/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.10672527]

Sony prevented Radiant Silvergun from being released on PS1 and to the West.

[Anonymous No.10672535]

>>10672527
>Sony's policies toward arcade ports
This must be part of the reason why some other late arcade ports had tons of added content on PS1 compared to Saturn.

[Anonymous No.10672537]

What were the policies? Was it something like "you gotta make it a console version, you can't just make it so you pump quarters in and beat it in 5 minutes"
because if so, based policy

[Anonymous No.10672669]

>>10672537
I remember reading that they didn't like 2D games being released in the West

[Anonymous No.10672674]

>>10672537
The funniest part is that's exactly what Saturn Silvergun is. There's a revamped story mode that's longer than the arcade original.

[Anonymous No.10672681]

I'm not sure what to make of that when many other 2D shooters and 2D games were released for PS in the West. At least we got the 360 version, and now there are the Steam/Switch ones as well.

[Anonymous No.10672706]

Yet Capcom got away with throwing the unaltered arcade version of Captain Commando with no extra frills onto a playstation disc in japan.

[Anonymous No.10672708]

>>10672527
Sony prevented a lot of stuff. This is well known. They said Growlanser 1 was a no go too even if it was gonna be part of a collection.

[Anonymous No.10672965]

>>10672669
>in the West
What about Japan?

[Anonymous No.10673897]

>>10672708
It was always weird that an American company, Microsoft was fine with Japanese only audio in games, while Japanese company Sony didn't allow Japanese games to be released unless dubbed in English. That's the reason we have those terrible PS2 English dubs.

[Anonymous No.10676170]

>>10672527
lol.. Sony allowed literal shovelware, but not quality arcade games. Fucking retards.

[Anonymous No.10676176]

>>10672527
This can't be true because there were plenty of arcade ports (2D games included) on the PS1 by that time

[Anonymous No.10676217]

>>10673897
ps2 english dubs are soulful

[Anonymous No.10676235]

>>10676176
it depended on how big a game and/or its publisher was. something like Street Fighter Alpha was always going to get the green light, but Konami had a hard time getting SOTN cleared for release.

[Anonymous No.10676240]

>>10676217
Learn how to read.

[Anonymous No.10676282]

>>10676235
Absolutely wild that there was an actual conspiracy to keep fun games with good graphics out of the hands of American gamers. Never closely followed the Playstation scene, so I never knew any of this at the time.

[Anonymous No.10676290]

>>10672706
Capcom had an advantage because it was a AAA publisher. That's why it was able to get Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4 on the US PS1 because it threatened to make Resident Evil a Saturn exclusive. Plus Street Fighter was still huge so if you were Sony you weren't going to tell them to shove it when it came to their other arcade games.

[Anonymous No.10676310]

>>10676282
It wasn't that insane a policy if you knew what the market was like at the time. It's not like today where the pipeline is so smooth that games launch worldwide same day. There were a lot of things to consider back then. If you flooded the market with a bunch of crap retailers would get pissed. They didn't have the shelf space and any unsold merchandise had to be bought back by the publisher. The calendar mattered, too. Christmas is the equivalent of Valentines Day in Japan but in America you want a game on the shelf in December. So if you were an executive at Sony of America you'd be judicious about what games you let cross the Pacific. They didn't always make the right calls but they weren't completely out of line either.

[Anonymous No.10676318]

>>10676310
before online distribution a lot of genres were gatekept entirely by the preferences of retailers. if retailers weren't interested, the game wouldn't get stocked and wouldn't sell

[Anonymous No.10676329]

>>10676318
Yup. That's what CES and E3 were really about. You wanted to get in the good graces of Toys R Us and Kaybee. Those managers and executives in attendance had a shit ton of sway.

[Anonymous No.10676512]

>>10676282
Sony was very insistent on pushing PS1 as a 3D platform. I don't think this policy was limited to NA, but I'm not sure how it worked. they either had a quota of 2D games that were allowed to release or they only allowed exceptions. having or not having Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat would seriously hurt any system back then.

[Anonymous No.10676558]

>>10673897
>PS2 JRPG dubs
Truly the dark ages

[Anonymous No.10676565]

>>10676290
>threatened to make Resident Evil a Saturn exclusive
Source? I've literally never seen anything about this before

[Anonymous No.10676630]

>>10676217
No they are not.
>>10676558
Don't even try to play past Dynasty Warriors games. Those are by far the worst.

[Anonymous No.10676708]

>>10672527
Oh, so it wasn't just Bernie Stolar who had a 2D mandate then. It's almost as though he was right or something.

