Contra Force isn't exactly the peak of the series, but it's actually kind of fun when it isn't slowing down all the time (i.e., when playing on certain emulators). I assume the SNES port will fix this automatically, simply because of the faster CPU.
@KingMike The developer claims that it doesn't affect performance at all, as the calculations are already being done, even in 30fps mode.
Yeah, GBA only had two main audio channels, so using more than two sounds at a time meant either mixing everything down to 2 channels using the CPU (which could cause slowdown, or- as you mentioned- would at least increase battery drain slightly), or just relying on the built-in Game Boy hardware to generate some beeps and boops, a la Harmony of Dissonance.
@Eocene84 "Pretty much always" is a major generalization, which mostly just applies to overly aggressive companies like Nintendo, if even that.
However, the point does stand: it's a risk, and yet people take it. Why?
Speaking for myself, at least (having previously dabbled in some modding, etc.), I think it's down to the passion that people have for specific franchises and games. Sure, they could make a legally-distinct project, but they really, really want to work on a Mario game, or Pokémon, or whatever. Or maybe they even want to take a specific game and enhance it to deliver the absolute best experience. It's hard to explain, but there's almost an obsession that can drive you to work on a project, and that can't just be magically turned on and off, or even necessarily rerouted into something different.
If the creators of mods and fan games tried to make new games instead, then it might go amazingly well (as we've seen before), or the spark could just die out, and they'd make nothing at all.
This patch is 15 bytes, with a third of its content literally being the word "patch". I assume it's just changing a single address in the ROM.
Why didn't Intelligent Systems just do this themselves, if they're so Intelligent? Was it a bug? A misguided attempt to reduce blur on the OG horizontal GBA? I'd always assumed it was performance reasons.
In any case, great stuff- this'll definitely be my way to play Super Circuit from now on!
So this is an actual port, and not emulation? In that case, it should be possible to fix all of the timings to compensate for the higher framerate... though that will take effort and attention to detail.
@WileyDragonfly What happened with Headhunter? I hadn't heard of this. From my understanding, the first game had janky motorcycle sections, but the second removed them. Did reviewers complain about non-existent mechanics in the sequel? (Do you remember which sites/mags?)
@MysticWangForce Yep, the North American release, at least, has two instruction manuals: one on how to play the game, and the other on driving techniques. It uses a double-sized case (the same format as 3- and 4-disc games), despite the game itself only having one disc!
PS: As a side note, I was looking at Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and it's a bit surreal to see that this "modern" game came with a large, full-colour manual. I seem to remember physical manuals all but dying off during the PS360 generation, but this manual from 2007 is a blast from the past!
the trap of adding a lot of unnecessary details, based on what they like and what they've seen elsewhere
He basically just described Rare in their heyday. It was extravagant, but it was glorious! Though you could argue it came back to bite them- repeatedly- in this post-N64 era.
@Sindayl Good point about the accessibility: lots of great games like Lost Odyssey and Rare Replay are still available for a few bucks, and all it requires is an Xbox One: a system which was very cheap, even when it was brand-new: $235 CAD for an Xbone and Lost Odyssey is peanuts compared to dropping $480-580 on a Switch and either BotW or TotK. (I don't know what used Xbones go for now, but I bet the price gap compared to Nintendo's consoles has only widened.)
Still, LO is capped at 30fps, which is a bummer. From what little I've seen, the Xenia emulator's FPS Boost equivalent can run this beautifully, so I don't know why MS didn't do the same.
You can disable anti-aliasing and enable de-blur, and that will turn it into a pixelated mess instead!
Personally, I don't care for the jagged pixel look, but a lot of people seem to love it, so your mileage may vary. Most N64 games run in roughly the same resolution as 16-bit games, as well as many indies like Shovel Knight.
@kirby2000 That's apparently coming from the GBA, not an added audio track. The dev mentioned in one YouTube comment that he got the audio running at 28 KHz.
@BLAZINOAH Perhaps being "this close" to making it a TG16 exclusive... wasn't quite as close as Garwood thought.
Could be that some discussions did take place, and it seemed like a real possibility at the time, but a small degree of misinterpretation and/or exaggeration on his part turned it into "We had it in our pocket."
@Blast16 Most games these days are designed to allow for most players to get through them, making actual cheats unnecessary. But goofy "cheats" like paintball mode or moon jumps? Bring them on! If they can be used to break the game and/or cause all sorts of chaos and hilarity, then that's all the better!
Of course, players could use cheats to finish the game too quickly, and then either find it unsatisfying, or feel that the game is too short, but that's on them.
