The new one looks nice tho. And looks like it is less BS than Contra 3 and Contra 4. Only shame is that it didn't take the torch of Hard Corps... Which, TBMFH, NO CONTRA DID! Hard Corps is the only Contra with multiple routes, multiple endings tied to the route.
GryZor sounds like the fake video game in a cartoon. I love the Contra series but I can't believe I never knew of all those cool graphical changes in the NES Japanese version
That goemon interlude got me. I mean maybe they are "too japanese" for your regular consumer and the humor is.... so weird but man they are good. Ganbare goemon 2 (and somewhat 3 & 4) is sooooo good and both the N64 american releases are just sooo damn fun, the music is godly, there no excuse really. Tbh a lot of goemon games are pretty bad like... the NES ones... but it really hurts me that we got barely any releases and so ppl never talk about goemon at all. Thanks for mentioning it.
ninjacape / if you are able to beat Bayou Billie you are pretty much a God in my eyes. It’s unnecessarily difficult...so much so that it’s no fun. Mad City is a great game and totally worth finishing. I LOVE difficult games, I loath games that are basically unbeatable simply because of Blockbuster video and rentals. I realize it’s just my opinion and it’s worth nothing but...there you go. ;)
Rondo of Blood also saw a US release on the Wii Virtual Console. Also worth noting in regards to Probotector, the character itself is playable on Contra Rebirth for WiiWare. But yeah, I like this idea and obviously we’ll see episodes of Capcom, Nintendo, Square, Sega, and Sony but it does give me a suggestion for a Punching Weight episode, Western Made Games Released Exclusively in Japan
@@GiordanDiodato They screwed over a lot of people, but yeah... Then again, we got some things the US did not, notably Terranigma. (That's published by Enix though, so not the same thing prior to the merger) Everyone should have gotten both Terranigma and Chrono Trigger though. Seiken Densetsu 3 would've been nice too... Apparently that was never ported because Squaresoft didn't want to pay the costs associated with it. It's already a very large ROM, and English translations require more space than the japanese text. (you can see this with the Pokemon games - japanese game roms are much smaller than western versions of the game.) This also plagued Secret of Mana before it, since, although the ROM is about the same size as the japanese version, (which already has about 40% of it's intended content missing since it was supposed to be a SNES CD game but that never came out), the English translation is extremely simplified and cut down due to lack not having a large enough cartridge available. Though my guess is it's more that they're cheapskates and didn't want to pay for the extra ROM required, rather than it not being technically possible. A Snes can support at a bare minimum, 13 megabyte cartridges after all, on a purely technical level, yet the largest games ever released topped out at 6 megabytes...
"No one gets Contra games! Konami doesn't even make them anymore! So all's well that ends well." Ah, to be so innocent in 2018, in the time before Rogue Corps.
I always imagined a timeline where Konami continued Contra and Castlevania and even made a crossover called "ContraVania." Plot: aliens try to resurrect Dracula. Imagine a game that plays like Contra and Castlevania, you can play as characters from both and have powerups from both. "Spread whip" is one of dumbest most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life.
You know what? I always wondered what a Contra/Castlevania crossover would have been like as well. Would you be playing as a Belmont, a Lecarde, and/or a Belnades in the distant future aiding Bill Rizer and Lance Bean as they take down the evil forces of Red Falcon? Would you be able to attack with both the Spread Gun AND the Vampire Killer? Would Alucard, now some 900 years older, be in the game? I believe Konami circa 1990-1995 could have pulled this off, too. I think the idea is and would have been absurd, but also extremely fun.
Issue: Balance. Why would you ever play as Simon Belmont with committed jump arc when you could play as Bill Rizer who can shoot a spread gun in 8 directions? Castlevania peeps have healthbar, but that isn't that much of an advantage when Contra guys can just obliterate all medusa heads in front of them by mashing fire.
Lovely video! Random Contra censorship note: the WiiWare exclusive Contra ReBirth changed the evil end boss from Hitler (in Japan) to a lizard guy (in NA and EU) called Plissken!
A little disappointed you didn't spend more time on Castlevania III. On top of changes to the music and some graphics, several gameplay elements got changed for the US version (for the worse). Particularly Grant simply stabbing with his knife instead of throwing it, and the mechanics of enemy damage. In the JP version, different enemies deal differing amounts of damage, while in the US version, all enemies deal the same amount of damage, with that amount ramping up as the game progresses. It seriously alters the balance of the game. Lumped together, these make for compelling reasons to stick with the JP version of Castlevania III over the US one.
Thanks ! I was going to comment on that exact thing. Also, the fact that Contra - and Castlevania III - didn't get their extra chips in the West because Nintendo didn't allow that, not because Konami didn't want to produce them.
And let’s not forget how in the US version, dying to Dracula forces you to repeat the pendulum room, which itself was made harder by adding bats to assault you, while in the JP version, dying to Dracula just sends you back to the staircase right before him.
@@blara2401 I thought that Contra and CV3 for the market outside Japan didn't have the additional chips because the "western" NES model lacks the extra pins in the cartridge slot required to support it.
Omg the psycho mantis fight reading your hard drive joke was comedy gold and definitely one of the best comedy skits I’ve seen in UA-cam for a long time.
"re-imagining" works for something like Dracula X but I tend to use the word "conversion" because it was always used to refer to arcade home ports like what we saw on NES, where everything from Ninja Gaiden to Bionic Commando and Guerilla War were vastly different games at home. The terminology carried forward in my memories of the SNES and Genesis era with it's totally different licensed games like Aladdin, Taz, Turtles In Time vs Hyperstone Heist etc.
Excellent video; I'd love to see more. :> Vaguely related: all these alternative versions of Castlevania games are a large part of the reason why I've barely played the series; I generally go in release order and treat remakes as separate games, and there are like fifty different versions of Castlevania 1 scattered across regions and consoles, all of them just different enough to be distinct games.
@@GiordanDiodato That's the thing: it's essentially a different game from the original. I'd rather play the original first so I can understand what's different and judge the changes on my own.
@@Loader2K1 True that. Nintendo had a well-intentioned but poorly executed policy meant to prevent flooding the market with shovelware while Sega basically just IGNORED its American division as being "rude and unknowledgeable."
@@OtakuUnitedStudio: Ironically enough, in the later and twilight years of the NES (1991-1994), the console got flooded with shovelware from such terrible, non-Japanese developers and publishers such as the now-defunct Ocean (which never truly went away; it's still around under the branding of Atari), the now-defunct THQ (long before the company would hit paydirt with the WWF/E license in the late 1990s all the way into the early 2010s), Camerica, Codemasters, MicroProse, LJN, and Hi-Tech Expressions, to name a few. As for Sega, in my humble opinion, both their North American subsidiary and parent Japanese company are to blame for them leaving the video game industry as a first-party company. Between late 1994 and early 1998, the company as a whole was on a downward spiral. This was due to the infighting and miscommunications between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. SOJ apparently thought they knew better than SOA, the division of Sega that was once raking in the cash thanks to Tom Kalinske. To make matters worse, they ousted Kalinske for former Sony Computer Entertainment America president/plant, Bernie Stolar, who nearly ran SOA into the ground by fucking over North American Saturn owners. Stolar chose not to release a LOT of third-party games on the Saturn in North America, and he ultimately and prematurely pulled the plug on the console. Sega shortly turned themselves around with the Dreamcast, but, according to Sega Reniassance ( segareniassance.blogspot.com/2016/03/op-ed-bernie-stolar-and-isao-okawa-dumb.html ), pulled the plug on that console in the West because the SOJ president at the time, Isao Okawa, wanted to take the company out of the video game industry.
@@somethingsomething9008 I knew where most of the games I played were made, who they were made by. I read magazines. Assuming your question means how did I know which games came from Japan.
@@somethingsomething9008 Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well that came a bit later than the nes era, in my teens, information started to become more abundant and easily access, ya know? When the internet really took hold from the early/mid 90s and so on. I didn't mean to imply I knew games were changed for localization in the 80s of anything.
Contra III in the West actually had the codes for 30 lives, level select, and the sound test taken out of it for whatever reason Even weirder is that the 30 lives code for it is the motion for a Hadouken instead of the usual Konami Code
Konami was well aware of the Code's popularity by the time of Contra III's release, so by then they played with players' expectations by changing up the code itself and/or its effects - remember Gradius III on the SNES and how the standard Code in there is essentially a suicide button, with the real deal being the one where Left and Right are swapped by L and R? :B
Not only that. In the EU/US, to get the ending, you had to beat to game on hard. The Japanese got it on any difficulty. Curse that rental market, right?
@@NosferatuMalus: As fucked up as the video game industry is now, how fucked up it used to be in the 8-bit and 16-bit era is unbelievable. Japanese gamers had to buy their video games outright, which, while expensive, were much more balanced and enjoyable experiences. North American and European gamers, on the other hand, had the option of renting a game until they're done with it in contrast to buying expensive video games, but had to deal with absurd difficulty spikes, dumbed down or entirely-deleted content, or getting screwed out of great video games from Japan altogether. Well, at least we had the Game Genie and Pro Action Replay to use to finally see the end of nearly unbeatable games.
