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@gojiguy Have you encountered enough differences to warrant coverage of Canada? I know we got some different packaging up here, like how Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikmin 2 used the PAL box art, but other than that, we basically just get all of the same stuff as the US, even localized with their funny spellings of "color" and such.

Mexicans probably have more to talk about, at least regarding the '80s, although I was under the impression that all three countries are pretty much in alignment now, with even the packaging for many games being identical (with trilingual text).

PS: I thought I heard some mention of the MSX having a limited run over here? If that's true, that'd be something! But still not really a relevant point if you're looking at the state of gaming in a typical Canadian household.

This effect is almost identical to the one used in the first stage of Gunstar Heroes: it looks like they're splitting the cloud layer on every line, and moving the odd rows at a different speed from the even rows.

Those pre-rendered graphics were converted really well, though. You'd think the Genesis's limited colour palette would be an issue, but it doesn't seem to be a problem here (maybe because most of the graphics are small enough to avoid colour banding?).

@KingMike Tokihiro Naito has been at M2 for at least 5 years, so he's probably in his sixties now. (Unless he was just 50 when he was hired, but that seems unlikely, considering when Hydlide was made)
But even if he is 60+, that still means that, like a lot of pioneering game devs, he still would've been quite young when developing these famous games!

This just seems crazy to me (whether it's in Japan or the west).
Why wouldn't you want a middle-aged guy with a lengthy resume, especially if that resume is full of esteemed studios and classic or groundbreaking titles?
It's not even like they're necessarily going, "who is this old dude, anyway", as the interviewers in Naito's case were thrilled to meet him... just not to actually work with him.

(As MARI0 mentioned, money is a likely factor, though even then, you'd think they could just offer the older guy whatever they're paying the younger kids, and if he wants to negotiate or turn it down, that's up to him.)

@h3s SSF was amazingly accurate, back when I used it (10-15 years ago), but the input lag was just awful. Has that been improved?

Mednafen is also accurate, but I didn't notice any lag.

Yabause has always lagged behind in compatibility/accuracy, but is more full-featured, with HD rendering, as I recall.

I think Kronos is similar to Mednafen, and then Beetle has enhancements like Yabause, but good accuracy as well?
I'm admittedly a little out of the loop with the current state of Saturn emulation.

Still amazed that this game even exists, and all the more so when considering the history touched on here, which sounds pretty tumultuous, with the changing genres and scope, publisher issues, etc.!

Even aside from all that, the mix of hack 'n slash combat, open-world driving, and RTS battles is about as strange and niche as it gets. But it actually got approved, and apparently received a decent budget. And EA (of all companies!) published it. And it has a ton of licensed music and big-name cameos. And it somehow hasn't even been delisted, over 15 years later!

Definitely worth checking out, for those who haven't yet, even if you're put off by the mention of RTS gameplay. (If I was able to fumble my way through the main story, then anyone can!)

Just want to point out that a form of this has been on Steam and GOG for years now. It just has the SNES and DOS versions, however.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant That was such a great time for gaming that it's hard to separate things: how much of it is EGM itself, versus gaming in general, versus being a kid in the late '90s?

I've recently been looking up some archived issues of EGM on the internet, to see if I can find any articles that I remembered from before. I found the one mocking Link for resembling a Keebler elf, but there are still more to track down. Even aside from that, though, just reading various articles (and yes, even the totally wicked ads full of 'tude!) has been a blast!

@jojobar Guess that's what happens when the original franchise goes 15+ years without a new game. You snooze, you lose!

@Martin_H Could you be thinking of Dave White, who used to co-host Game Sack? (That other balding, bearded guy talking about retro games!)

@Coalescence Yeah, that sounds a bit questionable. Does this have "improvements" that no one asked for, which make the game worse? Or maybe they're talking about Super Mario Bros. Special or something.

@HammerKirby It's weird to think that the little toy device was more powerful than the main handheld, but I guess it makes some sense, given that the Game Boy was 12 years old by then (and wasn't even cutting-edge back in 1989)!

@ArcadeRacingCENTRAL Yeah, this actually looks cool- like some kind of Sega-flavoured Kirby Air Ride or something. The possibility of TJ Davis and Shogo Sakai being on board sweetens the deal!

