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Post by toei on Mar 24, 2019 23:29:10 GMT -5
The first platformer released for the Mega Drive in Japan, and the only one out of the 1988 lineup that never made it overseas. The Japanese hated it and mocked it for years, but is it really that bad? Spoilers: It's not. BUT IN WHAT WAYS? Read to find out.
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Post by kingmike on Mar 25, 2019 0:36:27 GMT -5
Wasn't there a shooter (Curse?) that didn't make it overseas, either? Or was that a 1989 game?
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Post by toei on Mar 25, 2019 2:15:51 GMT -5
Wasn't there a shooter (Curse?) that didn't make it overseas, either? Or was that a 1989 game? December 23, 1989, as per mobygames. Might actually be a decent shmup if it wasn't incredibly choppy, but then it wouldn't be a Micronet game without some kind of major programming flaw.
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Post by Woody Alien on Apr 3, 2019 12:53:34 GMT -5
The first platformer released for the Mega Drive in Japan, and the only one out of the 1988 lineup that never made it overseas. The Japanese hated it and mocked it for years, but is it really that bad? Spoilers: It's not. BUT IN WHAT WAYS? Read to find out. I didn't know about this game, or that it was so badly received. Though I don't understand why since it doesn't seem that much worse than many subpar games out there... Maybe because that article you linked says these games were announced with great fanfare and then were revealed as quite underwhelming.
Didn't know much about the anime/manga series either, just because there was the recent adaptation that apparently was a huge success (but nobody cared about the second season though?); ironically, thinking about the references put in the video game, the first episode of the anime had to be recalled and modified since it was a gag episode that made references to everything from Naruto to Attack on Titan, and so they were afraid of the copyright holders...
Also reading that linked article the pretty low opinion that Akatsuka has of gamers (they stay all day in their rooms jacking off!) is kinda amusing and makes him sound like another famously grumpy dude, Hayao Miyazaki.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 3, 2019 13:31:49 GMT -5
The entry on Game Catalog outlines its issues, you can plunk it into Google Translate to get a rough idea: www26.atwiki.jp/gcmatome/pages/3043.htmlThe biggest one is that the game was very obviously incomplete, the manual mentions the three stages and says there are later ones, but there aren't, and the area-warping was clearly something implemented to hastily lengthen the play time. Add this to being a launch window title, which got the benefit of a lot of exposure, plus the tie-in license, and it's easy to see why there was a backlash against it.
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Post by toei on Apr 3, 2019 14:07:15 GMT -5
The first platformer released for the Mega Drive in Japan, and the only one out of the 1988 lineup that never made it overseas. The Japanese hated it and mocked it for years, but is it really that bad? Spoilers: It's not. BUT IN WHAT WAYS? Read to find out. I didn't know about this game, or that it was so badly received. Though I don't understand why since it doesn't seem that much worse than many subpar games out there... Maybe because that article you linked says these games were announced with great fanfare and then were revealed as quite underwhelming.
Didn't know much about the anime/manga series either, just because there was the recent adaptation that apparently was a huge success (but nobody cared about the second season though?); ironically, thinking about the references put in the video game, the first episode of the anime had to be recalled and modified since it was a gag episode that made references to everything from Naruto to Attack on Titan, and so they were afraid of the copyright holders...
Also reading that linked article the pretty low opinion that Akatsuka has of gamers (they stay all day in their rooms jacking off!) is kinda amusing and makes him sound like another famously grumpy dude, Hayao Miyazaki.
It's also the best episode! I couldn't really get into the rest of the series at all, but the first episode is a parody of the modern state of anime in general, and it's pretty great. The setup is that these old-fashioned black-and-white characters are set to make a comeback, but they worry their character designs and catchphrases are too outdated, so they try various identities to be popular. It starts as a ridiculous shojo "idol school" type set-up and becomes progressively more absurd before exploding into a million references. I don't want to spoil it, but I thought it was particularly cool that they even threw in a heavily polygonal Virtua Fighter 1 reference in there. You can find that episode with english subs quite easily. I'd recommend watching it even if you have no interest in the series otherwise. Discoalucard I mentioned all of that at the end, except for the manual saying there were more levels (I did say magazines had announced more, though). That said, the game really isn't awful on its own terms, and I was more interested in discussing it as it is than promoting that narrative.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 3, 2019 20:17:15 GMT -5
I was wavering with tagging it "kusoge" but due to the actual contents of the article I decided against it.
