brains -
Flying Hero (Sting - Super Famicom - 1992)
Help me raise awareness - Did you ever want a mainline Pokemon game for the Nintendo 64? Well, it kind of happened with Onegai Monsters; A so-obscure-it's-almost-non-existent Japanese exclusive.
Yes this is real, and It's a crime almost no one knows about it. Onegai Monsters is a Pokemon clone released exclusively in Japan in 1999. There's little to nothing online about it aside from a few Youtube videos and a couple of translation guides. Needless to say, it didn't make a big splash upon release.
It has breeding, turn-based battles, a bunch of monsters to collect, a journey that involves letting a 10-year-old out into the world on their own. WHY ISN'T THIS MORE WELL KNOWN? I can kind of see why it's not exactly popular. It's not the prettiest game but when do we care about graphics around here anyway? As long as the game is decent, we can handle walking animations with a whopping 3 frames right?
2023 is the year we put Onegai Monsters on the map. The good folks behind it tried to give the people what they wanted when Game Freak refused and their efforts amounted to near nothing. We have to get this a proper translation and into the hands of geeks like me and you. How do we do that? Spread awareness until someone smart enough does so!
Until then, we have to rough it and play it with what little guides are available on the internet. Incoming link dump:
Rocket Knight Adventures is the best game ever
(Konami - Genesis - 1993)
At the end of the Famicom era, Nintendo mothballed its two first party adventure game series Famicom Mukashibanashi and Famicom Detective Club with no apparent signs of intending to revive them on their new generation of consoles. Yuuyuuki (1989) would have been the last game of these franchises, had it not been for an unusual 1995 Japan-only satellite broadcast, games-as-a-service peripheral for the Super Famicom called the Satellaview. The add-on allowed paying subscribers to download content such as games, music and magazines to a special memory cartridge through the, for English-speakers, slightly unfortunately named BS Network (“Broadcast Satellite”). Apart from the fact of how far ahead of its time the Satellaview was, the probably most fascinating aspect of the service was the so called SoundLink games, where special Satellaview versions of games were co-broadcast with satellite radio audio that enabled CD quality music and voice-acting to play at set intervals during the game. The trade-off of doing this were that games were only accessible at pre-scheduled time slots, and that the gameplay was tied to a timer in order to make sure that the game was properly synced to the satellite audio (for more information on Soundlink games and their state of preservation, see e.g. the BS Tantei Club article). Following the success and popularity of the first SoundLink game, BS Zelda no Densetsu (1995; a time-attack re-imagining of the first The Legend of Zelda), a number of old and new Nintendo properties got their own Satallaview versions, including Famicom Mukashibanashi: Shin Onigashima.
After having based their first ever adventure game, Shin Onigashima (1987) on Japanese folklore and subsequently honing their ADV craft by the new thematic directions of Tokimeki High School (1987) and the two Famicom Detective Club games (1988 & 1989), Nintendo and PaxSoftnica returned to their Famicom Fairytales series in the fall of 1989. Rather than continuing adapting Japanese tales, the developers based the second entry in the series, Famicom Mukashibanashi: Yuuyuuki, on the famous Chinese story “The Journey to the West”. This 16th century book is considered one of the Four Classic Chinese Novels and tells the story of a band of characters tasked by a Buddha to travel to India to collect Holy Scriptures. One of the protagonists of the tale is the Monkey King Sun Wukong (Son Gokuu in Japanese) who can probably be said to be one of the most famous characters in the history of East Asian literature and is instantly recognizable by his signature strength, flying cloud and magic extendable staff. The 100 chapter novel is extensive in size and content, but after the initial parts wherein the main characters are established, it becomes highly episodic in its depiction of the different perils the party encounter on their journey. This format lends itself well to reinterpretations, and many translations and adaptations are based on an abridged selection of chapters. Being such an old tale, “The Journey to the West” has been told and retold innumerable times, but is for Westerners probably most famous for being the basis of Dragon Ball (1984). A very popular Japanese TV series called Saiyuuki (西遊記, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese title) was broadcast in 1978-80 that focused specifically on Son Gokuu, so the source material was very much part of the zeitgeist of when this game was made.
