KingMike

NUON was always very mysterious. When it was first announced as "Project X" in game magazines around 1997, it seemed like another vapor-console from a company we hadn't heard of.

It's too bad Sunsoft didn't think Gimmick! would sell in America.
It would have been about the same time the first Kirby game was released in the US.
Maybe they just needed to make Yumetarou more angry and '90s American!

Didn't help that, I think it was this but I could be mistaking for Ufouria, that one (or more?) of the EGM editors rated the game something like a 4/10 and said it was "too easy".
An opinion markedly different than what most others have said.
Do wonder if they had played or not (I mean, in the sense, I have seen other game reviews before that had sus gameplay statements that make you legitimately wonder if they had played? Not just because they disagree.)

@JackGYarwood In the case of Fester's Quest, it has become known that the North American version was very likely rushed to market while the European version was given more time for some polishing changes.
Being allowed to shoot through walls was change that alone probably improved the playability of the EU version but also the damage tables were adjusted to make enemies less bullet-spongey.
You know it's been when reportedly even the instruction manual recommended a turbo controller.

Funny that they pound them on shoddy manufacturing over software piracy. But I suppose that is an easier to stop them. I don't know how it works in Italy but I would guess copyright violation would be up to the individual IP owners to prosecute.

@Bonggon5 Well, the crypto and NFT markets have always been shady, so that's not much new.

I'd be wary of anything that makes it this easy to make games for older consoles.
It's going to have to be EXTREMELY limited.

@Scollurio Yes, Klik 'n Play. That sort of thing is probably fun to see what you can make within the software limitations but I wouldn't expect to rival the professional games. Well... maybe of the really crappy ones you could do better than...

@RetroGames The last percent is always the toughest. You have the most to check, and even then no game has ever been released that was completely bug-free.
Not to mention having the necessary hardware/software to compile such old code. I had many years ago made a couple debug assistance mods to an open-source Game Boy emulator. Years later, I wanted to fix up some of the glaring flaws in my code but multiple technical issues prevented being able to compile the code again. (Not just the compiler but also that the emulator had been written for an outdated version of DirectX as well. I couldn't get it all together so I had to leave it broken.)

@Damo "Ryu and Ken, arguably the two 'main' characters in the game." They WERE the only two playable characters in Street Fighter 1. As I understand, Ryu was the protagonist and Ken only appeared as the player 2 character for Vs. mode.
Sagat was also the only boss to not get their name swapped because he was the final opponent of the original and the only other returning character.

I remember the control was a little rough, but it was a very cool idea. It is Atlus game, so it's decent. The soundtrack sounds very Megami Tensei like as it is actually the same composer as the original MT game. (and originally released only a little over a week apart)

"Don't forget that Sega is pronounced 'SEYGA'"
I know the chat for Australian streamer Macaw45 is assumed whenever he takes about "SEE-GA". (which isn't nearly as often as Amiga barbarian/alien games and often-lewd Japanese computer games)

But was that pronunciation just a AU/NZ thing? I imagine stemming back to when Sega licensed their products, going back to the SC-3000 to local companies who did their own marketing.

I do know the Genesis version is somewhat known for sudden cartridge failure. I don't know if in the years since someone has figured out how to fix them. When it was brought up in collecting circles, I had only heard of fans who would transplant the ROM chip (which was still good) to a donor game PCB.

@Forgotten_Worlds I wonder if the game was more famous in Japan. 1993 seemed a little late to be releasing a home console port for such an old game (even if it did contain a remixed mode) though maybe Yuzo Koshiro's involvement adds to its value.

@no_donatello It's easier to say it retrospect where the 3DO probably went wrong.
It would be a couple years later Sony would establish the practice of selling the console at a loss initially to boost the ownership and drive software sales (the "razor and blade" model).
But still, 3DO's idea was to sell manufacturing licenses. Since I don't think Panasonic originally planned to sell software, where were did they expect to make money without charging a profit margin? (I think it was only a year or so after launch they started publishing games for it.)
They did sell MSX computers in Japan (maybe the closest comparison to how they expected to profit on hardware sales alone) but home computers had the benefit of being user programmable to get some value. With a home console, it's only as useful as the professionally-developed software offered.
But yeah, maybe those are just things easier to say thirty years of gaming later.

@Damo 3DO was for chumps. Now if you bought the LaserActive in 1993, you were really rolling.
Not only did it cost over $700 for the LaserDisc base unit, but depending on which game you wanted to play, you'd have to spend another $500 each for a Genesis or TurboGrafx add-on.

I've watched a streamer a few months ago play the Japanese 3DO port of Pyramid Patrol and he was lamenting he couldn't play the LA original, but merely watch a video.
Over $1,200 to play Pyramid Patrol in 1993 was surely worth it!

Funny thing about Sony sound chips.
It's thought part of the reason Nintendo kept Sony around as the SNES CD partner as long as they did was because of Sony's development of the SNES sound chip.

