I think it's a huge exaggeration to say that Sony is killing physical games. The only thing Sony is killing is Sony. This isn't the first all-digital console. There was... well, the PSP Go. Which no one wanted. And stuff like Ouya, or Stadia, and similar things that all slip my mind. Because again, no one wanted them. And instead we all went elsewhere to get our physical games. And we will continue doing so.
Physical games are still going to exist. I'm personally going to be buying a lot more Switch 2 stuff. If any other company wants to release a console, I'll buy from them too. Like maybe Evercade will finally join the big leagues? And people like modern Atari would release a console in a heartbeat if the market was completely untapped.
In the world of consoles, many companies have risen and fallen over the decades. If Sony wants to nail their coffin shut, then so be it. I'll bury them next to Atari and Sega and Neo Geo. While I join the other consoles still marching on. If you want, you can mourn the loss of Sony themselves. But physical gaming will go on just fine without them.
I had a good laugh at: "Ultima series is one of the most famous in the world of RPGs – which makes the fact that we haven't had a proper, mainline game since 1999 all the more puzzling."
Followed immediately by: "The name is currently owned by Electronic Arts..."
PSA is the same company as WATA. They renamed themselves because their reputation went down the toilet when their blatant corruption was exposed.
And speaking of which, why are sites even covering this? Maybe the first two times were innocent enough, but after the scandal blew up I am utterly appalled that certain websites (HINT HINT) are once again posting these stories. And in no way can these sites pretend like they were unaware of this.
So just for the record, if the authorities do crack down on this undeniable fraud, why did this site/author feel the need to act like a complicit mouthpiece for yet another Heritage/WATA pump-and-dump scheme?
@Aetheling
You are incorrect. But do go on about how you've clearly never played them in Japanese.
The games are written in basic Japanese, not any kind of pompous "sophisticated-sounding" faux-archaic medieval language. And despite being colorful, the tone and atmosphere are absolutely straightforward and serious, and not at all riddled with puns so crappy that they would make an 8-year-old cringe.
For example, I can guarantee you that the Japanese version of a classic famous original character was never renamed to be a reference to The Simpsons.
Next time please do research instead of parroting what "you heard" from other ignorant people. And better yet, also contribute to encouraging devs not to butcher their localizations, instead of jumping on a defense force bandwagon.
Square Enix's localizers are deliberately trying to make this series be "4kids goofy", and trying to make FF be "grimdark Shakespearian". They're not even hiding it.
And for DQ specifically, it is 100% this man's fault. I will never respect him or his work. His only value is that old Working Designs localizers can point to him and be like "At least we're not this guy."
I liked the first dungeon a lot. It was one of the few dungeons of the game that was actually DESIGNED, as opposed to randomly generated. I restarted that game a lot due to bugs, such as dungeons where the quest goal was completely missing somehow. I suspect the random dungeon corridors never quite connected correctly and something was stuck in an inaccessible room, or down into the floor, or something. But that FIRST dungeon, it always worked right and felt good to play.
I've also never in my life heard it was controversial before. Daggerfall's biggest shortcomings, aside from the bugs, are all because a huge amount of everything is randomly generated. So you got a giant map that's completely empty, and dungeons that feel lifeless and tedious. Daggerfall needed MORE dungeons like this one. Ones that were actually designed by humans, to be fun and detailed and scale up appropriately.
@Coalescence Haha, when I first read the headline here, Destructoid was my first guess. That site did the quickest nosedive into the garbage heap that I've ever seen.
I've been noticing a ton of this everywhere. There is a lot of undiscovered secrets in old games. Like if the devs themselves didn't tell it to a magazine, then nobody knows it. People actually taking apart the code of a game and looking this deeply is extremely rare.
Like for example, let's take Super C for the NES. Until four months ago nobody knew what changed during the second loop of the game, or if anything at all changed during the third. Wildly popular game, and yet still unknown for almost 40 years.
That is crazy that no information about this game even existed. And completely awesome that it's now available for more people to see/play. The absolute perfect game to pick.
And it seems this all stems from the above, from the age-old belief that anything "bright" and "cartoony" needs to target young children. It sounds like he even surrounded himself with cronies who agree with him, to ensure that nobody shoots any bad ideas down. I'd also suspect that his sense of humor is just really crappy, though I don't know him and that's just speculation. Though I will say that I've never met a Jehovah's Witness who had a particularly biting wit.
And while the force to make the games more juvenile isn't that surprising, what consistently shocks me is their continued ignorance about the importance of NOT CHANGING NAMES. This has repeatedly blown up in people's faces as game get sequels and suddenly a minor character becomes big. Or a town is reused, and can no longer be a radish pun. But most importantly, with modern-age internet globalization, people have full access to Japanese game and media, so it's incredibly obvious and confusing when the same thing has different names and backstories.
Well, random example, take the DQ character カンダタ, previously known as "Kandar". An odd breakout villain, who's iconic look became a staple of much artwork if you look up DQ stuff. But here in the west, Honeywood's team thought it would be brilliant to call him... "Robbin' 'Ood". Get it, he robs people (except he's actually wanted for stealing.) And I guess he's British now or something. Not only breaking the cardinal rule of not changing a proper name into an eye-rolling pun, but also breaking the rule of not phonetically spelling out an accent. You can be sure that no young player in the west is ever making fanart of Robbin' 'Ood.
(Edit: Oh hey, and turns out he's actually named Kandata, based on a short story where a low-life criminal who was cast into hell gets a second chance because he did one good deed. Thematically, this all fits the character 100%. But hey, let's throw that all away because... "Robin" sounds like "Robbing". Reduce everything to the depth of a puddle, and then be shocked that nobody likes it. Brilliant plan!)
So anyway, Honeywood did some stuff at Square, and maybe some of it was good. But his handling of the Dragon Quest series was absolute garbage, and the stench lingers to this day. "We need to give it a new and different identity in the west!" is a stupid concept. Young people, especially now, LIKE Japanese media and culture, and they prefer it to actually be the same experience as it was in Japanese.
Look up whatever else you want yourself, but prepare for disappointment.
And 8, 9 ,and 11 sold okay, but still not great. And 8 didn't actually sell well at all, but did good enough and started to get the ball rolling with western awareness of the series. 9 had a huge marketing push from Nintendo, and they bragged about it selling 1 million, which was amazing for the series in the west. (Speaking of which, Time Extension, you guys want to solve the mystery of why NoA published SO MANY Square games in the west?) Last I recall, 11 across all versions sold like 8.5 million total, with 2 million being outside of Japan.
But all of this pales in comparison to what they sell in Japanese. These games in the west regularly sell like 20% of what they sell in Japan, which remember has a TINY population in comparison. And the smaller spinoffs and remakes sell less than 10% as much as they do in Japan. Assuming they even get brought over to the west at all, because many don't since Square's financial data shows it's not worth it.
