Digital only isn't real ownership. And the fact that I can still pop in and play a physical copy on original hardware regardless of whatever self-serving gimmicky nonsense the companies cook up is the clincher. Physical forever.
This game is actually a port of the second ever arcade game by Raw Thrills, The Fast and the Furious, just with a different title because the console rights to the F&F franchise were already spoken for and Midway co-owned the Cruis'n name. Raw Thrills was started by Cruis'n series creator Eugene Jarvis after he left Midway, and the F&F arcade game was clearly more of a Cruis'n sequel than anything to do with the F&F movies. After getting a couple of updated editions in the arcade (Drift – which added new tracks in Japan and a new car lineup inspired by the third movie – and Super Cars – which added tracks from RT's motorcycle game Super Bikes, featured a whole new lineup of cars, and upgraded the graphics to HD) Raw Thrills made an all new game, Cruis'n Blast, which was released under license from Nintendo, which became sole owner of the franchise rights after Midway shut down. So the series lives again.
@EarthboundBenjy Now that the Game Boy version is on Switch as part of the first batch of Game Boy/GB Color games for NSO (which constitutes the seventh (!) version of Tetris on the system) I wouldn't entirely be surprised if Nintendo's NES version was added to that set of games as well.
The main reason Panel de Pon wasn't given its western title for NSO is because The Tetris Company won't let them use the name anymore. Henk Rogers always regretted letting them use the name in the first place for a game that is utterly not Tetris at all.
@Karatecanine The Wii U was in no way mid-generation of a launch. It came out 6 years after the Wii, and only one year before the PS4 and Xbox One. That's a full generation. Ever since the GameCube came up short in market performance, Nintendo hasn't aimed for specs, so the fact that the Wii U wasn't as powerful as the other two doesn't make it part of the previous generation.
If anything was a mid-generation launch, it was the Switch, as it came out while the PS4 and XB1 were still current, three years before their successors. (Though it still was 4 1/2 years after the Wii U.)
@DarthNocturnal This, despite its name, wasn't a PC in any way. NEC made high end business-oriented PCs in their 8-bit PC-88 and later 16-bit PC-98 series, which has some popularity as gaming machines, though not as much as their respective peers, the MSX and Sharp X68000. Supposedly it was the reputation of those that lead to the PC Engine's name, despite it having nothing to do with those computers. The PC-FX was clearly named because of the success of the PCE, even though it wasn't a PC either.
@JLPick Dreamcast was really the following generation, though. Which Sega jumped into first because the Saturn was a dud in western markets due to a combination of factors, not the least was the bungled early US launch (ordered by the Japanese head office over the objections of the president of the American branch who had actually made the Genesis a success) which made he console look like it had no games, and then mismanagement in the latter part of its lifespan by then-Sega of America president Bernie Stoller (who basically said no imports of Japanese games that probably would have been successes in the west, and pretty much announced that he was giving up on it less than a year into his tenure). Didn't help that the hardware design was a mess either, making it more expensive than the PS1 and much harder to program for. Or that the entire design project was handled by a team in Japan with little input from or updates given to American management, which lead to the belief that the console was a year or two off and so they came up with the 32X add-on to act as a bridge only for the Saturn to be released in Japan later that same year. The entire mess damaged Sega's reputation inexorably.
The Dreamcast was their attempt to put the mess behind them and reset for the next generation, which they jumped into first. Much better received critically, unfortunately people knew the PS2 was coming (and it would wind up being the best selling console ever) and Dreamcast console sales weren't enough to sustain Sega. (Probably also didn't help that the copy protection was defeated really early on the console's life and piracy of its games was rampant.)
As for the Jaguar, it was a poorly designed, falsely advertised piece of junk from day 1. And everyone following the industry at the time knew it was going to be so it never amounted to squat. The games were mostly terrible, with some of them being obviously incomplete betas.
@BloodNinja Because, plainly put, they're not game breaking at all. Calling them such is simply an overreaction. That goes beyond skepticism into a self-deluding cynicism.
