Chatterbox: Video Games

Huh.

Funny how Ogre Battle, the game with a backstory specifically set up to make prequels to the point they called their first game "Part V" never got any prequels.

sometimes devs get overconfident,or it was the publisher

I mean there where four other games. If they went in reverse chronology they could have had parts 1 to 5. Instead we have parts 5 to 7 with two Gaiden Games.

And then there's Xenogears which was the 5th part of an ambitiously planned out story that never got any prequels or sequels made, and its successor Xenosaga which was meant to be a massive series but development went completely haywire.

Continuing from our Mortal Kombat discussion a few posts earlier, I don't know why there's an uptrend of Mortal Kombat kontent on the Japanese side of things as of this year. Is it just a Cult Classic in Japan that we've misunderstood for so long until just recently?

They tried back in the day, like MK 2 had a killer commercial in Japan.

EDIT: the embed wont work so here is a link [1]

But once the CERO rating system hit, its just impossible for any MK game to actually be compliant to it. Monster gore is just straight up fine in Japan, human gore... that's got a lot of restrictions. Even the 'Z' rating which is 18+ has restrictions and MK doesn't meet those at all and the devs gave up trying.

MK 1 was the only version of MK 1-3 that wasn't censored and 3 was the last game released in Japan.

Edited by Memers on Mar 15th 2024 at 4:35:26 AM

The last couple MK games were on Switch, right? It's a huge console in Japan that isn't region-locked, maybe more people than usual imported the recent games and played them. According to one Japanese site I read, Mortal Kombat: Deception was more popular than usual in Japan because it had a PSP port, which was a region-free system you could easily import games for.

More insane about Xenosaga is that is was essentially a 6 episode concept for just one Xenogears's Backstory episodes

I'm brainstorming a faction from within Kid Icarus: Uprising, a race of half-human, half-beast creatures that my 'sona is part of.

Another trailer for Inazuma Eleven Victory Road.

Oh hey embeds are working again.

Started playing Rise Eterna because Unicorn Overlord was TOO GOOD and I needed a mediocre SRPG to calm down with. It's eh so far.

Lately I've been getting into old Game Boy games, like Spud's Adventure, Great Greed, Final Fantasy Adventure, Avenging Spirit, and Skate or Die Bad 'n' Rad. It's really cool seeing the variety of genres and how they were adapted to fit on such a small screen!

Great Greed is interesting that it was one of the first games to give you a choice of romance options... Including at least one guy from what I know. Although I'm sure given the era the change is ultimately just one or two lines of dialogue and is probably not played too seriously. (I know you can also invoke The Jailbait Wait if you choose the youngest princess... Amazing what flew under the radar back then.)

My favorite Game Boy titles will always be Donkey Kong '94 and Dragon Quest Monsters though. I think my memories of the latter are from the Game Boy Color specifically, although my young mind did not make a distinction between the two systems when I was a kid.

The Mega Man titles on the Game Boy are particularly awesome too.

According to the game's YMMV page, "At the end of the game, Sam (a male hero) is offered a Standard Hero Reward for his trouble where he can propose to one of the five princesses, but with repeated interaction he can choose the others, some of which are male. While it's a short scene and there's a comedic edge to it — you can also marry either the queen or the king, which naturally gets them divorced — the marriage is not considered anything strange regardless of whether Sam's partner is male or female."

You can also not pick anyone if that's your preference.

DK '94 and Dragon Quest Monsters are also awesome, and so are the Mega Man games <3

Edited by lalalei2001 on Mar 21st 2024 at 1:45:40 PM

Since Sony canceled the plans to wrap up the Left Hanging unlockable ending for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, why can't the developers just tell us how the DLC would've gone, or better yet, how it would end?

I have a kinda random question: For old licensed games like Home Alone for Game Boy how did they turn movie still frames into pixel art?

Depending on age, while I have no doubt that sometimes early on it was manually generated pixel by pixel, as the years passed it became more likely that the art team got the still onto a computer, and then ran it through a converter function, either as a stand alone program or as tool in a larger program. Vary the settings some or pick a new still if things don't turn out good enough, then hand it over to the programmers once they had a decent result.

The Game Boy game looks like they redrew the pictures entirely, but the SNES game has pictures that look like they straight up were scanned from screenshots!

Is it really in question that they could put super low-res movie screenshots into an SNES games? Remember that Mortal Kombat was on the 16-bit systems its whole graphical gimmick was that they took pictures of actors and turned those into character sprites.

Does anyone know of any games that portrayed convincing or otherwise well-depicted cave interiors?

(Noting that I'm not necessarily looking only for realistic depictions; stylised depictions would be welcome, too! Similarly, I'm open to both modern graphics and older.)

I'm working on a game project, and want to see how other games have handled such environments...

My first thought is the Donkey Kong Country series.

To the question about the making of pixel art of movie scenes for Game Boy games, this may not be an exact answer, but this video about how the pixel art of the card art from the Pokemon Trading Card Game game might shed some light on how that sort of thing can be done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QCN4BVYKjE

(Embeds still aren't working for me, so a direct link it is)

Thank you—I'll look that up, I intend! ^_^

Masahiro Sakurai once taught me (via YouTube) that back in the day, particularly on Game Boy, sprites had to be drawn by using a number-based system.

He also once said that while developing "Kirby's Dream Land", there was a mechanic where Kirby could get launched if he was low on health, and if he went off-screen he loses a life, similar to Smash Bros. (although he admitted that he forgot about that mechanic until afterwards)

Edited by wooden-ladybug93 on Mar 26th 2024 at 1:08:38 PM

This is interesting. A new Marvel game made by NetEase will be revealed.

According to some, it's gonna be a 6v6 3rd person shooter similar to Overwatch. And here are some of the Marvel characters that will appear in this new game.