Sketcz

@Maulbert
Well said. I have read so many interviews regarding Sega over the last 20 years (conducted a few myself), and every single one of them feeds into what you've just said. I am amazed they survived as a hardware manufacturer as long as they did. I am amazed they had the successes they did. Because the self-sabotage is off the scales.

As far back as 1983 they were self-sabotaging. Instead of focusing on marketing and development for the 8-bit Mark console, they kept releasing new versions of the hardware and squandered whatever market lead they had against the Famicom (Sega's console had scrolling whereas Nintendo's did not, for like... 8 months?)

I often think: if one went back in time, with a suitcase filled with $10 million, and all the foresight and foreknowledge, could one have changed Sega? Could one have steamrolled through the self-sabotage?

I'm still mad Steam killed support for Windows 7.

Why can't we just keep using legacy systems, even if we are knowingly putting ourselves at a security risk? I'm assuming Google had some kind of major code shift that killed legacy support?

Is there a page that explains the technical side of why legacy support can't just be left in the back to run and run?

I love this game so much. Revolutionary. Also so difficult to really enjoy properly. You need a large screen, and you need to be close to it, especially for when it zooms out.

Personally I'd really like to see the Xbox 360 version translated. Or another large console instalment. Playing on a cramped handheld - whose batteries are all dead and prone to exploding - isn't my idea of a good time.

The Xbox 360 version of Idolmaster is in fact fan-translated! You can find videos online. Someone did the work, but then never uploaded the files anywhere.

If you have a modded X360 it's pretty easy to patch stuff too. Just install, and then in a folder overwrite any files containing text.

I'm wondering how easy it is to open up the X360 files. Are they encoded and compressed? Or just raw text files that get loaded? That's how Drihoo got fan-translated.

I suppose if this is the only option, it's better than no option.

@KingMike
Yeah, looks pink to me, and I assumed the three colours are a riff on RGB?

I noticed the different colour lasers since I played lots of Konami games, but assumed it was just semi-random based on the game. Like, this game has this colour, and another just has another colour for arbitrary selection. I never realised it was for specific hardware!

Konami's Arumana no Kiseki also took heavy influence. It's an Indiana Jones platformer on FDS with the exact same rope mechanic.

@N-MCMXCIX @Martin_H
I can understand replacing capacitors for functionality. Old caps die. So restoration so that something can retain its original function makes sense. But all of my white plastic consoles and peripherals are yellow, and it's purely cosmetic. They still work. From what I watched of this, it looks like the plastic is starting to disintegrate. Which is itself a whole other topic - since some game systems are made from plastic which is prone to brittling over time. I'm fine with 3D printed replacement shells - but dousing something in hydrogen peroxide feels inherently problem causing.

I've never, ever understood this practice. Book collectors don't try to unyellow ancient manuscripts. Coin collectors and gun collectors don't polish off the natural occurring patina on the metal - doing so is a big no-no and will severely devalue an item.

And yet...

Game collectors: let's put hair bleach on everything!!

ROFLMFAO feels an apt response

There was a convention some few years back, in London. I think 2019? I can't recall the year. Some Japan pop culture thing. And there was a cab like this on free play - I distinctly remember the three spaces for up to three players.

Everyone ignored it. So I sat and credit fed to the end, hoping someone might join me. Nobody did. Was kind of surprised because to me, this was a legendary cab, and amazing to see in the wild, and it was completely overlooked in favour of stands selling overpriced tat.

I'm sure it was in English. Could it have been this unit?

I would love to own one of these. You really need the roller to play it properly.

EDIT:
It was HYPER JAPAN at the Olympia in London. Did anyone else attend that specific year that had this cabinet? I didn't take any photos, and I wish I had now.

Welcome to 2025, when a Zelda style game is not popular. WT actual F?

Whatever this new rubbish is has zero appeal to me. Less than zero. But I have an obsession with any game that models itself on old-school 2D top-down Zelda.

How is it possible we exist in a reality where this is not popular?

I feel like I fell through a portal into the wrong dimension. I want to go back to my own world! Where Zelda is popular!

