KingMike

You don't HAVE to pay to finish Pokemon Picross. You can finish it for free, if you don't mind needing to spend the better part of a year waiting to grind out daily free Picrites.
TBF at least Nintendo reportedly put a spending cap on there, so after spending about what a packaged copy of the game would've cost, it would reportedly unlock unlimited Picrites.

All I know about Pokemon Typing Adventure (especially since it was never released in North America) is the soundtrack is "typing intensifies"!

@The_Nintend_Pedant Nintendo had some kind of contractual legal stronghold on third parties then (the exact details seem to differ between different stories on the Internet).
Namco was easily pushing out the most games of any licensed third-party in Japan (having published a total of 84 games between 1984 and 1993). But even they eventually got sick of it and took the latter half of 1989 off before coming back in 1990.

@Fiergala The Famicom was still a step above the SG-1000 which launched on the same day in Japan.
During its entire run as a hardware manufacturer, arguably one of Sega's flaws was too many incremental hardware upgrades. (true though that SG-1000 to SMS was a better one than 32X)

What's really bad about the SNES LotR game is that you have off-centered hitboxes. That's some Addams Family Values frustration there.
Also as I recall, for the multiplayer, additional players have to hold down a button the entire time to activate human control of their character, or it will revert to CPU control.
Those visuals are also quite bland for a 1994 SNES game. Much worse than Secret of Mana, a game released nearly a year earlier which also had multiplayer capability (more famously), despite Interplay's claim of being the first multiplayer action-adventure.

Though I recall reading the game was originally in development for the NES. I think there is a screenshot but I remember word many years ago from Frank Cifaldi that we probably shouldn't expect a prototype to ever show up as reportedly the devs actually erased earlier builds (by going outside and exposing the EEPROMs to sunlight).

I don't think there were many LotR games in that time. I know of only the DOS games of this same title (which unlike the SNES game, DID make it to a Volume 2). I believe there was a War on Middle Earth game for the MSX but I don't know if that was a licensed game or not.

One point of note about is that seven very early adopter third-parties WERE allowed to manufacture their own Famicom cartridges.
However, Capcom was not one of the privileged companies. Capcom's first game was published at the end of 1985, the year many other companies jumped aboard.
Among those companies with elevated permissions was its rivals Konami, Namco and Taito.
(although Capcom would very quickly become of the best-regarded NES developers, they were also a fairly newly established company, having only launched their first games in 1984.)

JALECO was the greatest game in that collection, we all know!

(yes, I know that's actually Bases Loaded)

@KaiserGX They did release Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman on Wii U.
Wild Gunman's release was quite cheekily timed. October 2015. They couldn't mention it but it was most definitely when people were in a Back to the Future mood because that was the month real time caught up with the date of the second film, for which that game had a rather famous cameo.
It still required hands to play.

@AussieMcBucket I also abused the sleep mode, which I have a feeling was an intentional feature.
The timer for how long you solve the puzzle is based on how long you are actually playing the game, but Energy is restored based on system clock time. So you can just close the system and leave it in sleep mode for a couple hours to recharge your Energy.
I figure it was intentional because the game tells you if you don't logically have enough Energy to solve a puzzle before you start but asks if you want to play anyways. It's possible for that to save having to wait a day or whatever longer for a Legendary respawn.

"Switch 1 Pro Controller is also compatible" Is or IS NOT compatible?
I would think if the former is true then people wouldn't be in a rush to buy a new one.

Pokemon Picross was free to play on 3DS, and you could finish the entire game for free... eventually. I recall it took me something like 10 months to earn the available free daily Picrites (and that was remembering to play the one permitted "training" session every day) to collect enough to unlock all the progression.
They really wanted you to pay for Picrites to progress at non-glacial speed (though Nintendo was at least then kind enough to put a total spending cap on the game. I have no idea about what they'd do now).

@Privatkatze On iTunes you can buy Final Fantasy soundtracks, and you can also buy individual tracks which means you can pay 99 cents or $1.29 or whatever for the "rest at an Inn" track.
I'm sure the Pokemon soundtracks have some very short music. I think even the level-up jingle is considered "music".

So, yes, that has happened before.

@N00BiSH I don't know. I though it might've had some kind of sample game but I'm not sure.