At least they still made great games and released them in the West. I miss the Konami of old. They went out as one of the worst video game companies of all time. Their management treats their employees like prisoners and they have absolutely no respect for them, no matter how much they've done for them. They have no respect for their IPs. They have no respect for their customers. After everything they've done I'm surprised they're even still making games, even if they are mostly low budget garbage now.
K I've been following the channel since before he moved. I always used to hope I'd run into him at Bosco's sizing up the NES games for any hidden gems. Seeing that bit of my own personal history with the Snake's Revenge cart was really cool. :-) (And I can't figure out how people are getting these @'s to work all of a sudden.)
OneColdMonkey too funny. I just asked if he was from Anchortown. Good ol Video City...I remember them being known for their “Adult” sections when I was a kid,
Man, I feel you with the Goemon games. I fell in love with Mystical Adventures as a kid and have always wanted more. Also, while we may not have any more Contra games, can we get a shoutout for Hard Corps. Uprising? It's fantastic and so much fun!
Dracula X appeared because an exclusivity contract Nintendo use with third parties. Konami could not make a port of Rondo. Konami used assets and remade the OST but changing certain parts to elude Nintendo.
I would totally watch a whole series on how certain companues were worse in the west or even vice versa. It's interesting stuff and I found myself engaged by your delivery and commentary.
Man, ive been keeping up with you ever since i found space money octogon years ago, and honestly, that goemon interlude is the best god damn thing; this episode in particular is seriously some of the best comedic timing on SSFF. Great stuff guys
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and its N64 sequel will very likely never ever be rereleased. At least not through official emulation as both were some of the few N64 titles that required the memory card.
Arcadian Legend if Sony could do proper memory card emulation on the PS3, Nintendo should just as easily be able to do the same! If I were to do an N64 mini: - controllers would be USB-C, allowing for vibration and the controllers to also have external storage built in allowing for Controller Pak emulation - parental controls would be present, allowing parents to lock out T rated titles while their pre-teen offspring to play E rated titles Games: Super Mario 64 Mario Kart 64 Mystical Ninja starring Goemon Ms Pac Man Maze Madness Yoshi’s Story Rayman 2 The Great Escape Rakuga Kids Pokémon Snap Pokémon Puzzle League Pokémon Stadium (connection of a Game Boy Classic Edition would allow this one to be enjoyed in full) Bomberman 64 Mega Man 64 Pilotwings 64 F-Zero X Dr Mario 64 Excitebike 64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Donkey Kong 64 Mario Party 3 BONUS GAME The Legend of Zelda Master Quest
I don't see how that's relevant. Emulating the memory card isn't exactly a major challenge compared to having an n64 emulator in general. It's really just a minor functional variant on s-ram within cartridges... If you can emulate one, you can emulate the other. No, the reasons for not officially re-releasing games are rarely technical (well, maybe - the virtual console didn't seem to have any SuperFX games on it. Though again the reasons could be non-technical too), but more frequently ideological or legal. Goldeneye for instance has the exceptionally unfortunate combination of being developed by Rare, Published by Nintendo AND being a licensed game. That's an absolutely terrible combination legally speaking. (how many games with 3rd party licenced content have been officially re-released in general? I can think of some, but not many...) Though not as bad as dealing with games where ownership at this point is just plain uncertain... Like a developer or publisher that no longer exists for instance. Or even where they do, where it's unclear what the exact ownership implications might be. Take Terranigma - a frequently overlooked SNES action RPG that is perhaps one of the system's most significant yet forgotten games. This was published by Enix, but created but developed by a company that no longer exists. (the previous game from that developer was even published by Enix in Japan and Nintendo in the US and Europe - Terranigma itself got a European release, but not a US one, which is the opposite of the far more famous Chrono Trigger.) So the developer no longer exists, and Enix merged with Squaresoft to form Square Enix - given that some of the games of this developer were published by multiple companies in different countries, it follows that the legal rights may not have belonged to Enix... So... What are the odds of this getting a re-release? Almost zero. As for a hypothetical N64 classic, realistically to properly reflect the best of the system it should include Rareware games... Alas, that seems incredibly unlikely given the current situation. Still, I struggle to imagine doing the n64 justice without having Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, and perhaps something like blast corps as well. (personally it'd also feel off if it lacked Conker's Bad Fur day and Perfect Dark, but those games, while amazing were less popular, and thus not exactly iconic as such...)
There was a really weird situation when it came to the western release of the Tactics Ogre remake on the PSP. Interestingly they added a crap load of content, easily 100 hours or more on it's own, but then reduced stat growth by 10 times. On top of this they changed the weirdly included crafting fail rates to make them better....and gimped the AI...sort of. Namely the original AI was competent, sure, but no one wanted to sit through them passing along buffs for half an hour until one of their units could move. Still, it's fun to look through the Japanese version to see what could have been if they lef the AI in tact (Sometimes it's a bit retarded, so it's a bit jarring where in a couple battles they actually play it safe and hold formations. I've tested and even found they they actually removed the option for certain AI settings entirely, resulting in a unit just moving and doing nothing every 3-4 turns.)
And the initial name for the "Super C" grocery store franchise was actually "Super Carnaval", they quickly (and wisely) opted to shorten it to Super C. So it made the name of the Contra sequel game even more hilarious in the 80s :)!
because the word "contra" was associated with the iran contra scandel when that port came out, this is probably also why the name wasn't used for the European releases (not just probotector but also the microcomputer ports of the first game which went by the japanese name, though the US computer versions of both games still used the contra and super contra names respectively).
Like all the third parties, Konami had to use mapper chips supplied by Nintendo for the western markets in place of their custum chips used for the japanese versions. Nintendo did this to avoid the risk of third parties being able to produce carts by themselves and flood the US market like it happened during the Atari 2600 era.
I heard that story as well, but I also heard, in the case of Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, the NES had some expansion slot at the bottom of it that could have used Konami's special chips, but it was never used.
@@GiordanDiodato: I have no idea, but I'm guessing that, if Nintendo of America had used that expansion slot on the bottom of the NES like Nintendo of Japan did with the Famicom, we probably would have been able to experience Castlevania 3 the way it was intended to be experienced. Well, from an audible standpoint, at least. I'm pretty sure Konami of America would have still jacked up the difficulty to the point where use of a Game Genie was understandable.
@@GiordanDiodato: Again, I have no idea. You might be able to if you have a modded NES or one of these reproduction NES consoles with both NES and Famicom support.
I never got to play the two titles for the N64. I REALLY wanted to. They looked awesome. Blockbuster never had any copies. But I got to play Chameleon Twist so that's SORT of a consolation?
I'd argue we're not missing too much. The Super Nintendo/Famicom (Specifcally the platformers), 64, and two of the PS1 games are worth one's time. Maybe the DS one? Never played that. That sounds like a lot, but the rest amounts to board, party, RPG(s?), or mediocre platformers particularly with the PS1 and the one on PS2.
nick malcom Then stole all your passwords and logged on to all your accounts and trolled and made fraudulent purchases, then SWATted you with the police. XD
I made it into the top 50 worldwide ranking with that game. Unfortunately it's not really contra at all. You can type the konami code during stage 1 loading screen to get the jungle stage soundtrack remix which is cool but besides that the game was okay. Had its addictive moments Edit the code for the PS3 version is Up Up Down Down left right left right X O start.
The thing that always amused me about Konami and Capcom back then is that they seemed to take opposing views of changing difficulty for Western releases. Many Capcom games were made easier for the West (Ghouls n Ghosts, Super GnG, Megaman 2) while many Konami games were made harder, like Super C, Turtles 2, Turtles in Time, Castlevania IV, etc. Of course sometimes they were harder just because they took out the cheat codes!
Yes and no actually. For Capcom they made varying degrees of difficulty for the west (MM1 Bionic Commando, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Darkwing Duck) but usually if the game was challenging by default (Ghost's Goblins, Ghosts n' Ghouls, Super GnG, both Gargoyle's Quests), it wasn't noticed as much. I'd disagree about your Konami picks though: Super C was much easier than Contra, TMNT 2 is easier than TMNT1 by a long shot, Turtles in Time had different difficulty levels, Super CV 4 is considered one of the best of the NES/SNES era of CV games and was not considered unfairly difficult. Now, Mad City/Bayou Billy was an unfairly difficult game in the west by Konami, to an extent Goonies 2 was aswell (very much due to it's butchered translation and being difficult to know how to progress beyond trial and error on every room).
rugalb98 I think you misunderstood what I meant. I wasn’t saying games like Super C and TMNT were easier/harder than the previous games in their series, I meant the US releases were made a easier than the Japanese releases. Although in the case of Super C it’s because they took the 30 lives cheat out! 😅
Xulomander Yes that’s true, some games were made harder. I’d love to know why Capcom thought turning the auto-aim off in Resident Evil was a good idea! Obviously it was only a temporary decision as it was back on for the Director’s Cut!
