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GreatRedSpirit
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CloseI remember Romancing SaGa 3. I couldn't grasp how different it was from the more traditional RPGs. I remember turbo-grinding on some monster that sometimes dropped gold so I could try to buy a new weapon, only to rank up the monsters and get curb stomped after a few minutes.
I really hope the remake gets translated to English like RS2.
...
I should really get back to playing RS2, I bought it when it came out on mobile and now got it on PS4 because holy jesus is it bad playing on mobile. They neat interesting games and I wish they weren't so hard or opaque to get going.
e: to try and fix this shameful snipe, nintendo power owns. As a kid I loved reading them and the games I never had and imagining how they would play. Like one book had Sword Master and the stage layouts and the enemies. It was pretty for a NES game and it had a dude in armor and a sword in a fantasy genre and that's all it took to enamor me back then.
I really hope the remake gets translated to English like RS2.
...
I should really get back to playing RS2, I bought it when it came out on mobile and now got it on PS4 because holy jesus is it bad playing on mobile. They neat interesting games and I wish they weren't so hard or opaque to get going.
e: to try and fix this shameful snipe, nintendo power owns. As a kid I loved reading them and the games I never had and imagining how they would play. Like one book had Sword Master and the stage layouts and the enemies. It was pretty for a NES game and it had a dude in armor and a sword in a fantasy genre and that's all it took to enamor me back then.
Darken
3952
Going down the rabbit hole of jpn magazines I found some cool stuff about RPG Dante (the later then called Tsukuru series).
Imagine seeing this coverart for your personal computer magazine:
From what I gather these were people being interviewed for a game making contest they held for the magazine. The MSX Dante ports I think were around the time you could construct actual stories in games, previous the RPG Maker equivalents were just editable battle simulators.
Interesting to note that TAKERU refers to the vending machine you could purchase software from. Imagine getting an RPG Maker in a vending machine... Though like the Famidisk it seemed like it was a way to copy stuff over efficiently via kiosks rather than individually mailing them.
Imagine seeing this coverart for your personal computer magazine:
From what I gather these were people being interviewed for a game making contest they held for the magazine. The MSX Dante ports I think were around the time you could construct actual stories in games, previous the RPG Maker equivalents were just editable battle simulators.
Interesting to note that TAKERU refers to the vending machine you could purchase software from. Imagine getting an RPG Maker in a vending machine... Though like the Famidisk it seemed like it was a way to copy stuff over efficiently via kiosks rather than individually mailing them.
LordBlueRouge
2143
...I wanted to post in this earlier but completely forgot about it!
First off, thank you for finding this Darken! Super cool that peeps reuploaded those Nintendo Powers to webarchive - as great as retromags is, those cbr files are quite big and hard to go through, etc.
The next part was, that interesting article you guys mentioned in Nintendo Power Issue 27: The Winner of the 1995 ASCII entertainment software contest was actually "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo" which also had a game on Super Dante"Cooke de Dure Doe"? I'm going by google translate here, but I'll see if I can get a screen shot of it:
This was the furthest I could get without knowing the language, it looks like a decent comedy, but it's hard to tell without going further. You play as a chicken but your "master" bails on you whenever you try entering a cave etc - again hard to tell without it being in English.
EDIT3: Found a playthrough vid
The winner next year would be Corpse Party, which would later get released on psp here and a couple years after that would be Palette - This was the rpgmaker game that was later remade into a PS1 game and released in 2001. A lot of people seem to think Palette was released during the mid 90s because it was made with RPGMAKER 95, but it was actually much later than that, like closer to 1999 or 2000s etc.
Eitherway, looking at the previous contest winners will be interesting to dive into at some point: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813081106/http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/gamecon/index.html
(they're at the very bottom, no one won the grand prize for 96')
As far as I can tell they're all preserved through webarchive. I don't have much else to add except to say this is all fantastic stuff.(...there was something else I later wanted to add but I can't remember at the moment)
The only thing I wanna say is the TAKERU vending machine they're refering to. I don't know if we had anything like that in the west yet. We had shareware, but it was like, you'd go to buy a new computer at some sort of job fair and the guys there had a list of free games, they'd give to you on black floppy disks in a bag to go along with your new computer. That's how I eventually discovered stuff like chopper commando, and robot maze 3, but also later ports like Golden Axe for Windows and Wolfstein 3D (I wish I still had this computer it made a really cool humming noise when it would read a disc) But yea, this machine:
...Looks a lot like the old coffee machines that you'd usually get like coffee, tea or hot chocolate from. XD I kid. But no, I can see why they're out of circulation now, at the time this was probably the fastest way to distribute software of this kind without having to deal with a clerk, mail order or trying to get direct access to another computer. Really interesting and very cool stuff here!
EDIT2: ...You know, there's something that feels off about this, we can't be the only ones writing about this stuff. I came across a wikipedia entry for the Silfade series, awhile ago, a series of rpgmaker games extending back to rpgmaker 95 (He also made the Wolf RPG Editor)... Either no one has written about this stuff in English yet or we're looking in the wrong places.
First off, thank you for finding this Darken! Super cool that peeps reuploaded those Nintendo Powers to webarchive - as great as retromags is, those cbr files are quite big and hard to go through, etc.
The next part was, that interesting article you guys mentioned in Nintendo Power Issue 27: The Winner of the 1995 ASCII entertainment software contest was actually "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo" which also had a game on Super Dante
This was the furthest I could get without knowing the language, it looks like a decent comedy, but it's hard to tell without going further. You play as a chicken but your "master" bails on you whenever you try entering a cave etc - again hard to tell without it being in English.
