KingMike

I was a kid who grew up on the OG of Rugrats. Not the second gen that these games are from.
So I didn't have any Rugrats games growing up.

I've watched a playthrough of Search for Reptar and it seemed fairly alright.
That first Game Boy game, definitely didn't feel like I had missed out on that. I know there was a Gafield GBA game that immediately asked the player to collect 416 hotdogs (not exaggeration) in the first stage alone, but I feel like that Rugrats game was of similar ideology.
Hope as they made more games, they got a little more respectful of the player and the IP to do things more fitting with it.

I remember for the 25th anniversary they had a cute video about someone pulling out a box of Famicom cartridges to pop in some Super Mario Bros. and blowing into the cart before inserting it.

Then they edited the video to take out the blow. Glad to know some things were universal.

I'd say the European boxart the least demonstrates the game's core gimmick, putting the arrow behind the title where you probably won't notice it.

I know that Crazy Taxi would probably have some licensing issues. Not just that I think the soundtrack is licensed, is it?
But I do recall at least one the places the riders would ask for is the Levi's store. Any other brand locations?

@Uncle_Franklin I had been last year watching a streamer who had set out to play and rate all the arcade games nobody had heard of, chronologically.
I can't believe Data East had the Crazy Taxi idea, though as a top-down game, 15 years before Sega. I think it was called, and I know now it wouldn't be considered a very considerate name, Kamikaze Cab. Or something. At least I don't think I imagined that episode of the streamer's series.

@shiningpikablu252 There was originally going to be THREE different Y's IV games but the Mega Drive got abandoned (I can only presume due to being the far last in the Japanese market in its three-way console war.)

The original is the only PS Vita game I own, bought when it was new.
I picked it up in anticipation of cheaply getting a Vita to play it on at some point, but that still hasn't happened. I passed up a Vita TV when those were super-cheap because this game was not on Sony's whitelist for the device.

Toei gave us many a kusoge on the Famicom, such as the infamous first Hokuto no Ken game. Wow, 40 years since Kenshiro first burst skulls quite violently. (sadly I've heard the franchise never got great representation among video games)

I want to say that original gaming division was sold off to become a different brand. I forget who, and if it is someone still alive. (in how I know that Marvelous Entertainment was originally JVC's game division)

@Liam_Doolan I think it might be a mistake to call this a forgotten game. Even people who have no idea what the actual game is have bumped to the booped to the bumped to the bass.

Even the name "Networkgo" sounds like a scam.

Though not the most blatant scam Nintendo's ever dealt with. Perhaps some have heard of Caltron 6-in-1 for the NES? Nintendo sued the crap out that publisher for being the American front for a Taiwanese publisher called NTDEC whose name in Chinese characters indicated it stood for "Nintendo Electric Company" and their output in Taiwan is what you'd expect (pirated).

The American cover is a lot cooler looking.
However, the Japanese cover sure is Game Freak alright.

@somnambulance Safe to say at this point Yokai Watch 4 on Switch 1 will remain a Japanese-exclusive. I can't even remember what year that was, 2019?
I refused to pay digital for the barely-physically released 3 on 3DS, so now that one is effectively a Japanese-exclusive for me as well.

For $80, they can afford to put an actual ROM in the card. No excuses.

@OrtadragoonX Druaga didn't get physically released on NES in the west.
Though Pac-Man did get released, Nintendo has twisted the release history of the game. It got a fully licensed release in 1988 by Tengen. However, either because Tengen notoriously defected or because Tengen reprinted the three games they released while licensed by Nintendo and reprinted them on the "unlicensed" black cartridges, Nintendo redacted those three games from the list of official games, and so now they consider Namco's 1993 reprint the "official" release date.

Baffling how when Namco released their "licensed" NES port of Ms. Pac-Man in 1993, they created a version that is merely a sufficient port of the arcade game. It does the job fine but when Tengen's "unlicensed" port already existed and added new stuff to the game, why they didn't just reprint that?

I see with the Mendel Palace boxart, they had to edit that a bit since Hudson Soft originally published the game in North America. Since Konami (owning the brand) has nothing to do with the rerelease, I guess they had to edit the Hudson name out? I suppose that sort of thing happens a lot with NSO?

