I have a strong feeling that the reason Splatterhouse wasn't released for the NES was not because of its content (games like Friday the 13th had no issue lol) but more likely because it was a Namco game and right around the time Splatterhouse initially released for the Famicom in Japan they had pretty much burned their relationship with Nintendo. I won't go into detail here and suggest you check out RndStranger's Famidaily episode on the game.
@@masonasaro2118 No. They were an alternate name for Atari Games. Long story, but basically Atari was split into two different companies at the time. One had the right to use the Atari branding for computer/console games and the other could only use it for arcade games. When the arcade branch wanted to get into console games, they needed a new label to do it under, hence Tengen.
@willmistretta Partially right. Atari was split into 2 halves like you said. Atari Corp went to Jack Traimel of Commodore fame. Warner retained Atari Games. Warner and Namco created a new entity called AT Games. Warner owned 40 % of the company, Namco owned the rest. Namco then sold 20% of the shares to the employees. Which means it was then owned by 3 different entities.
Famicom Splatterhouse also has a highly clashing tone. The name Splatterhouse is given to a highly bloody and gory series, yet the game's tone is very silly and full of parodies. How would you market it? Call it "Silly Splatterhouse"? People who want the blood and gore might be scared off by the comedy.
I always thought that Lifeforce was Gradius 2, and then Gradius 3 was on the SNES. Turns out Lifeforce was just a spinoff. Learned something new today, I guess!
@@CptJistuce Not to be confused with the 1985 sci-fi/horror mystery flick "Lifeforce", which would have made a pretty cool videogame adaptation, to be honest.
You are one of very few UA-camrs who are consistently able to bring a new and fresh conversation topic to the subject of early video game systems. I feel like I've been hearing the same 12 stories on repeat from everyone for the past 20 years, but you bring a perspective of actual technical competence and familiarity with the hardware that sets you way apart from the rest.
Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti is amazing, one of my all-time favorite 8-bit games, period. The West got totally screwed over something awful in regards to Contra ports. Gryzor on the Famicom is waaaay more polished than its NES counterparts in the US and Europe.
NES Contra made good use of graphics compression to fit on the 128KB cartridge. US and Japanese versions shipped at around the same time. They just added a bunch of extra stuff for the Japanese release, and there's a lot of blank space in the Japanese version because the cartridge size was doubled. Also, it was not named Gryzor, that's the name from the European arcade release. Japanese version is named with three Kanji that read as "Kon to ra", it's Contra.
No mention that the PCB for Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse actually has an expansion audio pin/contact? That PCB was only used in Castlevania III and Laser Invasion. It’s also the only way we know what pin on the expansion port to connect for expansion audio since there were multiple that connected to otherwise-unused auxiliary pins on an NES cart. Expansion audio did not require an internal mod. It just required plugging something in to the expansion port covered by an annoyingly difficult break-away panel. Inside the cart you can see that the extra contact connects through a 10KΩ resistor to the last leg in the MMC5 mapper chip. Understandably, they left the resistor footprint unpopulated since they ultimately reprogrammed the game to use system audio instead, but it seems the PCB really was designed for an expansion audio dongle at some point. At first I thought the dongle would have included whatever sound generator they used in the VRC VI chip but, no, the MMC5 really does provide the expansion audio. A few people have modified their cartridge and installed a hacked ROM to re-enable Expansion Audio but I wouldn’t expect VRC VI expansion audio to sound the same from an MMC5 unless Nintendo specifically tried to incorporate the same functions. Regarding the theoretical expansion audio dongle, one must wonder: How was anyone planning to implement it when they laid out that PCB? The break-away panel covering the expansion port is not as easy as most break-away panels intended for end users. Unlike a PC slot cover, you aren’t getting it off with a screwdriver. It would require a cutting tool of some kind which may be why they decided not to move ahead with it. No idea why Nintendo bothered designing it and putting it into every console and even designed a game PCB that could use it when they made it so difficult to expose for end users. Ultimately Nintendo removed the expansion port and the pin that would have been used for it in the NES-101 “toploader.”
It is worth noting that the breakaway panel isn't on earlier units. They stopped cutting it away in the factory at some point, but continued to populate the connector for some reason. In the era, it wouldn't be outrageous to ask people to use a razor blade to cut away the plastic struts.
@@CptJistuce I’ve heard that but I’ve serviced and modded hundreds of consoles including some that I suspect were from the 1985 test launch and yet I’ve never seen one with the panel removed. OK, that’s not true: I’ve seen some where the owner removed it but never seen one removed from the factory. Even my Deluxe Set had the panel… though I’d love to inspect a confirmed 1995 test launch set (same contents but without “Deluxe Set” on the package).
As a kid I removed the expansion cover out of curiosity since it clearly looked like it was supposed to be removed easily on the PAL version. Then I spent years wondering what the connector should be used for.
Other games that didn't get a Western localization on NES times are visual novels like The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Enix, 1983), the first two Detective Club games (Nintendo, 1988 & 1989), Hokkaidō Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu (Armor Project, 1984), Yamamura Misa Suspense: Kyōto Zai-tech Satsujin Jiken (Tose, 1990), and the Tantei Jingūji Saburō series (Data East, 1987, 1988 & 1990).
Atari being hurt by crappy 3rd party shovelware/bad games is as overstated as blaming ET and Pac Man for the great shakeout of 1983/84 in the US. What caused the crash was there was at least 12 different and incompatible systems. This and this alone caused it. The NES is absolutely overrun with bad shovelware. The real reason Nintendo did it was to tax 3rd party publishers. That's why Atari locked out 3rd parties with the 7800. They taxed them twice. First, they overcharged them to manufacture, package and distribute the game and then second they took a cut of the actual sales. This is plain old fashioned grift and NOT looking out for the customer to ensure the game has the "Nintendo seal of quality"
@@catsaregovernmentspies I've seen a number of them and they always get this cause wrong. It sounds plausible and I guess that's good enough for most people. Another thing is a lot of people thought video games were a fad that would pass. When the big players started losing large sums of money, all of the weak players and even some of the strong ones cut and ran. They thought the fad was over and that people would ditch the consoles for home computers and get down to doing serious work. What exactly that serious work in the home was supposed to be, I have no clue.
Well said. Konami suffered the most. It’s why of all the Konami games I have a lot of them are Konami titles that we’re objectionable, overpowered with VRCs, the release limits or breaking games to punish renters. A lot of the games you have here like splattehouse too I have.
It is worth noting that the FamiCom Disk System didn't just exist to enable bigger games. It was not just meant to solve the problem of the Nintendo's limited address space, but also the problem of games being too expensive for kids to buy(a problem that was exacerbated by high ROM prices at the time). The FDS looked like "the future" until ROM prices came back down and then fell farther, and pirates noticed it was SUPER easy to copy FDS games(the system used standard QuickDisks and had no copy protection). Piracy was what really killed the FDS. But cartridges were never as cheap as Disk System games were.
The MSX series of home computers were a viable alternative in Japan, not so much in the West save for the Netherlands, Italy and Spain (even though we had the C64 and ZX Spectrum).
@@OnafetsEnovap The MSX is a pretty rad format, though really only the MSX2 and later is a viable Famicom competitor. MSX1 has the same problem the SG-1000 had: it is basically a ColecoVision released at the same time the FamiCom launched.
@@CptJistuce Indeed. I think that's what crippled its legacy somewhat (and ruined its chances of making a big splash in the West - that, and oversaturation). Looks like first impressions do count after all.
@@OnafetsEnovap I think it is more that there was an appreciable market split at the time. The modern global market wasn't really a thing, not like it is now. Japanese systems that were rather nice never left the land of the rising sun, or were ignored when they did. American systems never made it to Japan, Britain still thinks the Spectrum is something to be proud of rather than ashamed(note I have an anti-Spectrum bias). The MSX was apparently rather big in Brazil, for what it is worth.