It's unfortunate that this was touted as a "standalone Chao Garden" before, at least in the previous article on this site. As much as I loved Sonic Adventure, I never especially liked the grindy Chao-raising side of things, and though I've heard others calling for a game built primarily around that, it really didn't sound very appealing to me.

Though admittedly, a big part of the problem was having to switch between the Chao Garden and the Action Stages over and over, with no option to just play the main game for a few hours, build up some resources, and then go chill in the Chao Garden for a couple more hours. Plus, I had neither a GBA nor an entirely empty VMU to play the mini-games on.

@wollywoo
And they could transform, and there were even secret ones?

Yep, I had the same experience reading a friend's copy of Pokemon Power, that little mini-magazine that was included in Nintendo Power for a while. (I later found it online- it was issue 6, the one which unveiled Mew.) Mesmerizing stuff for a kid in the late '90s, but perhaps that was not quite as obvious to an adult at the time.

@Lowdefal Yeah, I'm not saying Pokemon was such a shoo-in that anyone who approached it cautiously was stupid, or anything like that. There was some risk in launching a franchise of that size, all at once! (Though, speaking as someone who was a kid back then, the appeal was immediate and obvious!)

But in general, there was this constant internal pushback against anything anime/Japanese in the '80s and '90s: characters always had to be renamed/redesigned, box art had to be westernized, cultural references and text had to be scrubbed, etc. Look at basically any NES or Genesis game's box art for some easy examples!

Eventually, anime caught on in the west- Sailor Moon being the earliest show I actually remember as "anime"- but I have to question whether the limiting factor until then was audiences or just marketing.
Did anime succeed in the west because of, or in spite of, itself?
And could unapologetically Japanese media have succeeded earlier on, if marketing and localization had simply gotten out of the way? I mean, we westerners were more than happy to play the likes of "Ninja Geiden" featuring "Raiyu Heyabuusa", even if it had a funny name!

Like you touched on, dumb decisions kept happening even well after anime was popular in the west: the heavy-handed 4Kids censorship (which I always thought was really hypocritical, considering the stuff their own TMNT got away with!), for one. And like I mentioned, Nintendo was still putting angry eyebrows on Kirby in the mid-2000s. Even Pokemon itself was shoehorning "jelly donuts" and American money into the anime.

@Tom_Gamer What I wonder is how many actual potential customers were turned off by anime-looking character designs? It's obvious that the marketing teams in the west had a major phobia of anything too Japanese or cutesy (but I repeat myself) in the '80s and '90s, but then, they were not always in tune with their audience.

Was anime really poisonous to sales, and if so, for how long? We still saw questionable decisions happening well into the '00s, years after Pokemon had become a huge phenomenon: stuff like painting angry eyebrows on Kirby, or making Japanese games look like shovelware in an attempt to hide their origin.

But I wasn't (yet?) an angsty, edgy 12-year-old in 1990, so I can't say firsthand how anime stuff was perceived in the west at the time.

@Sketcz

I suppose there's an argument to be made that not knowing this in a way fostered a carefree creative attitude?

That's an interesting thought, and it leads to a slightly unsettling one:
Would the industry have gotten where it is now- risk-averse and full of rereleases and rehashes- a whole lot sooner if they had known that certain games would be so hugely successful and iconic?

On the other hand, some games that succeeded in spite of time and budget limitations could have been granted the resources they needed to really deliver on their true potential!

Does this mean there's going to be a karaoke scene? Or will there be a level where Joe and Yamato jump on the backs of racing stock cars (or run alongside them)?

@Coalescence I was going to say, "man, Sega's getting to be as bad as Nintendo", but then I got to the part where the hardware is technically Nintendo's property, so... yeah.

Of course, the British police were also involved- and doing what they do best, naturally- so it's not all about the game companies.

@JumpingJackson What about renaming King Koopa after their future CEO? Now that's foresight!

@Sketcz How often did a company realize that they were onto something really big like that, though?

