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Post by toei on Sept 6, 2021 16:09:36 GMT -5
Thanks for the clarification. They just licensed them out, as you say, which I suppose has the chance of being even worse since Konami would go hands-off at that point with no quality control.Perhaps the best case is one like Sega getting the rights to reprogram a lot of Capcom's games, for example. Although even that was mostly because of Nintendo's stance on third-party devs not publishing for other systems. That, plus the fact that Ocean Software and those other companies generally sucked, plus the limitations of those platforms not designed for arcade-style games, all but guaranteed bad ports. Random memory: when I was a kid, I had a handful of French videogame magazines my brother had brought back from a school trip. In one of those, they explained that Ocean were no longer sending them review copies of their games because they had given several of them low scores, so that reviews of their games would be delayed. |
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Post by Sarge on Sept 6, 2021 16:27:21 GMT -5
What's interesting about Ocean games is that they often looked really nice to me in magazines... but yeah, the reality ended up often being that they were trash games. They had a few that turned out alright, though, like Jurassic Park and the Addams Family games on NES and SNES, and Navy Seals on Game Boy. (And some of their computer ports may have been good - I definitely don't have encyclopedic knowledge of their output.)
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Post by Ex on Sept 6, 2021 20:33:43 GMT -5
It's true there were a lot of licensed western PC versions of popular Japanese games. But there are exceptions. For example the internet is telling me that Technos developed the Amiga and C64 versions of Double Dragon. Technos developed the Amstrad CPC, C64, and Amiga versions of Double Dragon II: The Revenge, and the Amstrad CPC version of Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone. The MSX version of Contra that Sarge played was developed by Konami. |
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Post by Sarge on Sept 6, 2021 20:36:56 GMT -5
Yeah, that's why I made sure to mention that the MSX version turned out good - Konami themselves did the port, and considering the hardware, I'd say it turned out pretty well. I've played more slightly more fluid action games on the MSX, but those are few and far between. (I'm actually reminded of Psycho World, which actually had smooth screen scrolling, something pretty rare on the system.)
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Post by toei on Sept 6, 2021 22:34:38 GMT -5
It's true there were a lot of licensed western PC versions of popular Japanese games. But there are exceptions. For example the internet is telling me that Technos developed the Amiga and C64 versions of Double Dragon. Technos developed the Amstrad CPC, C64, and Amiga versions of Double Dragon II: The Revenge, and the Amstrad CPC version of Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone. The MSX version of Contra that Sarge played was developed by Konami. That's inaccurate. Technos isn't responsible for any of those Western computer ports. In general, the actual dev responsible for programming ports like those isn't listed on the box or in-game, so a lot of sites will make incorrect assumptions upon seeing Technos' name somewhere. They're the original developers, but they're not the developers of the port. In general, Japanese companies didn't work on those computers at all, though I'm sure there were exceptions. As per mobygames' Releases pages for Double Dragon and Double Dragon 2, all those versions you listed were coded by Binary Design, a UK-based company. Technos didn't even make the original arcade version of Rosetta Stone, so it would've been very strange for them to make the Amstrad CPC version alone, of all things. It was probably ported by a company called Sales Curve (they did some of the other ports), but I have no definite info on that. Mobygames lists East Technology (the makers of the arcade game), but again, I doubt this is accurate. They're probably only listed as the developers of the original game, in the absence of info specific to the port. The MSX was a Japanese computer, so it's not unusual for Konami to have worked on it directly. Lots of big Japanese companies made MSX games at the time. |
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Post by Ex on Sept 6, 2021 22:46:18 GMT -5
toei I'll definitely take your word for it over generic info sites like GameFAQs or Giant Bomb. Even Wikipedia often gets this stuff wrong. Looking more closely now, if you look at the sprite work in those PC Double Dragon games, the pixel art doesn't look Japanese at all. Maybe these web people just look at the box and take a wild guess as to the developer, or maybe they just make it all up entirely.
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Post by Sarge on Sept 6, 2021 23:09:12 GMT -5
I think it's just limited info, and some intern plugging stuff into a database and saying, you know what, this isn't worth me spending the (probably little pay) digging for hours trying to figure out this one company that developed the game. As toei illustrates (and others have, too), even finding solid information can be extremely challenging. So much of that era has been obfuscated, either through bad record keeping or the passage of time, in addition to the language barrier with Japanese companies. |
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Post by toei on Sept 6, 2021 23:55:56 GMT -5
I think it's just limited info, and some intern plugging stuff into a database and saying, you know what, this isn't worth me spending the (probably little pay) digging for hours trying to figure out this one company that developed the game. As toei illustrates (and others have, too), even finding solid information can be extremely challenging. So much of that era has been obfuscated, either through bad record keeping or the passage of time, in addition to the language barrier with Japanese companies. Also, subcontractors were kind of an industry secret, or at the very least, something the industry was very discrete about, so gamers knew nothing about those then. And since "retrogaming" is so tied in with nostalgia, even within that niche, most people are focused on their memories rather than learning about things worked (beyond the usual stories about Mario and a handful of other big titles), so misconceptions tend to remain. Plus a lot of those databases use user submitted info, so the accuracy is all over the place. |
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Sept 7, 2021 8:07:10 GMT -5
There are three Konami-published games on the Atari 2600. I always wondered if Konami themselves programmed them or if such duties were handed off to someone else.
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Post by toei on Sept 7, 2021 13:14:37 GMT -5
That's true, the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision actually had solid ports of Japanese arcade games by Konami, Sega, and a few others, IIRC, and they seem to have been published by those companies directly rather than licensed. Maybe the US console market was seen as too big not to go into themselves, unlike the UK computer market and it's 500 micro computers? No idea who programmed those games, but the standard of quality seemed higher from what I saw when we did our pre-NES month.
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