KingMike

@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.

@LowDefAl Maybe Sega themselves would like to see where this joke is going first?
Let it stew a bit then crush them when it's run its course.

@MARl0 @Cyber_Akuma Attempting to "finish" someone else's work is just asking for the result to be garbage anyways, on either the code or text side.
I'd be worried about even reusing my own code from many years ago without relearning how the games work, let alone try to figure out someone else's.
I mean, reprogramming a game is already a matter of trying to figure out how the original game programmer's brain work. It's like a game of telephone when you add other coders into the mix.

And on the translation side is much the same, the more people you have writing the text, the sloppier it's going to be. Aside from the original writer, different people are going to have different ideas of how the same things should be translated.
There's probably a number of professional translations where you can it had different writers (inconsistent tone or even worse, things like the US version of Lufia II where even a few names were inconsistent between the dialogue and menus).

@slider1983 I'm fairly certain Virtua Racing on the Genesis was the only Sega cartridge to use a custom video chip.
It's been said by SMS Power forum that it's likely Codemaster tested/RE'd their games on a late model PAL SMS without realizing they were using a video mode only in certain consoles.
Checking GameFAQs, Codemasters' SMS games were all released in 1993! EXTREMELY late to enter that market! That would make sense.
I do believe limited emulated support would be because Codemasters were the only ones that mode. I'm going to guess it probably wasn't a documented feature, thus why it didn't get spread. These were the Game Genie people, breaking stuff is kind of what they did.

@bluemage1989 How are you going to play 3DS and Wii U eShop games if you haven't previously purchased them?
Should every person that wants to play Dinosaur Peak being expected to pay $1,500 to experience it?

@N64-ROX I could go to a library and check out a book and make copies too.
I would take a long time and I wouldn't do it but I could. Why hasn't the book industry shut down public libraries?
(not like the book industry doesn't have its own evils: college textbooks are expensive because Wiley et all price them based on how much they think your country can afford to pay for them and would like that you not support gray market importers)

@slider1983 I don't know what is really different about Codemasters games other than using a video resolution only supported by certain PAL SMS video chips. Making them not even with all PAL SMS consoles at least.

@pomegran Simulate. Emulate. Potato.
It's a different form of emulation.
It's games that aren't running on the same (or even alike) hardware chips it was designed for, therefore it can't not be some form of emulation. Or whatever term you want to use for it.

The NES DuckTales producer Darlene Waddington, I believe her name was, revealed many years ago that there was a computer educational game that Disney had to ask the developer to alter, where Donald got electrocuted.

The GBA port of Magical Quest 3 I believe didn't arrive until 2005, which would explain how it remained in obscurity. That was fairly late in the GBA lifespan.
I think the fan translation of the SNES version was released in like 2002, and I recall it was pretty distinctly written by a UK translator (might be a surprise for such a famous "American" IP).

Also, I recall trying the Hard difficulty in Magical Quest once, and I recall barely finishing stage 1.
I remember on Hard the game definitely channeled Mega Man energy in its difficulty.

@JackGYarwood A Genesis port of The Magical Quest was announced in early 1994 (I'm quite positive the magazine previews I read were 1994, not a more timely 1992/1993). I can only imagine it went unreleased because it was too close to the the sequel The Great Circus Mystery (for which a port was released).
Early 1993 was when Capcom had entered the Sega publishing scene (or at least when their licensee status was publicly revealed), and of course Street Fighter II: Champion Edition HAD to be its big entry game.

I assume Pipi and Bibi has had the gratuitous and unnecessary sexually explicit cutscenes removed?
(I'm sure that's the game I'm thinking of.)

I've heard that loading cartridge ROMs through disk images is at least something period-accurate software pirates did.

SG-1000 at least makes sense to emulate because it is practically identical in hardware components to the MSX1 (legality of software distribution is another matter).
SG-1000 doesn't utilize a BIOS so there is nothing really that Sega could copyright claim on, assuming the user is left to the matter of obtaining the game ROMs.

@Hexapus "Whatever happened to the SNES port?" I WAS JUST DESTINED TO DIE.
I wonder how accurate it will be?
Funny to learn that if the arcade machine is set to max (level 8) difficulty, one boss is apparently literally impossible to defeat without credit-feeding to eventually beat it with the i-frames on each new life.

@RejectedAng3L Not released in America despite those had to have been in the works as their plan to rework the hardware into a home computer.
They had to have thought was going to be a better entry going into the 1984 US gaming market.

That and also cartridge hardware very quickly caught up to much of the FDS' advantages (aside from cheaper game prices, which was understandably a very divisive point for game publishers).

