/vr/ - Retro Games

Actually pretty comfy, Dendy allowed us to play a lot of good classic games, including games that were only released in Japan officially.
Around the early 2000s it got soulless though, with online gaming and LAN taking over. It was just people sitting in front of dirty PCs screaming at each other from the distance. Couch co-op or VS on dendy will always be the core of /vr/ soul.

It was so shit that we've almost completely skipped gens 4 and 5 and went from knock off NES straight into Playstation 2.
Sega MG was somewhat popular at around 1999, Playstation was a rarity.
You best believe that the cartriges were all pirate knock offs.

>>8062045
How good is the Dendy library? Top five games on the system?

>>8062130
Dendy is just a Famiclone, so it has the same library as the Famicom sans a few of the bigger games I suppose (but if I'm not mistaken, you can play original Famicom carts on a Dendy).
Most played ones when I was a kid:
Super Mario Bros 3
Contra
Battle City
TMNT III
Punch-Out

Bootlegged

>>8062012
>All those shitty"Mario" hacks sold for money in physical form
>Tank1990 kino
It was...something else entirely

>>8062012
Post-Soviet Union you mean.

>>8062012
Pretty cool if you were PC master race or, more realistically, had computer class at school and could play after classes are over. I didn't enjoy Counter-strike which most normies played (i did join for half-life multiplayer, shit was fun as fuck), so mostly me and 2-3 other guys played Diablo. When I got my own PC (though it was towards the end of 90s and it was barely working piece of garbage assembled from guts of three decommisioned PCs from my parents' workplace), i got myself one of those "100 cracked shareware games on one disk" collections (some of them i occasionally play to this day, there was a lot of garbage, but also a ton of SOUL), obligatory HoMM and assorted RPgs and strategies.

>>8062012
Good because even some zoomers got a chance to play Famicom classics due to poverty. I shit you not people here know way more about NES/FC library than murricans and other countries where it's hip to be a retro gamer and collect games you have never even played. What's hidden gem for them is basic stuff for us.
>>8062045
>including games that were only released in Japan officially
What he said basically. For example there is that one Tezuka game with the 3-eyed kid, it's a hit in our country yet it has never officially left Japan.
However, one interesting thing to note is that people here who didn't start with Dendy/other famiclone hate Nintendo so much it's not even funny. Like if you mention Mario to them their ass literally explodes. It's sort of like on this board and /v/ but WAY worse

>>8062012
>russian soviet union 90's
Please no underage posting here. Thank you.

>>8066536
>>All those shitty"Mario" hacks sold for money in physical form
I love them, and I know people who collect those.
I personally am thankful for these crazy chinese people doing them because it led me to discover actual good games like Mario 8 (Don Doko Pon 2), Mario 10 (Jackie chan) or Mario 14 (Keikatsu Yanchamaru 3)

>>8066875
What about 7 Grand Dad?

>>8066884
Yes, that one is good too, but I actually had the original version of it with Fred Flintstone. The very first time I played it, though, was the mario 7 version at a friend's house.
Kinda funny how somehow that's the most famous one for zoomers due to some e-celeb making a video about it randomly.

>>8066892
Kinaman mentioned 7 Grand Dad way before that Vinesauce guy as far as I remember, interesting stuff

>>8066897
Yeah Kinaman did a video mentioning all or at least most of the mario hacks, but I think kinaman isn't too famous. He should be.

Чepвaны нa мecтe?

>>8062143
> Punch-Out

Never even heard of this game as a kid. But the thing is, Dendy cartridges were like Pokemon, certain games were more common in a certain regions of country. I never encountered Bucky O'Hare, none of my friends played or even knew about it, and yet this is one of the most popular Dendy games across the entire Russia.

The stuff I played the most:
TMNT 1-4
Mitsume ga Tooru
Adventure Island III
Rockin' Kats
Nekketsu games (soccer, mostly, but my friends loved Kakutou Densetsu)
plus Contra and Battle City that already mentioned

> Super Mario Bros.

One day my mom said we're gonna get me a new cartridge so we went to game store and the seller put out SMB3 cartridge and said "Hey this one is good". I looked at it and thought it's some uninteresting shit (I didn't even recognize it's Mario, i just saw the world map and thought it's the main gameplay). We didn't buy anything that day and I never saw SMB3 in store again. What a poor idiot child I was.

>>8066884
I had this one on a 2-in-1 cartridge. It's really weird to know it's a meme nowadays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEDDLm3Y-uw&ab_channel=RetroView

>>8066618
Those shiny jars reminded me of Konung, but it looks like game teams never shared any artists.