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Post by arugulaz on Jul 7, 2019 21:40:16 GMT -5
mdshock.com/2018/09/16/osomatsu-kun-the-bizarre-story-of-the-mega-drives-most-infamous-game/I always wondered why the Sega Genesis (Megadrive) bombed in Japan. It turned out that this friggin' game was to blame. Sega showed it off at a launch event for the console and people didn't like it then, even though they couldn't possibly have played it for more than ten minutes. Maybe it wasn't kusoge, but man, when you're introducing your game system to the world, this is the kind of foot you don't want to put forward. Tiny cartridge size, derivative gameplay eerily reminiscent of previous generation consoles, that stupid Gordian knot level structure that artificially lengthens the game while annoying the player... it pretty much torpedoed the Genesis in Japan and made its hardware designer have second thoughts about his work. This game would have been forgivable- and forgettable- halfway into the lifespan of the Genesis, but as a launch title?! No way. It's hard not to have a chip on your shoulder about Osomatsu, when you realize how poorly it reflected on the Genesis and how difficult it made it for Sega to sell the system in Japan.
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Post by toei on Jul 8, 2019 16:20:13 GMT -5
mdshock.com/2018/09/16/osomatsu-kun-the-bizarre-story-of-the-mega-drives-most-infamous-game/I always wondered why the Sega Genesis (Megadrive) bombed in Japan. It turned out that this friggin' game was to blame. Sega showed it off at a launch event for the console and people didn't like it then, even though they couldn't possibly have played it for more than ten minutes. Maybe it wasn't kusoge, but man, when you're introducing your game system to the world, this is the kind of foot you don't want to put forward. Tiny cartridge size, derivative gameplay eerily reminiscent of previous generation consoles, that stupid Gordian knot level structure that artificially lengthens the game while annoying the player... it pretty much torpedoed the Genesis in Japan and made its hardware designer have second thoughts about his work. This game would have been forgivable- and forgettable- halfway into the lifespan of the Genesis, but as a launch title?! No way. It's hard not to have a chip on your shoulder about Osomatsu, when you realize how poorly it reflected on the Genesis and how difficult it made it for Sega to sell the system in Japan. You're misreading several things from that mdbomb article and jumping to the wrong conclusions. Osomatsu wasn't actually a launch title - it came out a few months into the MD's life. The MD had a very weak launch there with just two titles available, Space Harrier 2 and Super Thunder Blade, both of them shooters of the same type. It took a full month before a 3rd game came out (Altered Beast), and another for Osomatsu-kun. Things only started picking up in '89, software-wise, with the first 3rd party release halfway through the year (Thunder Force 2), and high-quality first-party releases like Revenge of Shinobi. It was a rushed launch, and all those early titles were rushed, too, not just Osomatsu. Ultimately, it was a niche game system in Japan because Sega was primarily an arcade company and concentrated most of its energies there. They had little experience with home consumer products - their previous 8-bit consoles had been a side-business, but they'd made money, and Sega was happy with that. The Genesis was conceived as an arcade-at-home, with similar hardware as the System 16 boards. This was the era of the RPG in Japan, and turn-based RPGs were exceedingly rare on the system. Any console without a strong RPG lineup was bound to have low sales in Japan in the '90s. The N64, for example, was a flop there, selling less than the Saturn did (and less than a third of what the Super Famicom had) after two generations of Nintendo dominance. Why? Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were announced for the PSX, and Nintendo had nothing to make up for it. Also, Hideki Sato said he had a problem with all the first wave of Genesis titles, not just Osomatsu-kun. He also criticized Altered Beast, yet that game was a hit in North America. And he didn't design the Genesis's hardware, really; he was head of the department that did, however the actual internal design was done by Masami Ishikawa. He had no involvement in game design, so his appraisal of the early software is incidental, and seems to be mostly based on technology - ie they didn't fully utilize the Mega Drive's capacities, which launch titles almost never do, anyway. Also, criticizing Osomatsu-kun for having "derivative gameplay" is just bizarre. Literally 99.9% of all video games have derivative gameplay. Super Mario World, A Link to the Past and Super Metroid are all literally just slightly refined NES concepts on a larger scale, yet no one's ever called them "eerily reminiscent of previous generation consoles".
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Post by kingmike on Jul 24, 2019 17:20:22 GMT -5
"Derivative gameplay" I believe is to say they add nothing of value over pre-existing games. I'd hard to imagine saying those three SNES games added nothing of value over their NES predecessors.
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