@Tandy255 No, Atari Tetris, both the arcade and the NES port, do not have hard drop where you can drop the block instantly, but instead pushing down soft drops the piece, where it moves faster, but isn't instant. Indeed, the Atari arcade version was the first version to have that. All previous computer versions had hard drop only. Sega's Japanese arcade version, the first version released in Japan and recently ported anew to the Genesis Mini, also is soft drop. The Nintendo NES and Game Boy versions follow the soft drop model as well. Modern Tetris games allow both, with hard drop often mapped to up on the directional pad (ironically, enough).
You may be thinking of the original Bullet-Proof Software Famicom version, which for some reason is often the version used in multi-game retro consoles like the AtGames Flashback line, or one of the earlier computer ports. Those have hard drop only. Worse, or more confusing to players of later versions at least, in the original release of the Famicom version, down on the directional pad was rotate and the A button was drop. That's been switched in the re-releases, as down-for-drop is just plain more intuitive, but it's still hard drop-only.
As for commenting on the games themselves, as someone who actually owns both the Nintendo and Tengen NES versions, I disagree that the Tengen version is necessarily superior.
Yes, it's two-player. But unlike more recent two-player versions (starting with the Game Boy) there's no "garbage" that appears on the bottom of your opponent's stack when multi-line clears occur, so it isn't really two players directly competing, just two players that happen to be playing at the same time. All it really does is save time with having to alternate. (This isn't mentioning the co-op mode, which is actually rather silly and annoying if the other player is not good at the game).
Also, the Tengen version plays stiffer, in part because of how the blocks rotate. But the entire discussion of Tetris rotation systems is a long one. Graphically, it's a bit of a wash. The Tengen screen has a bit more going on, but because of that (due to NES technical limits) the tetronimos themselves are kinda bland, with dull colors, no highlights, and a uniform grayness once locked into place. The Nintendo pieces just have a glossy highlight to them that looks good, and they change color each level, which is fun.
The whole issue with Tetris rights is an hour long story in itself. I recommend watching the hour-long piece on it by the Gaming Historian (it's on YouTube). It's very well presented.
@DWWM The article gets the history wrong. After selling the home console and computer division to Jack Tramiel (who named it Atari Corporation), Warner held on to the arcade division as Atari Games Inc., because Tramiel wasn't really interested in video games; he mostly wanted the home computer division so he could use it to get back at Commodore, the company he founded but had been forced out of in 1983. Atari Corp owned the rights to the Atari name and Atari Games could only use it for arcade machines and only with "Games" fully attached.
After a short while, Warner sold a majority share to Namco, which had at one point been Atari's arcade distributor in Japan, and they installed new management. Namco soon lost interest in owning a separately operating company that was essentially a competitor (as opposed to just a subsidiary to act as a distributor), so they sold their portion to Atari Games management (which had been originally installed by Namco). Warner retained their 40% share throughout.
It was then that they started to do the third-party publishing thing, and, because of the limit on using the Atari name outside arcades, formed Tengen as a home publishing subsidiary; it had nothing to do with Nintendo's licensing limits (the article is confusing unrelated elements).
After all the unpleasantness with Nintendo was settled, in 1994 Time Warner (as it was by then known) reacquired full ownership (having never sold their minority stake) and renamed the whole company Time Warner Interactive. After only three or so years, though, they lost interest again and sold TWI to Midway, which had just been spun off into a standalone company, and TWI became Midway Games West. (Not to be confused with Midway Games San Diego, the former Tradewest, which Midway's then-parent WMS Industries had bought a couple years before so they could publish home games themselves instead of licensing their arcade games to Acclaim as had been done for the first couple of Mortal Kombat games; they had decided there was no reason to share the profits from that very lucrative series, and so MK3 was published by Williams not Acclaim like the first two.)
Eventually Midway shut down the former Atari Games studio, then later the San Diego studio as they went bankrupt. What was left of Midway was acquired by ... Warner Bros. Can't make this stuff up. All Atari Games arcade titles after 1985 are now owned by Warner Bros. Interactive, as is the Midway (and old Williams) library.