Most of the time, a company just gets the job done and moves on: no ceremony, no lavish budget spent on minute details in the hopes of making a perfect classic, no saving up a bunch of game assets and records and memorabilia in the hopes that they'll be valuable, or that there'll be an HD remaster or 30th anniversary collector's edition, or that people will want to make documentaries about the project.

It would seem that Nintendo didn't really have the resources to do proper English translations back then, so it makes sense that they'd outsource. It explains how their instruction manuals turned out as well as they did, while the games themselves had stuff like: 'Many years ago Prince Darkness " Gannon " stole one of the Triforce with power.'

@KingMike I didn't know that the longer voice lines weren't in the original Japanese version until reading this article- I just knew that the "Shindou" (Rumble) version did have them... minus "So long, gay Bowser", of course!

Was Nintendo responsible for Tales of Phantasia's GBA dub? That one's up there with The House of the Dead 2 for the best worst acting in a game:
"Come forth, thonder of the gods!!!"
"What the HECK is that?"

How does this actually work? I assume that new games (or old games with patches) can tap directly into it, but judging by the way they're switching modes in that brief demo, does the controller itself have built-in graphics for select games, so that it can intercept the plain old VMU inputs and substitute its own thing?

@GravyThief Have you tried Phantom Edition? It's the fanmade PC port with uncapped performance and other enhancements. You can probably alter the soundtrack easily enough as well!

@h3s Your CD player is trying to interpret the game data as audio samples. Normally, audio samples have patterns that represent natural combinations of amplitude: play them in order, and they make realistic, coherent sounds. But other data could be anything, so you'll get all kinds of unnatural jumps from high to low, potentially even thousands of times a second.

Looks neat, but I have mixed feelings: is this all that different from simply buying a bunch of DRM-free games and playing them offline through one of the many launchers out there? Except Kazeta requires you to drop an extra few dollars on each game to make it physical.

However, there's something special about that old-school save data screen, combined with inserting the SD cards, that gives a nostalgic element.

And even from a practical perspective, that save data management sounds quite useful. I'm curious as to how they pulled it off, and what its compatibility rate is. Games save their data all over the place: in My Documents, in C:, in their own installation folder, in Steam, in AppData... Kazeta's save management could be really helpful if it works, but I'm a little skeptical that it'll work for more than, say, 75% of games.

@GravyThief And it was remade as Sword of Mana, and then remade again as Adventures of Mana!

Note/correction: Ys III was also released in English for North America.

Anyway, I hope these all get international releases now (preferably in English), as it would be either the first release in a very long time, or the first release ever! Of the games listed, only Ys I & II received more recent releases on Wii and the Turbografx Mini.

I liked Faxanadu and especially Ys I & II, so any opportunity to dig into Falcom's back catalogue is welcomed! I understand that most of the Dragon Slayer/Legend of Heroes/Xanadu games aren't that much like Faxanadu, but I'd still be interested. Dragon Slayer on Turbografx CD has a great soundtrack, as you'd expect.

@The_Nintendo_Pedant Nearly 30 years later, I still remember the headline: "US family installs Windows 95 from CD-ROM"!

@bring_on_branstons Ah, I never did make proper use of those weapons. Now that you mention it, I bet the three-way shuriken thing would be really helpful.

Cobra Triangle! That's a good one, but brutal- not that it comes as a surprise, being from Rare's Battletoads era! Even with a Game Genie for unlimited health, the final boss is still hard to finish off in the time limit. Snake Rattle 'n Roll isn't exactly a cake walk, either, though I haven't spent much time with that one.

@KingMike Yeah, it still struggles (flicker and slowdown), so it's not even totally stable at 30fps.
The weird thing is that Konami's other games were 60fps, like Contra, Castlevania, and Getsufuumaden itself! TMNT does sometimes throw more stuff on screen than any of those, but I'd say it wasn't worth the jank, if that's why.

I always thought of Konami as technically skilled (on top of simply making fun games), but going by your Dragon Scroll anecdote, they may have used a lot of duct tape to hold things together!

@Razieluigi Got to agree with you.
I liked the NES game for what it was, and I especially appreciate what it was trying to do, even if the execution was rough.
If this SNES port adds 60fps and unlimited continues, that'll go a long way. But I'd also love to see a game that expands on the concept, with larger maps, more exploration, and less difficulty.

