/vr/ - Retro Games

>>1646804
Because Japanese computers had the best graphic chipsets back then and it was much muxh easier to port from MS-DOS to MSX and PC-98 than to Amiga.

Japs loved WRPG's like Wizardry on that time.

>>1646819
they still do, they have threads on wizardry and ultima on 2chan.

>>1646825
Do you know what japs think about more modern WRPG's like Black Isle stuff? They know about them?

imho it sure looked like Ultima 4 and 5 were best on nes? I never saw anything close to it on any other platform, they always stayed too close to the original cga. U4 nes seemed like all new code and they polished the graphics to a shine.

>>1646828
There's some fallout 3 fanart and mass effect on danbooru. I don't really keep up on it partcularly.

Wizardry and Ultima were also the main inspirations for the early JRPGs including Dragon Quest and Hydlide, and that genre pretty much evolved seperately from the WRPGs afterwards.

>>1646828
I'm not sure I was only really browsing to see if they still talked about retro games and they do on their regular video game board there are quite a few retro threads.

>>1646804

Partly it was beause they tended to be the last editions made so they were pimped out, and partly it's because Japanese PCs had to support higher resolutions, since they were primarily business machines and thus a spreadsheet with names of people or companies on had to have enough pixels for the more complicated moonrunes to be legible. They tended to be similar in the level of graphical grunt, though, which is why their old games tend to have fewer colours, a static boarder and not much moving if they could help it.

>>1646828
They don't like how most of them are shooters now (ME, Fallout, etc)

Those games do horrible in Japan.

Only WRPG that did decent in Japan in the past 10 years was Skyrim.

They hate Bioware

>>1646906
I'd question the taste of anyone who doesn't hate Bioware. They've re-released the exact same game every couple years starting with KOTOR.

>>1646906
Doesn't help Fallout's Japanese advertisements basically said "Dragon Quest sucks, play a REAL video game like Fallout 3"

Cause, you know, the best way to get Japan to buy your shit is to insult the most iconic and popular RPG franchise over there

>>1646923

They really did that? Jesus, what did they expect?

>>1646962
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/102584-Japanese-Fallout-New-Vegas-Ads-Hate-On-JRPGs

Pretty much

>>1646832
> original cga
Ultima was originally on the Apple II. Only 2 and 3 even got CGA graphics on the IBM PC.

Ultima 5 on the NES looks like a poor copy of Ultima 6 and plays even worse.
The PC98 and X68k are the best looking, surprisingly leaving the FM Towns behind.

Ultima 4 on the NES needed a lot of new code because they made major changes to the game. The graphics aren't as ugly as in 3 but I don't feel like they stand out in comparison to earlier ports. The SMS was the definitive version at the time.

PC88, as mentioned, had double the resolution of most Western PCs. It wasn't particularly powerful as a gaming platform, but anything with still or slowly moving images looked great.

Because they actually bothered to remake games. Ultima 1 was the only one that got a rerelease in America, the others were just available for the platforms that were available at the time whereas in Japan they made a special version of 1-3 for the Towns.
For Wizardry it's even more so since they remade the first trilogy first for the PCE-CD, then the PS1, Saturn and Windows and then the SFC while America just got Wizardry Gold.

>>1647060
Is the lazarus remake of u5 worth playing?

>>1647124
I don't think it's a good replacement for 5 but it should be worth trying in its own right.

>>1646804
The main reason was to promote the new expensive japanese home computers at the time, by showcasing superior ports of already familiar games.

>>1647462
That happened outside of Japan to some degree.
A couple of games got remade for VGA or Windows 95

>>1646828
I'm interested in this too, do Japs like Arcanum, P:T, Baldur's Gate etc.

>>1647783

>>1647792
I used to have the whole thing back when some anon first translated that. Long story short, the nip really liked the game but disliked the ugly characters. And I don't really blame him, BG's airbrushed character art is pretty ugly, and this coming from someone who generally likes that sort of stuff (Vallejo et al).