@Martin_H Modern Britain sounds ripe for satire... the only problem being that a game poking fun at it would probably get banned.
But anyway, I find it funny and ironic that a Scottish studio made all of these games that take place in America. Then one game about the UK comes along, and... it's developed in Canada!
@gojiguy The thing is, we tend to get treated as an extension of the US, when it comes to video game releases, even if we are a distinct country otherwise. A racing game will be built overseas with metric in mind, but then the US localizers will remove all of the metric and send us an exact copy of their Americanized version that uses MPH!
But you're right that there are many differences when you look outside the narrow topic of the games themselves- and we're indeed a disproportionately huge player when it comes to game dev! I don't think most people realize how many games are/were made in Canada: major franchises (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Need for Speed), all kinds of sports games (not just the obvious ones like NHL and SSX, but also FIFA and Mario Strikers), and even Japanese horror games (multiple Dead Risings and Luigi's Mansions) have been developed here.
@jojobar Valid concerns- it might be worth waiting to see if they have anything more substantial laid down... or if it's just hopes, dreams, and mock-up scenes.
The part about limiting the audience should be a non-issue, though, as lots of other SNES games have already been released on modern platforms using emulation.
@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!)
@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!
@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.
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.
@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.
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.
@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.
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Re: "Correcting The Timeline Of Gaming History" - Here's Virtua Fighter 4 'Running' On Dreamcast
@lordlad It has 2 SH4s and 2 PowerVR GPUs, on top of all that extra RAM, making it basically 2 Naomis or Dreamcasts stuck together.
Re: SNES Port Of The Much-Maligned Contra Force Is Now Playable
Contra Force isn't exactly the peak of the series, but it's actually kind of fun when it isn't slowing down all the time (i.e., when playing on certain emulators). I assume the SNES port will fix this automatically, simply because of the faster CPU.
Re: 24 Years After It Launched, Fans Have Finally "Fixed" Mario Kart: Super Circuit
@KingMike The developer claims that it doesn't affect performance at all, as the calculations are already being done, even in 30fps mode.
Yeah, GBA only had two main audio channels, so using more than two sounds at a time meant either mixing everything down to 2 channels using the CPU (which could cause slowdown, or- as you mentioned- would at least increase battery drain slightly), or just relying on the built-in Game Boy hardware to generate some beeps and boops, a la Harmony of Dissonance.
Re: The TimeSplitters Series May Be On Ice, But This Impressive Fan Project Will Help Soothe The Pain
@Eocene84 "Pretty much always" is a major generalization, which mostly just applies to overly aggressive companies like Nintendo, if even that.
However, the point does stand: it's a risk, and yet people take it. Why?
Speaking for myself, at least (having previously dabbled in some modding, etc.), I think it's down to the passion that people have for specific franchises and games. Sure, they could make a legally-distinct project, but they really, really want to work on a Mario game, or Pokémon, or whatever. Or maybe they even want to take a specific game and enhance it to deliver the absolute best experience. It's hard to explain, but there's almost an obsession that can drive you to work on a project, and that can't just be magically turned on and off, or even necessarily rerouted into something different.
If the creators of mods and fan games tried to make new games instead, then it might go amazingly well (as we've seen before), or the spark could just die out, and they'd make nothing at all.
Re: 24 Years After It Launched, Fans Have Finally "Fixed" Mario Kart: Super Circuit
This patch is 15 bytes, with a third of its content literally being the word "patch". I assume it's just changing a single address in the ROM.
Why didn't Intelligent Systems just do this themselves, if they're so Intelligent? Was it a bug? A misguided attempt to reduce blur on the OG horizontal GBA? I'd always assumed it was performance reasons.
In any case, great stuff- this'll definitely be my way to play Super Circuit from now on!
Re: R-Type Delta HD Boosted May Not Be The Definitive Way To Play This PS1 Gem, After All
So this is an actual port, and not emulation? In that case, it should be possible to fix all of the timings to compensate for the higher framerate... though that will take effort and attention to detail.
Re: R-Type Delta HD Boosted May Not Be The Definitive Way To Play This PS1 Gem, After All
@WileyDragonfly What happened with Headhunter? I hadn't heard of this. From my understanding, the first game had janky motorcycle sections, but the second removed them. Did reviewers complain about non-existent mechanics in the sequel? (Do you remember which sites/mags?)