And I'm not aware of PAL regions being huge on anime-looking RPGs, and if anything I would think NA is more accepting of cute vibrant colors and EU is more about hyper-realistic dark and gritty style. But I suppose for all the FIFA and GTA topping the UK charts, the US ones are filled with CoD, so maybe they're not all that different overall.
But in general, you are right that the west is far more accepting of anime shows and Japanese-style games than ever before. Which just makes it more apparent that DQ games are really failing to reach an audience. Even other hardcore niche games like the Trails and Disgaea series regularly sell more overseas than in Japan. And be sheer population, they totally should. So why is DQ such an exception, despite always being critically-acclaimed games?
Well, the most common complaint is the localization. But even those who don't actively complain or spot weirdness, are just left with a feeling that the game "didn't really speak to them", and they never play another one after that.
@PKDuckman Heh, thank you, I thought I was going crazy reading this. I wasn't aware these ever stopped. Japan makes a bajillion of these, including every Wizardry game from the last 30 years. And then there's some little-known obscure franchises like Shin Megami Tensei.
I think he means action-combat ones, specifically those that copy the Dungeon Master look.
DQ8 itself was fine, with the British VAs adding an excellent sense of being in a genuine European medieval fantasy. But after that, they cranked up the bad ideas to 11. The ones right up there, where he says he says he wanted to deliberately change it to give it an identity different from FF. No longer was it a deep adventure in a sincere fantasy world, but now it comes across like you're watching one of those cartoons made for five-year old preschoolers.
And you know who that target gaming audience is? Nobody. The games repeatedly bomb in the west. Despite other RPG series being incredibly popular, and anime and JRPGs in general being incredibly popular, still nobody plays DQ games or talks about them. It is not reaching any audience. Except in Japan, where the theme is untouched, and their sales greatly eclipse the entirety of the much more populated western audience. In fact the recent Nintendo Partner Direct in English had zero mention of DQ7 Remake in it, but that game was all over the Japanese version of the same show. This is not "my opinion", it is clear and evident that this direction is torpedoing the series over here.
Also, whoever told him to not use too much non-standard "punctuation, spelling, phrasing" was completely spot-on, because not listening to that is exactly what wrecked DQ4. (Particularly the Scottish parts, but the rest were just as bad too.) And they have since recognized that and toned that way down. But so far they are still full-sail ahead on all the forced immersion-breaking baby jokes that are also turning people off.
And don't worry about me, I don't need validation. The sales figures are doing that for me.
Oh, so it was him that irrevocably fuucked up the DQ series in the west. I assumed it was just the remnants of Plus Alpha's incredibly bad botching of DQ IV on the DS. But no, he was actually directing everyone to cram in as many lame-ass dad jokes as possible into all the parts that never needed it. Oh well, RIP for this series ever selling well here.
@Coalescence
This is a really good point, and maybe people's struggles with this stage is just due to having narrow vision. Like many other people have said, I beat it as a kid, and it's far from the hardest stage. (I always struggled with the elevator the most.)
It might also be why people make objectively false claims like that it's "unfair" and that you need to "memorize it". The game blantantly shows you the next wall, in advance, every single time. It blinks right there on the edge of the screen, screaming "A wall's coming right here, move away!" If you hit one, it's no one's fault but yours. I thought people were just making excuses for their failings, but maybe they really just never saw the wall warnings because they were staring at their toad the whole time instead of looking at the area where the danger was.
Even the last part of Turbo Tunnel, the ACTUAL hard part, was completely fair. The game very slowly makes you go down, up, down, up... while it increases the speed up to crazy levels. But at no point does it ever trick you and change the cadence. The entire segment is indeed all down, up, down, up, down, up.
In fact the entire game is actually a very good design lesson on fair gameplay. Every stage introduces new challenges in a slow, deliberate, semi-safe way, before ramping up the behavior of these obstacles after they've already taught you about them. Anyone who complains about it being "bad design" or "unfair" is just looking to pass blame for their own failures. But I do appreciate how these people always tell on themselves. 😉
@Sketcz
"So I subitted a database entry to GameFAQs and intend to write a guide soon."
Absolutely awesome. I've been doing this myself a lot lately, ironically using GameFAQs way more now than I ever did decades ago. And not even with obscure old games, but there's also modern games that completely go under the radar and no one ever talks about. So I'm just playing a game, trying to find all the somethings, and I figure it out myself the hard way. And it's like, man, I wish someone had made a guide for this. And then... well, I guess I should, since apparently I'm the only one who knows how to do this.
Whoa, this video is extremely good. Usually these things are full of "Did you know!?" facts that I indeed already knew, and a lot of parroting of highly questionable rumors they clearly got from Google/Wikipedia.
But no, this thing is top-notch, actual facts and never-before-seen information. Absolutely recommend watching it. Best video I've ever seen on the topic, and probably even one of the best gaming videos period.
Haha, I only know this series too because it was a Club Nintendo reward, but the one I got was definitely Crashmo. And it was indeed really good.
Even then I was always surprised it didn't have a physical release. It was a Nintendo game, but also from around the time Nintendo suddenly went in on digital-only releases (and timed releases. 🤮) I would've easily bought the rest of the games if I could've got them physically.
So if anyone is reading this, sounds like a great time to release a collection of these three games. I mean certainly it's not making you any money sitting around being inaccessible...
It was popularized by Scott Sharkey. Why does nobody doing this garbage ever just ask him? He's still alive and has an online presence. Parish has literally said multiple times that he got it from Sharkey.
Long ago around the year 2000, Sharkey had a very popular gaming comedy webpage. Think Seanbaby, but more of a jerk. He also had a huge IRC channel. Bizarre that this video eventually realized that IRC was a thing, but didn't look into Sharkey's actual channel.
Anyway, so at this point Parish wasn't even an entity doing anything, but he eventually became friends with Sharkey and made a name for himself in his own right (and ultimately eclipsing Sharkey). They both eventually joined 1up many years later, and took their terminology with them, reaching a much wider audience at that point.
Though I don't know why these videos insist on checking 1up as a source when it was made way, way after the term was popularized. Or why they insist on checking forums that Sharkey's circle was never around.
Groups formed organically around certain personalties who were deemed clever. Basically like today's YouTube influencers, but way less of them. And these groups made their own spaces and intermingled. These people aren't going on neogaf and making tons of posts saying "metroidvania". They have their own places to do so, to their own audience. And even today, good luck finding comments from a popular Twitch streamer on forum posts, let alone posts from 2001 when most of these sites no longer exist in any form.
Similarly, I'm sure many people made up "Metroidvania" independently as a funny-sounding word, so it's weird to attribute the "first" usage to a single forum post that managed to survive. But regardless of when the combination of letters first appeared, it was definitely Sharkey and his group that made it a well-known genre term.
Yggdra Union was definitely also released on PSP, and in English. In fact it looks like that one didn't get an EU release, while the GBA one did. So something's getting mixed up in that paragraph there.