@REAVERZINE I had considered it buying it just to see if it's as bad as people said.
But I was REALLY into RPGs and was buying most of those.
Wasn't really forward thinking (though I imagine at least some of those RPGs have to be rarities of their own these days).

All I know about this is that it got one game released in the west. On Sega CD, in 1995, so probably almost nobody bought it.

Ogre Battle seems like a pretty cool game, but one you really have to want to make a time investment in.
I only rented it once as a kid and quickly learned it was too big-brained for me.
But also that the OST is awesome, almost enough to entice learning the game.

The more pressing concern with Quest is that they did make games without "Ogre" in the title.
Where's Conquest of the Crystal Palace or the infamously expensive game Magical Chase?
Famicom RPGs Dungeon Kid (a dungeon crawler with a creation mode) or The Adventures of Musashi might be cool (a VERY late DQ1 clone but it's got some charm).

Hope they don't forget to check that the anti-piracy measures are working correctly this time.

Thirty years later and the game is still not on CD-ROM or any 32X adapters.
With the latest trend of porting everything to the Genesis, I wonder if any fan has dared to attempt the latter (Nintendo lawyers unafraid).

No Sega Master System and no TurboGrafx. Two consoles that weren't very popular when originally released but are surely more popular now?

@Deuteros I wonder if the "compatibility with older Windows" thing is similar to what was wrong with the S3K port (or at least the original 1997 boxed PC version. I still have my disc but no longer the box or comic.) That is, for whatever reason, Sega limited the framerate in fullscreen mode (which I've heard used a low resolution only supported by old video cards and probably also 4:3 CRT monitors) but didn't limit the framerate in windowed mode WITH NO USER OPTION to change those.
Only decades later have I read that someone found settings that could be typed in to the settings file to manually change that framerate setting. Why Sega didn't put that in the GUI in the first place, who knows!

@Nischenliebhaber Its reputation as the worst came about before it became more widespread knowledge that Konami arcade games usually had more reasonable difficulty in the Japanese versions.
Though they did make changes to console games, reportedly the most common reason Konami liked to inflate the difficulty for the US market was to make the machines more favorable to arcade owners. 25 cents a game in the US was a much lower cost than 100 yen a game in Japan, so they needed to put pressure on Americans to put more coins in the machine.

I'm told Crime Fighters is another game Konami did brutal things to do in the localization (not the least taking out one of the attack buttons to encourage arcade owners to put their game in former Gauntlet cabinets).

@Damo LordBBH has shown the Japanese version is much fairer. The game's horrible reputation is because of the two English versions of the game.
Presumably the more offensive of those two is the US version. Konami in that era especially really jacked up the difficulty in their arcade games (and to very degrees on their console games) especially for the US market.

@Deuteros The '90s PC port was definitely sold at retail.
It was even at some point bundled with the PC port of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, during the multiple years that S3K was sold as budget PC software.

Sega also created the Activator, which did get released. About 10 years before EyeToy and like 15 years before Kinect.
Though I hear it didn't work very well.

@-wc- I think one game copier device for the N64 DID use CDs. Funny that one such device (not the CD one, the one I saw was a Zip drive device) actually got ads run in GamePro, even going so far as to promote the piracy usage in addition to the legitimate "amateur developer" usage.
Quite surprising GamePro ran that ad. Did they not care about Nintendo objecting?

@Zenszulu Now I remember that back in the day, EGM ran a rumor of Capcom considering a chip+CD combination for the PC-Engine version of Street Fighter II. One problem then is that Capcom would've had to bake in their own CD firmware into the game, as the standard firmware takes up the chip game slot.

And even as it was, SFII needed its own unique card as it exceeded the (roughly) 16 megabit (2MB) chip ROM maximum (minus some space occupied by RAM and IO) the PCE CPU's built-in mapper was designed to support. (I think the 20mbit SFII was the only released PCE or SuperGrafx HuCard/TurboChip game over 8 megabit).

Just realizing that launch date will also be the 20th anniversary of the DS.

But also, 720p for ZX Spectrum games sound crazy. I think it was kind of the thing is that Spectrum graphics were low-tech even for 1982. But it needed to be to deliver a low-cost home computer to the masses at a time when most of those were crazy expensive. (on the opposite end of the...uh... spectrum... in that time frame, I was watching this promotional video for the Apple Lisa and Apple was promising what an "affordable" computer was... only like 10k 1983 US dollars, wasn't it?)

@sdelfin Now I feel bad guessing Jaguar for that one. Now that I recall, I think Jaguar doesn't even HAVE a Start button.
I think its buttons are PAUSE and OPTION.

@KitsuneNight Not only was that not the default NeoGeo controller (it does say that was for the CD) but I thought even the NeoGeo CD's standard controller was a SNES-like arrangement. Or was that just the Mini's extra controller (which I own one)?

@carlos82 I probably wouldn't have guessed WonderSwan if I didn't own one (and know the SOUND button next to it as a giveaway).

