onmode-ky
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Posts posted by onmode-ky
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I think it's still possible for SNK Playmore USA to release Vol. 0 in North America, specifically as a PSN exclusive. That's what they did just a few months ago for NEOGEO HEROES ~Ultimate Shooting~, also a PSP title. If Vol. 0 were released the same way and at the same $20 price (or less), I'd pick it up, primarily to check out the scrolling shooters. A.S.O. (Alpha Mission) would join its sequel that I picked up for the NeoGeo Station.
As for Vanguard, take a look at this recently added ESRB rating. Judging from the platforms listed, I think it might appear as a Mini. Presumably, they removed the ST:TMP theme music.
onmode-ky
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Looking to my family members for examples:
- My parents have not gone beyond the Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Wii Fit that my sister and I got them (simultaneously with the Wii) years ago, though my mother at one point was interested in Just Dance 2 (I convinced her it wasn't worth the money for what she was looking for, though; she didn't even know any of the songs).
- My parents' DS library only consists of what I've gotten them over the years, which amounts to just over 5 titles, I believe. They have not played some of them before, either, I think.
- My sister and her family have somewhere between 5 and 10 games for their Wii, of which at least a couple were crappy games given as gifts to the kids by others.
- My sister has, to my knowledge, about 5 games for her DS.
In terms of games purchased for themselves, my parents have 0, and my sister has somewhere between 5 and 10. In comparison, for the Wii and DS, I myself have 4-5 games for each--which is quite a tie ratio, considering I don't actually own either piece of hardware. I have well over 10 games per system for nearly everything I do own, though, topping out at a little over 40 PS2 titles. How many have I actually finished? Heh.
This is my 200th post at AtariAge, which, with my having taken over 5 years to reach this number, means I am not a hardcore poster. Still, it's worth noting that while it was nearly 4 years to reach my #100 post, it's been just under 1.5 years more to double that. I started reading more categories. . . .
onmode-ky
P.S. Sample gamer tie ratio: 5 games per system. Sample star destroyer TIE ratio: 200 Fighters, 150 Interceptors, 90 Bombers per ship.
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I sold a sealed copy of Rorona, the GameStop premium edition with the art book, a couple of months ago for nearly twice the price I paid for it. Then, I used that unexpectedly high profit toward the cost of a new copy for myself. I've played a little of it, basically just the tutorial portion, and like it so far. Charming art direction (the art book is lovely, FYI), silly dialogue, and it looks like it will be an interesting exercise in resource management to complete the alchemy assignments. Regarding the dialogue, I note that certain parts that are voiced in the Japanese audio are silent on the English side, which also applies to other localizations from NIS America.
Speaking of their localizations, most of the assorted game industry jokes that are in Neptunia, like "Neptune does what you all don't" and "People say I only do everything," are unique to the English script. The Japanese dialogue is plenty funny, too, but those references were added for the localization and really make it stand out. The game allows you to replay those event scenes from the menu, too, so you can revisit the wackiness. I don't think that capability is available in Rorona, though, nor fellow NIS America release Trinity Universe.
onmode-ky
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A Role-Playing Game That Makes You Pay For Your Party Members
NIS is damned lucky I already have it from the preorder before finding this out. Ar Tonelico 3 is already preordered as well so I'll be getting that later this month, but those are probably the last games I'll be buying from them.
I do not like DLC. Never have. I further more hate it being advertised in the game like a carrot reminding you that you don't have the entire thing you paid full price for.
Thats brutal. I ordered Ar Tonelico 3, I have the 2 PS2 games and they are great. What a shame and such a exploitive thing to do to hardcore fans. Unbeleivable.
Gotta love modern gaming.
This can't entirely be blamed on NIS America. NIS didn't develop the game, nor were they the Japanese publisher. NIS America just mimicked what was done with the Japanese release. If it makes you feel any better, we got a price break compared to Japan, $1.99 as opposed to 250 yen, though I suppose that's still $1.99 more than free.