And who says Tactics Ogre is a prototype Final Fantasy Tactics? Anyone who played both is painfully aware that FFT is a watered-down TO with an FF skin over it. Granted, most people in the west only know FFT, so it's expected that some people won't know any better. But anyone who did experience them both coming out would say TO was revolutionary and FFT was just a knockoff. It'll be like saying that Chocobo Mystery Dungeon is the best Mystery Dungeon game.
@slider1983 Nope, we definitely read the manuals. Maybe went quickly through some of the "no duh" sections, but they were definitely opened and read.
You sound under the impression that manuals were "instructions", but that was less than 10% of the point. As mentioned in this article, manuals were also a free artbook, and had numerous tips and tricks for beating the game. In fact many puzzle-oriented games were basically impossible if you didn't have the clues from the manual. Also, the manual often contained elaborate world-building backstory and character bios for your game, that did not exist anywhere else.
And when he talks about the PAL version being worse for having multiple languages, he means because they cut out all the fun stuff above in order to have room to put the "How to insert your cartridge" and "warranty information" pages five different times.
"The critical reception at the time was very unfair in my opinion, as the game was criticised for being 'old school' at a time where it felt like every game that was not an open world was viewed as 'old school' by the western press."
Nothing has changed in this regard. RPGs still get this, all the time. But really, they get criticized most whenever they don't have an ultra-realistic graphic style. And let's not pretend that E33's mysterious accolades and magical status as the "savior of RPGs" isn't primarily due to the coat of paint they put on it.
Things only may look slightly different now because user reviews are becoming the norm, so actual RPG fans are reviewing the games. Instead of a handful of stodgey old dinosaurs who think that all games should be movies, and that anything that "looks anime" is beneath them.
But rest assured, the old xenophobic guard still crawls out of the mud sometimes, as seen recently by the utterly terrible nominations this year for Best RPG at The Game Awards.
@h3s As I recall from reading about a previous EGGCONSOLE release of this game, the vast majority of the game is already just in English. Until you reach the ending, and then get ready for a huge blob of pure Japanese. But also, good luck ever reaching the ending...
Yeah, an absolutely shocking amount of people don't realize that there was never really any huge translation problems in this game. A lot of the "clues" people gave you in the game were just plain false. The game even told you this! The book flat-out told you that people will lie to you.
I felt like this was the entire point. It's just a bunch of gossipy villagers. Why exactly do you expect them to know about magic objects and dungeons on the other side of the world? MAYBE there might be an ounce of truth somewhere in their statement, like they were 50-people deep in a telephone game, but for the most part they don't know anything about what they're saying.
And then they all miss the ACTUAL clues, the hidden books. And then have the gall to say "But if only this false villager BS was put into high prose, then I would've been able to finish it!" Nah, it's 100% a problem of you giving up easily. Old games weren't there to hold your hand. Either spend 5 hours wandering around before you solve it, or go buy a hintbook.
Edia has brought Valis Collections 1, 2, and 3, Cosmic Fantasy Collections 1 and 2, and Telenet Shooting Collection 1 to the west in English, and they also available physically on the Switch from Limited Run Games. There is also the Cho Aniki Collection, digital only.
Since then, they've announced many more collections, with suspiciously missing English announcements. The Tenshi no Uta collection, and I think one more, said it was getting a western release with "details to be announced later". But many more have not gotten any such promise, and I suspect they're slowing down on the effort to bring these over.
If there is any English release still planned, that LRG Direct thing in a few days is probably the best chance to confirm it. The Earnest Evans collection seems like a strong contender, since LRG already released two of these as Sega CD repros. For the one in this article though, I'd say low odds of this one ever coming over if the other ones don't start appearing.
He defines it right there. "catering to loyal customers".
Just because you can trick a grandma into buying a movie licensed game, or a sports fan into buying a sports game, doesn't mean these people are going to continue buying from you in the future. They're aiming for long-term customers, who will buy every product, because they actually like and trust the company.
Or maybe you're hearing it from the opposite end, like gacha games? That's because they know they'll never have a mass-appeal product, so they're aiming to entwine a small dedicated group of gambling addicts.
I'm against historical censorship myself, but I don't feel like this is the case here. I'm sure this is also what ALL PLATFORM-HOLDERS (not "Nintendo") are going to do too; evaluate if this can stay because the games are trying to be historically accurate.
But they will likely get denied, because these games are set in the modern day and have nothing to do with imperialism or WW2. It was just a bunch of English people who put it in the game because they thought it was the Japanese flag, and were unaware of its real connotations throughout Asia.
Just like if somewhere in Asia they wanted to make a game set in the US, and used the Confederate flag. And while technically these are flags that were used and a person may see, it's not seen in good taste to wave one around.
And on another note, who was comparing this to destroying paintings and statues? You can't be serious. The original version of this game still exists, with the rising sun flag still there. Nobody is rounding up copies and "destroying" anything. This NEW version of the game, however, will have a different flag in it. Should we also complain when remasters don't have the same exact artwork as the original game?
Haha, I had the same confusion with the headline. Though I thought "under the hammer" meant "will get destroyed if no one buys them", which... is probably about the same. And I'm not too worried that someone won't buy the games if they're really cheap.
But the big part was thinking 100 arcades were closing. And "Mortal Kombat" is an oddly specific name for an arcade... oh, wait, okay, it means to say arcade MACHINES, or arcade CABINETS, are going down.
I don't know about regional slangs, but historically an "arcade" is definitely the word for the building itself, not anything inside of it.
She was really best known for transitioning, at a time long before the current trans movement or acceptance. Kind of groundbreaking at the time, though I can understand the author wanting to dance around a sensitive topic.
To the people bickering about health care, I doubt she has a lot of money. Other than the elephant in the room above, she was really only known for tales of office hijinks on the early Bard's Tale games, and then later for drama and schisms between the original Bard's Tale creators.
As you can see above, the rest of her career is a bunch of headscratchers, and even The Bard's Tale was far from a financial avalanche. She probably did fine with day-to-day money, but is vastly unprepared for something of this scope.
Oh, and the N64 was Nintendo's foray into making one big "primary" button that you should always press. The GameCube and Wii took this idea further with making the button literally gigantic. And while I guess it worked well for new players who only wanted to press one button, it was a huge pain for anything that involved pressing multiple buttons together. So they ditched that during the Wii U and went back to the SNES layout. Which their handheld systems had been using the entire time anyway. And so far that's been the end of their weird "buttons for non-gamers" phase.
I was talking about in Japan. Circle as accept was the standard the entire time, and all systems they commonly played all had the accept button in the same exact location.
In the west the PSX was a mess, with some people using X and some using Circle. (Early SNES had this problem too actually.) Also, often it would be Triangle for the "back" button, which lasted all throughout the PS2 era too. There was no standard for any of this. The MGS series used Circle as accept all the way until MGS4.