If you needed 30 lives for Super C (specially when most kids had played Contra) you didn't bother learning the game at all and used a programmer code to make the game play itself. The patterns are a lot easier, enemy projectiles were bigger and clearer to see the only inherent difficulty spike that the programmers put in was using the Spreader (it made bosses have double health and spawn more running enemies on the levels). Super C was waaaaaaay easier than Contra and doesn't count as a Western difficulty spike. TMNT was just frustrating altogether for either Eastern or Western audiences, but the sole reason it was a hit regardless was that it came out during TMNT's prominence in media culture. Still have no idea why he didn't include the Mad City/Bayou Billy difference. That was a clear indication of Konami being a dick to Western gamers (specially with how much attention the game got in previews, write ups, and commercials).
This N64 Mystical Ninja was one of my favourite childhood games. It's painful they don't make them like that anymore... or they do and I've just never seen them..
Me too, that was first distinctly "Japanese" game Id played, and was for many people. It was a miracle it even had an international release at the time, I think it still holds up compared to other N64 games.
@@JetWolfEX It does but anytime I try to emulate it (I don't own a WiiU and it ain't on Switch) it's very poor quality. Skybox doesn't work, laggy. I know Project 64 is average but it runs most games sweet.
The Metal Gear segment is missing the rawest deal the West got. When the Metal Gear Solid The Essential Collection got released, it only included MGS 1, 2, and 3 (with 2 and 3 having the updated versions included), but Japan got all of that plus VR Missions, Portable Ops, Metal Gear 1 and 2, and an assortment of special features that weren't included in the Western release.
I remember playing contra force quite a bit when I was a kid. It does have that awesome opening level music though and the ability to play as 4 different characters.
Fun fact Bayou Billy was supposed to be based on Crocodile Dundee but Konami never got the rights for it. The famicom artwork to Mad City even resembles Paul Hogan.
...shame they have the durability of a Trade Fed combat droid... unless you're building them en masse on the cheap, a combat robot needs to take more than one hit!
I agree. The story in the manual said something about these cool fighting robots being sent into warzones where humans could not go. I always thought they resembled the Terminator. When I found out that the USA had these generic muscular humans instead and was called 'Contra' was so confused xD Thinking about it, sure Probotector is a weird name but so is the name Contra... I know it's short for Contraband but even that doesn't make it any less weird. 'Probotector' to me sounds like 'Terminator' and just sounds cool
Probotector = Protector + Robot. Fun fact. Poland didn't get the censored version. We had the pirated Soviet Famiclones, so we had the "original" Contra on multicarts.
As far as I know, with Metal gear there was two reasons for the changes, NES could not run the MSX games properly and Nintendo´s censorship. You know that was cold war era, and Metal gear was kind of sensitive material. But now when we have access to the Metal gear original games, instead of two classic Metal gear games we have *four* and as a Metal gear fan I think that is a win-win situation. And I prefer Snake´s Revenge over most of the modern Metal gear games. I never had problems with Contra/Probotector, actually I wish that Konami revives Probotector at someday. And back in the NES days I didn´t even know there was a sequel for Probotector. And also with Castlevania I think there was just hardware limitations, like SNES could not run Rondo of blood so they made the Vampire Kiss, which is not a bad game, it´s like Mega man 6 it´s not bad, but it´s just not as good as the predecessors.
Yeah, that's definitely the reason for the change. What weirds me out about it is how this policy only seems to have become a thing by 1994, pretty late into the Genesis/MD's lifespan...
@@thestripedmenace Much like Ninja Gaiden 3's changes to be harder, despite it being the last game of the series (at the time) and near the end of the NES's lifespan too. NG3 USA had double damage and limited continues.
@@thestripedmenace Also IMO is one of the things that ended up killing the Genesis as well. Since Sega made their games super difficult, and rarely gave options to save, many of their new games felt old school compared to many next gen games on the market.
@@Nandru85 Apparently it was intentional. It also had a password system that was omitted from the US edition. According to wikipedia, it never saw a EU release. It seemed that Tecmo had a different take on the US audience than Square did, so it wasn't a rental thing?!
"No more staggered releases." I wish. Us Falcom fans are still waiting for the western release of Trails of Cold Steel III even after the FOURTH game was released in Japan. Hopefully there won't be such a ridiculous wait for the newly announced Ys IX.
it's probably due to how text-heavy CSIII is. It's more text-heavy compared to Trails in the Sky SC, which took 3 years to localize. Also the fact Falcom refuses to allow publishers the rights to their games till their next game comes out. I know, it's weird, but it's just how they roll. And don't get me started on how much Falcom milks their franchises...
Falcom is a very small company that only cares about Japan. Western releases are nothing but an afterthought. It also doesn't help that some of their games have scripts that can fill several books.
@@asteria9963 Yeah Sora SC has more than 720,000 words in it. For comparison, War & Peace has about 580,000 words, Atlas Shrugged has around 645,000 words, and Les Misérables has around 655,000 words. And both parts of Don Quixote combined is 345,000 words.
See though, falcom games have always been hit or miss as to if they will or won't come to the west. Even as of late, they're one of the major companies I can think of that's still like that for some bizarre reason
I just gotta say, I know you've been making videos without the HVGN moniker for awhile now, but since you moved on from that point in time, your content has absolutely FLOURISHED in terms of quality. I remember back when you first announced that you were ending the HVGN name and were gonna start making a name for yourself. That, to me, translated to "I'm gonna do a few more things with this channel at most then fade into obscurity". I'm glad to say that you've stuffed my expectations for you down my own throat and then some. Keep up the awesome work Derek. Happy Holidays!
.... Thanks for reminding me that just recently, I found out that he's the old HVGN. Branching out and moving out of James' shadow REALLY did wonders for Derek!
Some corrections. 9:40 - Famicom Disk System games don't have battery backup. The whole point of the disk card media was the fact that save data was easily writable without the need of battery. 13:30 - As for Contra, it's not that Konami didn't want to make a special chip for the U.S. version so much so as it is the fact that the Famicom and NES reads their cartridge pins differently and Konami's VRC series of chips made use of pins that were not on the NES (it's hard to explain without going too technical). I get the impression the NES Contra was the actual original, since the cutscenes, background animation and hidden ending in the Famicom version are extra stuff that wasn't based on anything in the arcade game (and on top of that, the Famicom version is a bit more polished in some minor instances like the different stage clear music for the final boss and the sound test mode). It's quite telling that the Famicom version of Super Contra didn't have any of that extra content from the first FC game and is almost identical to the U.S. NES version. Also, I kinda liked Snake's Revenge and never had any issue with its difficulty.
Good corrections - I believe one of the details about Famicom game extra chips that's often not talked about is how the individual companies in Japan would make their own carts with their own chips (Like the VRC6) but in the US/World Nintendo themselves manufactured the carts and did not/would not use 3rd party chips which is another reason Castlevania 3 ended up with a regular MMC chip from Nintendo.
@@OhmiKuma This video doesn't even bring up Jackal on the NES, which is one of the rare instances when Konami actually made a better version for the US. The Japanese version, Akai Yousai, was released for the Famicom Disk System and had its levels shortened to such an extent to fit the smaller media format.
@@GiordanDiodato Yes but there are a lot of differences between Life Force & Salamander and also between the Arcade, NES / Famicom & PC Engine versions.
No mention of Mad City/The Adventures of Bayou Billy? Shame, is an obscure game, but infamous for being made worse in the west(mostly due to being made almost unplayably difficult: the enemies do double damage, take half damage, and have far more aggressive AI, the shooting segments give you way less bullets and the driving sections in the US feature instant death instead of a life bar and much more narrow roads)
I LOVE the Probotector games - they are an insanely elaborate way to skirt around violence laws. Back when I was doing art for J2ME version of FarCry 2, we decided to add Probotector mode to the game for shits and giggles, replacing player and all enemies with robots. The mode never got finished, but I believe you can still unlock Probotector (obviously renamed for legal reasons) as a playable character in that game.
Rondo of Blood is amazing. I just finally played it last year and I was blown away. Easily the best Castlevania IMO. Symphony of the Night would be there if the game wasn't too easy (I almost never say that about anything).
Derek born and raised, Grace since elementary school. And that copy of Snake’s Revenge was bought by Derek at Video City when they were liquidating all their old games to make room for newer consoles.
To this day I still don't understand the love Rondo of Blood gets. I mean, it's fine, it's got some good ideas, but I don't think they were executed that well. Maria just straight up breaks the game in terms of difficulty, and the branching paths are not branching as such, more like the normal path, and a hidden path behind layers and layers of asinine secrets. For years I read from Castlevania Dungeon how Rondo was so much better than that sad Dracula X on the SNES, which I actually liked, so I was so stoked to play it when it was released on the PSP, and felt a resounding "meh" go over me. The same feeling stayed with me in Castlevania Requiem earlier this fall. A good game, with lots of flaws on the game design side. I actually much prefer Dracula X. It's not even near some of the best games in the series either, but at least it's a nice, tight package, with much improved visuals over Rondo.