Re: Random: Remember When Games Came With Instructions? This Guy Does, And He Wants To Find The Heaviest PS1 Manual
@MysticWangForce Yep, the North American release, at least, has two instruction manuals: one on how to play the game, and the other on driving techniques. It uses a double-sized case (the same format as 3- and 4-disc games), despite the game itself only having one disc!
PS: As a side note, I was looking at Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, and it's a bit surreal to see that this "modern" game came with a large, full-colour manual. I seem to remember physical manuals all but dying off during the PS360 generation, but this manual from 2007 is a blast from the past!
Re: "There Weren't A Lot Of Extras, So It Had To Be Done Right" - Fallout Co-Creator Reveals What Modern Game Devs Can Still Learn From The '80s
He basically just described Rare in their heyday. It was extravagant, but it was glorious! Though you could argue it came back to bite them- repeatedly- in this post-N64 era.
Re: "Justice for Lost Odyssey" - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Director Wants To See The Cult Xbox 360 JRPG Remastered
@Sindayl Good point about the accessibility: lots of great games like Lost Odyssey and Rare Replay are still available for a few bucks, and all it requires is an Xbox One: a system which was very cheap, even when it was brand-new: $235 CAD for an Xbone and Lost Odyssey is peanuts compared to dropping $480-580 on a Switch and either BotW or TotK. (I don't know what used Xbones go for now, but I bet the price gap compared to Nintendo's consoles has only widened.)
Still, LO is capped at 30fps, which is a bummer. From what little I've seen, the Xenia emulator's FPS Boost equivalent can run this beautifully, so I don't know why MS didn't do the same.
Re: Review: Analogue 3D - The Ultimate Way To Play Nintendo 64?
@Wakkawipeout
You can disable anti-aliasing and enable de-blur, and that will turn it into a pixelated mess instead!
Personally, I don't care for the jagged pixel look, but a lot of people seem to love it, so your mileage may vary. Most N64 games run in roughly the same resolution as 16-bit games, as well as many indies like Shovel Knight.
Re: "I Never Thought That It Would Be Possible" - Ridge Racer Comes To The GBA
@kirby2000 That's apparently coming from the GBA, not an added audio track. The dev mentioned in one YouTube comment that he got the audio running at 28 KHz.
Re: "It Should Have Been Ours" - Street Fighter 2 Was Supposed To Be A TurboGrafx-16 Exclusive, Claims Former TTI President
@BLAZINOAH Perhaps being "this close" to making it a TG16 exclusive... wasn't quite as close as Garwood thought.
Could be that some discussions did take place, and it seemed like a real possibility at the time, but a small degree of misinterpretation and/or exaggeration on his part turned it into "We had it in our pocket."
Re: "Games Were Pretty Hostile" - Duke Nukem Co-Creator Reveals How The Bitmap Brothers Turned Him On To Cheat Codes
@Blast16 Most games these days are designed to allow for most players to get through them, making actual cheats unnecessary. But goofy "cheats" like paintball mode or moon jumps? Bring them on! If they can be used to break the game and/or cause all sorts of chaos and hilarity, then that's all the better!
Re: "Games Were Pretty Hostile" - Duke Nukem Co-Creator Reveals How The Bitmap Brothers Turned Him On To Cheat Codes
I can appreciate that philosophy.
Of course, players could use cheats to finish the game too quickly, and then either find it unsatisfying, or feel that the game is too short, but that's on them.
Re: "You Needed Guns" - Rockstar Co-Founder Weighs In On Why 'GTA London' Ended Up Being A One-Off
@Martin_H Modern Britain sounds ripe for satire... the only problem being that a game poking fun at it would probably get banned.
But anyway, I find it funny and ironic that a Scottish studio made all of these games that take place in America. Then one game about the UK comes along, and... it's developed in Canada!
Re: Tired Of "The Usual North American Perspectives", This New Book Aims To Offer A Global View Of Game History
@gojiguy The thing is, we tend to get treated as an extension of the US, when it comes to video game releases, even if we are a distinct country otherwise. A racing game will be built overseas with metric in mind, but then the US localizers will remove all of the metric and send us an exact copy of their Americanized version that uses MPH!
But you're right that there are many differences when you look outside the narrow topic of the games themselves- and we're indeed a disproportionately huge player when it comes to game dev! I don't think most people realize how many games are/were made in Canada: major franchises (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Need for Speed), all kinds of sports games (not just the obvious ones like NHL and SSX, but also FIFA and Mario Strikers), and even Japanese horror games (multiple Dead Risings and Luigi's Mansions) have been developed here.