Anyway, so around PS3 Sony was now strictly enforcing standard button usage. If you had a non-standard setup, they rejected your game. Which is where it officially became X in the west, and Circle in Japan. PS4 even included a really cool option in the system itself where you can swap them around for all games. And then PS5 came along, and said everyone everywhere must use the western setup. And since Japan had been using Circle as accept for like 30 years now, that did not go over well.
Many outlets do use AI, yes. As mentioned above, it can be used as just another another efficiency tool. I mean, are these people not using spellcheckers either?
But that is a good point, maybe all this hate from some writers is supposed to be like a flex about declaring that they write real articles and not full-AI SEO slop. Though I imagine it's more like a case of "old man set in his ways". Like some guy back in the day who angrily insists on calligraphy and refuses to use a printing press.
Also, some of you here seem way too young. The SNES had B-A because that's what the NES did. So if you played a NES port or something, the letters are still in the same place. They ordered Y-X in reverse to match. (But they're not really in reverse; just read them top-to-bottom.)
The Genesis had A-B-C in left-right order, and later added X-Y-Z to match (For the same exact reason as the SNES: Two distinct rows). Eventually the Dreamcast just chopped off the C and Z from the pad itself. (But they still exist as inputs! Other controllers use them, like the official fightstick.)
In the modern day, the PlayStation straight-up copied the SNES layout, and just "renamed" the buttons as symbols. To be legally distinct and not get sued, or something, I don't know. But they literally started as an SNES add-on, you know.
And similarly, the Xbox was just a continuation of the Dreamcast, under new ownership, and they flat-out copied the Dreamcast controller exactly. (Kind of. They added back in the "C" and "Z" buttons, now as "Black" and "White". But people hated that controller, so those buttons were then moved around, and eventually on the 360 they became the second shoulder buttons, to match the PlayStation.)
And that's it. It's not complicated. We currently have two face button styles, deriving from either Nintendo or Sega. Although Sony eventually took the ballsy move of switching their buttons to match the Xbox, instead of continuing to match Nintendo. Thus forever pissing off Japan.
This explanation makes no sense. What does X and Y have to do with CAD? Yes, it uses X-axis and Y-axis, but so does the entirety of mathematics. Also, X is often used for "new variable", and after X, then Y will be used (and then Z). What is this alleged connection between the Nintendo designers being huge fans of drafting, and somehow not knowing X and Y from basic mathematics?
Also, his factoid about that's why the top row is a different color and concave is clearly BS, between the original SFC controller didn't do either of this. This seems like an incredibly unreliable source.
It seems much more logical that they just wanted to have two rows of buttons, and chose letters that were far away from each other and would allow more to be added in the future, without confusing which row/letters are on top and which are on bottom. This doesn't seem like rocket science.
I agree about the moral panic, and I want to add that I always see a lot of anti-AI articles keep coming up on the same sites, repeatedly. Like it's really obvious which people are trying to push an agenda about it. Or maybe it's just a high-click-rate ragebait topic. But either way, it's super apparent when it's always the same sources blasting it out in their echo chambers.
This feels like one of those things that would've easily been found by just reading Japanese sources for this game. Like certainly the makers of this demo disc magazine had heavily advertised this, yeah?
There's actually a lot of things like this with games, and some still happening to this day. Like I recently solved a CvS2 mystery (how to determine your final boss) that no one in the West knew for over 20 years... by simply spending two minutes looking it up in Japanese. It's funny seeing these things that are widely known in the country, but no one ever wrote it down in English.
Yeah, I've never understood the claim that people get worse at games as they get older. Like maybe if they stop playing over the years? (And were never actually good in the first place, but rose-tinted-glasses?)
Because as I've gotten older, I've gotten WAY better at games. In fact I routinely go back to games I was never able to finish as a teenager, and beat them easily.
Ha, I was thinking about the Atari/ET landfill thing too. Out of nowhere this documentary comes out claiming to "mythbust" it, but before that point not a single person ever called it a myth. And then they eventually sold people garbage for outrageous prices, so you can kind see what their angle was...
Comments 56
Re: I'm Really Not Sure How I Feel About Sony Killing Physical Media
I think it's a huge exaggeration to say that Sony is killing physical games. The only thing Sony is killing is Sony. This isn't the first all-digital console. There was... well, the PSP Go. Which no one wanted. And stuff like Ouya, or Stadia, and similar things that all slip my mind. Because again, no one wanted them. And instead we all went elsewhere to get our physical games. And we will continue doing so.
Physical games are still going to exist. I'm personally going to be buying a lot more Switch 2 stuff. If any other company wants to release a console, I'll buy from them too. Like maybe Evercade will finally join the big leagues? And people like modern Atari would release a console in a heartbeat if the market was completely untapped.
In the world of consoles, many companies have risen and fallen over the decades. If Sony wants to nail their coffin shut, then so be it. I'll bury them next to Atari and Sega and Neo Geo. While I join the other consoles still marching on. If you want, you can mourn the loss of Sony themselves. But physical gaming will go on just fine without them.
Re: "Finally, The Time Has Come" - Richard Garriott Is Reclaiming The Rights To Ultima
I had a good laugh at:
"Ultima series is one of the most famous in the world of RPGs – which makes the fact that we haven't had a proper, mainline game since 1999 all the more puzzling."
Followed immediately by:
"The name is currently owned by Electronic Arts..."
Mystery solved! 🤣🤣🤣
Re: "Not Touched For Nearly 40 Years" - Rare Copy Of Super Mario Bros. Sells For $3 Million
PSA is the same company as WATA. They renamed themselves because their reputation went down the toilet when their blatant corruption was exposed.
And speaking of which, why are sites even covering this? Maybe the first two times were innocent enough, but after the scandal blew up I am utterly appalled that certain websites (HINT HINT) are once again posting these stories. And in no way can these sites pretend like they were unaware of this.
So just for the record, if the authorities do crack down on this undeniable fraud, why did this site/author feel the need to act like a complicit mouthpiece for yet another Heritage/WATA pump-and-dump scheme?
Re: "They Really Hated It" - The Battle To Get British English Into Dragon Quest VIII
@Aetheling
You are incorrect. But do go on about how you've clearly never played them in Japanese.
The games are written in basic Japanese, not any kind of pompous "sophisticated-sounding" faux-archaic medieval language. And despite being colorful, the tone and atmosphere are absolutely straightforward and serious, and not at all riddled with puns so crappy that they would make an 8-year-old cringe.
For example, I can guarantee you that the Japanese version of a classic famous original character was never renamed to be a reference to The Simpsons.
Next time please do research instead of parroting what "you heard" from other ignorant people. And better yet, also contribute to encouraging devs not to butcher their localizations, instead of jumping on a defense force bandwagon.
Square Enix's localizers are deliberately trying to make this series be "4kids goofy", and trying to make FF be "grimdark Shakespearian". They're not even hiding it.
And for DQ specifically, it is 100% this man's fault. I will never respect him or his work. His only value is that old Working Designs localizers can point to him and be like "At least we're not this guy."