Apparently, TMNT3 on Game Boy does some of the same things, with a Metroidvania-style structure, as well as turtles all having their own unique abilities? Just recently picked up the Cowabunga Collection, so I'm planning to dig into this one soon.

@bring_on_branstons Ugh, AVGN again. Nothing against the guy himself, but I wish people would form their own opinions. It seems like whenever there's an over-hated game, I find out that AVGN had done a popular episode ripping it apart.

Now, the dam in itself is a bit of a wake-up call, I guess. Sort of like the Turbo Tunnel in Battletoads, it's nowhere near the hardest part of the game, yet it is the part where I imagine a lot of players met their match after breezing through the first bit of the game.

I didn't really struggle with the dam when I played it (I was also 11 or 12), and those single-square gaps in stage 3 weren't an issue either, as I had discovered the correct way in that first building where you get the missiles. But the Technodrome- how did you beat that as a kid???
It just goes on and on, and then that final corridor is downright hellish, with those astronaut-looking guys that can destroy your run if RNG (or a slight mistake in your positioning?) puts them in the wrong spot.

@BausRifle I think the question these devs usually ask is "why not"!
But even besides that, this makes it a lot easier to add enhancements, like improved audio. In this specific case, I'm also hoping all that extra CPU headroom allows for 60fps, as this was one of the relative few NES games that only ran at 30.

@Guru_Larry I liked GA2 and 3. Great soundtracks in both of them, and 3 had those branching paths and a more expansive move set.

Though I have to agree that they didn't look nearly as good or play nearly as well as SoR2. (And GA3 does not look like a first-party 1993 game!)

@EarthboundBenjy I didn't know that Halloween hack had crossovers with other franchises, let alone such a deep cut as Brandish! Cool bit of trivia, anyway.
But then, I've never played it. Only knew that it was what Fox worked on before Undertale and Deltarune, and that he was apparently a bit of an angsty teenage edgelord at the time?

@zen-dev @Professor_Icepick You know it's tongue-in-cheek, right? Check out the description on the Indiegogo page, which is full of lines like:
"eliminate all remaining pockets of resistance and free-thinking that dare threatening our Workers' Paradise"
and
"Resistence is futile. The Sovietborgs are here to free you from your freedom."

I already hate soldering under normal conditions. The thought of trying to melt tiny bits of metal onto a small board with almost the same melting point is the stuff of nightmares!

Quite a spiffy end result, though!
(As a side note, I miss that trend of transparent cases.)

Even for those of us who grew up with consoles and never saw an Amiga, Brimble did some great soundtracks on consoles/handhelds as well. The likes of Driver and Glover come to mind- the latter of which caught many by surprise, it seems, for being groovier than any 3D platformer soundtrack had a right to be!

@The_Nintend_Pedant Your thoughts on the 2- and 4-button layouts make a lot of sense. You know, I don't think I've really had much experience with a normal 6-button layout. Maybe I'd get lost in the endless matrix of buttons, unable to find a point of reference!

• Obviously, N64 emulation would benefit from 6 buttons. Currently, I just make do with the right analogue stick to simulate the C buttons, and I'll sometimes add a secondary mapping for C-down onto B, or something (like for the knife in Castlevania 64). Works for 90% of games, easily, but some, like Jet Force Gemini , are still a problem.
• I only have 3-button Genesis controllers. Always felt comfortable with B to attack and C to jump, as they're large and more or less laid out horizontally. (Side note: I hate when the secondary/attack button is diagonally down and left from primary/jump! Makes most modern Nintendo games a real chore to play, and now that I think of it, maybe that N64 layout wouldn't be so great for Genesis unless it got turned about 20 degrees clockwise.) Mapping 6 buttons onto a 4-button controller for emulation is awkward, and requires learning the functions, as memorizing the layout of the letters is unintuitive.
• It's surprising that you find the 360 controller uncomfortable. When you say the top is cramped, do you mean your fingers are too big to fit on the shoulders and triggers, or are the face buttons also an issue?
• Love both the Xbox Controller S and GameCube controller. Neither is perfect (mainly not having enough buttons for certain games), but I find them both really comfortable. And the GCN's 4-button layout is ingenious, though I've always felt like the original 3-bean prototype layout would've been a bit better.