@jygsaw @Deuteros @Daniel36
I think I recalled this wrong, or at least conflated two interview answers. My apologies.

https://hg101.kontek.net/localization/localization2.htm

In the above interview I did he says 40% from the JP edition. Meaning yes, the JP cartridge should contain what was lost due to ROM limits during localisation.

But there were other interviews, with Woolsey and other members of the team, talking about content being cut during the shift from SNES CD to cart. I think I probably read a lot of the same materials Jygsaw refers to. It's pretty well established, rather than just rumour.

I conflated these two distinct separate losses of content.

There's evidence for the CD cut content - others have documented some of the missing holes in the gameplay; the one I remember most is a cave entrance which leads nowhere (I think near the water temple), and doors which you'd think lead somewhere important but simply don't open.

Sadly given that Square said they have few of the design documents from FF7, I suspect they have even less from SoM.

Every time I see Secret of Mana I think about how Ted Woolsey described 40% of the game content getting nuked due to cartridge limitations and abandonment of the SNES CD add-on, and how Square remade the game in 3D and promptly never added back in any of the lost content, despite this being the PERFECT opportunity, and how that content is now probably lost forever, leaving us with only half a masterpiece.

I'd like to see a hundred such fan projects, each adding in their own best guess at this lost content, and then in the end the fan community comes together selecting the best examples, to create a new vision for SoM.

Or something.

I'm obsessed with the lost 40%.

Hope this grows beyond a demo - I would guess lots of people have multiplayer adapters for use with Bomberman, so they're good to go with 3 players.

On his website:

"Available soon through the shop"

<click the shop>

"404 The Shop is Unavailable"

I love cross-media such as this. There have been surprisingly few examples of this sort of thing over the decades, despite it being such a rich idea. I don't just mean a separate adaptation, like manga to anime to game, where each is disconnected. I mean something where two different types of media are created concurrently to generate synergy and something fun to explore at the same time.

There's a few examples, but not enough. I keep thinking of The Matrix, where segments of the film's story existed only in the videogame, expecting you to play it alongside. Japan had some good simultaneous tie-ins.

@KingMike
True. And the old Resi games are also on GOG now. But that actual interview which I'm satirising continues to blow my mind. The execs were approached by GOG and had to be pursuaded people cared about old games. The fact such an attitude exists makes me think every old game release is someone desperately trying to convince one of the higher ups. It gives me constant anxiety.

https://www.timeextension.com/news/2025/10/capcom-almost-didnt-reissue-resident-evil-1-3-on-gog-because-we-already-have-their-hd-remakes

@SlangWon @Magrane
Capcom is the same company, that when GOG suggested putting older Resident Evil games up for sale, they replied, and I quote:

"Nah, why would you want to sell old games? People buy old games? No one is interested in old games, there's remakes of the Resi games which is obviously the best versions now because it's new, so we deleted the archives of all that old *****, because ***** old ***** man, we only care about the bestest and latestest versions, man, stop being silly and talking about old stuff, it's so old, we're all about the NEW games! Now, if you'll excuse me GOG, I appear to have fouled myself and need to change again."
~ an actual Capcom Executive

EDIT: I might be paraphrasing just a little

I miss the old days. Lavish colour manuals. Obi strips / spine cards. Paper maps. Cloth maps. Sealed tips leaflets. Art books. Bonus music CDs. Flexible vinyl records. Company catalogues. Making of discs. Weird and wonderful omake and "feelies" as they were called.

We have lost so much.

@PKDuckman
I see! Honestly, don't worry about the reports. Hunting them down is tedious. If all enemies die the mission ends, so you need to keep one alive until you've found it. If you're unlucky the lone survivor will be holding it, forcing a restart. And your reward at the end is just some challenge missions in a generic square room - not very interesting. Just play the main campaign and savour it. The last few missions are difficult, but not insurmountable. Make sure you've attached the skill which auto-uses healing items when knocked out. That's going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Good hunting!

@PKDuckman
Exactly! I remember watching YT videos, and thinking: this looks really fun. Good music, nice art style, cool vamps vs werewolf story, complex systems, large battlefields, funny things like werewolves punching tanks to death. And then the YT commentary was all "this totally suuuuucks!!"

And there was this weird disconnect for me. Like, it can't be THAT bad based on what I'm seeing. So I had to import a US system immediately with copy of the game.