Re: New Book Tells The True Story Of Nintendo's Legal Fight To Establish Who Invented The Video Game
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Re: New Book Tells The True Story Of Nintendo's Legal Fight To Establish Who Invented The Video Game
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Re: New Book Tells The True Story Of Nintendo's Legal Fight To Establish Who Invented The Video Game
Removed
Re: "That's My Fault" - If This Elder Scrolls' Dungeon Made You Want To "Tear Your Eyes Out", Here's Who To Blame
I liked the first dungeon a lot. It was one of the few dungeons of the game that was actually DESIGNED, as opposed to randomly generated. I restarted that game a lot due to bugs, such as dungeons where the quest goal was completely missing somehow. I suspect the random dungeon corridors never quite connected correctly and something was stuck in an inaccessible room, or down into the floor, or something. But that FIRST dungeon, it always worked right and felt good to play.
I've also never in my life heard it was controversial before. Daggerfall's biggest shortcomings, aside from the bugs, are all because a huge amount of everything is randomly generated. So you got a giant map that's completely empty, and dungeons that feel lifeless and tedious. Daggerfall needed MORE dungeons like this one. Ones that were actually designed by humans, to be fun and detailed and scale up appropriately.
Re: This Long-Running Website Has Apparently Been Nuked From Google Thanks To AI-Written Resident Evil Review
@Coalescence
Haha, when I first read the headline here, Destructoid was my first guess. That site did the quickest nosedive into the garbage heap that I've ever seen.
Re: Croc Cheat Code Goes Undiscovered For Almost 30 Years
I've been noticing a ton of this everywhere. There is a lot of undiscovered secrets in old games. Like if the devs themselves didn't tell it to a magazine, then nobody knows it. People actually taking apart the code of a game and looking this deeply is extremely rare.
Like for example, let's take Super C for the NES. Until four months ago nobody knew what changed during the second loop of the game, or if anything at all changed during the third. Wildly popular game, and yet still unknown for almost 40 years.
Re: D4 Enterprise Plans To Bring Its EGGCONSOLE Reissues Of Old Japanese Computer Games To Steam
Well, I guess this is one tiny step closer to actually translating one of these...
Re: "Challenge The Unknown Rapids!" - A Rare Taito Deep Cut From The Early '80s Is Making The Jump To Consoles Later This Week
That is crazy that no information about this game even existed. And completely awesome that it's now available for more people to see/play. The absolute perfect game to pick.
Re: "They Really Hated It" - The Battle To Get British English Into Dragon Quest VIII
And it seems this all stems from the above, from the age-old belief that anything "bright" and "cartoony" needs to target young children. It sounds like he even surrounded himself with cronies who agree with him, to ensure that nobody shoots any bad ideas down. I'd also suspect that his sense of humor is just really crappy, though I don't know him and that's just speculation. Though I will say that I've never met a Jehovah's Witness who had a particularly biting wit.
And while the force to make the games more juvenile isn't that surprising, what consistently shocks me is their continued ignorance about the importance of NOT CHANGING NAMES. This has repeatedly blown up in people's faces as game get sequels and suddenly a minor character becomes big. Or a town is reused, and can no longer be a radish pun. But most importantly, with modern-age internet globalization, people have full access to Japanese game and media, so it's incredibly obvious and confusing when the same thing has different names and backstories.
Well, random example, take the DQ character カンダタ, previously known as "Kandar". An odd breakout villain, who's iconic look became a staple of much artwork if you look up DQ stuff. But here in the west, Honeywood's team thought it would be brilliant to call him... "Robbin' 'Ood". Get it, he robs people (except he's actually wanted for stealing.) And I guess he's British now or something. Not only breaking the cardinal rule of not changing a proper name into an eye-rolling pun, but also breaking the rule of not phonetically spelling out an accent. You can be sure that no young player in the west is ever making fanart of Robbin' 'Ood.
(Edit: Oh hey, and turns out he's actually named Kandata, based on a short story where a low-life criminal who was cast into hell gets a second chance because he did one good deed. Thematically, this all fits the character 100%. But hey, let's throw that all away because... "Robin" sounds like "Robbing". Reduce everything to the depth of a puddle, and then be shocked that nobody likes it. Brilliant plan!)
So anyway, Honeywood did some stuff at Square, and maybe some of it was good. But his handling of the Dragon Quest series was absolute garbage, and the stench lingers to this day. "We need to give it a new and different identity in the west!" is a stupid concept. Young people, especially now, LIKE Japanese media and culture, and they prefer it to actually be the same experience as it was in Japanese.
Re: "They Really Hated It" - The Battle To Get British English Into Dragon Quest VIII
@Zeldork
You have access to the same search engines I do. Here are some of my top results:
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Quest
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/189706-nintendo-switch/80866334?page=1
Look up whatever else you want yourself, but prepare for disappointment.
And 8, 9 ,and 11 sold okay, but still not great. And 8 didn't actually sell well at all, but did good enough and started to get the ball rolling with western awareness of the series. 9 had a huge marketing push from Nintendo, and they bragged about it selling 1 million, which was amazing for the series in the west. (Speaking of which, Time Extension, you guys want to solve the mystery of why NoA published SO MANY Square games in the west?) Last I recall, 11 across all versions sold like 8.5 million total, with 2 million being outside of Japan.
But all of this pales in comparison to what they sell in Japanese. These games in the west regularly sell like 20% of what they sell in Japan, which remember has a TINY population in comparison. And the smaller spinoffs and remakes sell less than 10% as much as they do in Japan. Assuming they even get brought over to the west at all, because many don't since Square's financial data shows it's not worth it.
And I'm not aware of PAL regions being huge on anime-looking RPGs, and if anything I would think NA is more accepting of cute vibrant colors and EU is more about hyper-realistic dark and gritty style. But I suppose for all the FIFA and GTA topping the UK charts, the US ones are filled with CoD, so maybe they're not all that different overall.
But in general, you are right that the west is far more accepting of anime shows and Japanese-style games than ever before. Which just makes it more apparent that DQ games are really failing to reach an audience. Even other hardcore niche games like the Trails and Disgaea series regularly sell more overseas than in Japan. And be sheer population, they totally should. So why is DQ such an exception, despite always being critically-acclaimed games?
Well, the most common complaint is the localization. But even those who don't actively complain or spot weirdness, are just left with a feeling that the game "didn't really speak to them", and they never play another one after that.
Re: Like Dungeon Master? Then Underkeep Will Be Right Up Your Rat-Infested Catacomb
@PKDuckman
Heh, thank you, I thought I was going crazy reading this. I wasn't aware these ever stopped. Japan makes a bajillion of these, including every Wizardry game from the last 30 years. And then there's some little-known obscure franchises like Shin Megami Tensei.
I think he means action-combat ones, specifically those that copy the Dungeon Master look.
