Connificent
Al Pachinko, Konami President
Having to wait longer for releases was agonising. We still got screwed with Gamecube and even the Xbox One lol.
Aldynes
Member
May I ask why? The PAL version was slower but suffers less slowdown overall and I find it more enjoyable to play tbh.Got Golden Eye 64 as usa import, 140 eurosbefore that I imported megaman Gameboy games 3 -4, GB was region free, good times
SirTerry-T
Member
It was only that bad if you didn't get hooked up with an imported machine or a mod to a Pal machine.
A Pal Saturn with a region select and 50/60hz mod was a brilliant gateway into the import scene.
Even the Amiga was still knocking out some terrific titles during the tail end of the 80's through to the early 90's.
A Pal Saturn with a region select and 50/60hz mod was a brilliant gateway into the import scene.
Even the Amiga was still knocking out some terrific titles during the tail end of the 80's through to the early 90's.
01011001
Banned
Got Golden Eye 64 as usa import, 140 euros
Handheld gaming was the 1 thing that wasn't really affected by PAL/NTSC crap thankfully... Unless of course you used a Super GameBoy lol
Fess
Member
I was all in on Commodore in the 80s and early 90s, one of my favorite eras of my whole gaming life.
Still enjoy those computers, played some Amiga tonight, Turrican
Hell showed itself once I started playing on console around 1993 or so and realized that almost everything was made for Japan/US and ran in slowmotion in Europe with squished image. Even worse when 3D came and framerates were halved and we got 25fps in Europe. Or in the case of the unplayable N64 version of Ocarina of Time, 17fps!!
Still enjoy those computers, played some Amiga tonight, Turrican
Hell showed itself once I started playing on console around 1993 or so and realized that almost everything was made for Japan/US and ran in slowmotion in Europe with squished image. Even worse when 3D came and framerates were halved and we got 25fps in Europe. Or in the case of the unplayable N64 version of Ocarina of Time, 17fps!!
Neff
Member
01011001
Banned
Turrican 1 was a terribly designed game tho. rarely have I played anything more unfair... I have nostalgia for it because it was one of my earliest gaming memories, but for real... that game sucks if you actually look at it a bit more removed from nostalgia.
Mega Turrican (Turrican 3 but better) was the only actually good Turrican IMO. it still has its unfair moments but not even close to the level of the first 2 games.
Mega Turrican (Turrican 3 but better) was the only actually good Turrican IMO. it still has its unfair moments but not even close to the level of the first 2 games.
LazyParrot
Member
Maybe, but how many people actually knew about these? You have to remember, most posters here were kids back then, if they had been born at all. Regular toy and electronics stores didn't sell imported games, and they naturally didn't sell adapters either. Magazines mostly stuck to covering official releases and almost nobody had internet access, so your chances of discovering any of this stuff as a kid were pretty slim.
01011001
Banned
It's gone now it can't hurt us anymore
you think? well, I have news for you! The turrican collection that released a few months ago, well... the games run at 50hz! meaning stutters because the PS4 doesn't support 50hz output (the XBox does... sucks that it's not on Xbox)
01011001
Banned
every single person I knew that had an N64 also had an N64 NTSC adapter, and many had SNES NTSC adapters, they were everywhere
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Neff
Member
Well yeah it's still around here and there (PSN has PAL PSone games), but at least it's not the norm anymore.
This is horribly hilarious.
jufonuk
not tag worthy
But I will. Man waiting ages for games to arrive in the U.K. then we get the gimped version
LazyParrot
Member
Where did you grow up, and how old were you back then? I grew up in Germany and was about 12 years old when the N64 came out. I knew close to a dozen people who had one, and not a single one had an adapter, or even knew that they existed. Same for any of the other consoles.
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01011001
Banned
south west germany, I was very young when that stuff came out, but through my cousin I knew a lot of pretty hardcore gamers. you'd go to the flea market every saturday and there were guys there that sold imported games and adapters. or you'd go to one of many electronic stores, usually the smaller ones had pretty good stuff, but some bigger ones (Prinz in Mannheim for example) also sold imports and adapters.
back then I personally didn't have an N64 but we would play at my cousin's or his friend's places and everyone had those black, Frankenstein looking adapters in their systems with the PAL game sticking out of the back. that stuff was everywhere
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Aldynes
Member
Here in France they were a lot of opportunities to get our hands on adapters, lots and lots of different video game store did imports games and it was pretty common, that and the manga/anime cultural phenomenon there was interest to bring Japanese games.
kurisu_1974
Banned
Never The Same Color
Pictures At Last
/coat
Pictures At Last
/coat
01011001
Banned
I had the same experience in south west Germany, not too far from the French border actually... it was really not that uncommon
Fess
Member
Nah Turrican 1 is great, they spam you with extra lifes, I played like a noob and died a ton on some bosses and still had 14 lives just now when entering level 4. There are some frustrating areas later on, and lots of jumps that can end in instant death, similar to other older games, but it's a short game.