@Kyloctopus We just will never know the impact Druaga had since probably almost none of us were playing the game in arcades in Japan in 1984.
I get that being cryptic was its point. For certain they wanted players to talk about the game and solve it together.

@tempestryke The Tower of Druaga was most famous as an arcade game (from 1984) that was so obtuse about how to even complete the game that players were expected to share notes and figure it out together. Usually modern releases (even back to the original PlayStation, which I think was the first time it was even seen in the west) simply included a spoiler guide in the instructions. Even with a built-in guide, it's still an incredibly difficult game to finish.

@mandlecreed To be fair though, even with the Genesis Sonic games, those were designed to only go fast when you actually know what you're doing.
Trying to play those fast before you've played the games enough to have them memorized, is going to result in a lot of BS of its own. (I still haven't finished that part myself. )

@iLikeUrAttitude Ah, Data East, a company that had both ends of the "protecting game mechanics as their exclusive rights" lawsuits.
In the '80s they had Karate Champ, and they sued... was it International Karate on the C64. No, they didn't want anyone else to make a different karate game than them.
Then they had Fighter's History, which Capcom sued them "seeking to copy Street Fighter II's success" and it was legally distinct enough.

@Dom_31 I don't care how cheesy the show might be in production values, the Mario cartoons were among my favorites as a child.

@Olliemar28 Slight incorrect. The third season was I believe "The New Adventures of Captain N and Super Mario World." (or as the announcer said it "Super Mario Bros. World")
For that last season, the former separate Captain N was folded in to combine an 11-minute episode of each series into a single broadcast. (Whereas Super Mario Bros. 3 featured two 11-minute episodes in each broadcast and Captain N was formerly its own 22-minute adventure)

@Res462 I thought it was the Japanese Mega Drive Maximum Carnage that was worth big money, with the MD Batman Forever right behind it.
Those Acclaim Japan games supposedly had a pretty small print run, with the MD unsurprisingly getting smaller print runs than the SFC.

Hmm... bizarrely GameFAQs lists the SNES version as not released in Japan at all. An odd decision for Acclaim to favor the MD as the single console over there.

@-wc- I do remember the classic webpage from when the PS2 launched, mocking it with their vision of the PS3.
"IT PRAY EVERYTHING!", including guessing a $500 launch price.

True, that writing is a little insensitive tone these days. But it was a popular article enough to get mocked a few times, someone slipping in a few bits that probably irked the original Australian writer just a bit so we could call it even.

Though I can't find it so easily these days, due to its similarity to Sony's actual marketing nearly a decade later "It only does everything!"

Have the AI bros yet made a clip of Kaz Hirai Eight Hundred and Ninety-Nine US Dollars?

I have never heard of four of the entries in the top 10. You can probably guess which ones.

@Grimley141 $100 for a battery in the Switch sounds absurd. That's about half the price of an average car battery.
Half the price for a battery that is what fraction of the size?

@RupeeClock Well, if the battery dies some year in the future when Nintendo won't replace it anymore, then if it isn't easily user-replaceable, then it won't matter if it fits in the dock anymore.

@Serpenterror So we should expect Capcom fighting games to start featuring more Saudi celebrities that nobody in the rest of the world has heard of?

Please don't let this turn into SNK vs. Capcom: who gets more ruined by rich Saudi investors.

Peach with a bomb sells it. So out of character. Sadly, we will never see the "Daisy" that was ready for Contra at the end of the 1993 Mario movie.
But the DK doing the wave is great too.

@Chaotic_Neutral Physical Pokemon cards are not a video game. So anything "predatory" about them will not to be taken up with a different body.
I don't play CCGs so I don't know what is "predatory" about them but if it resellers that's another story.
If it's about rare cards or what, well, that's what trading card companies had been doing long before Pokemon cards existed. How did older generations deal with that?

@GoldenSunRM I played a number of fake gambling games and some RPGs with fake gambling minigames and I've never gone to a casino (to actually gamble) in my life (my friend took me a few times to eat at the buffet but that was as close as I've gotten).

If anything, the gacha sidequest in Minish Cap taught me it was BS to complete with fake money, and laugh at the idea of ever spending real money on such a thing (just a few years before we'd see an entire industry of games pop up doing exactly that.)