A lot of complaints about the camera, but I found it was mitigated by using L&R to quickly swap between targets, which is such a great QOL feature.

I can understand if its average score was in the low 70% range, given that tactics games are an acquired taste. But the overwhelming hatred it got... I wonder if it's because the X360 target demographic at that time just wasn't into that kind of game, and maybe it would have done better on PS3?

I did an exhaustive write up on HG101, including an interview taken from the strategy guide, and then years later had a surprise interview of my own with its creator in Japan. It really didn't sell well, and he was kinda surprised at my interest. I have no shame in geeking out about how much I liked it. He needed to know!

The only complaint I personally have, is that the special reports you can find on random enemies is tedious. You need them all to unlock the Eagle Has Landed dungeon campaign. The string of battles are themselves quite dull, being devoid of story, and it's so easy to miss the special report during the story campaign. There's a bunch of them, and you need to search every corpse, hoping it's not being held by the last surviving enemy.

But I really enjoyed the guerilla warfare aspect of sending your team in without gear, so they were light and had earlier turns, then scavenging weapons from the enemy.

Did you finish it? Did you collect all the special reports?

@Babybahamut
I literally bought a X360 to play Operation Darkness. Loved that game so much. Unavailable anywhere else. Lost Odyssey is another good exclusive. Import Tuner Challenge. Naruto: RoaN (I think?). The Outfit. Project Sylpheed is incredible - INCREDIBLE. WarTech, or was that ported? Culdcept Saga - it was released all over, but X360 is the best in English.

There's also a bunch of good games which were on PC and the only console port was X360. Depending on your criteria for exclusivity.

Op Darkness and Sylpheed are my two recommendations.

@gingerbeardman
LGR does a lot of heavy comparisons. I think... He compares several alternative options with side by side footage.

Were you able to test any weird controllers or peripherals?

Tetris Bio Sensor

Pikachu voice unit

Densha train controller?

@MysticWangForce Civvie reference?

I finished this last month - the original. Fantastic FPS. Still feels inventive even in 2025. But yeah, those water gates were tough. I only discovered by accident the switches because I was shooting my gun off in anger. A lot of quick saves later and I beat it.

Using a guide didn't help because it's a maze with variable heights - not specific levels like in a house, but water tunnels that go slightly up and down, meaning it's not easy to see a 2D map of.

Was well worth getting past though. The game has some exquisite set pieces beyond this. Feels like proper 90s PC gaming.

@Xerox1919
Exactly this. I know some players prefer the cryptic nature of the original, but after playing Redaction, I thought to myself: it should have always been like this. I realise it's not "realistic" to have some peasant villagers know detailed arcane knowledge, but it made searching for them, and talking to them worthwhile, and it meant you could play and finish the entire mystery solely by using the game itself, rather than looking up a FAQ or opening Nintendo Power and having it win the game for you.

I'm not a kid any more, and none of my friends are going to play this, so the old style of sharing playground knowledge is gone. If the game itself doesn't explain stuff, I'm just going to visit GameFAQs on my phone and cheat my way through, which neuters the experience.

In the year 2025, I think we should be allowed to just have the game explain itself to us.

I'd really like to see other fan hack improvements added.

The NES version has hacks which remove invisible holes, and increase hearts collected. Since it gets very grindy.

I also dislike Bisqwit's retranslation. It keeps all the nonsense from the JP original.

Simon's Redaction by The Almight Guru is much, MUCH better. He took the time to rewrite all the clues so each of them was a real clue, and made real sense.

People complain about the original localisation, but the JP original's script was also garbage, with lying NPCs, false clues, and just gibberish. A retranslation fixes nothing. You need a full rewrite, as done by TAG and his Redaction patch.

This is the best retranslation, since dialogue is now actually no longer useless *****:

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/868/

@The_Nintendo_Pedant
😆 Nice. I love that scene. Fun dialogue, surprisingly good editing of game footage, well integrated, and it foreshadows the narrative arc of the film itself. It was perfect.

@AllieKitsune
Exactly! Hence I'm surprised the desire to make it more public now. I had hoped the need to sign up and log in at least deterred casual search engine lawyers et al from finding it. I dunno. Maybe it did nothing at all in the grand scheme of things?