[Anonymous No.10676713]

>>10672527
Sony did the right thing, especially after getting excellent console-exclusive shmups such as Einhander, Harmful Park, Philosoma, and Cotton 100% (also on SNES but at least it's not an arcade port)

[Anonymous No.10676952]

>>10676565
Not only RE, but MegaMan 8 and MegaMan X4 too.
Both games were designed with the Saturn hardware in mind

[Anonymous No.10677116]

>>10676708
He was pragmatic while being perhaps a little too rigid. Its hard to tell though because the majority of what we know comes from Vic Ireland who had an axe to grind since Stolar kept messing with his shit. We never got Stolar's side or any other company's perspective on him.

[Anonymous No.10677187]

>>10672706
It wasn't even done by Capcom and it shows (it's by New Corporation), it glitches the hell out.

[Anonymous No.10677193]

>>10676630
FEEL THE POWER OF MY MAJEEEEC!

[Anonymous No.10677229]

>>10676708
>>10672681
Stolar was vice president of SCEA during the PS1 launch, when he left they changed the rules.

>>10672965
Japan had different policies that allowed for 2D games, including some published by Sony themselves. Treasure likely could have released a japanese PS1 version but it seems that it was targeted at the US which got them into trouble with SCEA and killed the port altogether. Losing the North American market is a big deal

[Anonymous No.10677326]

>>10672527
Auster Won

[Anonymous No.10677415]

>>10672527
GEE
I WONDER WHY?

[Anonymous No.10677424]

>>10677415
Make the room foggy, problem solved

[Anonymous No.10677492]

>>10677415
Treasure drew ugly ass faces.

[Anonymous No.10677506]

>>10677415
They could've censored that if they wanted to

[Anonymous No.10677661]

>>10677492
That's not even the same artist.
Looks like the animation director who did the Saber Marionette J anime

[Anonymous No.10678446]

>>10672527
Does not make sense due to Sony allowing several other shmup arcade ports which were all just basic ports of the arcade games.

Japanese dev interviews have a lot of bullshit. They never take responsibility for anything themselves.

[Anonymous No.10678457]

>>10678446
>several other shmup arcade ports
Which ones? Raiden Project came out during the Stolar era, before Sony started cracking down on 2D. Shienryu came out on a budget label in 2002 when nobody gave a fuck.

[Anonymous No.10678913]

How did this come out then. I think this no 2d on PSX thing is a myth. It was probably just the case for the first year to differentiate from the prior gen.

[Anonymous No.10678920]

.....SAD!

[Anonymous No.10678927]

>>10678457
Nobody said anything about hard-and-fast rules, you absolute autist. Go re-read the part about "chances of approval were slim" and go ask your mommy to explain what it means to you.

[Anonymous No.10678930]

>>10678446
Nobody said anything about hard-and-fast rules, you absolute autist. Go re-read the part about "chances of approval were slim" and go ask your mommy to explain what it means to you.

[Anonymous No.10678965]

>>10678913
This is speculation but it sounds like Working Designs was good at either negotiating or badgering their way through soft bans. Vic Ireland was known to be more than willing to die on a hill for a game he was passionate about. But after a while they probably cashed in all their favors and the execs started playing hard ball. The killing blow was when Sony forced them to package Growlanser II and III together on PS2.

[Anonymous No.10679048]

>>10676952
I know MMX4 was made for the Saturn first but I don't think RE was

[Anonymous No.10679094]

>>10676290
They also notably blocked Capcom from releasing Mega Man Battle & Chase in the US AFTER Capcom was putting ads for it in Gamefan. But Bomberman Fantasy Race was OK for some reason.

[Anonymous No.10679538]

>>10679094
https://www.ign.com/articles/1997/05/14/megaman-killed
Yup, it wasn't just 2D games. The fact that of all Mega Man games it was Battle & Chase that Sony successfully blocked shows that there was a lot of friction there for a bit. It doesn't directly answer the question of whether they used Resident Evil as a threat but it wouldn't surprise me if they did.

[Anonymous No.10679552]

Flip flopping on the Magus/Guile thing screws everything up because now BOTH cases end up looking stupid. If Guile isn't Magus then he inexplicably looks and moves exactly like him for no reason at all. If he IS Magus then the game inexplicably doesn't do anything with that other than a random line in one of Lucca's letters.

[Anonymous No.10679553]

Sony treated third parties so much better than evil Nintendo lol

[Anonymous No.10679558]

>>10679552
wut?