Re: Eternal Hunters Is A New SNES Action RPG That Looks Part Secret Of Mana, Part Chrono Trigger
@jojobar Valid concerns- it might be worth waiting to see if they have anything more substantial laid down... or if it's just hopes, dreams, and mock-up scenes.
The part about limiting the audience should be a non-issue, though, as lots of other SNES games have already been released on modern platforms using emulation.
Re: Tired Of "The Usual North American Perspectives", This New Book Aims To Offer A Global View Of Game History
@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.
Re: Donkey Kong Country On The Sega Genesis? Not Quite, But Feel Free To Dream Regardless
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?).
Re: "They Didn't Even Bother To Look At My Skills" - One Of Japan's RPG Pioneers Struggled To Find Work In His 50s Due To Ageism
@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!
Re: "They Didn't Even Bother To Look At My Skills" - One Of Japan's RPG Pioneers Struggled To Find Work In His 50s Due To Ageism
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.)
Re: New Emulator Ymir Now Boasts Over 90% Compatibility With The Sega Saturn's Library
@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.
Re: Brütal Legend Devs Share Previously Unseen Pitch Video For The Classic Action-Adventure RTS
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!)
Re: Ubisoft's 1994 Mario Kart Clone 'Street Racer' Is Getting A New Retro Collection On Steam
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.
Re: Electronic Gaming Monthly Is Getting Its Own YouTube Documentary, Thanks To Game Sack And My Life In Gaming
@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!
Re: This New Pizza Tower, Antonblast & Sonic-Inspired Platformer Just Got Its First Demo
@jojobar Guess that's what happens when the original franchise goes 15+ years without a new game. You snooze, you lose!
Re: Dimitris 'Modern Vintage Gamer' Giannakis Leaves Limited Run Games To Join Digital Eclipse
@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!)
Re: 40 Years After It Launched, This Fan-Made Remake Has Given Us The Ultimate Way To Play Super Mario Bros.
@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.
Re: Pokémon Mini Gets Game Boy Emulation, Complete With Rumble Support
@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)!
Re: Sonic-Inspired Indie 'Star Garden' To Potentially Feature New Music From Kirby Air Ride & Mother 3 Composer
@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.
Re: Nintendo Of America Didn't Think Pokémon "Was Going To Take Off In The US", And It Wasn't Alone
@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.
Re: Nintendo Of America Didn't Think Pokémon "Was Going To Take Off In The US", And It Wasn't Alone
@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.
Re: Nintendo Of America Didn't Think Pokémon "Was Going To Take Off In The US", And It Wasn't Alone
@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.
Re: How Super Mario 64 Fixed Princess Peach's Ad-Agency Induced Naming Mishap
@Sketcz
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!
Re: Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance's Joe Musashi Is Voiced By Someone With Real Sega Pedigree
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)?
Re: Sega Accused Of Using Police To Recover Nintendo Dev Kits It Had "Negligently Disposed Of"
@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.
Re: How Super Mario 64 Fixed Princess Peach's Ad-Agency Induced Naming Mishap
@JumpingJackson What about renaming King Koopa after their future CEO? Now that's foresight!
Re: How Super Mario 64 Fixed Princess Peach's Ad-Agency Induced Naming Mishap
@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.'
Re: Interview: "We Did Try To Keep 'Forest' In The Name" - How Mario 64's Princess Peach Helped Bring Animal Crossing To The West
@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?"
Re: This "World First" Wireless Dreamcast Controller Has A Colour Screen
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?
Re: WipEout's Getting Another Soundtrack This Year
@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.
Re: Kazeta OS Turns Your PC Into A Streamlined Game Console
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.
Re: Four Classic Final Fantasy Games Have Just Got The "DX" Treatment For Game Boy Color
@GravyThief And it was remade as Sword of Mana, and then remade again as Adventures of Mana!
Re: Falcom's PC Engine CD RPGs, Including 'Ys' And 'Legend Of Heroes', Are Getting Re-Releases On Modern Systems
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.
Re: Random: Looks Like We All Owe The BBC An Apology - It Didn't Twin Windows 95 With An Apple Mac After All
@The_Nintendo_Pedant Nearly 30 years later, I still remember the headline: "US family installs Windows 95 from CD-ROM"!
Re: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Will Be The Next NES Classic To Get A Native SNES Port
@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.
Re: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Will Be The Next NES Classic To Get A Native SNES Port
@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!
Re: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Will Be The Next NES Classic To Get A Native SNES Port
@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.
Re: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Will Be The Next NES Classic To Get A Native SNES Port
@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.