Atari Corp never reacquired the arcade division (the article is also wrong there), and never made another arcade game. They also never amounted to much. The 7800 was delayed because Tramiel and Warner couldn't agree who needed to pay the designers (Tramiel eventually paid, reluctantly). Atari Corp's ST line of computers weren't the Amiga killers they were intended to be (they did ok, but both were crushed by the rise of Microsoft). The Lynx was an afterthought on the market, and the Jaguar was so disastrous that Atari Corp went under. It merged with a hard drive maker which then sold the name and back catalogue to Hasbro, who, after the dot-com bubble burst, sold what was left to Infogrames, a French publisher that renamed itself Atari SA. That's the only current Atari, which owns the pre-1985 library and licenses it out for those Atari Flashback consoles.
I'd expect a Zelda HD all-stars as part of the anniversary next year, and even then remember they really aren't Wii U games, but previous generation games that were already re-released. That's about it. Most of these were meh, and I think they've covered most of their bases in terms of trying to get these games out to those who skipped the Wii U (which is most people, being the Wii U was a failure)
The idea that a historical overview of the Castlevania series should have omitted Simon's Quest is just plain daft. Ridiculous.
As for where they cut off the games included, the inclusion of all games prior to Rondo of Blood (except the forgettable arcade game, which is in the arcade collection) makes sense. While still a 16-bit game like IV and Bloodlines, it's too directly attached to Symphony of the Night to not have those both together. And the two of them are already in a separate package called "Castlevania: Requiem". Unfortunately it's this far exclusive to the PS4.
Comments 15
Re: Talking Point: What Would Make You Happy To Give Up Physical Games And Go 100% Digital?
Digital only isn't real ownership. And the fact that I can still pop in and play a physical copy on original hardware regardless of whatever self-serving gimmicky nonsense the companies cook up is the clincher. Physical forever.
Re: Cruis'n
This game is actually a port of the second ever arcade game by Raw Thrills, The Fast and the Furious, just with a different title because the console rights to the F&F franchise were already spoken for and Midway co-owned the Cruis'n name. Raw Thrills was started by Cruis'n series creator Eugene Jarvis after he left Midway, and the F&F arcade game was clearly more of a Cruis'n sequel than anything to do with the F&F movies. After getting a couple of updated editions in the arcade (Drift – which added new tracks in Japan and a new car lineup inspired by the third movie – and Super Cars – which added tracks from RT's motorcycle game Super Bikes, featured a whole new lineup of cars, and upgraded the graphics to HD) Raw Thrills made an all new game, Cruis'n Blast, which was released under license from Nintendo, which became sole owner of the franchise rights after Midway shut down. So the series lives again.
Re: Feature: Japan's 'G-Mode Archives' - The Retrogame Series You've Never Heard Of
@EarthboundBenjy Now that the Game Boy version is on Switch as part of the first batch of Game Boy/GB Color games for NSO (which constitutes the seventh (!) version of Tetris on the system) I wouldn't entirely be surprised if Nintendo's NES version was added to that set of games as well.
The main reason Panel de Pon wasn't given its western title for NSO is because The Tetris Company won't let them use the name anymore. Henk Rogers always regretted letting them use the name in the first place for a game that is utterly not Tetris at all.
Re: Soapbox: After 10 Years I Finally Got A Wii U, Here’s What I Thought
@Karatecanine The Wii U was in no way mid-generation of a launch. It came out 6 years after the Wii, and only one year before the PS4 and Xbox One. That's a full generation. Ever since the GameCube came up short in market performance, Nintendo hasn't aimed for specs, so the fact that the Wii U wasn't as powerful as the other two doesn't make it part of the previous generation.
If anything was a mid-generation launch, it was the Switch, as it came out while the PS4 and XB1 were still current, three years before their successors. (Though it still was 4 1/2 years after the Wii U.)
Re: Feature: What NEC And Hudson Did Next: The Disasterous Story Of The PC-FX
@DarthNocturnal This, despite its name, wasn't a PC in any way. NEC made high end business-oriented PCs in their 8-bit PC-88 and later 16-bit PC-98 series, which has some popularity as gaming machines, though not as much as their respective peers, the MSX and Sharp X68000. Supposedly it was the reputation of those that lead to the PC Engine's name, despite it having nothing to do with those computers. The PC-FX was clearly named because of the success of the PCE, even though it wasn't a PC either.