The way I see it, though, the two characters being playable is not part of the thing I paid full price for, and I don't particularly mind. They're optional enhancements beyond the game which I don't have to get in order to get reach the end of the game. Now, if these were characters you were required to have in your party for the final battle, that would be different.
onmode-ky
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I was a bit puzzled that even though I made it to the 13th rank of the Hiscore list I couldn't register my initials. Is that "normal" for the 1942 arcade - or a bug?
As I recall from playing 1942 in the Capcom TV Game and/or Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1 for the PS2, only the top 5 or maybe 10 positions in the high score table are accompanied by initials. The rest are *ahem* unsigned integers.
I always assumed the arcade original did this as well.onmode-ky
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I was a big fan of Voltron when I was younger, and I was active in the fan community about 10 years ago. Even drew a redesign of Vehicle Voltron with more realistic features. In the way of merchandise, I don't have any of the old toys, aside from a partial set of Lionbot lions, but I do have the newer Toynami die-cast release, as well as all the DVDs for Voltron, Golion, and Dairugger XV (minus the most recent Dairugger volume, which I keep forgetting about). Back in the day, we used to have discussions on how to design a Voltron video game. I hope THQ figures out how to do it right--though I don't have full confidence in them, seeing as how it's regarded as a children's property.
I hope the new TV show is quality material, too. Not impossible, if it's handled like some of Cartoon Network's recent productions.
onmode-ky
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The product in your pictures looks absurdly bootleg:
- The proper PSP logo does not appear on the packaging, instead replaced by a poor imitation.
- There is no company information anywhere on the packaging.
- Here's the biggest indicator: do you see that space between the words "PlayStation" and "Portable" in every occurrence (except one) of the product name on the packaging, as well as the space after the word "PSP" after every occurrence of it on the packaging, even in languages which don't normally use any spacing between words at all? That space is normally occupied by the registered trademark symbol, ®. The fact that someone went to the trouble of removing this symbol (though they missed one in the upper left) from locations in the packaging text where it used to be is a pretty clear flag.
Amazon.com should absolutely not be selling this.
onmode-ky
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I have quite a few video game soundtracks. Most of them are from RPGs (e.g., Final Fantasy, Eternal Sonata, Xenosaga, Valkyria Chronicles, Ys Seven and Ys: The Oath in Felghana). But, I also have the Gradius arcade soundtrack set and the soundtrack from DariusBurst (as well as the remix collection from that). And then there are the soundtracks for Fate/tiger colosseum and its sequel. The kinds of soundtrack music I listen to vary, though I prefer orchestral music in general.
The above paragraph refers to official, CD releases. A few years ago, I also manually recorded all (?) the music, by Shin'en, from Sigma Star Saga and created an MP3 soundtrack.
onmode-ky
Edit: I just discovered that R-Types Retro Game Music Collection EX was released a few days ago. Hmm.
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Was there any action ever taken to shut down the pirate consoles?
Does "Atari" even care?
You should look farther back in this very thread.
onmode-ky
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I was quite alive during the 80s, but I had never heard of Thexder until the PSP remake. Then again, I had also never heard of Spelunker until the PS3 remake's Japanese release. At the time, I did not actively seek out video games; I just knew of what my friends talked about.
onmode-ky
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I put in my preorder for this within a day or two after it was first opened for preorders at NIS America's online store (now with free shipping!). So, I'll be getting their store-exclusive pack of Neptunia playing cards; it will probably sit in my drawer beside my pack of El-Hazard playing cards. I don't think Amazon.com will have a markedly better price, nor will they offer any gaming credit for such a niche title.
Xenosaga III is hanging over me like a curse. I get fed up with it quickly. So far, I think it's definitely the worst of the trilogy.
Oddly enough, I think the general consensus is that III is the best of the trilogy. At the least, I've never heard of anyone thinking it's worse than II.