It had the mystique of being a hard to access import for a long time. So many people built it up in their imaginations for years and/or paid out the ass to import it that they have an investment in angerly demanding that everyone else agree it's the bestest Castlevania ever. Without those goggles, it's a very unbalanced and gimmicky game lacking entirely the fierce challenge the best entries in the series are known for. CV1, CV3, Bloodlines, CV X68000, and, yes, Dracula X are all the real deal.
@@willmistretta The core elements which Rondo of Blood lacks, is Super Castlevania IV's dark atmosphere and Bloodlines' action and challenge. The main reasons that people give praise to Rondo of Blood (like me), is its variety, the saving system and the cd quality soundtrack.
@@elefsidi Hey, it's great that you like it. Really. I guess I'm just reacting against what I see as the unreasonable levels of insistence by some that it's this flawless, godlike achievement that puts the rest of the series to shame. The fanatics that cruise every retro gaming Internet venue available acting like Jehovah's Witnesses for it really are absurd.
Contra might be a hot mess but it's nothing compared to the Adventure Island/Wonder Boy/i'm not even going to list everything connected to these series because there are so many games.
Hey you're the guy who made that decent Contra 4 Review, i salute you. I personally think this guy was exaggerating a bit about Contra especially Contra Force since at least the game has nice graphics and music, and if you play it on an emulator you can get rid of the slowdown by overclocking the PPU i belive.
I remember Probotector, it was awesome and I've always been a fan of robots and battling alien robot-bio things was super cool. It was funny how late it was that I realised what Contra actually was (saw the title and even some screenshots but didn't really connect the dots until online videos became a thing and I saw the US contra parodies and such). Oh, and I loved the designs of the main two robots (the players) and some of the enemy bots (like the blue one that shoots up and such) sorta reminded me of some Decepticons (in their robot-mode, that is).
Fantastic video! It’s also worth mentioning that these alterations have made certain fans eager to “restore” the American version of game to better match the original Japanese version. I’ve seen patches for US versions or even complete retranslations of JPN versions of games like Contra 3, Megaman 3 and 7, and Castlevania 3 and 4 so people have access to “definitive versions” of said games in English. The JPN CV3 patch also remades Alucard’s sprite to resemble his Symphony of the Night look. Oh, and one think that Konami retroactively did sort of right with SOTN: its PSP (and subsequently PS4) port restores some of the JPN only features making it more complete than the original PS1 release, although they never bothered in bringing the Saturn-only features like new areas and music.
Man, Contra Force was cool! It had one of the most '80s levels ever conceived: Walking on the wings of an airplane, crossing onto other airplanes, and fighting your way through hordes of bad guys to stop a nuclear bomb!
![Capcom: How the West was Worse [SSFF]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tHZ08yk6z70/mqdefault.jpg)
![Capcom: How the West was Worse [SSFF]](/img/tr.png)
![I Can't Believe It's GBA 3D! FPS Edition, Pt. 1 | Punching Weight [SSFF]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/L9ngdYD31HQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![Most Ambitious Portable Mortal Kombat Ports | Punching Weight [SSFF]](/img/n.gif)
"Konami doesn't make Contra games anymore."
Oh, I think now we all WISH that were still true...
The new one looks nice tho. And looks like it is less BS than Contra 3 and Contra 4.
Only shame is that it didn't take the torch of Hard Corps... Which, TBMFH, NO CONTRA DID! Hard Corps is the only Contra with multiple routes, multiple endings tied to the route.
@@The-Zer0th-Law They carried a torch indeed. It's just not the Hard Corps torch.
It's those Appoloosa PS1-era Contra torch instead.
@@ChrisX_212 They are still cool Contras in my book, the PS1 ones...
GryZor sounds like the fake video game in a cartoon. I love the Contra series but I can't believe I never knew of all those cool graphical changes in the NES Japanese version
👍 lol
It broke my heart when I found out I couldn't hear that beautiful argument between Dracula and Richter in its purest form.
That goemon interlude got me.
I mean maybe they are "too japanese" for your regular consumer and the humor is.... so weird but man they are good.
Ganbare goemon 2 (and somewhat 3 & 4) is sooooo good and both the N64 american releases are just sooo damn fun, the music is godly, there no excuse really.
Tbh a lot of goemon games are pretty bad like... the NES ones... but it really hurts me that we got barely any releases and so ppl never talk about goemon at all.
Thanks for mentioning it.
"Lt. Solid Snake is a Martial Arts Expert" - Snakes Revenge, 1990
Underrated AF video game quote
Well, to be fair, soldiers are technically taught martial arts moves (albeit more to kill as well as self-defense), so that's not exactly lying.
CQC
'I know kung fu.'
'For the last time, no you don't!'
Anyone get the reference?
*gun spinning sounds*
What is that? Some kind of Judo?
~ Revolver Ocelot
@@chaosgreyblood I will venture a guess... who is Jaleel White?
You forgot Mad City/Bayou Billy. Mad City is a top 25 Famicom game and Bayou Billy is almost unplayable.
ninjacape / if you are able to beat Bayou Billie you are pretty much a God in my eyes. It’s unnecessarily difficult...so much so that it’s no fun. Mad City is a great game and totally worth finishing. I LOVE difficult games, I loath games that are basically unbeatable simply because of Blockbuster video and rentals. I realize it’s just my opinion and it’s worth nothing but...there you go. ;)
@@reagandow850 I've beaten Bayou Billy multiple times. It's all about timing on that game.
Rondo of Blood also saw a US release on the Wii Virtual Console.
Also worth noting in regards to Probotector, the character itself is playable on Contra Rebirth for WiiWare.
But yeah, I like this idea and obviously we’ll see episodes of Capcom, Nintendo, Square, Sega, and Sony but it does give me a suggestion for a Punching Weight episode, Western Made Games Released Exclusively in Japan
Squaresoft screwed over Europeans a lot.
Rondo of blood for Wii Virtual Console sucked for English speakers. There's a better, fully translated rom included with the 3D remake on PSP.
@@GiordanDiodato They screwed over a lot of people, but yeah...
Then again, we got some things the US did not, notably Terranigma.
(That's published by Enix though, so not the same thing prior to the merger)
Everyone should have gotten both Terranigma and Chrono Trigger though.
Seiken Densetsu 3 would've been nice too... Apparently that was never ported because Squaresoft didn't want to pay the costs associated with it.
It's already a very large ROM, and English translations require more space than the japanese text. (you can see this with the Pokemon games - japanese game roms are much smaller than western versions of the game.)
This also plagued Secret of Mana before it, since, although the ROM is about the same size as the japanese version, (which already has about 40% of it's intended content missing since it was supposed to be a SNES CD game but that never came out), the English translation is extremely simplified and cut down due to lack not having a large enough cartridge available.
Though my guess is it's more that they're cheapskates and didn't want to pay for the extra ROM required, rather than it not being technically possible.
A Snes can support at a bare minimum, 13 megabyte cartridges after all, on a purely technical level, yet the largest games ever released topped out at 6 megabytes...
Giordan Diodato European kids were like what is a Final Fantasy and where are the other six?
@@MatthewCobalt And I'm continued to be screwed because Castlevania Requiem is PS4 only. At least I still had fun with the game on Wii.
"No one gets Contra games! Konami doesn't even make them anymore! So all's well that ends well."
Ah, to be so innocent in 2018, in the time before Rogue Corps.
I always imagined a timeline where Konami continued Contra and Castlevania and even made a crossover called "ContraVania." Plot: aliens try to resurrect Dracula. Imagine a game that plays like Contra and Castlevania, you can play as characters from both and have powerups from both. "Spread whip" is one of dumbest most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life.
You know what? I always wondered what a Contra/Castlevania crossover would have been like as well. Would you be playing as a Belmont, a Lecarde, and/or a Belnades in the distant future aiding Bill Rizer and Lance Bean as they take down the evil forces of Red Falcon? Would you be able to attack with both the Spread Gun AND the Vampire Killer? Would Alucard, now some 900 years older, be in the game? I believe Konami circa 1990-1995 could have pulled this off, too. I think the idea is and would have been absurd, but also extremely fun.
Issue: Balance. Why would you ever play as Simon Belmont with committed jump arc when you could play as Bill Rizer who can shoot a spread gun in 8 directions? Castlevania peeps have healthbar, but that isn't that much of an advantage when Contra guys can just obliterate all medusa heads in front of them by mashing fire.
The spread whip exists already. It's called a Cat o' Nine Tails.
Wow, konami will never contact you to make that masterpiece
No Dracula!
You are the aliens!
Solid Snake.
Also called an Erection.
Konami Proudly Presents....Metal Gear: Solid 6-Trouser Snake introducing stealth kills via sodomy!
Lovely video!
Random Contra censorship note: the WiiWare exclusive Contra ReBirth changed the evil end boss from Hitler (in Japan) to a lizard guy (in NA and EU) called Plissken!
Alex Rushdy I had no idea, thanks for the info!
As in Snake Plisskin? Reminds me of another Konami character, hmm.
Lmao thats hilarious!
But isn't Contra set in the future and/or present in which Hitboy killed hisself in a bunker?
