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Post by Discoalucard on Aug 17, 2014 10:54:58 GMT -5
 www.hardcoregaming101.net/steelempire/steelempire.htmThe classic Genesis steampunk shooter gets a modern update with this 3DS downloadable title. It's pretty fantastic that this made it outside of Japan, since I assumed it would've been too obscure for anyone to bother with. But the price of $30 is....really optimistic. The new graphics are pretty decent, but it's still a Genesis shooter at heart, with barely anything else in the way of upgrades. I also prefer the FM synth music of the original. |
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Post by TΛPETRVE on Aug 17, 2014 11:13:19 GMT -5
Ah yes, a little favourite of mine, despite being a rather average game per se. The funny thing is that there seem to be people who actually believe the hoax story about the "steampunk" novel that allegedly served as inspiration for the game. Only that it makes absolutely no sense: The novel supposedly was written by a Prussian person at the end of the Napoleonic wars, in a dead language (Català) that was just about to arise again, after being suppressed by Castilian Spanish for centuries. Mind blown  . |
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Post by Discoalucard on Aug 17, 2014 11:17:40 GMT -5
The book is listed in the end credits, even in the 3DS version! It's just a joke though, there are a lot of other fake credits there, including roles appropriate for a movie but are clearly not related to a video game.
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Post by TΛPETRVE on Aug 17, 2014 11:30:29 GMT -5
As I said, gloriously elaborate nonsense  . |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2014 11:40:26 GMT -5
I was about to buy this on Genesis right before they announced the 3DS port for the US, glad I held out.
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Post by zerker on Aug 17, 2014 16:18:51 GMT -5
Noticed a minor stray character:
so it痴 on the easy side
Not sure how that got in there. I can't make it go away by switching encodings, so I suspect it was a copy-paste error?
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Post by muffins4life on Aug 18, 2014 10:53:31 GMT -5
Really glad someone covered this! HOT・B is a really funny company and lately I've been obsessed with them. They created one of the earliest PC JRPGs, In the Psychic City. The published tons of garbage Famicom games, but stateside we got four okayish to great titles: the NES port of Palamedes, Shingen the Ruler, the Black Bass, and the Blue Marlin. They made one other shmup called Over Horizon which was released in Japan and Europe. The company that keeps re-releasing Steel Empire, Starfish, was initially comprised of former HOT・B employees who quickly got the rights to HOT・B's goofy back catalog. They continued to churn out Black Bass after Black Bass game and are still staying afloat with Joshi soccer games, Wizardry rip-offs, and children's audiobooks. Here's a bunch of blog posts with screenshots, the first largely about the fishing games and the latter two about their various PC and console RPGs: jawshplaysgames.blogspot.com/2014/03/diary-entry-18-black-bass-fishing-with.htmljawshplaysgames.blogspot.com/2014/03/diary-entry-19-getting-down-and-dirty.htmljawshplaysgames.blogspot.com/2014/04/diary-entry-24-roaming-streets-of-hotbs.html |
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Post by Lord Dalek on Aug 18, 2014 14:12:10 GMT -5
Sadly Hot-B's probably best known around these parts as the company that made... oh dear... Hoshi Wo Miru Hito.
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Post by Allie on Aug 18, 2014 14:14:00 GMT -5
It's weird to me that this game just keeps getting ported/remade as much as it does.
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Post by lanceboyle94 on Aug 18, 2014 14:19:51 GMT -5
I'm still amazed by the fact that Hot-B's US division actually outlasted the main one, releasing games as late as 2005, although the only ones they released that were by StarFish were some of the Black Bass games, and even then a few other Black Bass games were released in the US by other publishers.
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Post by Discoalucard on Aug 18, 2014 14:22:04 GMT -5
It's a cult classic in Japan and the developers have the rights, so it makes for easy work.
Gauging its reception overseas is a little more difficult though, I haven't heard many people discuss it other than the novelty of being a steampunk shooter. Honestly I hadn't even given this game a second thought until relatively recently, since I was under the impression it was a piece of garbage from Flying Edge/Acclaim, since they weren't known for their stellar output. Didn't even realize it was a Japanese shooter that they had licensed.
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Post by Allie on Aug 18, 2014 14:42:20 GMT -5
It's a cult classic in Japan and the developers have the rights, so it makes for easy work. Gauging its reception overseas is a little more difficult though, I haven't heard many people discuss it other than the novelty of being a steampunk shooter. Honestly I hadn't even given this game a second thought until relatively recently, since I was under the impression it was a piece of garbage from Flying Edge/Acclaim, since they weren't known for their stellar output. Didn't even realize it was a Japanese shooter that they had licensed. It's still weird to think that during the PS1/Saturn era, Acclaim ended up publishing a good number of Taito's games in the US (Psychic Force, Bust-A-Move 2, RC de Go!, Zeitgeist, RayForce, Bubble Bobble & Rainbow Islands, Darius Gaiden)... |
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Post by muffins4life on Aug 18, 2014 20:37:16 GMT -5
I'm still amazed by the fact that Hot-B's US division actually outlasted the main one, releasing games as late as 2005, although the only ones they released that were by StarFish were some of the Black Bass games, and even then a few other Black Bass games were released in the US by other publishers. Yeah, the US division published a lot of random non-Starfish games starting in the late '90s. In 1999, they put out a "so bad it's good" PC game called Beatdown. It's a "real-time strategy" game where enemies stand around on playgrounds until you eventually beat them up. Fifteen year old me ate it up. |
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Post by lanceboyle94 on Aug 19, 2014 13:27:49 GMT -5
It's a cult classic in Japan and the developers have the rights, so it makes for easy work. Gauging its reception overseas is a little more difficult though, I haven't heard many people discuss it other than the novelty of being a steampunk shooter. Honestly I hadn't even given this game a second thought until relatively recently, since I was under the impression it was a piece of garbage from Flying Edge/Acclaim, since they weren't known for their stellar output. Didn't even realize it was a Japanese shooter that they had licensed. It's still weird to think that during the PS1/Saturn era, Acclaim ended up publishing a good number of Taito's games in the US (Psychic Force, Bust-A-Move 2, RC de Go!, Zeitgeist, RayForce, Bubble Bobble & Rainbow Islands, Darius Gaiden)... To be fair, Taito's US division was dead at that moment, although I'm honestly not exactly sure why they went straight for Acclaim. Then again, up until 2008 or so when Square Enix started handling Taito's games outside of Japan, pretty much everyone was publishing their games, including Hot-B USA to keep it related to this (the last game they published was Graffiti Kingdom), and even moreso in Europe since, to my knowledge, Taito's never had a home console division there. It's a mess, honestly. And yeah, Acclaim was bringing in quite the Japanese stuff back then; besides all the Taito stuff there was the PS1/Saturn ports of D (which were published by Acclaim in Japan anyway), No One Can Stop Mr. Domino, the European version of DOA2 (with the Shadow Man costume which ended up on all future releases, including Ultimate), the console ports of X-Men: Children of the Atom (rather, the Saturn port; PS1 port was Acclaim's own work, that's why it sucked) and some other stuff I can't recall. Even weirder was one title that Acclaim Japan released: Virtua Photo Studio for the Saturn. An adult game. Think about that. |
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Post by Discoalucard on Aug 19, 2014 13:44:13 GMT -5
IIRC Acclaim also published the 32-bit port of Yellow Brick Road, an insane combination of an RPG/Myst-like adventure game with awful CG graphics taking place in the kingdom of Oz. This was only in Japan - they was a really really small release of the game in the US for the PC, but I'm not sure who published it.
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