Re: Feature: What NEC And Hudson Did Next: The Disasterous Story Of The PC-FX
@JLPick Dreamcast was really the following generation, though. Which Sega jumped into first because the Saturn was a dud in western markets due to a combination of factors, not the least was the bungled early US launch (ordered by the Japanese head office over the objections of the president of the American branch who had actually made the Genesis a success) which made he console look like it had no games, and then mismanagement in the latter part of its lifespan by then-Sega of America president Bernie Stoller (who basically said no imports of Japanese games that probably would have been successes in the west, and pretty much announced that he was giving up on it less than a year into his tenure). Didn't help that the hardware design was a mess either, making it more expensive than the PS1 and much harder to program for. Or that the entire design project was handled by a team in Japan with little input from or updates given to American management, which lead to the belief that the console was a year or two off and so they came up with the 32X add-on to act as a bridge only for the Saturn to be released in Japan later that same year. The entire mess damaged Sega's reputation inexorably.
The Dreamcast was their attempt to put the mess behind them and reset for the next generation, which they jumped into first. Much better received critically, unfortunately people knew the PS2 was coming (and it would wind up being the best selling console ever) and Dreamcast console sales weren't enough to sustain Sega. (Probably also didn't help that the copy protection was defeated really early on the console's life and piracy of its games was rampant.)
As for the Jaguar, it was a poorly designed, falsely advertised piece of junk from day 1. And everyone following the industry at the time knew it was going to be so it never amounted to squat. The games were mostly terrible, with some of them being obviously incomplete betas.
Re: Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge - The Best Turtles Beat 'Em Up Ever Made
I did think. I thought you were spouting nonsense based on obvious misinformation.
Re: Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge - The Best Turtles Beat 'Em Up Ever Made
@BloodNinja Because, plainly put, they're not game breaking at all. Calling them such is simply an overreaction. That goes beyond skepticism into a self-deluding cynicism.
Re: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue
Turtles go Metroidvania. It's a surprisingly good game that holds up.
Re: Feature: How Nintendo Killed The Best Version Of Tetris
@Tandy255 No, Atari Tetris, both the arcade and the NES port, do not have hard drop where you can drop the block instantly, but instead pushing down soft drops the piece, where it moves faster, but isn't instant. Indeed, the Atari arcade version was the first version to have that. All previous computer versions had hard drop only. Sega's Japanese arcade version, the first version released in Japan and recently ported anew to the Genesis Mini, also is soft drop. The Nintendo NES and Game Boy versions follow the soft drop model as well. Modern Tetris games allow both, with hard drop often mapped to up on the directional pad (ironically, enough).
You may be thinking of the original Bullet-Proof Software Famicom version, which for some reason is often the version used in multi-game retro consoles like the AtGames Flashback line, or one of the earlier computer ports. Those have hard drop only. Worse, or more confusing to players of later versions at least, in the original release of the Famicom version, down on the directional pad was rotate and the A button was drop. That's been switched in the re-releases, as down-for-drop is just plain more intuitive, but it's still hard drop-only.
Re: Feature: How Nintendo Killed The Best Version Of Tetris
As for commenting on the games themselves, as someone who actually owns both the Nintendo and Tengen NES versions, I disagree that the Tengen version is necessarily superior.
Yes, it's two-player. But unlike more recent two-player versions (starting with the Game Boy) there's no "garbage" that appears on the bottom of your opponent's stack when multi-line clears occur, so it isn't really two players directly competing, just two players that happen to be playing at the same time. All it really does is save time with having to alternate. (This isn't mentioning the co-op mode, which is actually rather silly and annoying if the other player is not good at the game).
Also, the Tengen version plays stiffer, in part because of how the blocks rotate. But the entire discussion of Tetris rotation systems is a long one. Graphically, it's a bit of a wash. The Tengen screen has a bit more going on, but because of that (due to NES technical limits) the tetronimos themselves are kinda bland, with dull colors, no highlights, and a uniform grayness once locked into place. The Nintendo pieces just have a glossy highlight to them that looks good, and they change color each level, which is fun.