You should have 88 upvotes.
"I did a swear! I--hey, mom, I did a swear!"
"Wow, all grown up."
Very Cringe
Ugh
A little disappointed you didn't spend more time on Castlevania III. On top of changes to the music and some graphics, several gameplay elements got changed for the US version (for the worse). Particularly Grant simply stabbing with his knife instead of throwing it, and the mechanics of enemy damage. In the JP version, different enemies deal differing amounts of damage, while in the US version, all enemies deal the same amount of damage, with that amount ramping up as the game progresses. It seriously alters the balance of the game. Lumped together, these make for compelling reasons to stick with the JP version of Castlevania III over the US one.
Thanks ! I was going to comment on that exact thing. Also, the fact that Contra - and Castlevania III - didn't get their extra chips in the West because Nintendo didn't allow that, not because Konami didn't want to produce them.
And let’s not forget how in the US version, dying to Dracula forces you to repeat the pendulum room, which itself was made harder by adding bats to assault you, while in the JP version, dying to Dracula just sends you back to the staircase right before him.
@@ruthmcnally310 Never knew this! Just another strike against the US release.
Sounds more like a kirby game than a castlevania one :^)
@@blara2401 I thought that Contra and CV3 for the market outside Japan didn't have the additional chips because the "western" NES model lacks the extra pins in the cartridge slot required to support it.
I'll do ya one worse... my copy of Contra: Legacy of War?
It's for the Sega Saturn. It still has the 3D glasses too.
Who knew that Contra was on the Virtual Boy. LOL
Underrated comment
Omg the psycho mantis fight reading your hard drive joke was comedy gold and definitely one of the best comedy skits I’ve seen in UA-cam for a long time.
"re-imagining" works for something like Dracula X but I tend to use the word "conversion" because it was always used to refer to arcade home ports like what we saw on NES, where everything from Ninja Gaiden to Bionic Commando and Guerilla War were vastly different games at home. The terminology carried forward in my memories of the SNES and Genesis era with it's totally different licensed games like Aladdin, Taz, Turtles In Time vs Hyperstone Heist etc.
You said yippie kay yay? This is officially a Christmas video.
And this comment just made my morning!
Agreed.. i am 34 now and CV3 is still my all time favorite Nes game.
Ppp
Excellent video; I'd love to see more. :>
Vaguely related: all these alternative versions of Castlevania games are a large part of the reason why I've barely played the series; I generally go in release order and treat remakes as separate games, and there are like fifty different versions of Castlevania 1 scattered across regions and consoles, all of them just different enough to be distinct games.
Cool
I say go with the Chronicles version. It's a lot better compared to the original.
@@GiordanDiodato That's the thing: it's essentially a different game from the original. I'd rather play the original first so I can understand what's different and judge the changes on my own.
I do the same, it's worth it for the "main games" and some of the "side games". heads up, Castlevania 4 is a remake of 1
I love how enthusiastic Derrick is. It makes my day and is the reason I jump on these vids to watch.
One odd fact: In Europe, Super Castlevania IV came out BEFORE Castlevania III. Because... why not...?
That probably has to do with the fact that the NES never was a good seller in Europe, or in most of Europe anyway.
@@WeskerSega maybe if they sold it in normal store and not pharmacies people would actually buy it
@@Kippykip Part of the reason they ended up there is because people weren't.
@@Loader2K1 True that. Nintendo had a well-intentioned but poorly executed policy meant to prevent flooding the market with shovelware while Sega basically just IGNORED its American division as being "rude and unknowledgeable."
@@OtakuUnitedStudio: Ironically enough, in the later and twilight years of the NES (1991-1994), the console got flooded with shovelware from such terrible, non-Japanese developers and publishers such as the now-defunct Ocean (which never truly went away; it's still around under the branding of Atari), the now-defunct THQ (long before the company would hit paydirt with the WWF/E license in the late 1990s all the way into the early 2010s), Camerica, Codemasters, MicroProse, LJN, and Hi-Tech Expressions, to name a few.
As for Sega, in my humble opinion, both their North American subsidiary and parent Japanese company are to blame for them leaving the video game industry as a first-party company. Between late 1994 and early 1998, the company as a whole was on a downward spiral. This was due to the infighting and miscommunications between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. SOJ apparently thought they knew better than SOA, the division of Sega that was once raking in the cash thanks to Tom Kalinske. To make matters worse, they ousted Kalinske for former Sony Computer Entertainment America president/plant, Bernie Stolar, who nearly ran SOA into the ground by fucking over North American Saturn owners. Stolar chose not to release a LOT of third-party games on the Saturn in North America, and he ultimately and prematurely pulled the plug on the console. Sega shortly turned themselves around with the Dreamcast, but, according to Sega Reniassance ( segareniassance.blogspot.com/2016/03/op-ed-bernie-stolar-and-isao-okawa-dumb.html ), pulled the plug on that console in the West because the SOJ president at the time, Isao Okawa, wanted to take the company out of the video game industry.
Man, being a gamer when I was a kid always made me wish I was Japanese.
I was 9, dude
How could you know there was a difference between games as a kid?
@@somethingsomething9008 I knew where most of the games I played were made, who they were made by. I read magazines. Assuming your question means how did I know which games came from Japan.
No not really what I assumed your comment to be is that you knew there were differences between versions but i misinterpreted it
@@somethingsomething9008 Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well that came a bit later than the nes era, in my teens, information started to become more abundant and easily access, ya know? When the internet really took hold from the early/mid 90s and so on. I didn't mean to imply I knew games were changed for localization in the 80s of anything.
Contra III in the West actually had the codes for 30 lives, level select, and the sound test taken out of it for whatever reason
Even weirder is that the 30 lives code for it is the motion for a Hadouken instead of the usual Konami Code
Konami was well aware of the Code's popularity by the time of Contra III's release, so by then they played with players' expectations by changing up the code itself and/or its effects - remember Gradius III on the SNES and how the standard Code in there is essentially a suicide button, with the real deal being the one where Left and Right are swapped by L and R? :B
The Japanese version of Contra Hard Corps actually has an insane 70 life code.
@@hansweiss469 The Western releases could've used that lol
Not only that.
In the EU/US, to get the ending, you had to beat to game on hard.
The Japanese got it on any difficulty.
Curse that rental market, right?
@@NosferatuMalus: As fucked up as the video game industry is now, how fucked up it used to be in the 8-bit and 16-bit era is unbelievable. Japanese gamers had to buy their video games outright, which, while expensive, were much more balanced and enjoyable experiences. North American and European gamers, on the other hand, had the option of renting a game until they're done with it in contrast to buying expensive video games, but had to deal with absurd difficulty spikes, dumbed down or entirely-deleted content, or getting screwed out of great video games from Japan altogether. Well, at least we had the Game Genie and Pro Action Replay to use to finally see the end of nearly unbeatable games.
12:20 as much as I love the old dialogue and voice acting, I can't hate my boy Patrick Seitz as Dracula. He voices two of my favorite vampires.
One of the best SSFF videos in a while. Great work guys, I’d love to see more HWWW!
"Gryzor" sounds faaaaar better than "Probotector"
Fantastic topic. These were the kings of games growing up... then you learned how edited they were later in life. Jerks.
At least they still made great games and released them in the West. I miss the Konami of old. They went out as one of the worst video game companies of all time. Their management treats their employees like prisoners and they have absolutely no respect for them, no matter how much they've done for them. They have no respect for their IPs. They have no respect for their customers. After everything they've done I'm surprised they're even still making games, even if they are mostly low budget garbage now.
Konami is awful in marketing. Their product mostly were good. I haven't paid attention to the company in 12 years.
アメリカ人はとても愚かでテレビゲームを知らない。 物語はばかで 白人は嫌いです 中国人は嫌いです 中国人は日本人の口の中で排便した。
well thats kinda rude ain't it
Pandora's Box 6 (Arcade Box Super) Review
Lake Otis Video City! I FREAKING RENTED THAT COPY OF THE GAME.
Proof?
Rainbow Dash here's a picture of my rental copy of Tony Hawk 3 I got from them when they closed i.imgur.com/lI0SdzP.jpg
@@OneColdMonkey the digital world really is small
K I've been following the channel since before he moved. I always used to hope I'd run into him at Bosco's sizing up the NES games for any hidden gems. Seeing that bit of my own personal history with the Snake's Revenge cart was really cool. :-) (And I can't figure out how people are getting these @'s to work all of a sudden.)
OneColdMonkey too funny. I just asked if he was from Anchortown. Good ol Video City...I remember them being known for their “Adult” sections when I was a kid,
Man, I feel you with the Goemon games. I fell in love with Mystical Adventures as a kid and have always wanted more.
Also, while we may not have any more Contra games, can we get a shoutout for Hard Corps. Uprising? It's fantastic and so much fun!
I was surprised that Uprising wasn't mentioned. The Guilty Gear team worked on it.
Legend of the Mystical Ninja is still awesome. The song for the Yamato stage was my ringtone for decades.