>>8062012
It was okay, because we didn’t know anything better.
Pretty much everyone had Dendy. It was affordable even to poor families. Cartridges were cheap and you could exchange with friends. Many bootleg games, but many Japan-only games that provided limitless fun as well like Battle City.
Mega Drive was also pretty affordable, though still pricier that Dandy. Cartridges were all bootlegs, but they still had those big plastic boxes and in rare cases even manuals.
There was magazine called “Velikiy Drakon” (“The Great Dragon”) that wrote about all games from Dendy to PS1. Objectively it was horrible, on a level of a really bad fanzine (what can you expect when most authors were teens not even in their 20s), but it spoke on the same language as its target audience. Occasionally it did some really fun shit like Phantasy Star 4 walkthrough. Author played Japanese version and, of course, he had zero understanding of what was going on, so for walkthrough he named all heroes after Lord of the Rings characters and invented his own story on the go.
Now, when it comes to PlayStation there is no consensus on how widespread it was. I lived in a city on a far north of European part of Russia and many friends had PS1 and played most normie games like FIFA or Quake. At the same time I read a lot from people from central Russia, which was poorer that our region, that PS1was a luxury item. With PS1 came horrible Russian translations that were done by machine translation ways and made some games literally unplayable. And it was a great luck to find English version. Of course, all PS1 games were pirated and were even cheaper than Dendy and MD cartridges, around 3$ per game (or 6$ if it was a two-disk game).

Dendy -> Mega Drive -> PS1
GB original / electronica / bootleg chinese tetris (brick game) -> GBA (SP mostly)
That's how it was

>>8066904
he's more famous than you think.

>>8066856
Are you saying there was no gaming in the Russian SFSR between 90 and 91?

>>8067262
>Author played Japanese version and, of course, he had zero understanding of what was going on, so for walkthrough he named all heroes after Lord of the Rings characters and invented his own story on the go.
Unfathomably based.

>>8062012
I grew up in Moscow with a ps1 in the early 2000s and this anon >>8067262 is right, the pirated games were ridiculously cheap but also came with a fuckton of bugs.
It took me until we moved to the United States until I finally got my hands on a properly working version of Vigilante 8.

>>8067135
It was just how stuff was modeled in 90s. Garishly bright textures, excessive shininess and default 3dmax shading.

>>8066923
Tyт

>>8066923
>>8068623
Go and stay go.

For the uninitiated, Kinaman, >>8067278, and his buddies have gathered some following as gaymers and utoobers in the previous decade. An imageboard offshoot of that following appeared… let me check… they have Official Thread #3551 right now, dictum sapienti sat est.

Poland had it pretty similar. I personally never had a famiclone as a kid but my friends did and it was like Russianbros told, some good, some in japanese, a lot of hacked versions and 999999in1.
I had a C64 with a loads of games back then. I jumped in when PS1 came out. Piracy was easy, just leave your new ps1 for and 1h at some weird stand and there you go. We got a bit more lucky since 95% of games we had were in English. Only once I've encountered GER only ver and it was Apocalypse. Rest was JAP, but if you were fallowing magazine news then you knew that game was not planned to release in English. Only game I bought JAP was Metal Slug early because DUDE its like arcade in your house and you don't need to spend money on token (game costed me like 30 arcade tokens irl). It was fun times. Amiga times were really good from what I was told, but it was before my times

Are any Russian/CIS developed retro games worth playing?

>>8069990
I don't think that dozens of various solitaire and casino card games are that different from dozens of similar games from any other place.

Notable game series have had some fame: Cossacks, IL-2, Hard Truck, and Sea Dogs.

does this thread mean i have to buy a dendy? what the fuck is that
was the PS1 really that much more popular? none of the europeans in this thread even mention anything else. just Dendy and PS1

>>8070452
Dendy -> Mega Drive -> 3DO -> PS1 -> PC K62 compatible
That's pretty much the typical russian vidya timeline. Super Nintendo was also very popular but only for the elites, same with N64.

>>8070601
> International Classification of Diseases Diagnosis Code K62: Other diseases of anus and rectum
KEK

>>8070601
>3DO
There was a Russian 3DO market??

>>8067278
you think kinaman's scoliosis makes it easier to shoot videos from a first person perspective?

>>8070620
Russia had an extremely die hard 3DO community for some reason. The console had no copy protection, so if you got your hands on a console you could get some high calibre pirated games for cheap.