EDIT3: Found a playthrough vid
The winner next year would be Corpse Party, which would later get released on psp here and a couple years after that would be Palette - This was the rpgmaker game that was later remade into a PS1 game and released in 2001. A lot of people seem to think Palette was released during the mid 90s because it was made with RPGMAKER 95, but it was actually much later than that, like closer to 1999 or 2000s etc.
Eitherway, looking at the previous contest winners will be interesting to dive into at some point: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813081106/http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/gamecon/index.html
(they're at the very bottom, no one won the grand prize for 96')
As far as I can tell they're all preserved through webarchive. I don't have much else to add except to say this is all fantastic stuff.(...there was something else I later wanted to add but I can't remember at the moment)
The only thing I wanna say is the TAKERU vending machine they're refering to. I don't know if we had anything like that in the west yet. We had shareware, but it was like, you'd go to buy a new computer at some sort of job fair and the guys there had a list of free games, they'd give to you on black floppy disks in a bag to go along with your new computer. That's how I eventually discovered stuff like chopper commando, and robot maze 3, but also later ports like Golden Axe for Windows and Wolfstein 3D (I wish I still had this computer it made a really cool humming noise when it would read a disc) But yea, this machine:
...Looks a lot like the old coffee machines that you'd usually get like coffee, tea or hot chocolate from. XD I kid. But no, I can see why they're out of circulation now, at the time this was probably the fastest way to distribute software of this kind without having to deal with a clerk, mail order or trying to get direct access to another computer. Really interesting and very cool stuff here!
EDIT2: ...You know, there's something that feels off about this, we can't be the only ones writing about this stuff. I came across a wikipedia entry for the Silfade series, awhile ago, a series of rpgmaker games extending back to rpgmaker 95 (He also made the Wolf RPG Editor)... Either no one has written about this stuff in English yet or we're looking in the wrong places.
LordBlueRouge
2143
...Kind of want to continue this thread cause we left on an interesting note. Apparently there's a decent Dante98 player out there. Once I figure out how to get it to run and record it, I'll add it to the archive thread. The one I had disabled battles. But it'd be cool to finally play one of the 1995 Contest Winners. I think it had an snes port too? I don't know which came first:
I think it's just interesting to look at this, cause while a lot of aspects have become easier and customizable in later rpgmakers, you're still essentially making and playing jrpgs with these programs.
Anyways, today, I wanted to share with you guys the NA Magazine ad for Xenogears - I was going through old magazines and I noticed stuff like Bushido Blade 2 and Musashi had ads, but not Xenogears? and that's because the Xenogears ad apparently showed up between issues of Marvel Comics, you can browse more about it on reddit.
(click for close up)
I've never been a huge comicbook fan, so I mostly learned about xenogears through the demo disc that came with Parasite Eve? I dunno, as great as a game Xenogears turned out to be, I just feel like maybe they missed the mark on this one? Xenogears had more stuff to it. I thought if you were gonna do an ad for it, you'd focus on the fighting system, the story and the animated cutscenes. Like, I guess having this ad show in comics was the right route, showing Fei alongside his mech is sort of similar to showing off a superhero persona? -- But like, maybe someone could clarify, but I always thought it was a lot cheaper to get a magazine with a playstation demo disc back in the day (7.99 USD) than a comic book?
I dunno. There was limited tech back then, so they probably didn't have a whole lot to make this look exciting, I still wonder though.
I think it's just interesting to look at this, cause while a lot of aspects have become easier and customizable in later rpgmakers, you're still essentially making and playing jrpgs with these programs.
Anyways, today, I wanted to share with you guys the NA Magazine ad for Xenogears - I was going through old magazines and I noticed stuff like Bushido Blade 2 and Musashi had ads, but not Xenogears? and that's because the Xenogears ad apparently showed up between issues of Marvel Comics, you can browse more about it on reddit.
(click for close up)
I've never been a huge comicbook fan, so I mostly learned about xenogears through the demo disc that came with Parasite Eve? I dunno, as great as a game Xenogears turned out to be, I just feel like maybe they missed the mark on this one? Xenogears had more stuff to it. I thought if you were gonna do an ad for it, you'd focus on the fighting system, the story and the animated cutscenes. Like, I guess having this ad show in comics was the right route, showing Fei alongside his mech is sort of similar to showing off a superhero persona? -- But like, maybe someone could clarify, but I always thought it was a lot cheaper to get a magazine with a playstation demo disc back in the day (7.99 USD) than a comic book?
I dunno. There was limited tech back then, so they probably didn't have a whole lot to make this look exciting, I still wonder though.
LordBlueRouge
2143
Posting this in a couple of places, but thought I'd post it here as well.https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1655618541373259776
It's just wild to finally see some of these guys in person.
Filmed on 4.1.2023 at Midwest Gaming Classic.
Frank Cifaldi (Video Game History Foundation) moderates a panel featuring former EGM Editors Ken (Sushi-X) Williams, Terry (Trickman) Minnich, Ray (Radd) Price, and Mike (Virus) Vallas. They discuss working at Electronic Gaming Monthly Magazine, gaming in the 90s, and the infamous Street Fighter II Sheng Long 1992 April Fools trick. Thank you to Coury Carlson (My Life in Gaming) for capturing and editing this footage, so these stories can be preserved before the EGM editors drop dead from old age. Enjoy and please support The Video Game History Foundation and My Life in Gaming. Both just as important to our shared culture as EGM ever was.
The Video Game History Foundation: https://gamehistory.org/
My Life In Gaming: https://www.mylifeingaming.com/
RedMask
1139
One of my big magazine memories is seeing a game that looked like Final Fantasy but had a 6 man team battle. But, I could never recall what the game was.
In recent years I have found out that the game was almost certainly Romancing Saga 1.
In recent years I have found out that the game was almost certainly Romancing Saga 1.