Re: "They Really Hated It" - The Battle To Get British English Into Dragon Quest VIII
DQ8 itself was fine, with the British VAs adding an excellent sense of being in a genuine European medieval fantasy. But after that, they cranked up the bad ideas to 11. The ones right up there, where he says he says he wanted to deliberately change it to give it an identity different from FF. No longer was it a deep adventure in a sincere fantasy world, but now it comes across like you're watching one of those cartoons made for five-year old preschoolers.
And you know who that target gaming audience is? Nobody. The games repeatedly bomb in the west. Despite other RPG series being incredibly popular, and anime and JRPGs in general being incredibly popular, still nobody plays DQ games or talks about them. It is not reaching any audience. Except in Japan, where the theme is untouched, and their sales greatly eclipse the entirety of the much more populated western audience. In fact the recent Nintendo Partner Direct in English had zero mention of DQ7 Remake in it, but that game was all over the Japanese version of the same show. This is not "my opinion", it is clear and evident that this direction is torpedoing the series over here.
Also, whoever told him to not use too much non-standard "punctuation, spelling, phrasing" was completely spot-on, because not listening to that is exactly what wrecked DQ4. (Particularly the Scottish parts, but the rest were just as bad too.) And they have since recognized that and toned that way down. But so far they are still full-sail ahead on all the forced immersion-breaking baby jokes that are also turning people off.
And don't worry about me, I don't need validation. The sales figures are doing that for me.
Re: "They Really Hated It" - The Battle To Get British English Into Dragon Quest VIII
Oh, so it was him that irrevocably fuucked up the DQ series in the west. I assumed it was just the remnants of Plus Alpha's incredibly bad botching of DQ IV on the DS. But no, he was actually directing everyone to cram in as many lame-ass dad jokes as possible into all the parts that never needed it. Oh well, RIP for this series ever selling well here.
Re: Community Challenge: Can You Beat Battletoads' Most Notorious Level?
@Coalescence
This is a really good point, and maybe people's struggles with this stage is just due to having narrow vision. Like many other people have said, I beat it as a kid, and it's far from the hardest stage. (I always struggled with the elevator the most.)
It might also be why people make objectively false claims like that it's "unfair" and that you need to "memorize it". The game blantantly shows you the next wall, in advance, every single time. It blinks right there on the edge of the screen, screaming "A wall's coming right here, move away!" If you hit one, it's no one's fault but yours. I thought people were just making excuses for their failings, but maybe they really just never saw the wall warnings because they were staring at their toad the whole time instead of looking at the area where the danger was.
Even the last part of Turbo Tunnel, the ACTUAL hard part, was completely fair. The game very slowly makes you go down, up, down, up... while it increases the speed up to crazy levels. But at no point does it ever trick you and change the cadence. The entire segment is indeed all down, up, down, up, down, up.
In fact the entire game is actually a very good design lesson on fair gameplay. Every stage introduces new challenges in a slow, deliberate, semi-safe way, before ramping up the behavior of these obstacles after they've already taught you about them. Anyone who complains about it being "bad design" or "unfair" is just looking to pass blame for their own failures. But I do appreciate how these people always tell on themselves. 😉
Re: 'Magnavale: Eternal Soul' Might Be The Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Successor You've Been Waiting For
Holy sshit that character reveal. This is like the video equivalent of reading "coming to mobile!"
Re: The Zelda Adventure Nintendo Would Rather Forget Is Getting A Fan-Made Remaster
@Sketcz
"So I subitted a database entry to GameFAQs and intend to write a guide soon."
Absolutely awesome. I've been doing this myself a lot lately, ironically using GameFAQs way more now than I ever did decades ago. And not even with obscure old games, but there's also modern games that completely go under the radar and no one ever talks about. So I'm just playing a game, trying to find all the somethings, and I figure it out myself the hard way. And it's like, man, I wish someone had made a guide for this. And then... well, I guess I should, since apparently I'm the only one who knows how to do this.
Re: Game Changer: Shining In The Darkness - My Bumpy But Brilliant Introduction To JRPGs
There is a map. It's a spell you can cast.
Re: How The NES "Defined The Home Video Game Industry As We Know It"
Whoa, this video is extremely good. Usually these things are full of "Did you know!?" facts that I indeed already knew, and a lot of parroting of highly questionable rumors they clearly got from Google/Wikipedia.
But no, this thing is top-notch, actual facts and never-before-seen information. Absolutely recommend watching it. Best video I've ever seen on the topic, and probably even one of the best gaming videos period.
Re: "The World Needs More Games Like This" - Atari CEO's Best Game Of 2025 Proves He Has Impeccable Taste
Haha, I only know this series too because it was a Club Nintendo reward, but the one I got was definitely Crashmo. And it was indeed really good.
Even then I was always surprised it didn't have a physical release. It was a Nintendo game, but also from around the time Nintendo suddenly went in on digital-only releases (and timed releases. 🤮) I would've easily bought the rest of the games if I could've got them physically.
So if anyone is reading this, sounds like a great time to release a collection of these three games. I mean certainly it's not making you any money sitting around being inaccessible...
Re: Who Created The Term "Metroidvania"? Gaming Historian Critical Kate Tries To Find Out
@Damo Why is my comment with the answer apparently shadowbanned?
Re: Who Created The Term "Metroidvania"? Gaming Historian Critical Kate Tries To Find Out
It was popularized by Scott Sharkey. Why does nobody doing this garbage ever just ask him? He's still alive and has an online presence. Parish has literally said multiple times that he got it from Sharkey.
Long ago around the year 2000, Sharkey had a very popular gaming comedy webpage. Think Seanbaby, but more of a jerk. He also had a huge IRC channel. Bizarre that this video eventually realized that IRC was a thing, but didn't look into Sharkey's actual channel.
Anyway, so at this point Parish wasn't even an entity doing anything, but he eventually became friends with Sharkey and made a name for himself in his own right (and ultimately eclipsing Sharkey). They both eventually joined 1up many years later, and took their terminology with them, reaching a much wider audience at that point.
Though I don't know why these videos insist on checking 1up as a source when it was made way, way after the term was popularized. Or why they insist on checking forums that Sharkey's circle was never around.
Groups formed organically around certain personalties who were deemed clever. Basically like today's YouTube influencers, but way less of them. And these groups made their own spaces and intermingled. These people aren't going on neogaf and making tons of posts saying "metroidvania". They have their own places to do so, to their own audience. And even today, good luck finding comments from a popular Twitch streamer on forum posts, let alone posts from 2001 when most of these sites no longer exist in any form.
Similarly, I'm sure many people made up "Metroidvania" independently as a funny-sounding word, so it's weird to attribute the "first" usage to a single forum post that managed to survive. But regardless of when the combination of letters first appeared, it was definitely Sharkey and his group that made it a well-known genre term.
Re: Guide: Best Tactical RPGs
 - 20 Turn-Based Strategy Classics You Should Play
Yggdra Union was definitely also released on PSP, and in English. In fact it looks like that one didn't get an EU release, while the GBA one did. So something's getting mixed up in that paragraph there.