>>8070620
For whatever reason, yes. It wasn’t widespread, but it was there.
I remember talking to my classmate back in 2000 or so and telling him about this console called 3DO I recently read about in a magazine.
And then he says “I have a 3DO, wanna come and play?”. I thought he was bullshitting me, because I never even saw 3DO in a shop in our city. But no, he actually had one and we played NFS, Gex and some other games.
One of the weirder experiences of my childhood.

>>8070620
Not official, and not in its heyday. Full price imports existed, but they were exclusively for very rich kids. I guess after '95-'96 suppliers dumped their stock to anyone who bought it, and 3DOs from various countries resurfaced in Russia with much more affordable prices. My FZ-10 came in a complete retail box with registration card asking to send it to Denver in next ten days. Gex was either not bundled or taken out, but a nice heavy 220/110V transformer from FEL was added, probably at the American supply side, given it was the same for many owners, and local businessmen would use cheaply made Chinese products (which, in fact, they did with 110V consoles from other sources). Most of the games sold were burned CD-Rs anyway, with occasional original value CDs and second-hand retail cases which no one considered much cooler. Sellers did not bother with boxes and paper junk inside them; I still see it as something people only pretend to care about.

>>8069950
>999999in1
>actually its about 20-30 games repeated ad infinitum just with hacked grafix or GameGenie codes/cheats enabled by default
But that kino Unchained Melody 8bit cover and its pure sovl selection menu tho...

> 99999 in 1

I'm gonna tell you a sad story now. When I was like 10 or 11 years old, I saw a Dendy cartridge in a store. On a cover art, there was a usual mix of images from different games and anime. However, it immediately caught my attention, because cover featured many cool characters like Sonic, Tails, Sketch Turner from Comix Zone, and many more. I already knew these were Sega Genesis games but I was a naive child and thought that MAYBE there are 8-bit versions. My imagination instantly caught up with that.

All I had to do is somehow get this cartridge... I wanted it more than anything in life.
So I told my mom about it. I knew she would most likely buy it to me as a present for New Year. And she did.
She hid a cartridge in a wardrobe to give it to me on December 31st but I just sneaked in and quietly took it because I wanted to test it out so much.

And just before I was about to put cartridge into Dendy, I stopped and thought. What if I'll turn on the power now and there won't be any games from cover? After all, this happened before.
These 99999s are always give promises, but never deliver.
Part of me still hoped for a miracle and when I turned the console's power on... there was a basic menu with basic games like Galaxian and shit. Not a single game from cover, even ones that actually existed on Famicom.

After that, I never bought 99999 in 1 cartridges ever again. And a little part of me which believed in miracles died that day.

>>8070620
I had something called 'gold star' or just 'star' or whatever and it played 3DO games. I still remember playing Gex 1 and being scared as fuck

>>8070870
I experienced something similar with a game boy game, sucks a lot too because those carts were several times more expensive than a bootleg ps or pc disk. on the bright side I got to play the worst sonic game I ever seen.

>>8070870
I had somewhat similar story but with arcade. In 97 Metal Slug was hot shit where I live and "That Older Kid" told me that there was Metal Slug on my Commodore 64. As a 9 year old I beg my mother to visit every game shop in the city in search of it. As you know, it was in vain and I wasted my mothers free day from work. Still feel bad about it.

Super Mari Man 14 is great game comrade!

>>8071020
> too young to remember that LG was GoldStar

>>8070870
The general rule behind any 8bit multicarts is fairy simple, Comrade - never look at the cart pic and hope anything will look like that, look what games are listed on the back instead if possible ; Also any multicart that has over 40~50 tops games included in it is inevitably gonna be full of repeat or simple hacks - most of which are probably gonna be the lightwieht ones from early/mid 80s

t. smelly dumb Polak from the year 1990 who kept buying famiclone games untill 2002

>>8070870
I love how chintzy these bootlegs look. They're like trashy works of art.

>>8071226
None of the cartridges that I've got back then had list of games on the backside :( Idk why.

By that time I already knew I shouldn't trust anything that have more than 10 (in 1) games on label. I just thought that maybe this one single time they won't lie. I believed in that until the very last moment. A lesson was learned.

>>8062012
Soviet Union fell in 1991 you fucking idiot.

>>8071325
That means that it existed for almost 2 years in the 90s.

>>8066594
What's the difference?

>>8062012
In little Russia that was Yugoslavia, most people were into pc games. It stayed like that up to pretty much 2010 or some shit before the retard generation turned to consoles.

Back in the nineties, those that did have consoles it was only Nintendo. I think I knew two people that had a Sega machine abd and they just had Sonic on it.