It's not like the IRC days of the original Xbox, where it was a PITA to get any emulators because they were coded using a stolen XDK.

It was never dead - you just needed a secret account to access the updates.

I prefer it that way.

Let the surface level normies think it's gone, while the cognoscenti among us can seek it out.

@romanista
I do not have Protector. I've got... 13 overlays. Only TdF is misaligned. Most don't have precise alignment boxes, other than Clean Sweep and Starhawk, both of which are fine. What an odd anomaly.

@romanista
Yeah, I picked up TdF recently too. It's one of the prettier overlays, even though the game is quite frustrating.

I find the white square does not quite line up with the gearbox though. Is that the same for you (when it arrives)?

My favourite overlay is Narzod. It's just a shade of green / blue, but it works for multiple games.

Starhawk's overlay is good but the game...

Armor Attack is another special one given the broken buildings. But you can't really use it with anything else.

Now... If only I could find cheap reproductions of the Intellivision overlays!

This is a nice surprise to see!

So, so glad this can reach a wider audience, rather than only physical FC / NES owners.

If you decide to take a dip, please be bold and try out the hardcore difficulty mode - "God of Game" - it's honestly not as scary as it sounds! But it adds a lot to each stage, in terms of enemy waves and projectiles. Besides, with a rewind feature it won't be that difficult anyway.

Interestingly... Since this will be emulated, you can disable sprite flickering, but it was coded to avoid this on real hardware. So it was never really an issue (unlike Parodious and other hori-shmups on NES). I'm curious and looking forward to seeing the reception to this within a different market.

@romanista
Cool cool. Happy to help a fellow Veccy fan out. Which 3 did you get?

Are you participating in the forum tournament? It runs til Saturday. Still plenty of time to qualify and climb the rankings. Though you'll need a flashcart for all the homebrew.

https://vectorgaming.proboards.com/thread/2772/vectrex-tournament-vector-war-2025?page=1

@romanista
Indeed the shipping is high. There's a reseller on UK ebay, who charges £12 per overlay, but every time I buy them I get 4 or 5, so there's a reduction so they work out to £10 each. Which is reasonable enough. I use a Vectmulti cart, so have all the games, and I now have pretty much a complete set of overlays for what I enjoy playing.

Look up "consoleboxes" on ebay. He has all of them. Except... You're based in Holland, so the shipping might again be high? Good luck in the search.

But yeah. I bought a boxed copy of Crush of Lucifer from Kelly in the US, and with shipping to UK the overall price came to £80.

@romanista
Sean Kelly has reprinted all the original overlays. You can buy them either individually (about £10 each if you buy multiple), or buy the entire set. I nearly bought the set, but then realised that I don't need the sports overlays etc.

All my overlays are Kelly repros, and they are very high quality. There's a discreet marking stating they are OEM reproductions.

I own a real Vectrex. Plus a modded NeoGeo CD controller for better analogue control. It is a lovely machine. Still going strong despite being literally older than me.

Right now the big Vectrex forum is enjoying Vector Wars XV, a week long tournament. It only accepts real hardware, not emulation, so will be interesting to see how the tournie evolves once this is out.

I'm not an elitist gatekeeper. The Vectrex is a wonderful system, and every year brings dozens of new homebrew games, thanks to a university professor named Peer, who has made Vectrex development part of the games design course. There really are HUNDREDS of homebrew titles out there.

If this can raise more awareness for the system, and increase the number of homebrew projects, I am all for it.

However, I'll continue to enjoy my original.

It's a pity the methods to make new vector CRTs no longer exists. Are there any such factories still around? Doubtful.

What about the unreleased NES port of 2?

Review copies were sent out, but it's never been dumped.

@jygsaw
Back in the day I preferred them to Tekken. I didn't like Tekken or Virtua Fighter at all. Very drab, in terms of characters, moves, backgrounds, and actual fighting.

BAT though, incredible! So full of energy! I was stuck with the original Tekken for a month, as the pack in game, hating it, and was so glad to trade it in for BAT.

Would try the sequels as they came out, and every time I found myself left cold by Tekken and VF.