This will be a blow to especially that big Chinese mobile game company that keeps putting out these games that had gotten sponsored content time on some of the streams I've watched, but I've been able to tell myself that, while some of their content might've otherwise been interesting, the fact they're gachas isn't an instant No to me playing them.

@Daniel36 I wouldn't take Working Designs as a standard example of localization.

What's even worse than the Bill Clinton jokes is Popful Mail's joke. At least people will probably know and remember who Bill Clinton is (probably be glad that at least Lunar happened before Bill's big scandal, you can probably imagine how much worse they'd have gone in on that), but I was watching a stream a few years ago and realize that probably almost nobody in chat even knows who Robin Leach was. Those are the jokes that really date the game.
(Even moreso than the boss that spews as many Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes as it can cram together, and makes you realize how long ago 1994 was with the references that didn't exist at that time.)

@EarthboundBenjy The Game Boy Color localizations are the bad point.
You got LoraLuv!

Would I like a Yoshi's egg popcorn bucket? Yes.

Would I like it for how much it would probably cost me to get one? Probably not.

I don't know what that one girl is doing spinning rings on her fingers in the Japanese art.

@Erigen I remember 10 years ago, I made an effort to play through the Famicom Megami Tensei. That game definitely has some crust to its gameplay.
You can't really "collect" them nor do the minions level. You use them until they're no longer good then fuse them with another minion that has outlived its usefulness hoping to get something better. It's still quite a thematic difference.
Even if the "negotiation" means of recruiting them turns out to be about as random in result and chucking balls. Something I've learned from playing the spinoff Last Bible. A pre-Pokemon original GB game (from 1992) that wasn't seen in North America until after Pokemon (its GBC upgrade was released in English as Revelations: The Demon Slayer in 1999).

No, bugger is very mild in the US. Most people here probably wouldn't think much.

@contractcooker I'm fairly certain they had to resubmit for rating anyways since the game is not on the same hardware it originally was.

@SillyG And the Gen 2 guy's name used up the entire width of the textbox as it was.

@Ooyah "Spanner"? That sounds like UK vulgarity. I bet the censorship list is based on what is offensive in US English.

So I imagine it'll probably allow Bugger.

@Nep-Nep-Freak Despite whatever filter was in Gen 6, I've still gotten a few Wonder Traded Pokemon with names that should've been filtered. Clearly the system somehow wasn't working anyways.

@UpsideDownRowlet I remember when I rented Chrono Trigger as a kid and someone had made a save file with only slurs for the character names.

@Uncle_Franklin I'm sure at that point, Zelda was established enough it didn't need an extravagant cover. We saw that name on the box, we were there. (I think GamePro even said as much in its review.)

I think on that note, how Yoshi's Island SNES became a well-played and enjoyed game despite an absolutely trashy USA TV commercial. We knew Yoshi, we could trust that even if he let us know it was out with a garbage commercial, his game was going to be great.
But EarthBound, it had less appalling marketing and it took a decade or two to become an appreciated game. It was unfamiliar.

@Grim Was directed primarily at the title (though I know the Super Famicom game did the same thing). "GAME BOY Zelda no Densetsu".
Though I do own one PSP game BECAUSE it had a redundant title. (Densetsu/legend was in its title three times, though I suppose it was at least explained by that it was probably a licensed IP)

Nostalgia wins this one.

Though I may need a bit of help. I'm looking at the Japanese cover and I'm having a hard time telling what console this game is for. Anyone got any ideas?

@DaveJaVu The only color Red & Blue had was Super Game Boy.
Japanese Yellow didn't have GBC support either.
And the GBC support in the western Yellow versions was a conversion of the SGB mode with the colors altered to compensate for GBC's dim LCD.

So, lack of color in Gen 1 wasn't really a problem since it was made for B&W GB.

@The_Nintendo_Expat Can Nintendo be trusted for "high effort, excellent new ports" at this point?
I can only imagine the result something worse than leaving well-enough alone.

@Dyna-Z When I finally got a Gengar after searching for hours, I have to say its Moon Dex entry had some unfortunate implications that shocked me. I can only imagine the Moon entries (as other second versions) are like, someone banging 400 lines of text in one of the days before release.

I can't say I even remember all of them.

Mudsdale the only one I needed.

Morelull and Buzzwole sure are Pokemon names. "I'm not a Buzzwole, you are!"