Atari didn't really have a problem with too much software or the low quality of games. What killed the Atari 2600 was America had a massive recession which resulted in people pulling back spending and the toy retailers took that to mean that the video game fad was over. Eventually Atari started to make 2600s again because as soon as the recession ended they have a massive amount of demand for them
This is just a reductive and inaccurate view as blaming it all on the latter. It was very much a combination of both factors. You don't get the crash without both being there. When the 2600 came back it was mostly being supported by existing titles NOT new software. New Atari 2600 software post-crash was almost universally unsuccessful. Without the NES, home gaming likely permanently shifts towards the domain of the personal computer ala the C64 in North America, at least for a significant period of time. The reason the Atari came back wasn't because good new games were getting made for it... because they weren't. It's because it was dirt cheap and had an established software library in a revitalized console market. Without Nintendo revitalizing the market first and restoring both industry & consumer confidence, the Atari 2600 NEVER would have bounced back the way it did in the first place. 🤷
@@Cooe. Dude I was there.... And if bad software was the problem people would not have immediately started buying games the first chance they got. Remember that long before Nintendo entered the market Atari was still selling 2600 directly to consumers because they kept calling Atari asking for them. That's how and why we got the 2600 Jr (which I had because my original 2600 died) Back then you didn't have big data so retailers didn't know what consumers actually wanted they just made rough guesses. Everyone thought the public would want computers because they we're only $100 or so more than a game console. Like William shatner said, why buy a video game. Turns out there was lots of reasons but by the time Atari realized that it was a bit too late
@@jeremygregorio7472 Not THE problem but definitely A problem. And it was a major contributing problem. Your rose tinted nostalgia glasses and cognitive biases are brainwashing you from facing reality. Not all pleasure & toy purchasing saw similar hits during the early 1980's recession as console based video games. NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE in fact!
@@jeremygregorio7472 On top of this, most of the third party developers for the 2600 were so small that once people stopped buying their games, entire studios dissapeared, from Games by Apollo to Imagic. Also, by 1984 Atari was ready to release the 7800 wich had a demand in the market, but payement disputes between Warner Coms. and Tramiel delayed the system till 1986 when it was obsolete and late to the party. Nintendo didn't "save" the industry, the numbers show that as much, it was more like Atari suffered an economic crash based upon many things, their own stupid desitions (like comisioning more cartridges for Pacman than consoles already produced since 1977) that put them on a fatal loss, mixed with the smaller studios closing down due to their costs on logistics and catridge production. Once this fuzz was over in early 1984 the entire industry started to revitalize. What Nintendo did on its own was a quality control over the software produced for the system, however, the company approached this in very draconian terms wich just 5 years later made them loss the 16-bit war and with that it's dominance in the home console department till this very day.
This was a great and informative video! As someone mentioned in a previous comment, I truly do appreciate that you presented information I did not previously know. Keep up the great work!
Gradius was an amazing game and Gradius 2 was simply on another level compared to it. One of my favourite things I own is a complete set of YuGiOh cards based around the Gradius game. Konami owns both titles and so YuGiOh was able to make a whole set of cards based on the old game....very cool.
I don't blame them there where a lot of groups back then that would've destroyed Nintendo if they did. Those groups canceled Saturday morning cartoons, and many other cartoons and comic books. Those groups even went after music. The ramifications of their actions are still felt today. Ratings on games and music, cartoon and comic books standards, loss of cartoon blocks, censoring of anime and manga and video games.
Nothing about a mapper has anything to do with politics. The only group that canceled saturday morning cartoons is tv network execs. Nintendo was acting no different than those execs. Nintendo was controlling what could be on the NES in america. Apple today acts like nintendo. Apple consolized the iphone so they control the features apps can have. Don't blame "groups" for the actions of rich executives.
Shame it is wrong, at least in one detail. Nintendo put the lock in chip to the NES precisely to force other software vendors to publish with them under their terms. They effectively taxed all 3rd party games. First, by overcharging them to manufacture, package and publish the games and then second by taking a cut of the sales. It was just good old fashioned greed.
@@Sharopolis I got the impression you were saying they did it to protect from "unapproved" poor quality releases from hurting Nintendo. A lot of people falsely believe this is what caused the 83/84 crash in the US. It's not. It's not even close. But people like to say it.
Nintendo was kind of inconsistent with their US censorship back in the day. I remember being pretty shocked as a kid by the ending of Bionic Commando, for example, and NARC, while a terrible game, certainly held its own against that chibi Splatterhouse in the violence category.
You'll have to remember that the societal norms during that time were very conservative, so the marketing strategy for foreign media wasn't as forgiving as it is today. The reason why video games stayed true to social norms was because Nintendo of America wanted to make sure that gamers took the NES very seriously. As the gaming industry was in bad shape thanks to Atari's reckless video game handling, the NES was localzed as a children's toy. As the NES was localized as a children's toy, video games were marketed to children and all of them had to stay true to social norms. You may have not liked the conservative societal norms for the censorship, and Nintendo of America didn't like them either, but they had no choice to rely on social norms policies because they thought it was the only way many people were going to take the gaming industry very seriously.
Hahaha, I certainly remember being surprised they allowed Trevor Belmont to pray to a cross in _Castlevania III_ ! Good times. Lots of hilarious censorship jokes to be had from that era too, like "Frothing mugs of milk" and "coffee" causing dudes to be asleep at tables in "cafés".
I'd like to clarify Namco's chip wasn't a singing mapper. Unlike the other devs, Namco used two separate chips to manage mapping and handle expansion audio. Regardless, it's a shame we never got Megami Tensei 2.
I didn't even know there were any decent looking NES games like that, all I ever experienced were borning washout out pallettes and crap music. Probably why I rarely bother with NES emus, and why SNES seems like such a crazy leap forward.
Man, taking a look at the Switch online store, Nintendo most definitely has rescinded their old NES ideas of how to avoid a ton of crap games. The Switch store is pretty overwhelmed with them.
They have hentai games. They have a game where the whole point is beating women to steal and collect their underwear. Looking back, the Seal of Quality really NEVER meant anything. It only meant the 3rd party paid for the license, which is evident by 7/10 of the NES lineup being absolutely terrible. That said, the Switch lineup shows Nintendo never gave one damn about quality. 99 out of 100 games on the e-shop are shovelware dogshit that are in MOST cases free cellphone games being sold for $20+ on the Switch. ALL of them glitchy buggy and crashprone. NONE of them worth a fucking penny.
People are really tough on Nintendo for being so strict with 3rd Party Devs in the early days but I truly think it was smart and necessary in the West for the time. A great example of what can happen without such oversight is the mounds of shovel wear that was produced for the Wii. I think it was a brilliant business plan and we have that to thank in part for the resurgence of the industry in the West.
No it isn't. All that causes is American and European gamers to miss out lot of great classic games that never officially release here in the US and Europe. There's always going to be shovelware no matter what. We still got lot of the bad games by LJN on the NES. How is it a smart decision to license those instead of the good ones? So many underrated gems happens because of that idiotic rule by Nintendo of America. This hits home to me because I'm a huge fan of the Mappy series made by Namco(Really great series). Famicom version of Mappy is sadly only released in Japan and did not get localized back in the 80's. And because of the strictness of Nintendo not allowing custom chips in the NES causes Mappy Kids to only be released in Japan as well. In the long run all it causes is we're missing out a lot of great gems that would see a light of day of success and fanbase worldwide since a long time, not just in Japan. That's why I always feel Japan handled better in releasing Famicom games and not miss out any of the great ones by great third party developers by Namco for example.
@retrofan4963 You have to consider the context of the era. Atari almost killed the industry in the US with its lack of quality control that caused consumers to stop buying and playing games altogether. In the early days, the Nintendo Seal of Quality actually meant something, an assurance to consumers that the games being released were curated as quality experiences. Obviously, the efficacy over time was debatable, and Nintendo's walled garden approach would certainly cause a lot of problems that weren't always reasonable. But you can't just dismiss this as some random bad idea Nintendo had.
The reason why I think that Nintendo of America got strict with their video game policies were due to societal norms being conservative at the time. When foreign media first came to the west, many people did not understand the original work, and not that many people thought that video games are cartoons were enjoyed by everyone.
