KingMike

@jesse_dylan No, the game I was thinking of was a Japanese-exclusive. Dai-something. I'll have to go look it up.
Dai Fuushinden.
Yes, Sega CD only had 8KB onboard and the RAM cartridge was 128KB. i had to reconfirm after I had previously thought they were 128KB and 2MB.
128KB feels like a more generous amount in its time for something that should've ideally lasted an entire library. But maybe I'm wrong in thinking that. I think even Saturn only had 32KB internal storage?

Looks like I was not wrong that this got a SNES port released in Japan and Europe.
As another game in the genre, Megalomania, did.
(though I have to wonder if any reason for the latter due to the Genesis version was released in the US as Tyrants: Battle Through Time. Maybe that one didn't sell well enough, and maybe partly due to a "funny" advertisement whose punchline included use of "girlie" as a diminutive term)

Final Fantasy X in third?
It's a pretty gripping movie, but I don't think its gameplay stacks up. (which isn't surprising since that was the same year of the Square Pictures disaster)

I thought the game was published by JVC (well as we know them, Victor in Japan).
It barely looked better than an average Famicom RPG.

Oddly enough they bookended the Mega CD by releasing another RPG that also looks graphicly barely an improvement in 1995. One that wanted almost the entirety of the console's backup RAM to itself. (though maybe that was on Sega for, inside this console that cost $300 at launch, only installing backup RAM equivalent to the average Famicom cartridge. )

Konami made a similar NES game but I guess that one wasn't considered nearly as good (considering that for Japan, Konami went as far as making a PV with a release date but it never made it out over there).

If you want to talk about having to figure stuff out, I have an example.
These days the Koei name is most synonymous with games about one dude fighting an entire army at a time.

But those were the days when if you saw the Koei name on a game, you'd know you had to be a brain genius adult to figure out how to play their game.

@Serpenterror He can legally make a device to emulate Sega consoles as long as it: does not use the Sega name, and doesn't include any code or games written/owned by Sega.
Whatever Sega decides to do with their own IP has no bearing on the legality of Martin's actions.

"what consumers paid"
HOW ON EARTH is Sega responsible for what people paid for a device they never agreed to in the first place?

I guess Sega's probably laughed at this charade long enough now.

@Damo Blasteroids probably isn't on there for licensing reasons.
It was 1987, so I believe that would be an "Atari Games" game so it would therefore be part of the Williams/Midway catalog which I think WB owns now?

That or our multi-galactic overlord Mukor has forbidden it.

@LunarFlame17 I'd probably agree that for a lot of games, lag is a small argument.
But I've heard from multiple people that Tyson WAS that merciless.

@KitsuneNight With the NES Classic series on GBA, they thought people would be willing to pay $20 for Ice Climber.
I'm guessing $5 for digital releases was the price they came up with when they saw how low stores had to drop the prices on those to clear them out.
As much as those of us in the retro gaming emulation and collection scene at the time thought $20 for SMB was crazy (given how cheap NES carts were), we can at least say in retrospective MAYBE that could've passed at the time for casual players who weren't interested in an NES console and upkeep. But Ice Climbers was less defensible.

We've seen a leak of a collection of prototypes from the official Chinese market (even including a Chinese localization of Advance Wars, which is crazy that we got that leaked before the canceled Japanese original!), but it also included what Nintendo would've done if they were any other company: a 10-in-1 compilation of those NES Classic games.

Since few of those NES games had, even by 2004, stood the test of time to be considered desirable as individual releases. Maybe SMB, the Zeldas, Metroid and Castlevania (though CV was one of those bargain bin games now I kind of wish I did grab a copy of).

@nebzila And no button remapping on the Wii. That is a VERY basic feature any significant fan emulator will include, and it's a shock they didn't have it since the beginning.
Even on the 3DS, they didn't. It was good that for GB (and NES?) games they allowed Y to be used as a duplicate of Select, but I really would've like an option to choose the X function at least. I could have it backwards, but I think it was VC Menu in the Ambassador versions and changed to a duplicate of the B button in eShop releases. But a Start duplicate would've been nice (particularly one of the Mega Man GBC games which used it as a dash button).