Double Dragon II lacking the NES version sounds like a sore point for the Technos unit.
I hear that version specifically was like the definitive DD experience.
It sounds like the arcade wasn't as good, and the PCE-CD version at least had some wonderfully awful cutscenes to watch.

The title opinion was definitely from something not thinking very rationally.
Sega was struggling against Nintendo and Sony for the latter part of the '90s. For various reasons of Sega's doing.
Did the author think they could win making Microsoft's seemingly infinite cash another adversary? (despite that Microsoft I recall did have some involvement in the DC)

@nocdaes Analog is priced catering towards an enthusiast market who knows what they're doing with old games.

Nintendo or Sega releasing a console that plays thirty year old cartridges would have to be ready for a flood of questions from people who don't know the maintenance issues.
It's why the Atari Flashback 2 released in like 2005 was designed to be modded to add a cartridge port to play 2600 carts. It was presumed one who had the technical knowledge to add a cartridge slot would know to deal with the old tech issues on their own (ie, they don't need to be told hold to clean their games). Users who don't would only be playing it stock with the onboard games.

@solarwolf07 A game can't be "based on the engine of" another game that wouldn't exist for another three years. That just doesn't make any logical sense.
Also, what about Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver? "Based on the engine of BW" is acting as if those weren't made in the meantime.

They're giving us all of that for under 250 bucks?

(I don't know how many people here will follow where I'm going with this?)

Do they mean Diamond and Pearl?
How can a game believed to have been developed in 2007 believed to have been developed on the source code from a 2010 game?

It has to have been a decade ago I've seen someone do a NES tech demo of "the Axelay effect". Possibly there was even a ROM release. Solely a graphics demo, no actual gameplay.

Sadly I'm not expecting we'll ever see a rerelease of Smart Ball or its mostly- if not fully- completed sequel (credits music crashing bug aside) that went unreleased almost certainly due to its proximity to the PlayStation launch.

Its one thing to leak out unreleased games.

But doxxing the developers is not okay. The leaker should've taken the time to scrub that information.

The New Elves have been updated to look more hideous than they ever have!

@BulkSlash Block 4-3 might've been completely forgettable gameplay-wise, but it was either Displaced Gamers or (more likely) Retro Game Mechanics who managed to do an entire video explaining just how its visuals were executed.

I remember when bsnes was in development, byuu held out on added savestates for a long time because he wasn't sure how to add them in a way that wouldn't jeopardize accuracy.

I do recall how very early emulators didn't keep a copy of cartridge RAM ("the save file") synced to the savestate and that broke some games (such as Torkeo's Mysterious Dungeon which constantly updated the save data so you couldn't savescum out of bad situations).

@Coolmusic I suppose the stranger characters were the dolphin or Rabio and Lepus (two rabbits from an earlier arcade horizontal shooter titled after them, I can only imagine my local rollerskating rink as a child was one of the few places to get the US version of that, Rabbit Punch).

@Daniel36 The market was big enough that many companies wanted in on the Famicom market.
Vic Tokai is/was a Japanese cable TV provider that got into international video game distribution for awhile.
Kemco is a subsidiary of a chemical company Kotobuki System.

How does "silence" get a sequel?

I feel like that Silence II might have been the track seen in a video I watched many years ago of some Japanese player's recording of an original broadcast, and they managed to make just the most spectacular F-Zero car crash I've seen!

Wouldn't be the only Yuji Horii game with secret NSFW content.
I recall reading the MSX port of Dragon Quest II also had a dirty secret.

Streamer LordBBH has spent the last couple years playing every "obscure" arcade game he can in rough chronological order, starting with 1980 and is now up to 1985 games. Or has series "Push to Reject" is, the motto is something like "the games that failed to make an impact on the industry".

He's stated that couple failed companies named Orca and Crux (from like 1982 to 1984) were basically Toaplan predecessors.

So this is sort of the third translation of the game.
There is an Enix America translation beta ROM out there (before the game was licensed to Nintendo) which had a pretty rough translation about in line with other Enix localizations.

@Whatareyouonabout Also, this man is producing a commodity for a global corporation. He should know what he's getting into.
The corporation has decided they have a choice between crotch skin or a preferable rating. The corporation has chosen the rating.

Nobody is stopping these people from drawing all the crotch skin they want. They just can't sell it in this manner. These people want to have their cake and eat it too, and upset they can't.
If they really don't like it that much, they can make their own companies and do whatever they want. Many game companies have been formed by employees who decided they weren't happy with their former employer.

Lots of video games get affected by ratings from different rating systems across the world.
It's not just America, man. I'm more upset that a significant cutscene in Final Fantasy VI Advance got censored because of CERO. The fourth wall is broken the first time Celes appears when now the characters all look they're just actors rehearsing the lines. They can't animate anything they're saying because Celes getting punched unconscious was considered too violent for an "A" rating.