It's interesting when you dive deep into the behind the scenes with Nintendo's consoles back in the day how much of a pain in the ass they were to work with if you were a developer. They finally got it right with the Switch being region free and inviting to Indie developers to which I hope they continue this mindset going forward with whatever their new system or Switch 2 will be. I watched a video recently on what development was like on the N64 and besides the Rom space limitations just the way they engineered the different components of the system severely bottlenecked the capabilities the system could do graphically and on top of that developers heavily relied on Nintendo's development kits which weren't always optimized and didn't allow developers to really test the hardware unless they wasted months or years disassembling the system with their own homegrown tools. It's wild.
After a while i did understood how a game can be better because of the chip set was using,either for the mapping or the whole game to be for instance a perfect port or really close to an arcade! I started with GB and after that an snes and back then we didn't knew or better put couldn't put side by site an arcade with a 16bit system to see the differences in graphics etc! If a cartridge had one or two components inside the price tag would be higher,thus more difficult to make those games and sell them! If you wanted to play a perfect port of an arcade the cartridges should be like SNK's system with those big ass cartridges even years after the release of nes.Japan didn't release those outside because of the costs involved,which would make really difficult and more expensive the retail sales! I remember donkey kong country when it first released on snes,the console was close to the final steps and the price tag was fall because we were pretty close to the next gens.So the game it self because of the extra tech goodness it had inside cost really close to the entire system! I have gradius 1 complete boxed for NES and it shows really good that even the first game of the series work really well for an NES system,imagine now with the second game! Also i do remember the difference in the sound the japanese dracula's curse had compared with the western cartridge as well! Talking about a big difference in those releases in sound.
Very good video, really went into detail about what type of chip and how it was possible to have such advanced games on the Famicon, and the Nes. I never even knew what a mapper chip was.
The NES, from what I remember, only had any kind of major success in two European countries - Italy and Spain (I grew up in the former as well as the UK, so I got to see firsthand the difference between Nintendo games, which were really rich kids' toys, and what I normally got with my friends on the home computers such as the Spectrum and C64).
The British release of the NES was notoriously bungled with terrible distribution networks and absolutely jacked prices compared to home computers or even Sega consoles.
@@stevendobbins2826 So I understand. Maybe just as well - a computer is always a better buy than a console in my opinion (though I do have a soft spot for the Sega Master System).
I am finally playing this upload even though I've seen itultiple times since I bought an emulator stocked with every NES/SNES/etc. and wondered. . .where the heck is Gradius2!?🃏🤣🤣🤣 It must be in the Famicom section to which I've not checked yet.
It's scary to think that there could have been a lot more bad NES games considering how many we still got. Even as a kid I mocked the Nintendo "quality seal" after it had been placed on Deadly Towers, one of the worst games of all time. It was a true trauma when a precious Christmas gift or allowance expenditure went to a dud.
When it's on an emulator or flash cartridge, you're not constrained by manufacturing the cartridge anymore. You don't need to use a cheaper kind of cartridge board that runs the game more slowly. So you can change a few things and reconfigure the game to have the game use a faster kind of cartridge.
It's an easy and quick way to contract against the slowdown that some SNES games had. While some developers could make games with minimal slowdown without a fastrom, many developers really needed that extra oompf from a fastrom.
Emulators and flashcarts have to run games with enhancment chips like starfox or yoshi's island, so you can imagine gradius 3 running on the same type of cart will have no slowdown
@@xxdarklink93xx A fastrom isn't an enhancement chip though. It's just a type of cartridge that lets an SNES game run at the 3.58 MHz that the CPU is capable of.
I got a $35 thing on Etsy that plugs into the bottom NES expansion port and allows Japanese expansion audio work. I got it for the Pac Man Championship Edition cartridge, and for a few other games.
@@videotape2959 I just clipped the tab off and plugged it in. It didn't work at first, I had to bend it a little to get a tight connection. It's homemade.
Nintendo of America saved the gaming industry. They did what they had to do to be the gate keeper so only the highest quality games got the stamp of approval and do away with the quantity over quality.
It’s an oxymoron today that it’s getting harder and harder to find video games developed in America when they’ve been an enormous surge of Asian and Japanese games coming into the United States.
I imagine by 1992 it wasn't worth it to bring Crisis Force to the US because the NES was pretty much dead back then. It'll probably be 1993 by the time it makes it over.
Im in a country where Nintendo doesn't officially have a presence. Practically all the games here are pirated. I saw and played crises force at a store and marvelled at it. I wonder what chip or mapper these unauthorized, pirated copies used.
@@Dwedit Thank you for this answer. During the heydays of the SNES, I saw a pirated copy of "Star Fox." Unfortunately, the store didn't have a TV and SNES (or SFam) to test it on so I wasn't able to verify if it was really Starfox or just a mislabelled game. Since them though, I also wondered what chip the pirates would have used to replicate the SFX chip.
Wow...nintendo has always been nintendo...i guess in the age of information I shouldn't be surprised that all our favorite companies were always cut through businesses.
It's an interesting video, and while I did know some parts of this, I did not know the full tech side of all of it. I just wanted to say though that I think the tech side of things had less to do with it than you think. See, for a long time Japan had this weird Love/Hate relationship with the west as they were taking all their ideas from us, and were self conscious about it, especially given a lot of the mockery when they were doing a lot of it wrong. That and they really resented the US for being a bigger market when gaming was becoming such a part of their culture. There was a big "screw America" vibe, especially among fans, and keeping things "Japan Only" was a point of pride, and I think a lot of companies themselves had that attitude. I can't speak for a lot of these, but I know with Megami Tensei 2, the attitude was entirely different. Understand, everything their RPGs do was entirely cribbed from us. Ultima, Wizardry (still big there), Might and Magic, and others were massively influential, and this was one of their dominant genres. They made a huge deal, for a very long time, about series like megaten being "too hard for western monkeys" even if the games we made that they based them on were much harder (seriously, they were) especially early on. To actually think that RPGs were not going to be popular here, when they pretty much took it all from us... well... yeah not buying that. It should also be noted they also had this sort of complex about wanting to be seen as better video games than Americans, so among other things they did stuff like crank the difficulty up on the American version and then re-label it as Easy, Normal, and Hard when we're actually starting on some ultra-extreme mode. Another video game youtuber was just talking about how the PS1 era's "Biohazard" is much easier than the US release as "Resident Evil". You can also see some of this attitude in translations, look at all the "accidental" dialogue that makes Americans sound like idiots or involves sexual innuendos in say SNK titles from the 1990s. Understand in the 1990s I was trading fansubbers who were mostly students for various anime, comics, periodicals, etc... which they translated to practice english. I'd be sending them US stuff they couldn't easily get in trade via mail. Literal high school students could do better, and more accurate, translations than the professionals hire by these companies... think about it. Do you think this was accidental? Not according to the fansubbers, who talked about the attitudes a lot of other Japanese had. I'm not saying the tech theories are wrong, but I think the bottom line is that maybe some of those mappers were made to justify not releasing to the US. If nothing else I would think given the money to be made from the larger market they would have released an inferior US version (we've seen this happen quite a bit over the decades) and assume we just wouldn't notice (and to be fair most people wouldn't). I'm not Anti-Japan or anything, but as I was involved in dealing with the Japanese through Fidonet in the 90s and read a lot of their translated stuff, I'm not holding a grudge, but I'm not exactly quick to forget. If you want to be honest, I think what really changed with this was much later when Square did "Final Fantasy X" which could have been called "Project Screw America". This was popular with a lot of Japanese fans at the time, but wound up costing them a ton of money and getting them a bad reputation that was causing other games to lose revenue apparently. Basically what happened was they decided to release an "International" version of FF X right off the bat which went everywhere BUT America and had expanded content, while saying basically "Americans are too dumb and bad at game for that version", they also cut several costumes out of X-2 (entire classes in that game) as Japan only, and then decided the true ending of the story would be a stand alone piece of work called "Final Mission" which would be Japan only. Let's just say it too a bit but they relented eventually, and since then they really havem't had the audacity to be that flagrant again, if nothing ele they figured out Americans were becoming more aware of what was being said over there, and we are at least for the current era, a far bigger market. As this kind of thing goes back to the NES era... well yeah, I think in the end a lot of it basically comes down to "they didn't want to release in the US because it was popular not to do so"
Games were made harder for the stateside release because they were scared kids would rent them over a weekend, beat them, and never buy their own copy. Japan banned game rentals so that wasn't a problem over there, and couldn't in America because Blockbuster fought tooth-and-nail against Nintendo's attempts. And JRPGs, specifically Dragon Quest, were made easier because publishers thought casual gamers would be driven to play by the story rather than chasing high scores.