Not sure of the development time but Croc 2 was released on PlayStation in 1999, well beyond the Saturn's short lifespan.
Though with a September 1997 launch of the first game, I think a sequel would've been too far out.

Though when I hear a fan translator insisting they're going to make an "uncensored" translation, I have to immediately suspect they're going to translate things ultra verbose, as if every single word of the original text is a sacred object and that it is most respectful to have everything sound unnatural.
That and translating every instance of "kuso" as "s**t" or "f**k".

@RupeeClock If the English version added a Bruce Lee reference, that would be nothing compared to what I've heard of the Japanese version.
Reportedly Mallow's "Psychopath" skill had a lot of Japanese pop culture references in it in the Japanese text. Whether or not Ted Woolsey would've been capable of identifying them in 1996, especially when he was surely under a time crunch, a lot of them probably would've been lost on an American audience. A Sailor Moon reference might've been recognizable but not likely stuff more obscure than that.

Sometimes putting in a better understood reference gives the audience a better FEELING for the intended reaction to the line, than was a literal translation would've done.

@slider1983 I don't think Battletoads was released on the SMS, unless there's a Game Gear port I'm aware of.
To my knowledge the SMS only got a port of Battlemaniacs (for which it could be argued was likely an unfinished port for the UK/EU market, that was still finished enough to meet TecToy's quality standards). Battlemanics was the SNES sequel/reimagining, whichever you prefer.

@Gs69 The BIOS thing is the least of the issues with this joke. If these people surprise us all and actually produce a working device, they could simply ask the user to provide the BIOS ROM file themselves, putting the device makers off the hook for that one.

Asking a team that made an ice hockey game to make an adventure game doesn't sound like it would end up well.
So the reverse of Cinemaware, who had a vision of games more video than game (at least a respectable thought for the '80s) but got indebited to NEC to make sports games.
And ICOM Simulations, who made the MacVenture series but eventually got stuck making platformers as they got bought out by Viacom and them probably disbanded by them when its short-lived interest in games fizzled (maybe them thinking Zoop! was going to challenge Tetris for puzzle supremacy was a fitting example).

@axelhander What else did they use the AI to generate?

It's reasonable to expect that if they're too cheap to hire a real artist, they're probably not going to stop at "a freaking title card".

"An artist was not shortchanged here." Yes there was, it's just not an identifiable person. If they didn't use AI then SOMEBODY would've been hired.

I'm probably not the only one who was thinking Rayearth, but that's only approaching its 30th anniversary, isn't it?

I remember there was a time when the European NES version was considering one of the rarest and most valuable NES games. I think it's been surpassed in value these days.

I can recall the struggle BBH had when he streamed the arcade game for Retro Achievements, just on how much leeching he had to do to get the cheevo for beating the high score on THE GAME'S DEFAULT high score table.

ToeJam and Earl is most interesting.
Admittedly the rest were probably just going to be rather underwhelming Game Gear ports.

Fantasy Zone 1 might not have been released on cartridge, but surely has since been seen on the many x-in-1 consoles TecToy has put out in later years.

Interesting, as I've heard the game TECHNICALLY wasn't a light gun shooter.
It was a game with a joystick disguised as a light gun, which reportedly was enough to matter as far as 1CC-ability is concerned.
I've read it has been TAS'd but the comparative lag of joystick-based input is enough to make it not possible realtime.

Six hours isn't as long of a battery life as the original GBC, and I've seen how expensive disposable batteries are these days. It's kind of shocking.

I still remember the pinchies I got as a kid from playing Centipede on an actual cabinet. I don't think I'd need to imagine playing it on a touchscreen.

@Damo Games weren't downloaded through a dial-up connection. Games were encoded through an analog cable TV broadcast signal decoded by a special cartridge that subscribers would rent (or buy? but probably the former) from the cable company.
I don't know how long download times compared. But with 56k dialup, you'd be lucky to download 10MB in an hour. And I'd imagine most popular had even slower modems then.
I just imagine the cable signal was MUCH faster.