>>1647804
That's why I imported characters and gave them custom portraits. I even had Stone cold in my party.

>>1647920
could you give enemies the stunner?

>>1646923
LOL, that did not go well. Way to insult CRPGs, too, since Dragon Quest was made in tribute to Ultima and Wizardry.

Reminder: one of the great Japanese CRPGs, The Screamer (built for the PC-88), has received a partial translation posted here: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-screamer-the-story-of-a-boy-and-his-torch-worm-translation-project-thread.80444/

Games like these rarely get enough attention because translators have an easier time hacking recent VNs and CRPGs. Learning how to insert English-text translations into J-PC games from the '80s and early-through-mid '90s takes time and effort, so only a few of the older classics have been even partially translated (maybe even less than a few). There's the higher resolution to deal with and perhaps the need to design English characters for use in-game! Woomb had some translated games from the Xak series, back when it was still up, but the only official vendor for games and emulations is Project EGG: http://www.amusement-center.com/en/project/egg/index.shtml

A good place to look up Japanese CRPGs would be the Mercenary Force PC-98 database, which has some reviews/FAQs for certain titles and gives you all the necessary info to look for videos (Nico Nico Douga, most likely) and webpages: http://mercenaryforce.web.fc2.com/pc9801/pc9801.html

Let's go wild, guys.

>>1648261
We have fan translations of Rance 1, Rance 02, Rance 3, Rance 4, Rance 4.1, Rance 4.2, Rance without Ranca aka Toushin Toshi 1 and 2.
But then again it's always the Windows ports.

>>1648308
And that's just Rance, on Windows. That's as much of a given as Touhou, I say.

>>1647792

>>1648663

>>1648668

>>1648669
These comics are amusing. Where are they originally from anyway?

>>1648663
I'm sorry

>>1653225
You forgot the signature.

>>1648261
There are fan translations for Black Onyx and Genesis.
A few early titles were in English for technical reasons or simply don't need a translation.

>>1654396
Black Oynx I knew about, but not Genesis. Are there any translations of Cruise Chaser Blassty or any of Square's Death Trap games? For that matter, Yuji Horii's Hokkaido Serial Murders really needs work. We just had a thread here where the OP was asking for a Last Armageddon translation! And someone almost completed Illusion City's fix, but now the in-dev website's down...

Those early titles you haven't named were probably written in English because some Japanese computer models couldn't handle the display resolutions needed for Japanese-language characters. A lot of the stuff that needs translation first came out for the PC-88, a PC built first and foremost to allow native character drawing, which meant no more alien English for the player base.

>>1654404
Resolution wasn't the main problem.
The PC88 & co didn't have the Kanji ROM in the beginning so games were either entirely in Kana or in Latin script.

>>1654396

Black Onyx should've been in English anyway

It was made by a white guy who just one day went "I'm going to develop a videogame. One ticket to Japan, please!" I mean, what the fuck? How does that happen?

>>1654410
Yes, that too. The hardware manufacturers either went with MSX-like portability and spartan tech or for a more expensive approach combining more text memory with higher resolutions. Before the '80s, of course, there wasn't any choice but the former, but games weren't being made on Japanese PCs until around 1980-1.

>>1654702
lol

It's definitely the most popular Wizardry clone from that time and in just the right place to influence a lot of future J-PC developers. That said, Yuji Horii was going to make Dragon Quest already, having seen both Wizardry and Ultima at an event he and Koichi Nakamura were invited to. Falcom already did Apple II ports during that time, so Yoshio Kiya would have had knowledge of CRPGs at that point, and Koei was trying to be the big CRPG company in Japan during 1983.

>>1655002
There weren't many PCs before 1980 globally.

>>1655068
Yup.

One more translation that was finished a while back: Die Bahnwelt, one of Glodia's final games before disbanding. It's the most recent one I can think of, and y'all can find it here on the Tokugawa forums: http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1455