This sounds like bs to me. Nintendo could have done a test market on some of these games to see if they sold in Japan first. If they do well there then all they have to do is comparative analysis to similar products. Gus they could weed out all the crappy games and give the go-ahead to the better titles. I guess their operation wasn't big enough way back then.
It shows greatly that from the past nintendo had this huge stick shoved you know where and its not something that they are doing today only! It made really difficult for the develpoers to work on a project because they wanted to be the disney of gaming utopia and this is not right! Even as we speak with switch those years because their system was weaker they worked up problems with the devs once again to have them make downgraded ports of bigger titles in order to sell their system.The other bad thing they also did in the past was locking the system for playing usa & japan cartridges,why to do that?! I have an nes which i break the 4rth pin on their lockout chip in order to play my USA ninja gaiden & simon's quest because of those strict policies they had just for the heck of it! After years i can finally see that even though i started with nintendo,and i was nintendo forever as a kid etc that sega was more open minded as a company even though they failed to continue to make systems.
"Memory Management Controller" is an official term, along with "Memory Bank Controller" on the Game Boy. But then you get to the discrete-logic mappers like UxROM, which uses two chips. One chip stores 4 bits, and the other chip has four OR gates on it. There's no single "memory management controller" chip there. Then other mappers (AxROM, BxROM, CxROM) use only the 4-bit storage chip without the OR gate chip. But a 4-bit storage chip isn't a "memory management controller". So what do you call the arrangement of circuits on the board that makes bank switching happen? Emulator authors decided to call them Mappers. One early emulator, "Famicom emulator" (later named Famtasia) called it "Protect Type" rather than Mapper. (Also referring to a simple 4-bit storage chip as an "enhancement chip" is just silly, it's not the freakin Super FX chip)
very intresting, shows how Nintendo has only the ambition to control every title confirms how we are now in terms of gaming. Just one critique, on the voice, intonations, don't overplay things like you do.
Are you shure that it isn't the other way around? It makes no real sense from a development standpoint. Code is relative small compared to graphics data. 1:11
i still amazes my why no western youtuber has ever correctly named the japanese nes as the _FAMILY COMPUTER_ where it's clearly plastered at its console. it seems that western youtubers find it Japanish (opposite to Engrish) cutesy sounding to name it as a famicom where only sharp was the one who actually branded it as such. during its heyday here in asia, it's officially known only as the _FAMILY COMPUTER_ fyi. i just hope that western youtubers would stop bastardizing the name of this console give this the much respect it deserves!
The hell you on about? Yeah and it clearly says NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM on the NES, but we call it the NES because that's what the community and world decided on. Even Nintendo Japan refers to it as the Famicom. Jog on. Weirdo.
@@DavidDrury90 i pretty much don't mind how you call the NES. it's known to be that way since. in its market. but bastardizing the family computer, i do. because it's NOT a representation on what the console was called in its actual market during its time. show me an actual official nintendo made console named the famicom, then i will rest my case. and name-calling would make your argument better? such childish response.
@@DavidDrury90 yeah, nice one-liners. your argument makes a lot of sense because you get so used with the westernization aka bastardization of the brand lol
Another British guy talking about the system that was so unpopular and under the radar in his own country. A North Englander, by the sound of it, with the "thoot it wood make them moony."
it seems like back then they really liked making unnecessary changes to Japanese products sometimes. i think they where just racist or something Japanese people thought westerns had lower standards. and didn't mind losing world wide profits as long as it was successful at home. and westerners wanted to remove anything "exotic" .like rice and ninjas because who would like this. and Japanese companies where already making games targeted to teens and young adults. but in the west they thought nobody over age 10 would play video games. (maybe that was true looking at older generations lol) so everything got censored also it seems like it took years to launch a game in other countries back then. why was like this ?i don't think boats improved much in the last 40 years its not like they were in a wooden sailboat. if i was in charge of thing i would have just released the famicom world wide it with the Japanese design and renamed it to nes since famicom doesn't sound great if you speak English .and the pcengine would just be the same too but painted black and still calling it the turbografix 16 because pcengine is a bad and confusing name. i also noticed similar crap with anime and movies from many other countries everything had to go trough an American filter before coming out world wide. in most countries you could only watch local media and American stuff. maybe something from the uk Australia and the country next to you .stuff from other countries was too rare only in recent years are anime and korean movies becoming mainstream. because of the internet they can skip the Americanisation and people from around the world can decided what they want to watch or play without a filter. you can see for the first time in history non American movies and tv series and music (music has been around for much longer but i mean pre recorded music not classical music) is becoming popular world wide. Japanese video games have always been popular but they were usually westernised. but now even visual novels are mainstream and they don't even bother dubbing them in English anymore.
I have a strong feeling that the reason Splatterhouse wasn't released for the NES was not because of its content (games like Friday the 13th had no issue lol) but more likely because it was a Namco game and right around the time Splatterhouse initially released for the Famicom in Japan they had pretty much burned their relationship with Nintendo. I won't go into detail here and suggest you check out RndStranger's Famidaily episode on the game.
Yup. Relationships between the two companies was at an all-time low then. They collaborated with Tengen on unlicensed releases, even.
@@willmistrettathey basically *owned* tengen, didn’t they?
@@masonasaro2118 No. They were an alternate name for Atari Games. Long story, but basically Atari was split into two different companies at the time. One had the right to use the Atari branding for computer/console games and the other could only use it for arcade games. When the arcade branch wanted to get into console games, they needed a new label to do it under, hence Tengen.
@willmistretta
Partially right.
Atari was split into 2 halves like you said. Atari Corp went to Jack Traimel of Commodore fame.
Warner retained Atari Games.
Warner and Namco created a new entity called AT Games. Warner owned 40 % of the company, Namco owned the rest. Namco then sold 20% of the shares to the employees. Which means it was then owned by 3 different entities.
Famicom Splatterhouse also has a highly clashing tone. The name Splatterhouse is given to a highly bloody and gory series, yet the game's tone is very silly and full of parodies. How would you market it? Call it "Silly Splatterhouse"? People who want the blood and gore might be scared off by the comedy.
I always thought that Lifeforce was Gradius 2, and then Gradius 3 was on the SNES. Turns out Lifeforce was just a spinoff. Learned something new today, I guess!
LifeForce is a reworking of Salamander, which is a spinoff.
@@CptJistuce Not to be confused with the 1985 sci-fi/horror mystery flick "Lifeforce", which would have made a pretty cool videogame adaptation, to be honest.
You are one of very few UA-camrs who are consistently able to bring a new and fresh conversation topic to the subject of early video game systems. I feel like I've been hearing the same 12 stories on repeat from everyone for the past 20 years, but you bring a perspective of actual technical competence and familiarity with the hardware that sets you way apart from the rest.
Agreed!
Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti is amazing, one of my all-time favorite 8-bit games, period.
The West got totally screwed over something awful in regards to Contra ports. Gryzor on the Famicom is waaaay more polished than its NES counterparts in the US and Europe.
It's Splatterhouse is so much fun, such a shame it's still not well known.
NES Contra made good use of graphics compression to fit on the 128KB cartridge. US and Japanese versions shipped at around the same time. They just added a bunch of extra stuff for the Japanese release, and there's a lot of blank space in the Japanese version because the cartridge size was doubled. Also, it was not named Gryzor, that's the name from the European arcade release. Japanese version is named with three Kanji that read as "Kon to ra", it's Contra.
Gryzor is actually the European Arcade title.
It's still "Contra" in Japan.
What about probotector?
@@georgesiv2082 PAL console version with robots. There's no arcade Probotector.