@Zenszulu "criminal conviction" Well, at least in the US, when children become 18, they get their record wiped of most convictions (only the most serious stuff gets left on).

I would imagine other countries hopefully have some forgiveness for children doing dumb things.

@Sebidix And physically. I have a few aftermarket SNES games. Aftermarket published games of original era games. Someone cracked how to fake the SNES lockout chip in the early 2010s.
Nightmare Busters, Socks the Cat, Undercover Cops and Ghoul Patrol.
UC was Retro-Bit and GP was LRG but you can bet that if Nintendo could sue them, they would've and we'd have heard about it. (the last game being Disney-owned now, another litigious company)

"Relatively inexpensive". A hobbyist development console that could've been yours for just the cost of five retail consoles, as I recall!

The Wii VC release didn't make it to the American Wii Shop.
I believe it was also renamed Smash Table Tennis, for trademark reasons.
That hardware is some very MSX1 (or SG1000 or Colecovision, nearly the same) hardware in the arcade, isn't it?

@JackGYarwood The battery is not any more removable than any other cartridge games. Funny thing is that not only is the "battery door" on the Taito-produced cartridge entirely fake (I own a complete-in-box copy of the game), but from photos I've seen on a NES/Famicom cartridge documentation website, the real battery is not even on the same side of the circuit board inside.
It's worse with Famicom cartridges because nearly all of them cannot be opened without forceably prying apart the plastic trying to find the hidden seams, risking very possible damage to our valuable retro games.

@LowDefAl ebay even has a category for counterfeit instruction manuals (sorry "reproduction"). The ebay tech support rep nope'd out of that conversation as soon as they were asked if they were aware what "reproduction" means in common retrogaming parlance.

Sega Channel lasted into 1998? WOW!
I mean, sure, you could still buy Genesis games in stores in 1998 but by that point there weren't many new games.
Maybe just Frogger and some NFL games.

@WhensDinner That was the basis for the Dreamcast and I think the OG Xbox "Duke" controller.
I just remember with the former playing once on a demo kiosk at Best Buy when it launched and it was the first time teenage me was ever barely able to operate a controller. It was as big as they say.

But is $13k more expensive than an AES and a copy of the game?

I don't know the NeoGeo market these days, so I have no idea just how crazy of a comparison that is.

Quest of Ki is a game notorious for being soul-crushingly difficult to achieve a no-death completion on.

Can only imagine how much more difficult the VS. version!
(the VS. games I know were NES games with subtle differences to make them more challenging than the home originals)

Sega did make a personal organizer in the '90s. (though I've heard it might've been a rebrand of another device)
It had a very dull name like IR-7000 or something.

I think I recall seeing one kid who had one then.

@Zenszulu It was still before the western launch of the PS1 and Saturn.
That also didn't change that the Genesis was a console fairly lacking in RPGs, so surely the fans who were going to buy it were pretty starved for a new RPG anyways.

Even then, as to the new consoles, an RPG isn't usually the first time developers on a new console would want to make.
Surely they'd want to try out something simpler to learn how to work with the hardware.
That is in the case of Saturn.
In the case of Sony, they'd have yet to prove themselves better in the game industry over the other fly-by-night hopefuls in the market. 3DO, Jaguar, CDi.
Worse is how reportedly Sega turned down a PlayStation joint too because Sony had mostly been publishing third-party licensed garbage to that point. Not enough SmartBall and Equinox to overcome the Last Action Hero and Cliffhanger to convince us THEY were going to be the new leader in the console market.

@axelhander I'd like to be able to debate that with you but I haven't played PS4 yet because I haven't been able to sit through PS1 first to get to the rest of the games.
(I've tried to play the SMS game on emulator, then I tried to play through the GBA port before my save got eaten. I may have impulsively pushed a button on the DON'T TURN OFF YOUR GBA screen, at most. Who'd have thought THQ could mess up an RPG. A port of an RPG. That they didn't originally create.)