Russian NES clones with their games were just an off-shoot of a bigger Chinese bootleg market. Everything was done in Asia, from hacking to programming to production. Some Chinese brands, like Subor (keyboard with integrated famiclone) were also present. It seems that the real history of Famiclones is still not written due to language and cultural barriers.

However, the brands, marketing, and distribution were local projects of young but well-connected government-related IT vendor companies learning how to step in consumer market by the book. There were game shows on western TV channels to advertise consoles, and so they made a TV program. There were western gaming magazines, so they started one. Important talks on distribution were held in the West, so they opened their own stores and departments. After a couple of years, they even distanced themselves from the Dendy brand, offered all of that to Nintendo, and became its official distributor, but the sales of N64 could not compare to previous success.

>>8067262
>At the same time I read a lot from people from central Russia, which was poorer that our region, that PS1was a luxury item.
Do you know what it was like in the Russian Far East? I'd imagine you'd be able to get Japanese electronics far more easily if you lived in Sakhalin or something.

>>8072915
Actually, yes. I know a few people who lived in the Far East (namely, Vladivostok) and they say that Japanese electronics were widespread and relatively cheap there. They also said that bootleg "Russian translations" were not as common as in the western part of Russia and Japanese-only games were readily available there, including many unknown to the West games like Super Robot Wars series and other even more obscure titles.
Honestly, Russia is so huge, it's like three or four different countries in one and each has its unique history of gaming in the 90s.

not russian but I have to thank russkibros for my wide collection of DOS games back then.

>>8072915
>>8072947

I am from Far East. The guy that lives right next to me had PS1 and also once brought 3DO to show us. I have no idea where he got it as I never seen 3DO ever again after that.

I had a Dreamcast and stores around sold only bootleg games with russian translations (by "Kudos" and "RGR") No license, as far as I remember, although Dreamcast peripherals like VMUs and keyboards were genuine.
The games were cheap, I could easily buy a disc with my pocket money and my family is not very rich.

I still have a japanese Funai CRT bought in early 00's. The other Funai we've bought in 1996 during "90's poverty" sadly went to trash after 25 years of service.

I guess all post-communist countries had similar access to vidya. No IP rights were respected by officials in any form so in 80s ZX Spectrum and C64 games were aired during the night over state owned radio. Just record and play.

>>8071937
You act like this is a big secret or some shit. Most of those dendy products had chinese boxes and chinese text.

>>8072969
Your pic looks like something Grigory Oster would draw

>>8066892
>Kinda funny how somehow that's the most famous one for zoomers due to some e-celeb making a video about it randomly.
He was just playing a bunch of random bootlegs, and came across that and exclaimed in surprise. I notice he tends to not like many of the memes that he spawned, because some of his fans are pretty young and don't know to not hurriedly run them into the ground.

>>8066948
Interesting, wonder why it differed in different regions of Russia?

>>8067262
>Author played Japanese version and, of course, he had zero understanding of what was going on, so for walkthrough he named all heroes after Lord of the Rings characters and invented his own story on the go.
That is super charming.

>Quake
For real? Lobotomy Software built a port of Quake to the Sega Saturn, and got that published, and they did make a port to the Playstation, but couldn't find any publisher (for some reason), so it makes me wonder if that could have leaked at some point and shown up in Russia.

>>8067345
There was a big fascination with his channel in the early days of /vr/ because many westerners were seeing all kinds of fascinating bootlegs they had never encountered before. I had never seen Dendy before, so it was really interesting to me.

Never knew 3DO had a presence in Russia, that's so interesting

>>8073847
> Interesting, wonder why it differed in different regions of Russia?

Different ways of importing games and goods, I guess.

Moscow and other central cities had "official" Steepler stores where they were selling Dendy consoles and cartridges. Afaik those were imported from Taiwan.

We had a bunch of tents with chinese merchants who were selling cartridges under the open sky. Stores too, but they were just random small shops, I never saw Steepler cartridges selling anywhere nearby. I guess chinese guys just brought whatever they could get in their home region nearby.

In my childhood, there was a store named "Sonic" which, as you can guess, had Sonic the Hedgehog for its logo. They were selling Dendy, Sega, PS1 and PC games. Located in a weird tower building at a marketplace, you had to ascend a long spiral stair to get there. In mid-00's they moved to smaller place and started selling PC games only. And in early 10's, they moved into a even smaller place and were selling unlicensed PS2 games and stationery. I visited them like every month because I just bought PS2.

One day, they finally closed forever.
Last game I bought from them was "Anthology of Sonic games for PC". It came a full circle.