One good ramble deserves another, I guess.

That first image is channelling Baloo from The Jungle Book. Wonder if they would've gotten a Phil Harris soundalike as well!

The Adrian Barrios one has some '90s Nickelodeon energy. I hope Kazooie wasn't actually going to look like that, though, and this was just an exaggerated frame of her screaming!

@HammerGalladeBro I never watched the show, outside of seeing some commercials for it, but I do know it has the animals all talking and getting into various antics. The game, on the other hand, is a sim where you manage a garden, try to attract wild pinata animals, and even breed more. They don't talk, but they do mate, and they also kill each other. Somehow, I don't think much of the game made it into the show!
Though I do recall the character models in the show practically looking like they were ripped right out of the game, plus the game's animated intro has the 4Kids cast, and is presumably the same intro used in the show.

Don't know a whole lot about Chaotic's development, but it aired on 4Kids TV, and it featured Jason Griffith (2000s Sonic the Hedgehog) in the lead role.

The owners claim that their games are mostly "between five and 30 years old", but that's stretching the definition of "retro" just a tiny bit. Modern stuff like Cruis'n Blast (2017, so 8 years old) easily counts as retro, by that definition.

On the other hand, maybe they're just forgetting what year it is, seeing as most of the examples listed are well outside that 5-30 range: Donkey Kong (44 years), Final Fight (36 years), Street Fighter II (34 years), Mario Kart DX (12 years), and the Neo-Geo (up to 35 years).

@The_Nintend_Pedant Throw in a second stick, and you pretty much have the ultimate layout, with unmatched versatility! Come to think of it, though, the "Duke" Xbox controller basically did this... it was just missing a few buttons compared to newer controllers. Plus, it was the Duke.

My thinking on the evenly-sized buttons was that it would work well for Sega systems as well as presumably having no negative effect on N64 gameplay. I am starting to wonder if I'm unusually controller-agnostic, though. Some people have mentioned that they really get thrown off when switching between different manufacturers and generations, or when playing a game on the "wrong" controller (e.g., using an Xbox controller for emulating anything that's not Xbox or Dreamcast), but I'm not bothered by it, as long as the buttons are still in the same order.

That six-button layout with all of the buttons being the same size looks like a great addition in general- more controllers should use that!

@h3s Oh, yeah, there's no way they can't somehow get this running on mid-range or even low-end PCs, seeing as it literally runs on a low-end PC already (as indicated by the arcade system specs you posted). I think Koshiro justified the arcade version's features not coming to the Genesis, but keeping them out of the Steam version is just an arbitrary decision for whichever reasons.

@SlangWon I assume he means that this version is a native PC game, and isn't able to run on (or be ported to) old consoles like the Genesis.

@Chocoburger It's interesting and ironic how the PS2 struggled with games like this, Deus Ex, and even Half-Life, yet it had so many of its own games that looked much better than any of those, while also running at a consistent 60fps.

Even then, there were still meaningful differences between platforms, besides simply "this one is more powerful than that one" like it tends to be these days!

@Damo Thanks for bringing these up- they look like great stuff!

@WhiteUmbrella If only Polygon did more articles like these, instead of writing about, uh... being bored because you're too cool to play Rock Band.

So basically... everyone pronounces "Amiga" the same?

I'd describe it as "uh-mee-guh", like it's a schwa at both ends, but I think we're referring to the same thing. (Though maybe some Americans draw the last syllable owwt a bit to make it clearly "ah", as in "cahr" or "Mahrk"?)

Does "Ameeger" even count as a pronunciation, seeing as it's just a context-dependent quirk? As a similar example, I watch one English YouTuber who always says "Ocariner of Time" (and sometimes "Zelder" if it's followed by a vowel like it was just now!), but in isolation, he pronounces both "Ocarina" and "Zelda" the same way I would as a Canadian!

It's such a weird thought that video game coverage could have been so sparse even circa 1987, when the NES was really taking off.

Great for VGHF in making this acquisition, and it sounds like fascinating stuff- definitely going to check this out!