01011001
Banned
it's still terribly designed, like I said I like it because I grew up with it. but DAMN... there's barely a jump in that game that isn't a blind one, and barely an enemy pattern that isn't just there to fuck you over if you don't know every single level like you back pocket
LazyParrot
Member
Yeah, we didn't have any of that. The best you could hope for at the local flea markets was some burned PC games (and sometimes the police would actually show up and check for those!). For the most part stores didn't sell shit, and what they did sell was horribly overpriced. I didn't even find out Turok was supposed to have human enemies until I moved to North America a few years later.
On PC it was completely different, though. Everybody had all the uncensored/banned games, mostly because pirating them was easy and region lock wasn't a thing on PC.
01011001
Banned
getting banned/indexed games was also pretty easy, using the same sources basically. Even some bigger stores had limited supplies of stuff like Mortal Kombat 3, even tho it was banned. Like I said, Prinz in Mannheim was a pretty big store that did that shit lol... but a bunch of guys in flea markets also just sold them every Saturday, noone bat an eye.
too bad it's almost impossible to find good quality pics of Prinz, because the store closed in 2001 sadly
good memories tho
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FF:Enhanced_Reality
Member
I'm not sure it was tough? It wasn't just Europe that missed out on games. I remember waiting so patiently for Tobal No 2 before finding out in an OPM that it wasn't coming outside of Japan because Square thought the only reason the first one sold was for the Final Fantasy VII demo.
I do remember a lot of quirky things like the 'U R NOT E' or how gaming magazines had letters to write into, cheats to read and how you could order games and accessories over the phone.
I do remember a lot of quirky things like the 'U R NOT E' or how gaming magazines had letters to write into, cheats to read and how you could order games and accessories over the phone.
PayoLoko
Member
Was that secret of mana?
SidViscous
Member
Nah, Secret of Mana was released over here as a litmus test, it sold okay (wasn't a full price game, was like £39 instead of the usual £59) but they figured instead of Chrono Trigger, maybe releasing a western developed RPG would sell better instead. So they gave the tools and engine from Secret of Mana to Squaresoft USA who made Secret of Evermore, which was pure rubbish and one of my biggest gaming disappointments. We never got Secret of Mana 2 (Well, Seiken no densetsu 3) like Asia, nor the translated of Chrono Trigger released in the US.
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DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
That's especially sad considering Secret of Evermore was what Squaresoft made for the western gaijin audience instead of Trials of Mana.
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
What? It was awesome. A console gamer sure it probably sucked. But the home computer gaming era at that time was amazing. Constant stream of indie games, new genres popping up overnight, shareware, games designed by a couple of passionate people. And as the Amiga generation ended we had x86 PC's and the move to online gaming, mods with no-one giving a shit about copyright etc.
LazyParrot
Member
How easy was it to buy those games if you were under 18? I once had a store owner in Frankfurt threaten to call the cops on me when I asked him about a copy of Doom64 they had behind the counter. It was a ridiculous threat, of course, but as a kid I thought this was actually something you could get arrested for. The price was absolutely ridiculous, too. IIRC they wanted 180 DM for it.
Cockles & Whelks
Banned
I treasured my Secret of Mana US import, because the game didn't come out into Europe for another 12 fucking months.
Cockles & Whelks
Banned
And we had to watch shit like this.
Fess
Member
Yeah but that's how games were back then, I don't see it as bad design, it's just how they increased the difficulty. They aren't made to be beaten without having killed you over and over first, you have to memorize almost everything because if it would be more forgiving you would've finished them first night.
I did a playthrough of The Last Ninja on Virtual Console at the release, finished it in 45 minutes because I know each insta-death jump on a pixel level from having played it and died so much.
A game where you're truly trolled is Rick Dangerous. The whole freaking game is a trial and error memory excercise. I finished that too back in the days but today when I've forgot many traps they have me crying in a corner at level 3
01011001
Banned
50/50, you didn't usually if the person there knew the games, only if you were lucky and the person at the counter was a older lady that didn't really know/give a damn.
Usually if you were under 18 your parents or grand parents would get them for you. most parents in my friends group and in my family were pretty relaxed with this stuff, so you'd just as "hey they is 18 rated, can you buy it for me?" and that was that.
My grandpa once bought Manhunt on Xbox for my little brother lol, one of the more well known guys that was at the local flea market every week had it and my brother just asked... the guy apparently even explained to my grandpa what the game is and what it is about and he was unfazed by it lol.
it was not uncommon to play banned or at least indexed games at a friend's house on the living room TV, doing Fatalities in MK2 and stuff.