Psychic Force ended up my favourite PS1 fighter, but the BAT trilogy follows close by.

To this day I still feel a bit confused by the love Tekken and VF titles still get, while PF and BAT are forgotten.

This BAT trilogy sounds a treat!

@devil76
The impression from the EGM interview was "we have to have an escort mission"

Like, he felt obligated?

I agree with @bring_on_branstons

I've always preferred the Japanese boxes and the art, and find the US designs garish. The console redesigns too.

The US just seemed to arbitrarily do the exact opposite of Japan for no good reason.

This sentence from the guy is laughable:
"Our role, therefore, lay in the re-interpretation of Japan-originated games and rebuilding that content for American audiences."

They didn't reinterpret anything!

They slashed and burned. They destroyed beautifully creative and iconic artwork, and then just churned out their own junk in place of it.

The smug hubris of this man is off the scale! Unbelievable.

I know lots of people feel a warm happy nostalgia for the NES and SNES packaging, and that's nice. But objectively speaking... I think it's all awful. Really pause to look at it and assume you have never played games.

Look at Zelda.

US box: who knows what it's about. Maybe an edutainment game about the British monarchy? Some coat of arms. Lame!

Japan: guy with a sword! A huge map to explore! The distant horizon and adventure beckoning!

I think this guy has an inflated sense of self. To put it constructively. Classic case of thinking they knew better, throwing everything else out, so as to showcase only their own "superior" ideas.

Nobody will ever convince me the US Zelda box art has any merit whatsoever.

The sad thing is we will never know how the market would have reacted with the original art.

@devil76
There was an interview with the GameCube Star Wars guys. In EGM. Way back when. And they said in this interview: everyone hates escort missions, so we decided to put the escort mission early to get it out of the way.

I read this interview 25 or so years ago. And even at the time I thought: why not just not do it?

About 5 years ago I downloaded a fan-made package containing the PC version with numerous bugfixes and QOL improvements for modern hardware.

I very quickly realised the game relied on randomly generated escort missions.

You'd need to do these little missions, which the game would generate: take person X to place Y, etc.

In every instance the person to be escorted would start opening fire on police, resulting in a maximum wanted rating, and quick game over.

It was relentlessly difficult. Like doing self dentistry.

I deleted with extreme prejudice.

Any game which so feverishly relies on badly design escort missions is in fact trash. And can stay forgotten.

Insufferable.

I actually can't understand why a particular era of games was obsessed with adding escort missions to everything. They are universally awful.

@KingMike
It was def Pop'n Magic, since I recall the big smiling tree. Also tell a lie, not the late 90s, the mid 90s! Found it on YT:

https://youtu.be/NM77Rrnu1Wc?si=_I8_j5TVTYH59ObE

I've not seen this in 30 years. I make no apologies for the duration of PnM. Lol.

But I have vivid memories of wanting to know what the game was but not having internet access. I only discovered it many years later.

I played Magical Pop'n at a concention once. 15 years ago. Guy was saying how expensive it was. Comparitively it was much cheaper then!

Every time I see Pop'n Magic, I think of that Jonathan Ross special, introducing manga and anime to British audiences in the late 1990s. For some reason they edited a fair bit of footage of Pop'n Magic into it, despite it not really having anything to do with the subject matter.

@Deuteros
A fellow Game Zone collector? I have every issue, bar two. How's your set look?

@Blast16
Indeed. I also recall getting to know various shop staff on a first name basis - it was more than just an employee & customer dynamic. And when an exciting new release came out you'd chat about it, because obviously they had first access to it.

The kids today will never be able to understand this.

Feels like a punch in the gut. The past really, really was better. It's not just nostalgia. I don't think any of us realised how good we had it back then.

I was in South Africa at the time, and it's interesting to note how similar the shopping malls looked in 1994, just with a few different names. Someone came up with a template for commerce and exported it globally.

@Brilliant_Bird_Man
You must defeat Sheng Ronald to stand a chance!

"Munee? What is this so-called mah-knee you keep talking of, and why do we want it?"
= a Capcom executive, allegedly

Am I the only one secretly hoping for a SFII rom hack that makes this real and playable?

Every character with Maccy D related special moves and sprites?