And who says Tactics Ogre is a prototype Final Fantasy Tactics? Anyone who played both is painfully aware that FFT is a watered-down TO with an FF skin over it. Granted, most people in the west only know FFT, so it's expected that some people won't know any better. But anyone who did experience them both coming out would say TO was revolutionary and FFT was just a knockoff. It'll be like saying that Chocobo Mystery Dungeon is the best Mystery Dungeon game.
Re: Random: Remember When Games Came With Instructions? This Guy Does, And He Wants To Find The Heaviest PS1 Manual
@slider1983
Nope, we definitely read the manuals. Maybe went quickly through some of the "no duh" sections, but they were definitely opened and read.
You sound under the impression that manuals were "instructions", but that was less than 10% of the point. As mentioned in this article, manuals were also a free artbook, and had numerous tips and tricks for beating the game. In fact many puzzle-oriented games were basically impossible if you didn't have the clues from the manual. Also, the manual often contained elaborate world-building backstory and character bios for your game, that did not exist anywhere else.
And when he talks about the PAL version being worse for having multiple languages, he means because they cut out all the fun stuff above in order to have room to put the "How to insert your cartridge" and "warranty information" pages five different times.
Re: "Justice for Lost Odyssey" - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Director Wants To See The Cult Xbox 360 JRPG Remastered
"The critical reception at the time was very unfair in my opinion, as the game was criticised for being 'old school' at a time where it felt like every game that was not an open world was viewed as 'old school' by the western press."
Nothing has changed in this regard. RPGs still get this, all the time. But really, they get criticized most whenever they don't have an ultra-realistic graphic style. And let's not pretend that E33's mysterious accolades and magical status as the "savior of RPGs" isn't primarily due to the coat of paint they put on it.
Things only may look slightly different now because user reviews are becoming the norm, so actual RPG fans are reviewing the games. Instead of a handful of stodgey old dinosaurs who think that all games should be movies, and that anything that "looks anime" is beneath them.
But rest assured, the old xenophobic guard still crawls out of the mud sometimes, as seen recently by the utterly terrible nominations this year for Best RPG at The Game Awards.
Re: The MSX Version Of Xanadu, Nihon Falcom's Highly Influential Action-RPG, Is Coming To Nintendo Switch This Month
@h3s As I recall from reading about a previous EGGCONSOLE release of this game, the vast majority of the game is already just in English. Until you reach the ending, and then get ready for a huge blob of pure Japanese. But also, good luck ever reaching the ending...
Re: This PS1 Basketball Game Has Been Hiding A Wholesome Secret For Almost 30 Years
@Damo Looking a lot like @ckoerner found it, a few comments above. And great work!
Re: The Best Version Of Castlevania II Is Being Ported To The SNES
Yeah, an absolutely shocking amount of people don't realize that there was never really any huge translation problems in this game. A lot of the "clues" people gave you in the game were just plain false. The game even told you this! The book flat-out told you that people will lie to you.
I felt like this was the entire point. It's just a bunch of gossipy villagers. Why exactly do you expect them to know about magic objects and dungeons on the other side of the world? MAYBE there might be an ounce of truth somewhere in their statement, like they were 50-people deep in a telephone game, but for the most part they don't know anything about what they're saying.
And then they all miss the ACTUAL clues, the hidden books. And then have the gall to say "But if only this false villager BS was put into high prose, then I would've been able to finish it!" Nah, it's 100% a problem of you giving up easily. Old games weren't there to hold your hand. Either spend 5 hours wandering around before you solve it, or go buy a hintbook.
Re: Six PC Engine Games From Telenet Japan Are Being Reissued On Nintendo Switch Early Next Year
Edia has brought Valis Collections 1, 2, and 3, Cosmic Fantasy Collections 1 and 2, and Telenet Shooting Collection 1 to the west in English, and they also available physically on the Switch from Limited Run Games. There is also the Cho Aniki Collection, digital only.
Since then, they've announced many more collections, with suspiciously missing English announcements. The Tenshi no Uta collection, and I think one more, said it was getting a western release with "details to be announced later". But many more have not gotten any such promise, and I suspect they're slowing down on the effort to bring these over.
If there is any English release still planned, that LRG Direct thing in a few days is probably the best chance to confirm it. The Earnest Evans collection seems like a strong contender, since LRG already released two of these as Sega CD repros. For the one in this article though, I'd say low odds of this one ever coming over if the other ones don't start appearing.
Re: McDonald's Is Teasing Something Street Fighter-Related, But Only In Japan
Hopefully this one won't result in scalpers dumping food on the streets everywhere.
Re: "People Talk About Physical Being Dead... But We Have A Loyal Community" - Broken Sword Boss On "Defining Your Tribe"
He defines it right there. "catering to loyal customers".
Just because you can trick a grandma into buying a movie licensed game, or a sports fan into buying a sports game, doesn't mean these people are going to continue buying from you in the future. They're aiming for long-term customers, who will buy every product, because they actually like and trust the company.
Or maybe you're hearing it from the opposite end, like gacha games? That's because they know they'll never have a mass-appeal product, so they're aiming to entwine a small dedicated group of gambling addicts.
Re: Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror Is Officially Set To Get The "ReForged" Treatment
How "faithful" are we talking about here? Because Nico better be able to solve a puzzle by flashing her breasts.
Re: The English Fan Translation Of PS2 RPG Tales Of Rebirth Has Just Hit A Major Milestone
Really? I would want to play the original version exactly how it originally was. And if I wanted new content I would play the newer version instead.
Re: "Nintendo Has Made Serious Objections" - Last Ninja Collection Delayed On Consoles
I'm against historical censorship myself, but I don't feel like this is the case here. I'm sure this is also what ALL PLATFORM-HOLDERS (not "Nintendo") are going to do too; evaluate if this can stay because the games are trying to be historically accurate.
But they will likely get denied, because these games are set in the modern day and have nothing to do with imperialism or WW2. It was just a bunch of English people who put it in the game because they thought it was the Japanese flag, and were unaware of its real connotations throughout Asia.
Just like if somewhere in Asia they wanted to make a game set in the US, and used the Confederate flag. And while technically these are flags that were used and a person may see, it's not seen in good taste to wave one around.
And on another note, who was comparing this to destroying paintings and statues? You can't be serious. The original version of this game still exists, with the rising sun flag still there. Nobody is rounding up copies and "destroying" anything. This NEW version of the game, however, will have a different flag in it. Should we also complain when remasters don't have the same exact artwork as the original game?
Re: Over 100 Arcades, Including Mortal Kombat, OutRun And Daytona USA, Are Going Under The Hammer Down Under
Haha, I had the same confusion with the headline. Though I thought "under the hammer" meant "will get destroyed if no one buys them", which... is probably about the same. And I'm not too worried that someone won't buy the games if they're really cheap.