No mention that the PCB for Castlevania III Dracula’s Curse actually has an expansion audio pin/contact? That PCB was only used in Castlevania III and Laser Invasion. It’s also the only way we know what pin on the expansion port to connect for expansion audio since there were multiple that connected to otherwise-unused auxiliary pins on an NES cart.
Expansion audio did not require an internal mod. It just required plugging something in to the expansion port covered by an annoyingly difficult break-away panel.
Inside the cart you can see that the extra contact connects through a 10KΩ resistor to the last leg in the MMC5 mapper chip. Understandably, they left the resistor footprint unpopulated since they ultimately reprogrammed the game to use system audio instead, but it seems the PCB really was designed for an expansion audio dongle at some point. At first I thought the dongle would have included whatever sound generator they used in the VRC VI chip but, no, the MMC5 really does provide the expansion audio. A few people have modified their cartridge and installed a hacked ROM to re-enable Expansion Audio but I wouldn’t expect VRC VI expansion audio to sound the same from an MMC5 unless Nintendo specifically tried to incorporate the same functions.
Regarding the theoretical expansion audio dongle, one must wonder: How was anyone planning to implement it when they laid out that PCB? The break-away panel covering the expansion port is not as easy as most break-away panels intended for end users. Unlike a PC slot cover, you aren’t getting it off with a screwdriver. It would require a cutting tool of some kind which may be why they decided not to move ahead with it. No idea why Nintendo bothered designing it and putting it into every console and even designed a game PCB that could use it when they made it so difficult to expose for end users.
Ultimately Nintendo removed the expansion port and the pin that would have been used for it in the NES-101 “toploader.”
It is worth noting that the breakaway panel isn't on earlier units. They stopped cutting it away in the factory at some point, but continued to populate the connector for some reason.
In the era, it wouldn't be outrageous to ask people to use a razor blade to cut away the plastic struts.
@@CptJistuce I’ve heard that but I’ve serviced and modded hundreds of consoles including some that I suspect were from the 1985 test launch and yet I’ve never seen one with the panel removed. OK, that’s not true: I’ve seen some where the owner removed it but never seen one removed from the factory. Even my Deluxe Set had the panel… though I’d love to inspect a confirmed 1995 test launch set (same contents but without “Deluxe Set” on the package).
As a kid I removed the expansion cover out of curiosity since it clearly looked like it was supposed to be removed easily on the PAL version. Then I spent years wondering what the connector should be used for.
Other games that didn't get a Western localization on NES times are visual novels like The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Enix, 1983), the first two Detective Club games (Nintendo, 1988 & 1989), Hokkaidō Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu (Armor Project, 1984), Yamamura Misa Suspense: Kyōto Zai-tech Satsujin Jiken (Tose, 1990), and the Tantei Jingūji Saburō series (Data East, 1987, 1988 & 1990).
Atari being hurt by crappy 3rd party shovelware/bad games is as overstated as blaming ET and Pac Man for the great shakeout of 1983/84 in the US. What caused the crash was there was at least 12 different and incompatible systems. This and this alone caused it.
The NES is absolutely overrun with bad shovelware.
The real reason Nintendo did it was to tax 3rd party publishers. That's why Atari locked out 3rd parties with the 7800. They taxed them twice. First, they overcharged them to manufacture, package and distribute the game and then second they took a cut of the actual sales. This is plain old fashioned grift and NOT looking out for the customer to ensure the game has the "Nintendo seal of quality"
One of the UA-camrs I follow did a video debunking the ET crashed the market myth. I forget who it was, but it was a good video.
12 consoles and all of em sucked. If the nes had released in the U.S. same time as the famicom in japan probably wouldn't have crashed at all.
@@Ammothief41 Are you stupid?
@@catsaregovernmentspies I've seen a number of them and they always get this cause wrong. It sounds plausible and I guess that's good enough for most people.
Another thing is a lot of people thought video games were a fad that would pass. When the big players started losing large sums of money, all of the weak players and even some of the strong ones cut and ran. They thought the fad was over and that people would ditch the consoles for home computers and get down to doing serious work. What exactly that serious work in the home was supposed to be, I have no clue.
Business stuff i suspect. And remember the us was hit with a recession so that added to the problem
This gaming channel is one of the most underrated ones out on UA-cam. The sheer quality of these videos are amongst the best.
To probably has to do with the fact that his voice may be wanna. Put an ice pick at my eardrums.
Well said. Konami suffered the most. It’s why of all the Konami games I have a lot of them are Konami titles that we’re objectionable, overpowered with VRCs, the release limits or breaking games to punish renters. A lot of the games you have here like splattehouse too I have.
It is worth noting that the FamiCom Disk System didn't just exist to enable bigger games. It was not just meant to solve the problem of the Nintendo's limited address space, but also the problem of games being too expensive for kids to buy(a problem that was exacerbated by high ROM prices at the time).
The FDS looked like "the future" until ROM prices came back down and then fell farther, and pirates noticed it was SUPER easy to copy FDS games(the system used standard QuickDisks and had no copy protection). Piracy was what really killed the FDS.
But cartridges were never as cheap as Disk System games were.
The MSX series of home computers were a viable alternative in Japan, not so much in the West save for the Netherlands, Italy and Spain (even though we had the C64 and ZX Spectrum).
@@OnafetsEnovap The MSX is a pretty rad format, though really only the MSX2 and later is a viable Famicom competitor. MSX1 has the same problem the SG-1000 had: it is basically a ColecoVision released at the same time the FamiCom launched.
@@CptJistuce Indeed. I think that's what crippled its legacy somewhat (and ruined its chances of making a big splash in the West - that, and oversaturation). Looks like first impressions do count after all.
@@OnafetsEnovap I think it is more that there was an appreciable market split at the time. The modern global market wasn't really a thing, not like it is now.
Japanese systems that were rather nice never left the land of the rising sun, or were ignored when they did. American systems never made it to Japan, Britain still thinks the Spectrum is something to be proud of rather than ashamed(note I have an anti-Spectrum bias).
The MSX was apparently rather big in Brazil, for what it is worth.
@@CptJistuce Of course it was (and still is) - Brazil's a gold mine for retro systems. :)
Damn Gradius 2 looks awesome with the bosses and all. I loved the first one. What a shame we never got it.
Atari didn't really have a problem with too much software or the low quality of games. What killed the Atari 2600 was America had a massive recession which resulted in people pulling back spending and the toy retailers took that to mean that the video game fad was over. Eventually Atari started to make 2600s again because as soon as the recession ended they have a massive amount of demand for them
This is just a reductive and inaccurate view as blaming it all on the latter. It was very much a combination of both factors. You don't get the crash without both being there. When the 2600 came back it was mostly being supported by existing titles NOT new software. New Atari 2600 software post-crash was almost universally unsuccessful. Without the NES, home gaming likely permanently shifts towards the domain of the personal computer ala the C64 in North America, at least for a significant period of time.
The reason the Atari came back wasn't because good new games were getting made for it... because they weren't. It's because it was dirt cheap and had an established software library in a revitalized console market. Without Nintendo revitalizing the market first and restoring both industry & consumer confidence, the Atari 2600 NEVER would have bounced back the way it did in the first place. 🤷
@@Cooe. Dude I was there.... And if bad software was the problem people would not have immediately started buying games the first chance they got. Remember that long before Nintendo entered the market Atari was still selling 2600 directly to consumers because they kept calling Atari asking for them. That's how and why we got the 2600 Jr (which I had because my original 2600 died)
Back then you didn't have big data so retailers didn't know what consumers actually wanted they just made rough guesses. Everyone thought the public would want computers because they we're only $100 or so more than a game console. Like William shatner said, why buy a video game.
Turns out there was lots of reasons but by the time Atari realized that it was a bit too late
@@jeremygregorio7472 Not THE problem but definitely A problem. And it was a major contributing problem. Your rose tinted nostalgia glasses and cognitive biases are brainwashing you from facing reality. Not all pleasure & toy purchasing saw similar hits during the early 1980's recession as console based video games. NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE in fact!