So if you were alone in the city you had to get lucky to get 18 rated or brutal, imported titles if the person behind the counter was being a dick, but if you were with you parents it was a non-issue for most of the friends and cousins/family members I hung out with.
I think it only really began to become an issue once the USK actually printed the age ratings on the front of the box, because in SNES and N64 times it was the VERY early days of the USK age ratings, and at first there was no regulation where it has to be printed on, and many games had a tiny age rating print on the back or something. so you had to know where to look.
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One advantage you had was PAL TVs had better visual fidelity for movies and television. Converting anything shot at 24fps to 59.97fps is a real nightmare, while with PAL all you had to do was add an extra frame and call it a day. Pre-HD, American cinephiles go out of their way to get PAL transfers of movies for this reason. NTSC = Never Twice the Same Color, PAL = Perfect At Last.
Though, I feel sorry for you Sonic fans..
Though, I feel sorry for you Sonic fans..
01011001
Banned
Yeah but that's how games were back then, I don't see it as bad design, it's just how they increased the difficulty. They aren't made to be beaten without having killed you over and over first, you have to memorize almost everything because if it would be more forgiving you would've finished them first night.
I did a playthrough of The Last Ninja on Virtual Console at the release, finished it in 45 minutes because I know each insta-death jump on a pixel level from having played it and died so much.
A game where you're truly trolled is Rick Dangerous. The whole freaking game is a trial and error memory excercise. I finished that too back in the days but today when I've forgot many traps they have me crying in a corner at level 3
it was how many games were back the sure, but it's still bad gamedesign. and there were also games back then that tried to go away from that Arcade coin eating design for home systems.
Nintendo of course really made the first games that really tried to be thoughtfully designed and fair. they also had missteps... Mario Bros 2 being one of them, hence it was not released in the west until later as Lost Levels on SNES, but most of their games were absolutely fair and well designed, as were most of the big name games on NES like MegaMan or Castlevania 1/3... hard as fuck, but fair for the most part.
you can excuse it for the timeframe of release, but that doesn't mean that it's not bad design.
Berserking Guts
Member
Yeeeeah, but we got Terranigma... so it evened out.
nush
Member
There was an import shop in almost every small town or market. That's where you went to learn about this stuff, outside with other gamers. They fixed me right up with an education on modding your consoles to be region free (Or if they required an adapter) and 50/60HtZ toggle switches. The back of the magazines at the time were packed with adverts for all the companies that did mail order if there was not an import shop close to you.
Tokyo Joe, Raven Games, PC Engine Supplies, CEX, Another World, Bournemouth Computer Centre......
Then there was the vast supply of exotic gaming hardware, PC Engine, Neo Geo, FM Towns, Superguns
They were super knowledgeable and if you ask for game recommendations they were always solid choices. Being a hardcore gamer in the 90's meant more than how many hours you played COD or what level you are that is does now.
ABnormal
Member
Should we talk about the cost of games cartridges, then?
And some people today whine about games price, without even realizing that it's probably the only entertainment genre that have gone down on price for decades. And games price is still more or less the same (even taking account of euro conversion and inflation) since ps1. Before that, they did even cost more (sega megadrive, SNes, and do not even look at neo geo prices...).
And all this still with constant increase of games development budget. Luckily the market grew since the time of the first Playstation, but non proportionally to the costs, which grew far more in comparison.
Dream-Knife
Banned
Hey Europeans: If metric is so great, why only 50hz?
ABnormal
Member
After several years with C64 ( a dreams machine, for a young boy), I managed to convince my father to get me a Megadrive. What an incredible jump of everything, it was...
It was the beginning of the Holy grail of "arcade perfect" games. Strider above all. But even Golden Axe was great.
01011001
Banned
Fess
Member
Yeah things were weird back then, especially on C64. Adults were completely ignorant of what we played and devs weren't censoring a thing, as a kid at age 10 I had already chopped heads, executed prisoners at war and masturbated a woman to orgasm
01011001
Banned
Yeah things were weird back then, especially on C64. Adults were completely ignorant of what we played and devs weren't censoring a thing, as a kid at age 10 I had already chopped heads, executed prisoners at war and masturbated a woman to orgasm
the Wild West of gaming. And even tho 90% of that was banned in germany we still did it lol
01011001
Banned
I don't think there are any. the games that were developed in Europe were almost always designed for NTSC first as well. only a few games weren't and those usually didn't release in America either
nush
Member
They would run too fast and overscan.
Fess
Member
Yup I think some games were banned in Sweden too, just made them more interesting lol so they spread faster, kids swapped games on the school yard like it was candy