@JohnnyC Well, VB Wario Land was the only second Wario Land game so it wasn't really a franchise yet.
Among the many games in development but canceled was a F-Zero game. That too, in an alternate universe could've been the second F-Zero game released.
Nintendo did make an action-RPG called Dragon Hopper but the only copy known to exist is owned by a collector and not dumped. It would certainly be a curiosity to see. A shame as it could've even been a finished game (Nintendo Power announced new games throughout 1996, even after the last actually-released game came out. They were planning a "re-launch" that fall but unsurprisingly canceled that.)

Is that the entire "before Super Mario Bros." Famicom catalog? Family BASIC (if that even had a soundtrack) is the only thing I spot missing.
Wait, it doesn't have Popeye no Eigo Asobi or Spartan-X (Kung Fu). (The latter was at least concurrent with SMB1 in development.)

@BanjoPickles Oh. Well then, I've heard the problem with Activision is how much they value their classic IP. Not highly enough to reissue it themselves but reportedly they ask much higher in licensing fees than other parties are often willing to participate. But who knows if Microsoft would be any better of a negotiator.

@BanjoPickles Well, "the modern company" is really Infogrammes. Their only connection with the original Atari is that they bought all the legal assets and then legally changed their name.

@Gamebits I read SNES Doom had a multiplayer mode exclusively on X-Band. I think that game might have been first, but they were the only two SNES games I believe were natively programmed to support the modem. The rest of the supported games Catapult (the company who ran X-Band) had to reverse-engineer and develop software patches in order to support (sadly the emulation community was too late. The patch data could have been collectively recovered from the onboard RAM of several modems, as each would retain the patch data for the last game played, but by the time an effort was made to preserve them, seemingly all batteries had died out.)

@Olliemar28 "would go on to inform the Soul Blade / SoulCalibur franchises". "inform" sounds like an odd word choice.

But what I find amusing regarding WeaponLord was one means of promoting it. So, it seemed that Namco made a PV about its launch PS1 lineup and boasting about its Sony affiliation. They said that Sony called up "a very important business guy" at Namco because they need some "suck-janai" games. Within it, they ran a segment on WeaponLord specifically suggesting the viewer could take a potty break during it.
(I'm remembering that Saturn advertisement posted a month or two ago when Sega boasted about their arcade heritage over Sony. They of course didn't want to mention their rival Namco who was practically the answer on Sony's side. )

@Anti-Matter I'd say at least as long as it's not Totem Pokemon battles in Sun and Moon on an OG 3DS, I'd be fine.
(where you can actually see and hear the framerate drop. Yes, you could hear the framerate because the music would stutter. I've only heard stories about this billion dollar franchise game could show worse performance issues.
But I suppose it is at the least better than a Chinese bootleg translation of NES FF1 I've seen that would hold up the entire game a second even time it loaded a textbox.)

I thought this game didn't even make it out to Europe? I remember see comments online from European games shocked just learning of its existence from streaming.
Maybe it was a different game (was there a Wii sequel)?

@larryisaman I suppose at least GameStop's explanation for locking their bin makes sense. That will it does suck that they would just throw away boxes and instructions (now worth a lot of money, at least a little bit because of them), I believe they stated that they throw out broken merchandise that they didn't want people to take and do scammy things with.

Careful about digging in the trash, there could be an electric door lock switch inside.

@Serpenterror Square-Enix has "hundreds of popular IPs"? That's a LOT of IPs.

@Anti-Matter I'm not quite sure how a turn-based RPG needs a higher framerate.

@DevinRex Yeah, games have been leaked online for as long as there have been online networks to leak them onto.
Even SNES and Genesis games apparently got leaked ahead of release, with scene groups begging for leakers to boost their warez cred. It's just that far fewer people had online access in those days to ever be aware of their activities.
(There's even at least a few games that never made to legitimate sale though.)

Would you really want to expose yourself to the high chance of getting your console banned by playing Donkey Kong a few days early?

Funny how that last one doesn't have an option "I want to buy Game Cards with the software already on it as much as possible."
Unless that was a transcription/translation mistake. Those first two options look like the same thing.
No, it probably isn't. Those last two options also look like nearly the same thing.

Well, to be fair Magical Quest 3 is probably the most obscure of the trilogy given that the SNES original was only released in Japan (we can only imagine was due to Disney deciding to get into console publishing themselves at that time in the west, surely taking down Capcom's license except in Japan)

Then the GBA port gave the game its official English debut but was released fairly late in the console's lifespan.