That sounds a little off.

It doesn't make sense to go through with releasing something just to want to see it flop.

It wasn't just the ROM prices but also the more text in the game, the more they have to pay translators. Also the more content that needs to be checked for localization QA.

I suppose $100 wasn't that absurd. Most SNES RPGs were priced in the $70-80 range (in early '90s US Dollars!). FFMQ was priced as a "budget" game at $40 in 1992, and that's about the same price as your modern full-priced "AAA" games. $70 TotK, included.
Add that Genesis was a console pretty starved for RPGs, so I'd have imagined people were more willing to pay out for PSIV.

@X68000 The D button is my favorite button on a Genesis controller as well.
I think the button labels are Comic Sans as well.

When they say "new mapper", I have to wonder if it's an FPGA or something. (something FAR more powerful than the base console)
It does like nice, but using hardware too technologically removed from the original hardware does take a bit from the feel of the original game.

One stream I watch, has now called Edward Randy as just that, after too many jokes about another problem Data East had: reusing game titles.
Data East made a LaserDisc game called Cliffhanger that you'll get DMCA'd if you stream/upload gameplay because the game used footage from a Lupin III move.
Similarly Data East released two games called Cobra Command. A FMW game and then a side-scrolling shmup.

So much feeling of entitlement in the comments here.

The translation team has lives and they do it for free. They don't owe us anything in any sort of timely manner.
I recall CyberWarriorX was also one of the few people working to just emulate the Saturn correctly, that one fanatic driving the scene forward. I do recall Saturn being in an even worse state than N64 emulation at the time. The PS1 absolutely got most of the emu dev attention of that era of consoles. I do recall the Princess Crown translation even being one of their motivators for the former.

Twelve years is long enough anyone really desperate to play could've probably learned Japanese and played this and other games.
I do know you could probably even played along using Google Translator.

@sdelfin People with such discourtesy to the original patch team are likely to produce an awful result anyways, so it doesn't really matter.

I've read some Discord discussions this new patch translator has far less Japanese literacy qualifications than the original translator ("Absolutely no censorship!" claims tend to be a sign of the former) including some comparisons.

@nocdaes Really. This isn't the '90s any more where incomplete demo patches helped drive interest to the games, when it was harder to find Japanese games and check out if they are any good.
These days, incomplete patches only serve the most impatient of gamers. Only they'd be satisfied with a patch that is very likely to crash horribly or simply not translate anything after an hour's worth of gameplay. And they probably wouldn't even sit through an RPG-length (I don't know how long this game is) if it was.
People who want to devote time and effort to fully play a game aren't going to want their experience abruptly ended.

If people are really desperate to play the game, they can seek out the unpatched game, or watch videos online.
I have met many gamers on the Internet who have learned no Japanese beyond the kana charts. I've heard of Super Robot Wars fans who bothered to learn just the kanji needed for menu navigation.
If it's really that important to play a game, people can make efforts to play them regardless of a patch.
Buggy and incomplete patches do not have much more value for "playing" than just playing the original.

I'm not familiar with this game, but I have read above it is fairly playable without reading.

@Dr_Fresh Slap Fight it seems at least did get a remixed mode something more resemblent of a Genesis game (rather than just a port of the 1986 original which IMO graphically looked like 1982). Also, the remixed mode had Yuzo Koshiro tunes, which was probably enough for some people.

Twin Cobra for the Genesis is definitely cheaper to buy an original, especially if loose is good enough.

@RetroGames I haven't done so many things in my life, but conning 10,000 people out of 5 million bucks isn't something I've yet put on the to-do list.
I know sometimes game console plans don't work out, but no. I recall he had quite the mouth responding to his critics.
And his big launch game (Earthworm Jim 4) was something he announced without any sort of final licensing agreement. You just, don't do that kind of thing.

You can do many good things, but it all goes once you start scamming people.