Dracula X appeared because an exclusivity contract Nintendo use with third parties. Konami could not make a port of Rondo. Konami used assets and remade the OST but changing certain parts to elude Nintendo.
I thought it was because NEC couldn't get the rights to Rondo (along with the poor sales of the Turbografx in NA)
I would totally watch a whole series on how certain companues were worse in the west or even vice versa. It's interesting stuff and I found myself engaged by your delivery and commentary.
“And now a scheduled Goemon Interlude”
“Wow, you’re all grown up!”
Grace continues to have the best lines of this show. Sorry, Alex
I'd love to see more of "How the West Was Worse"! This Konami episode was incredibly insightful and entertaining. Keep up the great work!
And then...
"YOU PIRATED... HUH?
WHAT IS THIS "DELTARUNE"?"
yeah that would be funny if that mantis boss fight actually searched your hard drive.
Probotector sounds like something your Proctologist uses during an exam.
Goemon fans represent!
Man, ive been keeping up with you ever since i found space money octogon years ago, and honestly, that goemon interlude is the best god damn thing; this episode in particular is seriously some of the best comedic timing on SSFF. Great stuff guys
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and its N64 sequel will very likely never ever be rereleased. At least not through official emulation as both were some of the few N64 titles that required the memory card.
Arcadian Legend if Sony could do proper memory card emulation on the PS3, Nintendo should just as easily be able to do the same! If I were to do an N64 mini:
- controllers would be USB-C, allowing for vibration and the controllers to also have external storage built in allowing for Controller Pak emulation
- parental controls would be present, allowing parents to lock out T rated titles while their pre-teen offspring to play E rated titles
Games:
Super Mario 64
Mario Kart 64
Mystical Ninja starring Goemon
Ms Pac Man Maze Madness
Yoshi’s Story
Rayman 2 The Great Escape
Rakuga Kids
Pokémon Snap
Pokémon Puzzle League
Pokémon Stadium (connection of a Game Boy Classic Edition would allow this one to be enjoyed in full)
Bomberman 64
Mega Man 64
Pilotwings 64
F-Zero X
Dr Mario 64
Excitebike 64
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Donkey Kong 64
Mario Party 3
BONUS GAME The Legend of Zelda Master Quest
I don't see how that's relevant. Emulating the memory card isn't exactly a major challenge compared to having an n64 emulator in general.
It's really just a minor functional variant on s-ram within cartridges... If you can emulate one, you can emulate the other.
No, the reasons for not officially re-releasing games are rarely technical (well, maybe - the virtual console didn't seem to have any SuperFX games on it. Though again the reasons could be non-technical too), but more frequently ideological or legal.
Goldeneye for instance has the exceptionally unfortunate combination of being developed by Rare, Published by Nintendo AND being a licensed game.
That's an absolutely terrible combination legally speaking.
(how many games with 3rd party licenced content have been officially re-released in general? I can think of some, but not many...)
Though not as bad as dealing with games where ownership at this point is just plain uncertain...
Like a developer or publisher that no longer exists for instance.
Or even where they do, where it's unclear what the exact ownership implications might be.
Take Terranigma - a frequently overlooked SNES action RPG that is perhaps one of the system's most significant yet forgotten games.
This was published by Enix, but created but developed by a company that no longer exists. (the previous game from that developer was even published by Enix in Japan and Nintendo in the US and Europe - Terranigma itself got a European release, but not a US one, which is the opposite of the far more famous Chrono Trigger.)
So the developer no longer exists, and Enix merged with Squaresoft to form Square Enix - given that some of the games of this developer were published by multiple companies in different countries, it follows that the legal rights may not have belonged to Enix...
So... What are the odds of this getting a re-release? Almost zero.
As for a hypothetical N64 classic, realistically to properly reflect the best of the system it should include Rareware games...
Alas, that seems incredibly unlikely given the current situation.
Still, I struggle to imagine doing the n64 justice without having Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, and perhaps something like blast corps as well.
(personally it'd also feel off if it lacked Conker's Bad Fur day and Perfect Dark, but those games, while amazing were less popular, and thus not exactly iconic as such...)
:(
there were a lot of N64 games that required the memory card
*Castlevania 3 on NES is my favorite one!* ✅😆
nah man akumajou special boku - dracula kun
best castlevania
Whack!
There was a really weird situation when it came to the western release of the Tactics Ogre remake on the PSP. Interestingly they added a crap load of content, easily 100 hours or more on it's own, but then reduced stat growth by 10 times. On top of this they changed the weirdly included crafting fail rates to make them better....and gimped the AI...sort of. Namely the original AI was competent, sure, but no one wanted to sit through them passing along buffs for half an hour until one of their units could move. Still, it's fun to look through the Japanese version to see what could have been if they lef the AI in tact (Sometimes it's a bit retarded, so it's a bit jarring where in a couple battles they actually play it safe and hold formations. I've tested and even found they they actually removed the option for certain AI settings entirely, resulting in a unit just moving and doing nothing every 3-4 turns.)
15:13
Super C is the name of a grocery store franchise where I live so to me, that name is pretty hilarious
Why not just Super Contra? xD
And the initial name for the "Super C" grocery store franchise was actually "Super Carnaval", they quickly (and wisely) opted to shorten it to Super C. So it made the name of the Contra sequel game even more hilarious in the 80s :)!
probably because of the Iran-Contra affair.
because the word "contra" was associated with the iran contra scandel when that port came out, this is probably also why the name wasn't used for the European releases (not just probotector but also the microcomputer ports of the first game which went by the japanese name, though the US computer versions of both games still used the contra and super contra names respectively).
Like all the third parties, Konami had to use mapper chips supplied by Nintendo for the western markets in place of their custum chips used for the japanese versions. Nintendo did this to avoid the risk of third parties being able to produce carts by themselves and flood the US market like it happened during the Atari 2600 era.
I heard that story as well, but I also heard, in the case of Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, the NES had some expansion slot at the bottom of it that could have used Konami's special chips, but it was never used.
@@Loader2K1 but does that mean you can play the Japanese version of CVIII? (aka Akumajou Densetsu)
@@GiordanDiodato: I have no idea, but I'm guessing that, if Nintendo of America had used that expansion slot on the bottom of the NES like Nintendo of Japan did with the Famicom, we probably would have been able to experience Castlevania 3 the way it was intended to be experienced. Well, from an audible standpoint, at least. I'm pretty sure Konami of America would have still jacked up the difficulty to the point where use of a Game Genie was understandable.
@@Loader2K1 I'm saying with using an NES to Famicom converter cart. Can you still play Castlevania III/Akumajou Densetsu?
@@GiordanDiodato: Again, I have no idea. You might be able to if you have a modded NES or one of these reproduction NES consoles with both NES and Famicom support.
This was a great episode. Would love to see more in this format.
I'm still salty that Ganbare Goemon never got a fair shake in the west, those games were so good!
I never got to play the two titles for the N64. I REALLY wanted to. They looked awesome. Blockbuster never had any copies. But I got to play Chameleon Twist so that's SORT of a consolation?
I'd argue we're not missing too much. The Super Nintendo/Famicom (Specifcally the platformers), 64, and two of the PS1 games are worth one's time. Maybe the DS one? Never played that.
That sounds like a lot, but the rest amounts to board, party, RPG(s?), or mediocre platformers particularly with the PS1 and the one on PS2.
I think it's because us 'Muricans don't really care about Japanese culture, sadly.
What kind of moron would use a cardboard box?
Hayter: "Yeah..."
Kimmo Laine
Nintendo Labo
You should do this kind of episode for Atlus games! Their library is ripe for examination...
Revelations Persona could be its own whole video, really.
@@UltimaKeyMaster and then we got half of Persona 2. Twice.
nah, Falcom.
The story of how the original Devil Summoner never came to the west TWICE would be a pretty fun one to hear for sure.
@@OldmanJables because it was an RPG on Saturn and Bernard Stolar was stupid. That and I heard the PS1 version was awful.
Or even better, if Psycho Mantis read your browser history....out loud....after turning your com’s volume all the way up. XD
and then looked at your ram, chewed you out because you had cheat engine running, then deliberatly crashed the game and deleted your save file.
nick malcom Then stole all your passwords and logged on to all your accounts and trolled and made fraudulent purchases, then SWATted you with the police. XD
18:19
Oy, also everyone got Hard Corps Uprising on X360/PS3.
Why do people always forget that one?
Well, they dropped the 'Contra' part of the name here.
I made it into the top 50 worldwide ranking with that game. Unfortunately it's not really contra at all. You can type the konami code during stage 1 loading screen to get the jungle stage soundtrack remix which is cool but besides that the game was okay. Had its addictive moments
Edit the code for the PS3 version is Up Up Down Down left right left right X O start.
@bigevilworldwide1 "weeaboo shit"
@bigevilworldwide1 But they didn't even put the Contra name on it though...
@@Copperhell144 I think it's because it was made by Arc Systems.
Just kidding EU. You still my *PAL* okay?
That's one of the most clever pun ever made
The thing that always amused me about Konami and Capcom back then is that they seemed to take opposing views of changing difficulty for Western releases.