The only JRPGs I've ever actually finished are the first Dragon Quest and the first Final Fantasy (both via emulator).
onmode-ky
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Eh? The CEC owner doesn't have to buy more coins (not very often, anyway). They just reuse their existing coins ad infinitum.
I drop by my local CEC every now and then to play their pinball machine (it's the only one I know of in my area) and H2Overdrive, the excellent spiritual sequel to Hydro Thunder, from the original developers. My most recent visit, I ran into a kid who had played on his profile (you can save a profile on the machine) so much that he had leveled up many of his boats quite a bit. I still only have one partially leveled up boat; I think I've played maybe 7 races total.
The first time I went in there was 2009, I think, to ask if they had H2Overdrive (then just released). That was my first time in a CEC since the 80s. The first time that I went in and actually played something was last year, when they finally got an H2Overdrive cabinet. No one has given me any weird looks so far . . . but then, I look pretty harmless and nondescript.
onmode-ky
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Bought a few of Crazy's Space Invader-shaped metal tiles, which he's been custom-making out of excess metal for a mere $1 each + shipping. Packed them with the protective peelcoat still on and shipped them in a sturdy USPS Priority Mail envelope, on the day he said he would. Complaints . . . uh, I can't get the Invaders to dance in formation for me?
onmode-ky
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The reason the real Frogger music is so rarely (never?) in ports of the game is that the real music may actually be a violation of copyright. Konami used theme songs from then-recent anime TV series without permission. Well, either that or they had permission for the arcade version but never got it again for anything else. The Japanese Wikipedia page for the game discusses the music (and cites specific anime theme songs) and says Konami of that time often used sounds from television anime of the period in its games, but it doesn't outright say it was done without permission.
Also, this plug-n-play game was definitely built on an NES-on-a-chip.
onmode-ky
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The Michigan Lottery website says this of the "second chance" prizes: "The Michigan Lottery’s celebrating the fun of gaming with an Atari classic! Submit three non-winning Atari instant game tickets to play the virtual Pong game online and you could win one of 10 Sony® PlayStation®3 game consoles (320 GB model) or a Gamer’s Home Theater System! Check out all the details by logging into your Player's Club account and clicking the Atari logo."
Here is general info about the scratch-off game. It seems to have just started this week. Fairly decent odds, for a lottery.
This page shows how many of each prize are left out there. The odds for getting one of the top prizes are quite slim.
Looking into this also led me here, to see what big prizes (non-scratch-off) haven't been claimed yet. That's quite a lot of forgotten money, and one of them is about to expire.
onmode-ky
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With having always the full 30 titles in the download queue, I thought it'd be clever to just leave the thing on over night, in order to get a couple of extra GBs shifted my way. But every morning I find that the console instead has powered off itself...
Assuming this hasn't been changed recently, if you have downloads going when you scroll all the way to the left of the XMB and choose to shut off the system, it asks you if you want to shut off right now or do so after all downloads are complete. Thus, you can get the optimal solution of getting all your downloading done while you sleep along with not wasting any power.
onmode-ky
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Not in the least. We identified the source thanks to the pictures taken here, that's being taken care of in a way that won't require legal action. Kroger will being getting a cease and desist on selling the units in the future.
What was in the pictures that clued you in as to who was making them, specifically? Was there something unique about the plastic texture? It just looked like any other plastic to me, the layman. I didn't even know individual factories left "signatures" in their plastics.
And, the "way that won't require legal action," does that involve you and Curt getting stealth-dropped into a blissfully unaware Chinese factory and making use of a generous dose of C4? Or will there just be breaking of legs?
In search of details, onmode-ky
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Thread revival aside, if anyone is curious about the development of the Mortal Kombat TV Game, here are some words from the programmer himself: Cyberabi MK page.
Other details: the project started out built on the Sunplus SPG200 chip but was converted to Sunplus' PAC300 (SPG240) before shipping. It contained 6 MB of ROM (3 times the standard amount for a Jakks TV Game project), as well as 256 KB extra RAM to accommodate graphical data decompression.
onmode-ky
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The PS3 pricing is apparently for parity with the existing pricing on the Wii Virtual Console for Neo Geo titles.