Some of those are a bit of cheat.
The Saturn is a non-default. It is also the Japanese controller. I remember the US controller is a black and gray scheme because I remember playing Nights on the demo kiosk at Target as a child and being overwhelmed by it.
That "3DS" one is also not the OG 3DS but... either the XL, Lite or New or all of them. The OG 3DS Start and Select buttons are NOT good. They were front of the front panel and you had to really push to register them.

I guess at the least they didn't go to using any obscure third-party controllers.

At least the PC-FX pad gave us a hint with the "Run" button.
(as I suppose the GBA SP's Triforce logo)

@Zenszulu I do remember the aftermarket game Pier Solar boasted it was a cartridge game which could optionally utilize the Sega CD for an alternate soundtrack. I recall they encouraged players with the hardware available to burn a CD and play with it.

@Zenszulu That's what I was thinking. Something of a sort similar to the Sega CD Backup RAM cart. I know that was an officially released cartridge which acted as a removable Sega CD memory card. It needed a certain pin on the cartridge connector set to tell the console that the cartridge is not an executable program, don't try to run it.

This is as bad of an idea as the guy who got the Akira IP in the 16-bit era, and then licensed it out to the lowest bidder.
It ensures the worst developer gets rights to make a game, and you potentially locked out a better developer/publisher from getting a chance.

But does it have newer elves?

How is this connected to the Genesis?
The Sega CD uses the expansion port while the 32X used the cartridge port, so how do you make an upgrade supporting both devices?

@Axelay71 Dragon's Lair, a mediocre platform game which in the US arguably isn't even a properly functional game almost certainly because Sony was too cheap to spring for a second ROM chip.
I can at least get what they were attempting to do when playing the Europe version (Japanese was based on the latter but for some reason changed to Up To Jump control).

Doesn't someone else own the Dragon's Lair IP though?

If I assume Motivetime was their development team (they seem to have a connection), Elite would only own the NES game (maybe the ZX Spectrum platformer they reskinned as a Game Boy DL game).

@JackGYarwood Supposedly the CD32 got a NTSC release in Canada. I've heard Commodore had financial problems resulting in some legal issues distributing in the US.
I do remember reading just one CD32 game review in EGM back in the day, James Pond: Operation Starfi5h, I believe it was.
Makes me kind of wonder how popular Youtuber James Rolfe reviewed it. Did he get one of the elusive NTSC consoles (in pretty poor condition, as I recall) or did someone set him up with a PAL conversion?

@Blofse Don't forget the Polymega. Apparently that came out, eventually. This is sounding similar on paper.

@JackGYarwood "began to focus less" Sounds probably more like financial situation forcing them to accept contracted work.
I know Rocko came after Viacom bought them out and turned them into its own dev studio.
I recall something similar happened with Cinemaware, a company that pushed forward with games as interactive movies. That unlike Dragon's Lair where you had to push buttons to keep the movie on course to its predetermined "good" end, Cinemaware was working on games were like feature-length movies that followed a course determined by the player, to be experienced rather than "won". (I mean, for the mid 1980s, that was pretty novel.) So I've learned from streaming. But it cost them and they ended with NEC turning them a maker of (seemingly) pretty crappy TurboGrafx sports games. (I recall watching same streamer playing the football game and struggling how to even like, pass the ball or something.)

@LadyCharlie I played and enjoyed Stunt Race FX as a kid. I don't know what everyone else is thinking.

Will the MiSTeR FPGA core be able to remember the '60s, is the burning question?
(that is such a specific reference...)

@smoreon Yeah, Nintendo had very different motives for creating the AV Famicom and the NES top-loader.
The AV FC was made to update support to newer TVs while the newer NES was made to be sold cheaply (funny that it ended up being more desirable due to that cost-cutting meant also cutting out the lockout chip, which had the effect of removing the reset from a bad cart connection as well as allowing PAL carts to play).

Chuka Taisen seems like a neat game. I've played it but was never very good at it.
A shame that for the Famicom port, I've been told when the translated the shopkeeper from English (in the arcade) to Japanese they inserted a racism into the translation. Can't play that version now.

@smoreon I had gotten my SNES the first Christmas it was available. I know it came with both the stereo AV cable and RF modulator. I know because I remember seeing the AV cable just lying around the house randomly, unused, until it just disappeared entirely.
We had one TV with composite inputs, but it was the living room TV that I had never had any consoles connected to until the 2000s because my parents were nearly always using that TV so it didn't make much sense to me to make that effort to unplug the console from the other TV.

@RetroGames Most of my childhood SNES gaming was on crappy TVs that sure didn't have composite cable support (enough that I eventually lost my original SNES AV cable, luckily they are so abundant these days I have several).
First was, I want to say my mom's old TV that was probably from like the '70s but I think it died a year or two after getting the SNES.
Then we got some hotel liquidation TV that ran for a few years before dying as well. I want to estimate late '70s/early '80s was the vintage of that one. It had wood grain but also a channel number LED, though no on-screen adjustment menu.