Many Capcom games were made easier for the West (Ghouls n Ghosts, Super GnG, Megaman 2) while many Konami games were made harder, like Super C, Turtles 2, Turtles in Time, Castlevania IV, etc. Of course sometimes they were harder just because they took out the cheat codes!
Yes and no actually. For Capcom they made varying degrees of difficulty for the west (MM1 Bionic Commando, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Darkwing Duck) but usually if the game was challenging by default (Ghost's Goblins, Ghosts n' Ghouls, Super GnG, both Gargoyle's Quests), it wasn't noticed as much.
I'd disagree about your Konami picks though: Super C was much easier than Contra, TMNT 2 is easier than TMNT1 by a long shot, Turtles in Time had different difficulty levels, Super CV 4 is considered one of the best of the NES/SNES era of CV games and was not considered unfairly difficult. Now, Mad City/Bayou Billy was an unfairly difficult game in the west by Konami, to an extent Goonies 2 was aswell (very much due to it's butchered translation and being difficult to know how to progress beyond trial and error on every room).
I don't know, Resident Evil is way harder in the western release.
rugalb98 I think you misunderstood what I meant. I wasn’t saying games like Super C and TMNT were easier/harder than the previous games in their series, I meant the US releases were made a easier than the Japanese releases. Although in the case of Super C it’s because they took the 30 lives cheat out! 😅
Xulomander Yes that’s true, some games were made harder. I’d love to know why Capcom thought turning the auto-aim off in Resident Evil was a good idea! Obviously it was only a temporary decision as it was back on for the Director’s Cut!
If you needed 30 lives for Super C (specially when most kids had played Contra) you didn't bother learning the game at all and used a programmer code to make the game play itself. The patterns are a lot easier, enemy projectiles were bigger and clearer to see the only inherent difficulty spike that the programmers put in was using the Spreader (it made bosses have double health and spawn more running enemies on the levels). Super C was waaaaaaay easier than Contra and doesn't count as a Western difficulty spike. TMNT was just frustrating altogether for either Eastern or Western audiences, but the sole reason it was a hit regardless was that it came out during TMNT's prominence in media culture.
Still have no idea why he didn't include the Mad City/Bayou Billy difference. That was a clear indication of Konami being a dick to Western gamers (specially with how much attention the game got in previews, write ups, and commercials).
This N64 Mystical Ninja was one of my favourite childhood games. It's painful they don't make them like that anymore... or they do and I've just never seen them..
Me too, that was first distinctly "Japanese" game Id played, and was for many people.
It was a miracle it even had an international release at the time, I think it still holds up compared to other N64 games.
@@JetWolfEX
It does but anytime I try to emulate it (I don't own a WiiU and it ain't on Switch) it's very poor quality. Skybox doesn't work, laggy. I know Project 64 is average but it runs most games sweet.
The Metal Gear segment is missing the rawest deal the West got. When the Metal Gear Solid The Essential Collection got released, it only included MGS 1, 2, and 3 (with 2 and 3 having the updated versions included), but Japan got all of that plus VR Missions, Portable Ops, Metal Gear 1 and 2, and an assortment of special features that weren't included in the Western release.
Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection fixed this in the US.
@@9penguin9 Still 7 years after the fact.
@@originalscreenname44 still happened
I remember playing contra force quite a bit when I was a kid. It does have that awesome opening level music though and the ability to play as 4 different characters.
> Japanese Castlevania III doesn't necessarily sound better.
Suuuuure. :P
I mean, it's true. Akumajou Densetsu's chiptune is really, *really* not that great.
It seems like I do a lot of double takes at many things he says these days. This was another one of them. sigh.
his enthusiasm was great and the relatable jokes were even better good video especially the castlevania and contra parts surely struck home
How could you do a whole video about Konami shafting US versions of games and /not/ talk about Bayou Billy?
They pick up talk about how World Carnival got screwed over there is a
Wait...theres a version of Bayou Billy that doesn't suck? Where?!!
@@mattnova18 yeah, the Japanese version is called Mad City and its way less difficult. It also has nothing to do thematically with Bayou Billy.
Fun fact Bayou Billy was supposed to be based on Crocodile Dundee but Konami never got the rights for it. The famicom artwork to Mad City even resembles Paul Hogan.
@11:58 Made me your instant subscriber. XD *"That's the best part, c'mon!"*
Thankfully with the amazing Ghost Babel we got a taste of what classic 2D Metal Gear was like.
That "HEY MA" killed me. Subbed and belled!
Gotta say those robo dudes in Probotector look a lot cooler than the vietnam vets from Contra :P
Super biased cos i'm from Europe. But i prefer probotector as a concept. Robots are cool yo.
...shame they have the durability of a Trade Fed combat droid... unless you're building them en masse on the cheap, a combat robot needs to take more than one hit!
@@NotABot55 Yeah. In Contra 4 they are a secret unlockable. Said to be sent into warzones too dangerous for humans.
@@NotABot55 Dont talk shit about mah Pal-bots :D
I agree. The story in the manual said something about these cool fighting robots being sent into warzones where humans could not go. I always thought they resembled the Terminator. When I found out that the USA had these generic muscular humans instead and was called 'Contra' was so confused xD Thinking about it, sure Probotector is a weird name but so is the name Contra... I know it's short for Contraband but even that doesn't make it any less weird. 'Probotector' to me sounds like 'Terminator' and just sounds cool
Probotector = Protector + Robot.
Fun fact. Poland didn't get the censored version. We had the pirated Soviet Famiclones, so we had the "original" Contra on multicarts.
@Amarthar
And some lucky of us the japanese contra
@@bartek8309 Wszystko zależało od tego co panowie piraty przywieźli zza Buga :)
Imagine if Konami re-released these games with the features from the Japanese version.
and a pachinko machine that you have to play to access the game
MisterZygarde64 Konami should do compilations of their franchisees I swear they would make A LOT of money.
@@randomprofile5853 yeah if they have Yugioh on that I will buy it tell me they're done with their fan favorite
They still do, but mainly Pro Evolution Soccer and Bemani series.
Juan44444 Gomez4444 yeah or they should have made a triple A Yu-Gi-Oh game like back in the day I would pre order it defiantly.
As far as I know, with Metal gear there was two reasons for the changes, NES could not run the MSX games properly and Nintendo´s censorship. You know that was cold war era, and Metal gear was kind of sensitive material. But now when we have access to the Metal gear original games, instead of two classic Metal gear games we have *four* and as a Metal gear fan I think that is a win-win situation. And I prefer Snake´s Revenge over most of the modern Metal gear games.
I never had problems with Contra/Probotector, actually I wish that Konami revives Probotector at someday. And back in the NES days I didn´t even know there was a sequel for Probotector. And also with Castlevania I think there was just hardware limitations, like SNES could not run Rondo of blood so they made the Vampire Kiss, which is not a bad game, it´s like Mega man 6 it´s not bad, but it´s just not as good as the predecessors.
Look at all these amazing series that are pretty much dead now
I love how, on the Goemon segment, you put the original ending theme for Symphony of the Night, I am the Wind.
I'm thinking the reason Hard Corps was made more difficult was because of Sega's policy of making games harder to kill rentals.
Yeah, that's definitely the reason for the change. What weirds me out about it is how this policy only seems to have become a thing by 1994, pretty late into the Genesis/MD's lifespan...
@@thestripedmenace Much like Ninja Gaiden 3's changes to be harder, despite it being the last game of the series (at the time) and near the end of the NES's lifespan too. NG3 USA had double damage and limited continues.
@@thestripedmenace Also IMO is one of the things that ended up killing the Genesis as well. Since Sega made their games super difficult, and rarely gave options to save, many of their new games felt old school compared to many next gen games on the market.
@@TheLomdr wait, that's not ghe anti piracy kicking in?
@@Nandru85 Apparently it was intentional. It also had a password system that was omitted from the US edition. According to wikipedia, it never saw a EU release. It seemed that Tecmo had a different take on the US audience than Square did, so it wasn't a rental thing?!
You forgot to discuss the final contra game, Hard Corps: Uprising, which was awesome.
Loved Neo Contra and Shattered Solider.
"No more staggered releases." I wish. Us Falcom fans are still waiting for the western release of Trails of Cold Steel III even after the FOURTH game was released in Japan. Hopefully there won't be such a ridiculous wait for the newly announced Ys IX.
it's probably due to how text-heavy CSIII is. It's more text-heavy compared to Trails in the Sky SC, which took 3 years to localize.
Also the fact Falcom refuses to allow publishers the rights to their games till their next game comes out. I know, it's weird, but it's just how they roll.
And don't get me started on how much Falcom milks their franchises...
Falcom is a very small company that only cares about Japan.
Western releases are nothing but an afterthought.
It also doesn't help that some of their games have scripts that can fill several books.
@@asteria9963 Amen to this
@@asteria9963 Yeah Sora SC has more than 720,000 words in it. For comparison, War & Peace has about 580,000 words, Atlas Shrugged has around 645,000 words, and Les Misérables has around 655,000 words. And both parts of Don Quixote combined is 345,000 words.