As for the PSP side, Alpha Mission II is not in SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1, and that's the one I'm considering getting.
onmode-ky
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I think the two policies can be fairly summarized like this:
The XBox Live Marketplace policy is more consumer-friendly. All prospective buyers have the assurance that every downloadable game can be sampled for free before purchase.
The PlayStation Store policy is more developer-friendly. There is no requirement to spend the resources to create a demo, an undertaking which may not recoup its costs. The percentage of consumers who absolutely refuse purchase if no demo is available is probably not that large, and catering to this segment of the population may not be financially productive for a firm that's not rolling in the dough. Often, consumers ask why x game released a demo some time after the game actually released. The reason for this is probably that the funds to produce the demo came from profits generated by the sale of the game, pre-demo. The firm decided they had made enough back to cover the cost of making a demo, which itself would also serve as post-release advertising to help the game regain some consumer mindshare.
One may ask, "Isn't a demo really cheap to make? Just take a level out of the main game, slap a standalone interface on it, and voila!" I'm not a game developer myself, but I have heard developers talk about making demos as not being as simple (i.e., cheap) as that. As a company, you have to decide whether that expenditure is justifiable.
In a perfect world: both XBLA and PSN have demos for all games because all developers use a free process that takes your game code and automatically creates a demo out of it for you.
onmode-ky
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After searching a bit, Smiths, Ralphs and Bakers grocery stores direct you to Fred Meyer (a division of Kroger) concerning their entertainment products.
Nice detective work. I think the best thing to do now would be Legacy Engineering contacting Fred Meyer directly to find out their source for these. Marty, might it be likely that one of the retailers/distributors who bought stock from you guys back at launch recently found a bunch of leftover in a warehouse and decided to just sell all of it to someone else instead of redistributing it to their retail stores? Old stock does get rediscovered every now and then; my local Best Buy stores have suddenly all begun carrying heavily discounted copies of a certain anime DVD from 2006 that I know did not sell well back then. Perhaps a former FB2 buyer decided, "We won't make good money on these Atari things now; we believe the retro game fad is dead. Let's see if someone else wants them."
Of course, I'm just speculating. Better to ask the source.
onmode-ky
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Hey, nice work! Here's something for you to shoot for, then: my high score on Taxi (PS3 version) is 18,152,090, which, back when I got it this past mid-April, was good enough for 104 on the PS3 leaderboard (yes, I really wrote down all my high scores, ranks, and dates).
Have you ever looked at the top of the leaderboards? Some people are insanely good; I remember one of the tables had a #1 score which was actually more than twice the #2 score. Hard to tell if it's just skill or cheating.
onmode-ky
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Assuming you can find a consistent box size for shipping these to interested parties, can you let us know the package's dimensions and weight so we can figure the shipping costs from the various carriers' websites? With these being metal, I imagine a first-class stamp won't cut it. . . .
onmode-ky
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I've recently learned a massive amount about various aspects of the plug-n-play development scene (from back when it was more or less booming). So, I thought I'd share some of the new information here.