So, basically if America censors sex, Japan censors violence. Pretty sure there's been more than this example.
And rip Pokemon game corner because Europe and Australia censor fake gambling.
Every region (or at least their ratings boards) have their own thing they're worried about.

@gcunit Emulating a game doesn't change its value any more than buying a used copy or borrowing a friend's. Or rentals, if that is still an option anymore. In any of those situations, you are playing a game without paying Nintendo.

@Bakamoichigei When probably at least 15 different companies needed to put out a soccer game for World Cup '94, and whoever Mr. Zico is, his game was such the loser that even when it was new, it got discounted so cheap in stores that an unlicensed company bought them up in bulk to hack up into a porn game (despite Nintendo having considered that possibility when they designed the SFC cartridges).

@jamess That extra skin doesn't make any meaningful change to the character unless you play Dragon Quest III to get horny. In which case there's probably better choices for that satiation.

I don't see why it's necessary. It's already pretty T-rated to begin with?
Well, I at least know the GBC port was rated T, I'm guessing for having "Hell" enemies. (though the E10+ rating didn't exist at that time, so I don't know if "mild four letter words" are considered E10+ or T material)

Is this the end of the "puff puff"s too?

I do agree though that if you REALLY need to see just a bit more female skin, Dragon Quest III probably isn't the place you should be looking.

@Deuteros Another thing surprising about the Collection of Mana is that, for Final Fantasy Adventure (the original Mana game for the Game Boy), it has a few color palette options. I noticed one of them that would seem rather unfitting to the game for most people, but I recognized as the default Super Game Boy palette for third-party games. That made me wonder if M2 had any plans to support editing the palette SGB-style. That doesn't seem to be an available feature but M2 is probably the retro port developer most likely to do such a thing.

@Razieluigi Feels crazy to hear Virtual Boy hardware has become so expensive, to one who can remember seeing Target trying to get rid of unsold consoles for $30 in 1997.
Probably about as shocking to learn Best Buy had to go as low as $6 at some point trying to sell off EarthBounds. And I'm angry to learn I somehow missed that because EB was one of my favorite rental games as kid. How excited I'd have been as a teen to have finally owned an original copy with the book too!

@Deuteros Trials of Mana on Switch: that's two separate versions you're thinking of.
Collection of Mana is an emulation of the original games, with some bonus features such as additional "music player" ROMs.
The 3D remake was a separate game released like half a year after the international release of the collection.

@Bakamoichigei I've heard of them just throwing OG Famicoms in the trash. If they're basically garbage to the store, they should dump 'em on ebay to ship internationally for a deal. I'm sure they'd have enough foreigners willing to buy them up.

@Daniel36 Bio Warrior Dan was made by Atlus (possibly before they were an established game company), so while I recall it had some rough spots such as control, it's not too bad.
Cool idea though.
Also the music is by the same composer as the Megami Tensei games at least through the Saturn, so it sure has a similar sound to the original MT Famicom game (which released only a little over a week earlier).

Isn't Saiyuki World 1 just literally one of the multiple reskinned ports of Wonder Boy in Monster Land, not just "based on"?

I've heard Saiyuki World 2 (Whomp 'em!) is not considered a culturally sensitive game by modern standards. I wonder what is the issue and how that will be handled. I know we can probably guess by the fact it had a Native American player character.

@Deuteros But Trials of Mana IS "Secret of Mana 2". It might not be on actual SNES hardware but it is official.
And I would certainly support it when a company decided to at all give us a localization that was 24 years overdue when it launched.

@-wc- I've read in magazines of the time it was specifically for Pocket Printer support.
It was 1998 when the SGB2 and the Printer were released, and it sounds like Sega/Atlus' Print Club was trendy enough in Japanese arcades at the time that Nintendo would to push its own little knockoff.

I wonder why they didn't chose a new name.
I get that was the originally intended name, but now that the TurboCD game exists, it would be nice to have a distinguishing title. I don't like when newly-released games do that.

@UK_Kev The did publish some SNES games but I'm guessing they didn't do as much with Nintendo as Nintendo was a LOT more controlling in that era. Though it wasn't a whole lot, mostly sports ports, Rampart and B.O.B. are the ones I remember. Also the Strike series but the SNES ports came later.
Also, it has since been revealed in the years since, they were able to get a preferential license from Sega because EA had already cracked Sega's protection on the Genesis and was like "we don't really need a license but if you give us a good deal, we'll play along with your rules and not spoil it to everyone else". They couldn't do that with Nintendo.