See though, falcom games have always been hit or miss as to if they will or won't come to the west. Even as of late, they're one of the major companies I can think of that's still like that for some bizarre reason
I just gotta say, I know you've been making videos without the HVGN moniker for awhile now, but since you moved on from that point in time, your content has absolutely FLOURISHED in terms of quality. I remember back when you first announced that you were ending the HVGN name and were gonna start making a name for yourself. That, to me, translated to "I'm gonna do a few more things with this channel at most then fade into obscurity". I'm glad to say that you've stuffed my expectations for you down my own throat and then some.
Keep up the awesome work Derek. Happy Holidays!
.... Thanks for reminding me that just recently, I found out that he's the old HVGN. Branching out and moving out of James' shadow REALLY did wonders for Derek!
DQ XI is still an incredible game.
Yeah I got on to ask what that little jab was about?? Did people hate it? Did we lose something in the West? I liked it!
Duude I loved this video! I'm not even that into Metal Gear or Contra but you made it so interesting that I didn't skip a second of it 😂 keep going!
Some corrections.
9:40 - Famicom Disk System games don't have battery backup. The whole point of the disk card media was the fact that save data was easily writable without the need of battery.
13:30 - As for Contra, it's not that Konami didn't want to make a special chip for the U.S. version so much so as it is the fact that the Famicom and NES reads their cartridge pins differently and Konami's VRC series of chips made use of pins that were not on the NES (it's hard to explain without going too technical). I get the impression the NES Contra was the actual original, since the cutscenes, background animation and hidden ending in the Famicom version are extra stuff that wasn't based on anything in the arcade game (and on top of that, the Famicom version is a bit more polished in some minor instances like the different stage clear music for the final boss and the sound test mode). It's quite telling that the Famicom version of Super Contra didn't have any of that extra content from the first FC game and is almost identical to the U.S. NES version.
Also, I kinda liked Snake's Revenge and never had any issue with its difficulty.
Good corrections - I believe one of the details about Famicom game extra chips that's often not talked about is how the individual companies in Japan would make their own carts with their own chips (Like the VRC6) but in the US/World Nintendo themselves manufactured the carts and did not/would not use 3rd party chips which is another reason Castlevania 3 ended up with a regular MMC chip from Nintendo.
@@OhmiKuma This video doesn't even bring up Jackal on the NES, which is one of the rare instances when Konami actually made a better version for the US. The Japanese version, Akai Yousai, was released for the Famicom Disk System and had its levels shortened to such an extent to fit the smaller media format.
Probotector sounds like a probate lawyer, who by night fights crime & wears a cape.
Gradius, Salamander & Parodius would have been great for this video also.
I thought we got Salamander?
@@GiordanDiodato
Yes but there are a lot of differences between Life Force & Salamander and also between the Arcade, NES / Famicom & PC Engine versions.
No mention of Mad City/The Adventures of Bayou Billy? Shame, is an obscure game, but infamous for being made worse in the west(mostly due to being made almost unplayably difficult: the enemies do double damage, take half damage, and have far more aggressive AI, the shooting segments give you way less bullets and the driving sections in the US feature instant death instead of a life bar and much more narrow roads)
Wha-wha-wha-what is a man?!
A miserable cesspit of hatred and lies. Fight for them now, and die for their sins!
Needs ALL CAPS, 6/10
I LOVE the Probotector games - they are an insanely elaborate way to skirt around violence laws. Back when I was doing art for J2ME version of FarCry 2, we decided to add Probotector mode to the game for shits and giggles, replacing player and all enemies with robots. The mode never got finished, but I believe you can still unlock Probotector (obviously renamed for legal reasons) as a playable character in that game.
See the positive side of the NES Metal Gear game. You get to play as Kyle Reese from The Terminator.
Rondo of Blood is amazing. I just finally played it last year and I was blown away. Easily the best Castlevania IMO. Symphony of the Night would be there if the game wasn't too easy (I almost never say that about anything).
Looking forward to the Squaresoft edition...
I'd love to see the Falcom edition.
That ad placement was genius
los amo "Separen a los esqueletos de pelearse"
How some ports were released different from one country to another was very well explained here.
Dude...Video City, Lake Otis....you from Anchorage? Or at least that game?
Derek born and raised, Grace since elementary school. And that copy of Snake’s Revenge was bought by Derek at Video City when they were liquidating all their old games to make room for newer consoles.
Stop Skeletons From Fighting - love it! Glad to see some folks from the 907 kicking butt!
If you ever do a follow up, Bayou Billy was released as the far easier Mad City in Japan.
Also by Konami, too...
To this day I still don't understand the love Rondo of Blood gets. I mean, it's fine, it's got some good ideas, but I don't think they were executed that well. Maria just straight up breaks the game in terms of difficulty, and the branching paths are not branching as such, more like the normal path, and a hidden path behind layers and layers of asinine secrets. For years I read from Castlevania Dungeon how Rondo was so much better than that sad Dracula X on the SNES, which I actually liked, so I was so stoked to play it when it was released on the PSP, and felt a resounding "meh" go over me. The same feeling stayed with me in Castlevania Requiem earlier this fall. A good game, with lots of flaws on the game design side. I actually much prefer Dracula X. It's not even near some of the best games in the series either, but at least it's a nice, tight package, with much improved visuals over Rondo.
It had the mystique of being a hard to access import for a long time. So many people built it up in their imaginations for years and/or paid out the ass to import it that they have an investment in angerly demanding that everyone else agree it's the bestest Castlevania ever. Without those goggles, it's a very unbalanced and gimmicky game lacking entirely the fierce challenge the best entries in the series are known for. CV1, CV3, Bloodlines, CV X68000, and, yes, Dracula X are all the real deal.
@@willmistretta The core elements which Rondo of Blood lacks, is Super Castlevania IV's dark atmosphere and Bloodlines' action and challenge. The main reasons that people give praise to Rondo of Blood (like me), is its variety, the saving system and the cd quality soundtrack.
@@elefsidi Hey, it's great that you like it. Really. I guess I'm just reacting against what I see as the unreasonable levels of insistence by some that it's this flawless, godlike achievement that puts the rest of the series to shame. The fanatics that cruise every retro gaming Internet venue available acting like Jehovah's Witnesses for it really are absurd.
Non-linear gameplay and storyline
Awesome music
@@willmistretta Yeah, you are on the very very very very very very small minority side on this, and there's a very good reason for that.
Surprises me that you didn't mention Bayou Billy! That one has to be one of the biggest edited offenders
Contra might be a hot mess but it's nothing compared to the Adventure Island/Wonder Boy/i'm not even going to list everything connected to these series because there are so many games.
Hey you're the guy who made that decent Contra 4 Review, i salute you. I personally think this guy was exaggerating a bit about Contra especially Contra Force since at least the game has nice graphics and music, and if you play it on an emulator you can get rid of the slowdown by overclocking the PPU i belive.
nah, you want confusion? Try Falcom's Dragon Slayer series.
I've learned to dread the Ultra Logo worse than the LJN Logo.
I could not but help to notice it... and have flashbacks.
So ULTRA!
A part of me actually misses Konami of America's loophole subsidiary company.
I remember Probotector, it was awesome and I've always been a fan of robots and battling alien robot-bio things was super cool. It was funny how late it was that I realised what Contra actually was (saw the title and even some screenshots but didn't really connect the dots until online videos became a thing and I saw the US contra parodies and such). Oh, and I loved the designs of the main two robots (the players) and some of the enemy bots (like the blue one that shoots up and such) sorta reminded me of some Decepticons (in their robot-mode, that is).
What about Hard Corps: Uprising?
I LOVE HEARING ABOUT WEIRD REGION DIFFERENCES! Also more swearing. It's awesome.
What about Bayou Billy?
Ya I wished he talked about that alittle bit. Mad City is the better game.
Yeah, especially since this was Konami focused.
Thanks for the Goemon interlude dude, its way to true we need more goemon!!
NES metal gear was awful. I also hate Dracula’s Curse compared to Akumajo Densetsu
Fantastic video! It’s also worth mentioning that these alterations have made certain fans eager to “restore” the American version of game to better match the original Japanese version. I’ve seen patches for US versions or even complete retranslations of JPN versions of games like Contra 3, Megaman 3 and 7, and Castlevania 3 and 4 so people have access to “definitive versions” of said games in English. The JPN CV3 patch also remades Alucard’s sprite to resemble his Symphony of the Night look. Oh, and one think that Konami retroactively did sort of right with SOTN: its PSP (and subsequently PS4) port restores some of the JPN only features making it more complete than the original PS1 release, although they never bothered in bringing the Saturn-only features like new areas and music.
I'm glad I bought Rondo of Blood on the Wii shop channel before it was gone.
Kind of a moot point now, since it's on the PS4
Man, Contra Force was cool! It had one of the most '80s levels ever conceived: Walking on the wings of an airplane, crossing onto other airplanes, and fighting your way through hordes of bad guys to stop a nuclear bomb!