But the big part was thinking 100 arcades were closing. And "Mortal Kombat" is an oddly specific name for an arcade... oh, wait, okay, it means to say arcade MACHINES, or arcade CABINETS, are going down.
I don't know about regional slangs, but historically an "arcade" is definitely the word for the building itself, not anything inside of it.
Re: Gaming Legend Rebecca Heineman Could Really Do With Your Positive Vibes Right Now
She was really best known for transitioning, at a time long before the current trans movement or acceptance. Kind of groundbreaking at the time, though I can understand the author wanting to dance around a sensitive topic.
To the people bickering about health care, I doubt she has a lot of money. Other than the elephant in the room above, she was really only known for tales of office hijinks on the early Bard's Tale games, and then later for drama and schisms between the original Bard's Tale creators.
As you can see above, the rest of her career is a bunch of headscratchers, and even The Bard's Tale was far from a financial avalanche. She probably did fine with day-to-day money, but is vastly unprepared for something of this scope.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
Oh, and the N64 was Nintendo's foray into making one big "primary" button that you should always press. The GameCube and Wii took this idea further with making the button literally gigantic. And while I guess it worked well for new players who only wanted to press one button, it was a huge pain for anything that involved pressing multiple buttons together. So they ditched that during the Wii U and went back to the SNES layout. Which their handheld systems had been using the entire time anyway. And so far that's been the end of their weird "buttons for non-gamers" phase.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
I was talking about in Japan. Circle as accept was the standard the entire time, and all systems they commonly played all had the accept button in the same exact location.
In the west the PSX was a mess, with some people using X and some using Circle. (Early SNES had this problem too actually.) Also, often it would be Triangle for the "back" button, which lasted all throughout the PS2 era too. There was no standard for any of this. The MGS series used Circle as accept all the way until MGS4.
Anyway, so around PS3 Sony was now strictly enforcing standard button usage. If you had a non-standard setup, they rejected your game. Which is where it officially became X in the west, and Circle in Japan. PS4 even included a really cool option in the system itself where you can swap them around for all games. And then PS5 came along, and said everyone everywhere must use the western setup. And since Japan had been using Circle as accept for like 30 years now, that did not go over well.
Re: Code Mystics "Horrified" By Accusation Its New Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 Port Uses AI-Generated Art
Many outlets do use AI, yes. As mentioned above, it can be used as just another another efficiency tool. I mean, are these people not using spellcheckers either?
But that is a good point, maybe all this hate from some writers is supposed to be like a flex about declaring that they write real articles and not full-AI SEO slop. Though I imagine it's more like a case of "old man set in his ways". Like some guy back in the day who angrily insists on calligraphy and refuses to use a printing press.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
Also, some of you here seem way too young. The SNES had B-A because that's what the NES did. So if you played a NES port or something, the letters are still in the same place. They ordered Y-X in reverse to match. (But they're not really in reverse; just read them top-to-bottom.)
The Genesis had A-B-C in left-right order, and later added X-Y-Z to match (For the same exact reason as the SNES: Two distinct rows). Eventually the Dreamcast just chopped off the C and Z from the pad itself. (But they still exist as inputs! Other controllers use them, like the official fightstick.)
In the modern day, the PlayStation straight-up copied the SNES layout, and just "renamed" the buttons as symbols. To be legally distinct and not get sued, or something, I don't know. But they literally started as an SNES add-on, you know.
And similarly, the Xbox was just a continuation of the Dreamcast, under new ownership, and they flat-out copied the Dreamcast controller exactly. (Kind of. They added back in the "C" and "Z" buttons, now as "Black" and "White". But people hated that controller, so those buttons were then moved around, and eventually on the 360 they became the second shoulder buttons, to match the PlayStation.)
And that's it. It's not complicated. We currently have two face button styles, deriving from either Nintendo or Sega. Although Sony eventually took the ballsy move of switching their buttons to match the Xbox, instead of continuing to match Nintendo. Thus forever pissing off Japan.
Re: Here's Why Controllers Have 'A, B, X & Y' Buttons, And Not 'A, B, C & D'
This explanation makes no sense. What does X and Y have to do with CAD? Yes, it uses X-axis and Y-axis, but so does the entirety of mathematics. Also, X is often used for "new variable", and after X, then Y will be used (and then Z). What is this alleged connection between the Nintendo designers being huge fans of drafting, and somehow not knowing X and Y from basic mathematics?
Also, his factoid about that's why the top row is a different color and concave is clearly BS, between the original SFC controller didn't do either of this. This seems like an incredibly unreliable source.
It seems much more logical that they just wanted to have two rows of buttons, and chose letters that were far away from each other and would allow more to be added in the future, without confusing which row/letters are on top and which are on bottom. This doesn't seem like rocket science.
Re: Code Mystics "Horrified" By Accusation Its New Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 Port Uses AI-Generated Art
I agree about the moral panic, and I want to add that I always see a lot of anti-AI articles keep coming up on the same sites, repeatedly. Like it's really obvious which people are trying to push an agenda about it. Or maybe it's just a high-click-rate ragebait topic. But either way, it's super apparent when it's always the same sources blasting it out in their echo chambers.
Re: 26 Years On, The Mystery Of Vandal Hearts II's Gradius Weapon Has Finally Been Solved
This feels like one of those things that would've easily been found by just reading Japanese sources for this game. Like certainly the makers of this demo disc magazine had heavily advertised this, yeah?
There's actually a lot of things like this with games, and some still happening to this day. Like I recently solved a CvS2 mystery (how to determine your final boss) that no one in the West knew for over 20 years... by simply spending two minutes looking it up in Japanese. It's funny seeing these things that are widely known in the country, but no one ever wrote it down in English.
Re: One Of The Virtual Boy Games Coming To Switch Is "Worth $10,000"
It's not going to be worth that anymore. 🤣🤣🤣
Re: "The Creative Cauldron Of Nintendo Is A Bit Of An Anti-Climax" - 35 Years Ago, The BBC Visited Mario's Birthplace
I mean, were western devs getting all that rich themselves? Miyamoto got a steady paycheck, plus now he's probably richer than anyone from back then.
Re: "You Still Can't Beat Me" - 100-Year-Old Grandma Plays Her Super Famicom Every Day
Yeah, I've never understood the claim that people get worse at games as they get older. Like maybe if they stop playing over the years? (And were never actually good in the first place, but rose-tinted-glasses?)
Because as I've gotten older, I've gotten WAY better at games. In fact I routinely go back to games I was never able to finish as a teenager, and beat them easily.
Re: Who Is Chris Houlihan? One Of The Greatest Zelda Mysteries May Have Been Solved
Ha, I was thinking about the Atari/ET landfill thing too. Out of nowhere this documentary comes out claiming to "mythbust" it, but before that point not a single person ever called it a myth. And then they eventually sold people garbage for outrageous prices, so you can kind see what their angle was...