[Anonymous No.10679559]

>>10679558
Oh motherfucker, wrong thread. This is what I get for having multiple windows open.

[Anonymous No.10679615]

Another 2d game that came out in the west on the PS1.

[Anonymous No.10679634]

>>10672527
>>10672537
This isn't news if you were keeping up with who was in charge at these companies at the time. Bernie Stolar, great nemesis of all Sega fagboys, was heading up SCEA for the Playstation before getting booted and worming his way into being in charge of the Dreamcast. He fucking hated 2D games AND Japanese-y games, said they weren't what the Playstation was about and that gamers only wanted the new cutting edge 3D/FMV stuff, and would regularly cockblock localizations during his tenure with Sony. The only way you could get either of those brought outside of Japan is if you were big name company like Capcom, Squaresoft, Konami, etc. and/or a relevant enough company that was leaving Nintendo behind in order to support the Playstation brand like Capcom, Squaresoft, Konami, etc.
Working Designs got the worst of it because they originally got in good with Sony to bring over a bunch of localizations until Bernie Stolar threw their plans into the garbage. He's quoted as saying that Sony "has no plans of adding non-action titles to [the PS1] library", which is a massive irony given that JRPGs were the console's bread and butter in all regions except western europe, but since the company didn't come from one of the two previously-mentioned categories they basically had no way of getting a second chance with Sony. WD wound up having to wait until after Bernie left to actually get some PS1 localizations onto store shelves.

[Anonymous No.10679717]

>>10676558
Try Siren

[Anonymous No.10679739]

>>10679634
I really wish we got Bernie's perspective. I don't doubt Victor Ireland's account as far as the facts go but he's clearly biased because Stolar kept cockblocking him. The issue is that Working Designs did have a bad habit of doing, frankly, INSANE things. I love Magic Knight Rayearth but any company not named Working Designs would have immediately abandoned ship once they realized half the goddamn data was missing. The game got delayed so long that by the time it came out the Saturn was so dead a lot of stores didn't even have it on the shelves anymore.

Any other publisher would have cut their losses or not even taken the job in the first place. WD's behavior was more in line with a fantranslation passion project than an actual business. If I'm a Sega executive trying to get the Dreamcast ready in order to stop the bleeding I'm probably not going to be all that happy with one of my publishing partners plinking away on a three year old Saturn game and bitching at me that we're not selling backup cartridges anymore (that was one of Vic Ireland's big beefs). This may be projection but I'm imagining people at both Sega and Sony trying to get shit done and then having to field phone calls from this one weeaboo who wants to die on the hill of whatever Japanese game I never heard of that he insists MUST come out in America. If you look at WD's library they were pretty prolific for a smaller publisher. Four Sega CD games, six Saturn games, ten PS1 games, and a couple on PS2. It seems like they were given a pretty long leash. Arc The Lad Collection is an entire FRANCHISE worth of games, none of which America had ever seen before, coming out all at once on the PS1 after the PS2 was already available. As cool as that is from a consumer perspective, that's kind of crazy. If Bernie Stolar was the ONE guy at either company who looked at them a little side-eyed, that doesn't seem like a major crime.

[Anonymous No.10679764]

>>10672527
Wasn't Radiant Silvergun running on Sega hardware in the arcade? Maybe they had some kind of grudge against it.

[Anonymous No.10679818]

>>10676952
MM8 was mistold on the days of early internet. In reality, it was Sony OF AMERICA that didn't want to release the game in the West. When they found out about the Saturn port, they changed their tune but said they'd greenlight it only if Capcom could add something that'd make people buy the PlayStation version over the Saturn one since they knew about the bonus content. And that's the story behind that weird US-only "special collector's edition" physical booklet.

[Anonymous No.10679839]

>>10679739
Is this your pic and are these every Working Designs game ever?

[Anonymous No.10679890]

>>10679839
Not my pic but yes that's every WD game.

[Anonymous No.10681006]

Yeah, Sony was assholes about 2D and low-fidelity games during the PS1 and PS2 eras, apparently they were worried that they would make their system look weak compared to their competitors. They were even worse about it in the west. I recall that Disgaea almost didn't get released in the US because of that policy, and is likely part of the reason why many 2D RPGs didn't make it across the seas. The fact that their systems WERE weaker than the competition (except for SEGA's hardware) but still trounced all other rivals by a large margin in the PS1 and PS2 era really should have clued them in that the perceived power of a console means jack shit... and the Wii really hammered that point home in the PS3 era.