First, about Jakks Pacific's TV Games' GameKeys: several years ago, I wrote a post here at AtariAge which summarized what GameKeys had been released and for what TV Games systems. More recently, I have learned that several others were developed but not released or were in development when the call from above came to cancel them, due to the market failure of the GameKey concept. Here are the unreleased, possibly unfinished GameKeys I know:
- Dragonball Z (said to contain "an improved fighting game and a puzzle game")
- Fantastic 4 (canceled)
- Winnie the Pooh (said to double the total number of games on the Winnie the Pooh TV Game system)
I may as well list the unreleased-but-at-least-partly-finished TV Games systems I know of, too:
- Midway (included Joust, Defender, Sinistar, Stargate and Toobin'; the Mortal Kombat TV Game was a spin-off of this project)
- Capcom (a second Capcom TV Game that included Mega Man and Section Z)
- PGA Tour Golf II
- Tecmo (included Mighty Bomb Jack, Solomon's Key, Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Basketball, and Fire 'N Ice)
- Pokémon
- Brain Surge (ESRB lists this as Super Brain Surge)
The Midway system used Digital Eclipse's "Meta-Emulation" technology (details at Jeff Vavasour's site), except for Toobin'. Incidentally, to answer the old question of whether the EA Sports TV Game system (which contained NHL 95 and either Madden 95 or FIFA 96, depending on region) emulated the Sega Genesis: the original M68000 Genesis assembly code for these games was translated into μnSP assembly for the SPG110 chip in the TV Game, through a tool developed by project co-lead engineer John Harris. If you're aware of the differences between the two processors' architectures, you should be quite impressed.
I also know of a few unreleased, Sunplus-based plug-n-play projects commissioned by Hasbro and MGA, but details on those are scant. In addition, I know of some other unreleased, Sunplus-based projects, for a music education system and a movie theater group game system.
Other information I recently obtained includes some details about the memory types and capacities used in several plug-n-play systems. In the TV Games line, most systems seem to have contained 2 MB of ROM for game assets and, if they had game save capacity, 4 Kbits of EEPROM. There were a few exceptions, though. Here are some that I know:
- Mortal Kombat (6 MB ROM, 256 KB extra RAM for swapping graphics data during mid-match opponent character switch)
- Shrek (well, Shrek and Over the Hedge; 4 MB ROM)
- High School Musical (non-deluxe model; 8 MB ROM)
- Ultimotion Disney Fairies/Sleeping Beauty (0 ROM, 64 MB NAND, 8 MB SDRAM, 16 Kbits EEPROM)
- Ultimotion Playhouse Disney (0 ROM, 64 MB NAND, 8 MB SDRAM, 16 Kbits EEPROM)
- VMIGO Spider-Man (TV Game portion: 8 MB ROM, 256 KB SRAM, 16 Kbits EEPROM)
My digging has also uncovered more in the way of debug codes for a few Jakks Pacific TV Games systems. Here is a summary that includes earlier debug mode discoveries:
- Namco Ms. Pac-Man (both wired and wireless models; joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down)
- Tele-Doodle (easter egg: joystick up, press-and-hold button, joystick clockwise back to up, release button, joystick counterclockwise back to up)
- Care Bears (joystick up, joystick clockwise back to up, press 'A' button while joystick still up)
- Capcom (joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down)
- Namco Super Pac-Man (joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down)
- Namco Retro Arcade featuring Pac-Man (joystick up, press-and-hold 'A' button, joystick down)
Lastly, some technical tidbits: in the Sunplus SPG2xx line, the oft-used SPG240 seems to be the most cost-effective chip, while the SPG220 was (at least at its time) the "deluxe" variant. The differences lie in features which a given product may or may not actually need, like I/O lines and number of sound channels. As for the "PAC300" name that describes the same chip as "SPG240," I believe that name was assigned to the massive batches of SPG240 ordered by Jakks Pacific, to differentiate from other firms' orders.
So . . . was that enough text? You may let your eyes recover now. I'll be updating my PnP Info website with this data shortly.
onmode-ky
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Capcom Arcade Classics coming to Wii
in Nintendo Wii / Wii U
Posted
I'm a little confused by what you wrote. 1942 only has 32 stages, so it should have ended rather than letting you progress to a position where you could go back to Stage 32.
It does sound like you're better at it than I, though. I tried for several hours once, a few years ago, to beat 1942 arcade, but I got stuck somewhere around the 25th stage, unable to survive past the end of a certain stage, one that included a fight against the Ayako bomber. This was either Normal mode on the TV Game or Easy mode in Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 1; I've made the attempt in both, unsuccessfully (and curiously can only remember the details of getting stuck in one of the attempts).
onmode-ky