@@jeremygregorio7472 On top of this, most of the third party developers for the 2600 were so small that once people stopped buying their games, entire studios dissapeared, from Games by Apollo to Imagic. Also, by 1984 Atari was ready to release the 7800 wich had a demand in the market, but payement disputes between Warner Coms. and Tramiel delayed the system till 1986 when it was obsolete and late to the party.
Nintendo didn't "save" the industry, the numbers show that as much, it was more like Atari suffered an economic crash based upon many things, their own stupid desitions (like comisioning more cartridges for Pacman than consoles already produced since 1977) that put them on a fatal loss, mixed with the smaller studios closing down due to their costs on logistics and catridge production. Once this fuzz was over in early 1984 the entire industry started to revitalize.
What Nintendo did on its own was a quality control over the software produced for the system, however, the company approached this in very draconian terms wich just 5 years later made them loss the 16-bit war and with that it's dominance in the home console department till this very day.
@@jeremygregorio7472 Also the retailers always got refunds for unsold cartridges. This ended up bankrupting Imagic, for instance.
This was a great and informative video! As someone mentioned in a previous comment, I truly do appreciate that you presented information I did not previously know. Keep up the great work!
Ooh Crisis Force looks great!
It's 2024 and I'm still looking for a Video Ouija cartridge.
Gradius was an amazing game and Gradius 2 was simply on another level compared to it. One of my favourite things I own is a complete set of YuGiOh cards based around the Gradius game. Konami owns both titles and so YuGiOh was able to make a whole set of cards based on the old game....very cool.
I don't blame them there where a lot of groups back then that would've destroyed Nintendo if they did. Those groups canceled Saturday morning cartoons, and many other cartoons and comic books. Those groups even went after music. The ramifications of their actions are still felt today. Ratings on games and music, cartoon and comic books standards, loss of cartoon blocks, censoring of anime and manga and video games.
Nothing about a mapper has anything to do with politics. The only group that canceled saturday morning cartoons is tv network execs.
Nintendo was acting no different than those execs. Nintendo was controlling what could be on the NES in america. Apple today acts like nintendo. Apple consolized the iphone so they control the features apps can have.
Don't blame "groups" for the actions of rich executives.
Really informative and interesting video. Good work bro!
Thanks for watching!
Shame it is wrong, at least in one detail. Nintendo put the lock in chip to the NES precisely to force other software vendors to publish with them under their terms. They effectively taxed all 3rd party games. First, by overcharging them to manufacture, package and publish the games and then second by taking a cut of the sales.
It was just good old fashioned greed.
But that's exactly what I said in the video@@tarstarkusz
@@tarstarkusz I feel like I got that impression from this video, but good info
@@Sharopolis I got the impression you were saying they did it to protect from "unapproved" poor quality releases from hurting Nintendo.
A lot of people falsely believe this is what caused the 83/84 crash in the US. It's not. It's not even close. But people like to say it.
Nintendo was kind of inconsistent with their US censorship back in the day. I remember being pretty shocked as a kid by the ending of Bionic Commando, for example, and NARC, while a terrible game, certainly held its own against that chibi Splatterhouse in the violence category.
You'll have to remember that the societal norms during that time were very conservative, so the marketing strategy for foreign media wasn't as forgiving as it is today. The reason why video games stayed true to social norms was because Nintendo of America wanted to make sure that gamers took the NES very seriously. As the gaming industry was in bad shape thanks to Atari's reckless video game handling, the NES was localzed as a children's toy. As the NES was localized as a children's toy, video games were marketed to children and all of them had to stay true to social norms. You may have not liked the conservative societal norms for the censorship, and Nintendo of America didn't like them either, but they had no choice to rely on social norms policies because they thought it was the only way many people were going to take the gaming industry very seriously.
Hahaha, I certainly remember being surprised they allowed Trevor Belmont to pray to a cross in _Castlevania III_ ! Good times. Lots of hilarious censorship jokes to be had from that era too, like "Frothing mugs of milk" and "coffee" causing dudes to be asleep at tables in "cafés".
I'd like to clarify Namco's chip wasn't a singing mapper. Unlike the other devs, Namco used two separate chips to manage mapping and handle expansion audio. Regardless, it's a shame we never got Megami Tensei 2.
Don't forget Mappy Kids as well.
This is literally not true at all.
@@iyatemu You are literally the rudest commenter to grace a soundchip fun fact.
I didn't even know there were any decent looking NES games like that, all I ever experienced were borning washout out pallettes and crap music. Probably why I rarely bother with NES emus, and why SNES seems like such a crazy leap forward.
Fantastic info. You are so good at explaining complex things.
Man, taking a look at the Switch online store, Nintendo most definitely has rescinded their old NES ideas of how to avoid a ton of crap games. The Switch store is pretty overwhelmed with them.
They have hentai games. They have a game where the whole point is beating women to steal and collect their underwear.
Looking back, the Seal of Quality really NEVER meant anything. It only meant the 3rd party paid for the license, which is evident by 7/10 of the NES lineup being absolutely terrible. That said, the Switch lineup shows Nintendo never gave one damn about quality. 99 out of 100 games on the e-shop are shovelware dogshit that are in MOST cases free cellphone games being sold for $20+ on the Switch. ALL of them glitchy buggy and crashprone. NONE of them worth a fucking penny.
We didn't have Gladius 2 but we did get Life Force, damn near exactly like Gladius 2
People are really tough on Nintendo for being so strict with 3rd Party Devs in the early days but I truly think it was smart and necessary in the West for the time. A great example of what can happen without such oversight is the mounds of shovel wear that was produced for the Wii. I think it was a brilliant business plan and we have that to thank in part for the resurgence of the industry in the West.
No it isn't. All that causes is American and European gamers to miss out lot of great classic games that never officially release here in the US and Europe. There's always going to be shovelware no matter what. We still got lot of the bad games by LJN on the NES. How is it a smart decision to license those instead of the good ones? So many underrated gems happens because of that idiotic rule by Nintendo of America. This hits home to me because I'm a huge fan of the Mappy series made by Namco(Really great series). Famicom version of Mappy is sadly only released in Japan and did not get localized back in the 80's. And because of the strictness of Nintendo not allowing custom chips in the NES causes Mappy Kids to only be released in Japan as well. In the long run all it causes is we're missing out a lot of great gems that would see a light of day of success and fanbase worldwide since a long time, not just in Japan. That's why I always feel Japan handled better in releasing Famicom games and not miss out any of the great ones by great third party developers by Namco for example.
@retrofan4963 You have to consider the context of the era. Atari almost killed the industry in the US with its lack of quality control that caused consumers to stop buying and playing games altogether. In the early days, the Nintendo Seal of Quality actually meant something, an assurance to consumers that the games being released were curated as quality experiences. Obviously, the efficacy over time was debatable, and Nintendo's walled garden approach would certainly cause a lot of problems that weren't always reasonable. But you can't just dismiss this as some random bad idea Nintendo had.
The reason why I think that Nintendo of America got strict with their video game policies were due to societal norms being conservative at the time. When foreign media first came to the west, many people did not understand the original work, and not that many people thought that video games are cartoons were enjoyed by everyone.
It's interesting when you dive deep into the behind the scenes with Nintendo's consoles back in the day how much of a pain in the ass they were to work with if you were a developer. They finally got it right with the Switch being region free and inviting to Indie developers to which I hope they continue this mindset going forward with whatever their new system or Switch 2 will be. I watched a video recently on what development was like on the N64 and besides the Rom space limitations just the way they engineered the different components of the system severely bottlenecked the capabilities the system could do graphically and on top of that developers heavily relied on Nintendo's development kits which weren't always optimized and didn't allow developers to really test the hardware unless they wasted months or years disassembling the system with their own homegrown tools. It's wild.
there answer was if you don't like our rules, make your own system. That is the magic of the free market. LMAO
underrated country
1:59 TILES!!!
That's T I L E - tiles.
facinating. I'd love to see you cover unlicensed games and multicarts too
this is what makes it so interesting all those regional games so many cool gems
Very interesting. That was jam packed with a lot of details that I was unaware of.