@Metazoxan To some extent, piracy is needed today to preserve games in the future.
There's Sega Channel games that have only been found by being sourced many years later because people didn't copy when they were currently available.
There's still a community hunting down Satellaview games that miraculously exist still on memory cards. Some that it's really hard to believe how they weren't overwritten during its original lifespan.

But it's on people who download a copy without buying them.

Thing is, these pirates will probably just move their hosting operations to other countries where authorities are more concerned with other matters besides copyright enforcement.

How lucky we should be to live in a country where this is a high priority for authorities.

@Ryu_Niiyama You take that response WAY too seriously. You can call him whatever you want but I was merely informing you that "sama" is usually considered an over-respectful term when used for real, living people.

@The_Nintend_Pedant I believe that since at least the 3DS, Nintendo had been putting tracking information (such as the Nintendo Account name) in the ROM so that when someone posts ROM dumps online, Nintendo could track if there's a user account associated with the person who uploaded it.
However, I thought the scene was usually smart enough to delete that information from the ROM before uploading.

I thought people who were knowledgeable enough to dump Switch games were usually also knowledgeable enough to delete the tracking information from the ROM before playing?

I saw "Crocs" and immediately thought "Is Nintendo collaborating with the alligator 3D platform game that was initially envisioned as a Yoshi game?"

@Ryu_Niiyama "Miyamoto-sama"? I'm sure I've seen a clip before where a fan called him that in person, and he just looked at the fan strangely.

"Disarming Voice", you say?

"Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable."
Get out of here with this. They already put warnings on games they're not responsible for user interaction. Accessing servers after official servers are taken down requires enough effort for the users to have to be aware of what they're doing.

@CoastersPaul Well, it probably is worth noting that FF9 was the only game in the PS1 trilogy that didn't get a PC port back in the day. I understand the PC ports of 7 and 8 were where a lot of fan modding stuff happened (and it's been rumored that the modern Steam releases are heavily based on those mods of the CD originals.)

Sadly John Romero could only make so many people his employees for such a brief time.

@Bentleyma I had only seen the other movies when TPC did a marathon stream on Twitch for the 20th anniversary of the franchise.
But I recall Ash died multiple times.

I do remember the stream was a good time but also thinking, goodbye, POKMON! (referring to how they streamed with some captioning that was, not the greatest ) WHA BOUT THAT?

@Anti-Matter They've been pretty much making a new one every year for some time.

I do remember watching the movie in the theater. It was indeed the late '90s. Like, a month left of the decade.

I wonder if they have since redubbed the movie to remove a line I specifically remember where Ash seems to have awareness of the Minnesota Vikings.

@SirPrimalform I am for using flashcarts to preserve the longevity of aging hardware.
But this console hasn't even been out for a month yet, it's far too early to have a legitimate need for backups. No way the original copies have already broken down.

@Metazoxan At least in America, the cops can't bust your door down for pirating games (I've heard that might be different in Japan), if that's what you're suggesting.
That's a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Meaning it's up to the copyright owner to initiate action, with a lawsuit.

"unless it's thousands of dollars..." Yes, because THEN it becomes a serious criminal matter when the estimate damage to the copyright owner exceeds a certain amount.

@KBuckley27 That "underrated" list is so disappointing. I was expecting to see someone try to defend like Mario's Early Years or Super Mario Bros. Special.
No way does something like Super Mario Land need to be called "underrated". That game was on the Nintendo Power Top 20 chart for years, even after its sequel was out.

Though Wind Waker might be a bit short if the tedious padding of sailing and Triforce shard hunting taken out, I do have to admit to really liking its soundscape. It sure is a game of funny noises.

Isn't Pokemon XD technically the first Pokemon game to have Physical/Special split (though only in the case of Shadow-type moves)?
Only significant for big Pokemon fans, it did also introduce two Gen 4 baby Pokemon (though before they were named), Bonsly and Munchlax.

As great as it would be if the GameCube controller adapter would have made it possible to connect a real GBA with an original Gen 3 Pokemon cartridge to Pokemon Colosseum and XD on NSO, I think at this point we can imagine there's no way Nintendo's emulator developer will put that much effort to make it work.

"Tomb Raider IV-IV Remastered" Lovely typo, amazon!