1" even the SNES game never did well enough to get a Volume 2. Indeed, as I remember renting it and it was sure no Secret of Mana, a game that was released the better part of a year earlier despite Interplay's LotR marketing claiming they had made "The First Action Adventure RPG with Multiplayer Real Time Combat".

Re: YouTuber Raided For Reviewing Handheld Emulation Consoles Pre-Loaded With Sony And Nintendo Games

KingMike

@jamess How about Nintendo spend their efforts against Anbernic and whoever else? They won't because it's notoriously hard to sue Chinese companies.
Though I read Italy has historically been tolerant of piracy as well, I guess they still thought it was an easier avenue to feel like they've "done something" and still easier to confront that individual since being an EU member I've read made Italian authorities more obligated to investigate such issues. Still, that's putting great effort into suing a customer rather than the actual offender.

Re: Random: Did You Know About This Strange Sonic 3 'File Select' Bug?

KingMike

That is the sort of thing we'd hear out of the Super Mario 64 community. (I've heard there's one sound effect you can hear completely exactly once, if you leave the game running for like two weeks or something. May not be an exact amount but the SM64 "speedrunning" community has some strange expections of time. )

Re: Three More Konami NES Titles Are Getting Fanmade SNES Ports

KingMike

@Nintega_Is_Eternal The Displaced Gamers YouTube channel did a video a little while ago where he questions if the intended cartridge hardware for the canceled Japanese original would've made a difference.
He did make an comparison example of Tiny Toon Adventures, showing that game ran a little more optimal on Konami's proprietary Famicom cartridge than it did when transplanted to Nintendo hardware for the western versions. Though I suspect TTA is probably a less demanding game that is less affected by a bit of lag.

Dragon's Lair is a good example of what a cartridge hardware difference, not even necessarily needing a custom CPU, can make. The USA version of NES Dragon's Lair is famous garbage and it deserves to be. Sony just needing to not be ***** cheapskates and spend like another dollar on an extra ROM chip and we could have had the more playable European version. (yes, it was Sony, I'm not letting them hide behind the "CSG Imagesoft" label)

Re: Another Port Of Compile's Shoot 'Em Up Classic 'Zanac' Is Launching On Switch This Month

KingMike

Probably shouldn't be asking why a nearly 40 year old game has a spaceship named AFX-6502 when it is running on a Z80-based console/computer?
(To my understanding, the 6502 was an EXTREMELY obscure CPU in Japan at the time, with the Famicom being the one major Japanese game hardware based around it. Iwata got the gig from being one of the few to import Commodore hardware to Japan as a young person, with games for them being some of HAL's earliest work.)

Re: Random: I Was Pranked By These Metroid Barcode Battler Cards, And Now I Wish They Were Legit

KingMike

@Damo The lack of Metroid carts is explained that I don't think Metroid is nearly as popular with Japanese gamers. Certainly not as much as Zelda and Mario.
I do recall it has been said that Kid Icarus is also a lot more popular with western gamers than Japanese.

I do have both versions of Fusion, as I have read about the Japanese version containing more content (also released like three months later) but I hear Nintendo didn't sell nearly as many copies over there.

Re: Mario Kart 64 Has Been Ported To PC

KingMike

@bring_on_branstons I can only imagine someone has made a mod to put Kamek back in the game (was seen in early screenshots under its development name Super Mario Kart R then cut from the final game).

Re: Oops, Square No Longer Has The Source Code For Final Fantasy Tactics

KingMike

@Lowdefal Reportedly Chocobo's Dungeon 1 was denied a western release because of lost source code.

@Blofse Original source code would've surely had developer comments and/or meaningful code labels. Those can't be reconstructed, and there will certainly be parts of code you can only guess at what the programmer wanted to do.

Re: This Man Is Buying Commodore

KingMike

From what I've been told the Amiga CD32 was withheld from the US market due to some legal issue. (I hear the NTSC version did ship to Canada.)
I mean, I know by that point Commodore was, despite being an American company, far more successful with the European market anyways but that does sound like a notable point in its collapse.

Re: Final Fantasy Tactics Writer Yasumi Matsuno Just Found Out About The Game's Most Famous False Quote

KingMike

One of my favorite Laws in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is the one prohibiting attacking Monsters. Moreso thinking about what kind of morals is it teaching us?
How are you even supposed to win an encounter when it comes up?
I'm guessing you are supposed to use Anti-Law cards. Or Escape. Reroll the RNG.
But what I found is better: Get a Beastmaster to control the enemies to attack each other. Then for the last one get it to attack a player character with auto-counterattack abilities. Forgiveness mechanic abuse!

Re: 'Sega's Switch' Lives On Thanks To This Absolutely Incredible Mod

KingMike

@slider1983 I just watched Ashens' review of this from like a decade ago. He complained he only had one US game to review on the unit (Ecco the Dolphin) but surely he must have a number of PAL games (such as his Sonic he had in the background) that would play just fine on the device (or in Sonic's case, better than on his UK hardware, since Sonic 1 had no PAL optimization).
But it's possible that maybe he didn't want to show Sonic running on the device since the Green Hill Zone music at least will be copyright claimed by the composer on YouTube.