A little comic found in the Japanese manual for ‘Metal Max 2′ on the Super Famicom.
(Crea-Tech - 1993)
"Ted Broiler spewed flames!" -
Metal Max 2 Reloaded (Kadokawa - DS - 2011)
USA 1996
SoulTrap (Microforum - PC)
tower defense -
Hakaioh: King of Crusher (FAB Communications - PSX - 1998)
Home Alone 2: Lost In New York for Super Nintendo
(Imagineering/THQ - 1992)
Tumblr’s Core Prodct Stratgy
Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on trying to keep our sinking ship afloat for as long as possible. This means desperately trying to copy every new fly-by-night social media app that some multi-billionaire sh*t out during their daily Peloton routine. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. If you find the things we say here worrisome, please understand that is our exact intention. You've outgrown our target demographic. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The Diagnosis
It's lookin' pretty bad y'all!
After somehow losing hundreds of thousands of users during the great pr0n purge of 2018, we started to wonder if anything could be done to get back to where we were. We even brought in a management consultant who charged us a ridiculous amount of money. It would make you sick if you knew how much, but we got a few nice meals out of it at least. Anyhow, we handed this guy the app, and HE HAD NO IDEA HOW TO USE IT! It was f*cking hilarious! But suddenly it all clicked -- our users are a bunch of stupid idiots who can't even do basic arithmetic. I mean, they spend all day looking at their phones, so what do you expect?
Tumblr’s best feature is its unique content and vibrant communities. But who cares, right? We're just as happy getting traffic from people sh*t-posting memes, vague-booking, giving out-of-context hot takes to news events, and spewing whatever random thought is in their head at the moment. Plus that stuff doesn't p*ss off Apple.
To keep this thing going we need new people. And by "people" we mean teenagers, like we used to have back in the good ol' days. Unfortunately we're all in our 40s now, so we have no idea what they want. But teenagers are so cool! Imagine if they talked to us like we're one of them? We're getting hard just thinking about it.
Our Guidng Principls
To make Tumblr cool again, we must address these huge glaring issues.
- People can look at a blog without logging in. How is that fair to all the poor schlubs who had to fill out forms to get an account? Also we haven't figured out a way to force ads onto the personalized pages yet. But we swear that's not the main reason.
- People can see content they are looking for or linked to. People can keep up with blogs they follow. But the problem with this is, people don't know what they want. We know what they want! We're smart. We wrote this damn site, remember?
- Promote posts that incite pointless conversations. Posts that are guaranteed to bait every troll into responding. Isn't that why all your Magat relatives love Facebook so much? We can do that!
- P*ss off your content creators in every way possible (see #2).
- Create algorithms that throw an unending barrage of irrelevant content in your face. Have you seen Instagram lately? We could do that so easy!!!
- The app is slow. The website is slow. Obviously this is because of GIFs. Facebook and Instagram don't allow them, so why should we?
Conclusion
Our mission changes on a day-to-day basis. Right now we're super jealous of all the attention that new Threads thing is getting. We're still not sure what it is, but we're gonna download it after work.
Romancing Saga 2 (Square - Super Famicom - 1993)
Romancing Saga 2 (Square - Super Famicom - 1993)
As the Japanese adventure (ADV) game genre kept increasing in popularity throughout the 1980s, games became more ambitious in terms of graphics, text and storylines. On microcomputers, where the genre had had its beginnings, using multiple disks or tapes was a standard solution when software grew in scope and size, but consoles such as the Famicom were struggling with size limitations since cartridges were costly to produce and limited in ROM size. Many of these issues were overcome by the Famicom Disk System (FDS) peripheral, which took double-sided rewritable diskettes that could be produced at a fraction of the cost of a cartridge. Naturally, adventure games thrived on the system. Famicom Mukashibanashi: Shin Onigashima (1987) was Nintendo’s first foray into the genre and differentiated itself from the murder mystery craze that had exploded in the wake of the Famicom port of Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (1985) by basing the game on folklore rather than police procedurals. The game was developed by PaxSoftnica in collaboration with Nintendo R&D4 and was the first FDS game that came on two disks: Zenpen (前編; first part) and Kouhen (後編; last part); in total only six two-disk FDS games were officially released and all of them were ADV games.