3:24 ohhh lord thast would have awesome to make action games with the gun
After a while i did understood how a game can be better because of the chip set was using,either for the mapping or the whole game to be for instance a perfect port or really close to an arcade! I started with GB and after that an snes and back then we didn't knew or better put couldn't put side by site an arcade with a 16bit system to see the differences in graphics etc! If a cartridge had one or two components inside the price tag would be higher,thus more difficult to make those games and sell them! If you wanted to play a perfect port of an arcade the cartridges should be like SNK's system with those big ass cartridges even years after the release of nes.Japan didn't release those outside because of the costs involved,which would make really difficult and more expensive the retail sales! I remember donkey kong country when it first released on snes,the console was close to the final steps and the price tag was fall because we were pretty close to the next gens.So the game it self because of the extra tech goodness it had inside cost really close to the entire system! I have gradius 1 complete boxed for NES and it shows really good that even the first game of the series work really well for an NES system,imagine now with the second game! Also i do remember the difference in the sound the japanese dracula's curse had compared with the western cartridge as well! Talking about a big difference in those releases in sound.
Very good video, really went into detail about what type of chip and how it was possible to have such advanced games on the Famicon, and the Nes. I never even knew what a mapper chip was.
Splatterhouse was fun as an adult on an emulator.
Considering the first Megami Tensei wasn't ported, they probably never planned to port the sequel either.
Gradious 2 looks like life-force but g2 looks way more intense and harder
Gradius was such a great game.
A lot of other reasons too were because they felt it was suppose to do better in just Japan alone but mostly it came do personal problems too.
The NES, from what I remember, only had any kind of major success in two European countries - Italy and Spain (I grew up in the former as well as the UK, so I got to see firsthand the difference between Nintendo games, which were really rich kids' toys, and what I normally got with my friends on the home computers such as the Spectrum and C64).
It was also popular in the nordic countries in my country i think it divided equally between nes sega master system and c64 but my memory is too poor
Nordic countries were absolutely dominated by the NES.
@@MiharuHiramu Were they now? That's news to me. I stand corrected.
The British release of the NES was notoriously bungled with terrible distribution networks and absolutely jacked prices compared to home computers or even Sega consoles.
@@stevendobbins2826 So I understand. Maybe just as well - a computer is always a better buy than a console in my opinion (though I do have a soft spot for the Sega Master System).
the thing i hated most about castlevania 3 was the difficulty for the us version
A video series on bootleg games would be awesome.
Fascinating. I knew the Famicom had more audio channels but I didn't know about the mappers.
flashing image warning @9:39
I am finally playing this upload even though I've seen itultiple times since I bought an emulator stocked with every NES/SNES/etc. and wondered. . .where the heck is Gradius2!?🃏🤣🤣🤣 It must be in the Famicom section to which I've not checked yet.
Probably part of the reason Nintendo got sued for monopolistic practices in America and lost in the early 90s.
I bought a GradiusII clone for the US Nintendo on Ebay... I was afraid it wasn't gonna work but luckily works great and that soundtrack is fuckin lit.
Nintendo prevented crap games to be published by limiting game publishers to 5 game's a year, it DID work 🎉😊
It's scary to think that there could have been a lot more bad NES games considering how many we still got. Even as a kid I mocked the Nintendo "quality seal" after it had been placed on Deadly Towers, one of the worst games of all time. It was a true trauma when a precious Christmas gift or allowance expenditure went to a dud.
Excellent. I'm looking for more games for my Famiclone.
How are you getting hit on Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti but not taking any damage?
Life force is basically gradius 2
Gradius II looks amazing!
Видать нам повезло с пиратством и все эти игры завозили в Россию😅
You mentioned rom hacking. I’ve been seeing a lot of fastroms for the SNES roms. What’s that all about
When it's on an emulator or flash cartridge, you're not constrained by manufacturing the cartridge anymore. You don't need to use a cheaper kind of cartridge board that runs the game more slowly. So you can change a few things and reconfigure the game to have the game use a faster kind of cartridge.
It's an easy and quick way to contract against the slowdown that some SNES games had. While some developers could make games with minimal slowdown without a fastrom, many developers really needed that extra oompf from a fastrom.
Emulators and flashcarts have to run games with enhancment chips like starfox or yoshi's island, so you can imagine gradius 3 running on the same type of cart will have no slowdown
@@xxdarklink93xx
A fastrom isn't an enhancement chip though. It's just a type of cartridge that lets an SNES game run at the 3.58 MHz that the CPU is capable of.
@@LarryLopez91 I understand that, I was trying to make it as easy to understand as possible
19:45
we received super smash Bros in America.
I got a $35 thing on Etsy that plugs into the bottom NES expansion port and allows Japanese expansion audio work. I got it for the Pac Man Championship Edition cartridge, and for a few other games.
yo i need one of these! that’s so cool
So, did you knock out the tab, or did you find another way of using it?
@@videotape2959 I just clipped the tab off and plugged it in. It didn't work at first, I had to bend it a little to get a tight connection. It's homemade.
A Billy Goat boss! I've never seen that before!
this isnt just nes games stayed in japan
Crisis Force would have been awesome.
Funny how "history keeps repeating itself" and we have loads of crap games on phones because of lack of quality control.
Nintendo of America saved the gaming industry. They did what they had to do to be the gate keeper so only the highest quality games got the stamp of approval and do away with the quantity over quality.
I Just suscribed, greetings from México
I think the Famicom is a cooler design than the NES imo.
that splatterhouse game is one of my favorites! i got a copy of it in a lot of namcot releases
Murkins turned the Medusa into a Meduso. 🤣🤣
It’s an oxymoron today that it’s getting harder and harder to find video games developed in America when they’ve been an enormous surge of Asian and Japanese games coming into the United States.
Brilliant, thanks for posting!
Excellent content as always. Thanks once again for all your efforts they are greatly appreciated by myself and many others.
I imagine by 1992 it wasn't worth it to bring Crisis Force to the US because the NES was pretty much dead back then. It'll probably be 1993 by the time it makes it over.
Ummmm...."Gradius II" was called "Life Force"
Im in a country where Nintendo doesn't officially have a presence. Practically all the games here are pirated. I saw and played crises force at a store and marvelled at it. I wonder what chip or mapper these unauthorized, pirated copies used.
The MMC3 was the mapper most used for pirate games. Not a real MMC3, but clone chips. Games were even hacked to use MMC3 instead of other mappers.
@@Dwedit Thank you for this answer. During the heydays of the SNES, I saw a pirated copy of "Star Fox." Unfortunately, the store didn't have a TV and SNES (or SFam) to test it on so I wasn't able to verify if it was really Starfox or just a mislabelled game. Since them though, I also wondered what chip the pirates would have used to replicate the SFX chip.
Wow...nintendo has always been nintendo...i guess in the age of information I shouldn't be surprised that all our favorite companies were always cut through businesses.
It's an interesting video, and while I did know some parts of this, I did not know the full tech side of all of it.
I just wanted to say though that I think the tech side of things had less to do with it than you think. See, for a long time Japan had this weird Love/Hate relationship with the west as they were taking all their ideas from us, and were self conscious about it, especially given a lot of the mockery when they were doing a lot of it wrong. That and they really resented the US for being a bigger market when gaming was becoming such a part of their culture. There was a big "screw America" vibe, especially among fans, and keeping things "Japan Only" was a point of pride, and I think a lot of companies themselves had that attitude.
I can't speak for a lot of these, but I know with Megami Tensei 2, the attitude was entirely different. Understand, everything their RPGs do was entirely cribbed from us. Ultima, Wizardry (still big there), Might and Magic, and others were massively influential, and this was one of their dominant genres. They made a huge deal, for a very long time, about series like megaten being "too hard for western monkeys" even if the games we made that they based them on were much harder (seriously, they were) especially early on. To actually think that RPGs were not going to be popular here, when they pretty much took it all from us... well... yeah not buying that.