Re: Feature: How Nintendo Killed The Best Version Of Tetris
@clvr
The whole issue with Tetris rights is an hour long story in itself. I recommend watching the hour-long piece on it by the Gaming Historian (it's on YouTube). It's very well presented.
Re: Feature: How Nintendo Killed The Best Version Of Tetris
@DWWM The article gets the history wrong. After selling the home console and computer division to Jack Tramiel (who named it Atari Corporation), Warner held on to the arcade division as Atari Games Inc., because Tramiel wasn't really interested in video games; he mostly wanted the home computer division so he could use it to get back at Commodore, the company he founded but had been forced out of in 1983. Atari Corp owned the rights to the Atari name and Atari Games could only use it for arcade machines and only with "Games" fully attached.
After a short while, Warner sold a majority share to Namco, which had at one point been Atari's arcade distributor in Japan, and they installed new management. Namco soon lost interest in owning a separately operating company that was essentially a competitor (as opposed to just a subsidiary to act as a distributor), so they sold their portion to Atari Games management (which had been originally installed by Namco). Warner retained their 40% share throughout.
It was then that they started to do the third-party publishing thing, and, because of the limit on using the Atari name outside arcades, formed Tengen as a home publishing subsidiary; it had nothing to do with Nintendo's licensing limits (the article is confusing unrelated elements).
After all the unpleasantness with Nintendo was settled, in 1994 Time Warner (as it was by then known) reacquired full ownership (having never sold their minority stake) and renamed the whole company Time Warner Interactive. After only three or so years, though, they lost interest again and sold TWI to Midway, which had just been spun off into a standalone company, and TWI became Midway Games West. (Not to be confused with Midway Games San Diego, the former Tradewest, which Midway's then-parent WMS Industries had bought a couple years before so they could publish home games themselves instead of licensing their arcade games to Acclaim as had been done for the first couple of Mortal Kombat games; they had decided there was no reason to share the profits from that very lucrative series, and so MK3 was published by Williams not Acclaim like the first two.)
Eventually Midway shut down the former Atari Games studio, then later the San Diego studio as they went bankrupt. What was left of Midway was acquired by ... Warner Bros. Can't make this stuff up. All Atari Games arcade titles after 1985 are now owned by Warner Bros. Interactive, as is the Midway (and old Williams) library.
Atari Corp never reacquired the arcade division (the article is also wrong there), and never made another arcade game. They also never amounted to much. The 7800 was delayed because Tramiel and Warner couldn't agree who needed to pay the designers (Tramiel eventually paid, reluctantly). Atari Corp's ST line of computers weren't the Amiga killers they were intended to be (they did ok, but both were crushed by the rise of Microsoft). The Lynx was an afterthought on the market, and the Jaguar was so disastrous that Atari Corp went under. It merged with a hard drive maker which then sold the name and back catalogue to Hasbro, who, after the dot-com bubble burst, sold what was left to Infogrames, a French publisher that renamed itself Atari SA. That's the only current Atari, which owns the pre-1985 library and licenses it out for those Atari Flashback consoles.
Re: Feature: Potential Switch Port Round-Up - The Wii U Games That Haven't Come To Switch
I'd expect a Zelda HD all-stars as part of the anniversary next year, and even then remember they really aren't Wii U games, but previous generation games that were already re-released. That's about it. Most of these were meh, and I think they've covered most of their bases in terms of trying to get these games out to those who skipped the Wii U (which is most people, being the Wii U was a failure)
Re: Review: Castlevania Anniversary Collection - You'll Want To Get Your Teeth Into This
The idea that a historical overview of the Castlevania series should have omitted Simon's Quest is just plain daft. Ridiculous.
As for where they cut off the games included, the inclusion of all games prior to Rondo of Blood (except the forgettable arcade game, which is in the arcade collection) makes sense. While still a 16-bit game like IV and Bloodlines, it's too directly attached to Symphony of the Night to not have those both together. And the two of them are already in a separate package called "Castlevania: Requiem". Unfortunately it's this far exclusive to the PS4.