re: Little known video game facts

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Y’all won’t believe this but the character in Castlevania is named Alucard which is Dracula spelled backwards.

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The Scoreboard Tally in Donkey Kong Coutnry 2 contains a subtle dig at Sonic and Earthworm Jim, two of Sega's most popular franchises (although Jim would be ported to SNES).

The No Hopers trash can has Sonic's shoes and Jim's blaster.

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In Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, a player can move approximately 1.4 times faster than normal if you strafe while running forwards AKA Speed Strafing.

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Man, that's all we did. Strafing all over the bunker trying to get a drop on the other guy.

I can't say I miss split screen multiplayer too much (SCREEN PEAKER), but those were some fun times.

dammit



that and "screen" I always get mixed up with "ee" and "ea"




I'm leaving it

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Super Mario 2

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Peach was OP as frick

In the original Donkey Kong, Mario isn't saving Princess Peach. He is saving Pauline who is the mayor of New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo invented the D-Pad, and held a patent on it until 2005. This is why other d-pads to that point are slightly different, and not as good imo

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It was another Nintendo game re-skinned because the actual Mario 2 was thought to be too hard for Americans.

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Which is weird, because I know a bunch of games where the opposite occured. Games were made HARDER for the American market, and easier for the Japanese.

"From the 1980’s through the early 2000’s, it was characteristic for Japanese game developers to make one of their priorities overcoming the influence of the rental market on purchasing habits. Basically game publishers conjectured that if a game was hard enough to force people to rent it multiple times in order to beat it, then it was much more likely that it would be purchased instead. This applied mainly in the late 80’s and the 1990’s, when Blockbuster was in full swing and arcade-derived game design trends still flourished.
What this meant, though, was that for any given Japanese-made game, it wasn’t unlikely that the version made for the native Japanese market would be easier — maybe even what you’d consider to be “normal” by modern standards, but the North American version would range anywhere between slightly tweaked to be a little harder to completely jacked up. Contra 3 was less forgiving about letting you see the true final boss, Super Double Dragon had only one difficulty setting in North America — and it was harder than any of the three available in Japan, and so on.

This kind of practice certainly could have led, in conjunction with a few cherry-picked titles from the modern era, to a certain perception that Japan produces harder games, but on average, no, Japan does not actively prefer to make games harder.

They do make games more cryptic. Progression that requires relatively blind searching and experimentation is something that Japanese audiences tend to tolerate a lot more so than western audiences, who expect some amount of direction towards their next goal"

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Which is weird, because I know a bunch of games where the opposite occured. Games were made HARDER for the American market, and easier for the Japanese.

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renting games was illegal/uncommon in Japan. In America however it was very common, and Nintendo, et al thought they were losing money because gamers would just rent the game a day or two, beat it, and return it. No need to buy it. You couldn't really make the games bigger or longer, so ramping up the difficulty was their solution to force people to buy it in order to beat it