It should also be noted they also had this sort of complex about wanting to be seen as better video games than Americans, so among other things they did stuff like crank the difficulty up on the American version and then re-label it as Easy, Normal, and Hard when we're actually starting on some ultra-extreme mode. Another video game youtuber was just talking about how the PS1 era's "Biohazard" is much easier than the US release as "Resident Evil". You can also see some of this attitude in translations, look at all the "accidental" dialogue that makes Americans sound like idiots or involves sexual innuendos in say SNK titles from the 1990s. Understand in the 1990s I was trading fansubbers who were mostly students for various anime, comics, periodicals, etc... which they translated to practice english. I'd be sending them US stuff they couldn't easily get in trade via mail. Literal high school students could do better, and more accurate, translations than the professionals hire by these companies... think about it. Do you think this was accidental? Not according to the fansubbers, who talked about the attitudes a lot of other Japanese had.
I'm not saying the tech theories are wrong, but I think the bottom line is that maybe some of those mappers were made to justify not releasing to the US. If nothing else I would think given the money to be made from the larger market they would have released an inferior US version (we've seen this happen quite a bit over the decades) and assume we just wouldn't notice (and to be fair most people wouldn't).
I'm not Anti-Japan or anything, but as I was involved in dealing with the Japanese through Fidonet in the 90s and read a lot of their translated stuff, I'm not holding a grudge, but I'm not exactly quick to forget. If you want to be honest, I think what really changed with this was much later when Square did "Final Fantasy X" which could have been called "Project Screw America". This was popular with a lot of Japanese fans at the time, but wound up costing them a ton of money and getting them a bad reputation that was causing other games to lose revenue apparently. Basically what happened was they decided to release an "International" version of FF X right off the bat which went everywhere BUT America and had expanded content, while saying basically "Americans are too dumb and bad at game for that version", they also cut several costumes out of X-2 (entire classes in that game) as Japan only, and then decided the true ending of the story would be a stand alone piece of work called "Final Mission" which would be Japan only. Let's just say it too a bit but they relented eventually, and since then they really havem't had the audacity to be that flagrant again, if nothing ele they figured out Americans were becoming more aware of what was being said over there, and we are at least for the current era, a far bigger market. As this kind of thing goes back to the NES era... well yeah, I think in the end a lot of it basically comes down to "they didn't want to release in the US because it was popular not to do so"
Games were made harder for the stateside release because they were scared kids would rent them over a weekend, beat them, and never buy their own copy. Japan banned game rentals so that wasn't a problem over there, and couldn't in America because Blockbuster fought tooth-and-nail against Nintendo's attempts. And JRPGs, specifically Dragon Quest, were made easier because publishers thought casual gamers would be driven to play by the story rather than chasing high scores.
Great video!
I have gradius 2 . Not an import either
Thanks for a video!
Life Force?
You know your game is good if
Nintendo won't let it be released overseas.
This sounds like bs to me. Nintendo could have done a test market on some of these games to see if they sold in Japan first. If they do well there then all they have to do is comparative analysis to similar products. Gus they could weed out all the crappy games and give the go-ahead to the better titles. I guess their operation wasn't big enough way back then.
It shows greatly that from the past nintendo had this huge stick shoved you know where and its not something that they are doing today only! It made really difficult for the develpoers to work on a project because they wanted to be the disney of gaming utopia and this is not right! Even as we speak with switch those years because their system was weaker they worked up problems with the devs once again to have them make downgraded ports of bigger titles in order to sell their system.The other bad thing they also did in the past was locking the system for playing usa & japan cartridges,why to do that?! I have an nes which i break the 4rth pin on their lockout chip in order to play my USA ninja gaiden & simon's quest because of those strict policies they had just for the heck of it! After years i can finally see that even though i started with nintendo,and i was nintendo forever as a kid etc that sega was more open minded as a company even though they failed to continue to make systems.
KiloBITS
The term “Mapper Chip” seems to have been coined by emulator authors
"Memory Management Controller" is an official term, along with "Memory Bank Controller" on the Game Boy. But then you get to the discrete-logic mappers like UxROM, which uses two chips. One chip stores 4 bits, and the other chip has four OR gates on it. There's no single "memory management controller" chip there. Then other mappers (AxROM, BxROM, CxROM) use only the 4-bit storage chip without the OR gate chip. But a 4-bit storage chip isn't a "memory management controller". So what do you call the arrangement of circuits on the board that makes bank switching happen? Emulator authors decided to call them Mappers. One early emulator, "Famicom emulator" (later named Famtasia) called it "Protect Type" rather than Mapper. (Also referring to a simple 4-bit storage chip as an "enhancement chip" is just silly, it's not the freakin Super FX chip)
Thanks to piracy, we had everything here in Brazil...
Been saving money to visit Japan so I can finally take a crack at Jesus.
very intresting, shows how Nintendo has only the ambition to control every title confirms how we are now in terms of gaming. Just one critique, on the voice, intonations, don't overplay things like you do.
Are you shure that it isn't the other way around? It makes no real sense from a development standpoint. Code is relative small compared to graphics data. 1:11
TLDR; Money and Policy.
I like how Jesus, was followed by footage of a shmup; like damn, the bible is lit.
So Nintendo had no respect for people, especially customers, outside of Japan. Again.
Got it.
family "Computer"?????
Yup. And there were even keyboard peripherals released that turned it into an actual home computer.
@@videotape2959 ccol
More like lame Nintendo of America's fault
i still amazes my why no western youtuber has ever correctly named the japanese nes as the _FAMILY COMPUTER_ where it's clearly plastered at its console. it seems that western youtubers find it Japanish (opposite to Engrish) cutesy sounding to name it as a famicom where only sharp was the one who actually branded it as such. during its heyday here in asia, it's officially known only as the _FAMILY COMPUTER_ fyi. i just hope that western youtubers would stop bastardizing the name of this console give this the much respect it deserves!
The hell you on about? Yeah and it clearly says NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM on the NES, but we call it the NES because that's what the community and world decided on. Even Nintendo Japan refers to it as the Famicom. Jog on. Weirdo.
@@DavidDrury90Beat me to it! 🤣👍
@@DavidDrury90 i pretty much don't mind how you call the NES. it's known to be that way since. in its market.
but bastardizing the family computer, i do. because it's NOT a representation on what the console was called in its actual market during its time. show me an actual official nintendo made console named the famicom, then i will rest my case.
and name-calling would make your argument better? such childish response.
@@ecu4321 Long walk. Short pier. Go.
@@DavidDrury90 yeah, nice one-liners. your argument makes a lot of sense because you get so used with the westernization aka bastardization of the brand lol
Another British guy talking about the system that was so unpopular and under the radar in his own country. A North Englander, by the sound of it, with the "thoot it wood make them moony."
it seems like back then they really liked making unnecessary changes to Japanese products sometimes. i think they where just racist or something Japanese people thought westerns had lower standards. and didn't mind losing world wide profits as long as it was successful at home. and westerners wanted to remove anything "exotic" .like rice and ninjas because who would like this. and Japanese companies where already making games targeted to teens and young adults. but in the west they thought nobody over age 10 would play video games. (maybe that was true looking at older generations lol) so everything got censored also it seems like it took years to launch a game in other countries back then. why was like this ?i don't think boats improved much in the last 40 years its not like they were in a wooden sailboat. if i was in charge of thing i would have just released the famicom world wide it with the Japanese design and renamed it to nes since famicom doesn't sound great if you speak English .and the pcengine would just be the same too but painted black and still calling it the turbografix 16 because pcengine is a bad and confusing name.
i also noticed similar crap with anime and movies from many other countries everything had to go trough an American filter before coming out world wide. in most countries you could only watch local media and American stuff. maybe something from the uk Australia and the country next to you .stuff from other countries was too rare only in recent years are anime and korean movies becoming mainstream. because of the internet they can skip the Americanisation and people from around the world can decided what they want to watch or play without a filter. you can see for the first time in history non American movies and tv series and music (music has been around for much longer but i mean pre recorded music not classical music) is becoming popular world wide. Japanese video games have always been popular but they were usually westernised. but now even visual novels are mainstream and they don't even bother dubbing them in English anymore.
XDDDDDDD
Great content. 👍 Although I must say that your personal way of shaping your all sentences with a rising tonality feels exhausting. 😰
At least you weren't an European kid in the NES era... *grumble*
Your voice is the most offensive thing I have ever heard. Please note that I live in the same city as the Westbourough Babtist Church.
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