I recall the biggest complaint Ken Kutaragi had about the original US Playstation mascot, Polygon man, was that he he flat shaded instead of the more advanced Gouraud Shading the PS1 could do.

[Anonymous No.10681268]

>>10672527
I'd be curious to see how well PS1 could handle all the VDP2 effects and still maintain 60fps. Thunder Force V got nerfed pretty hard in that department and what it does with VDP2 is pretty tame compared to what Radiant Silvergun does.

[Anonymous No.10681279]

>>10679553
It's only natural as sony was more cool and Mature than nintendo and also CDs we're guarranted better graphics

[Anonymous No.10681284]

>>10677506
Censored the head, you mean

[Anonymous No.10681292]

>>10679615
Didn't this get a 1 or 0 out of 10 from some western magazine when it came out?

[Anonymous No.10681557]

>>10677415

[Anonymous No.10681612]

>>10672669
The game is 3D trash with a bit of 2D

[Anonymous No.10683043]

>>10679739
Bernie Stolar mismanaged the Atari Lynx (refused to pay the developer of a major launch title exclusive five months before the console launch and still expected the dev to send his copy) and Mattel/Bandai WonderSwan (sat on the rights for so long that Bandai, Capcom and Squaresoft were scrambling to port the games to its direct competitor, eventually never released it)

"The Saturn is not our future" extended to ALL third party support.
Even major flagship games SoJ was counting on to counter or fill niches (Panzer Dragon Saga as the anti-FF7 which got a laughably small print run, Grandia 1 to be localized by SoA as a Saturn technical showcase but cancelled at 40% by 1998 and handled by Sony of all companies, Deep Fear and Blue Stinger as horror games which were fully localized but SoA refused to publish them) was systematically sabotaged by SoA.
Capcom would cite "Sega of America" as a reason for the delays and cancellation of a Dungeons and Dragons US-exclusive arcade port that ended up cancelled and ported to the Saturn in Japan in fucking 1999.
Atlus and Konami had nearly ready localizations that went unreleased as well for Devil Summoners and Policenauts.
Even western publishers were shooed off
Games that would end up PC-exclusive
Inexplicable delays like a fully ready version of Clockwork Knight that was delayed on purpose to miss the Christmas 1996 period and release in February instead despite the US prototype ready to go and the European version released already
Games like Dead or Alive that were already in English and big hits on the Arcade and PlayStation somehow not to SoA's liking...

The almost two years of radio silence, and the attempted Microsoft takeover over the DreamCast with mandatory Windows CE use (that ended up optional), and his comments that it's a shame Nintendo of Japan has too much control over the American branch, and how he immediately pivoted to adware and games as a service just after ruining Mattel during his tenure...

[Anonymous No.10683069]

>>10683043
it boggles me that this guy somehow managed to get kicked sideways so many times into top positions in so many important companies. radioactive bastard

[Anonymous No.10683089]

>>10672527
Sony in general has always been a pile of shit with this. Like how they blocked Monster Hunter P3rd from getting an overseas release because they were pissy over updating AdHoc Party. You can even find various articles on Capcom's official site which use the intended overseas title "Monster Hunter Freedom 3", they'll never change

[Anonymous No.10683124]

>>10683069
Executives are a class that looks out for their own.

[Anonymous No.10683208]

>>10683043
I don't know if it's fair to pin everything wrong with the US Saturn on one guy though. He certainly didn't help matters but it seemed like by the time he got there the company was already on fire so he did the one thing that seemed like it MIGHT have a chance: blow everything up and start fresh with the Dreamcast. Putting aside whether it worked (it obviously didn't) it's hard to argue that it was an indefensible plan.

[Anonymous No.10683257]

>>10672527
That's kinda hard to believe look at the caliber of games that actually got released on the PS1
If there really was any policies regarding game quality then it would've been extremely shortlived. By '99 you started seeing literal trash being printed on discs, whereas prior to '98 you'd get damn near anything that even remotely qualifies as a video game released.

[Anonymous No.10683265]

>>10683208
>blow up all consumer relations and finances for the 2nd time in a row and focus on the next big thing that hinges on consumer confidence and having money in the bank to take early losses from unit movement before you make that money back with game sales
Yeah what a brilliant plan dumbass.

[Anonymous No.10683271]

>>10683265
The alternative was throwing good money after bad. The Saturn was toast.

[Anonymous No.10684006]

>>10683257
The business model seemed to change to get licence fee money. The documentation of their dev tool net yaroze leaned heavily into 2d sprite work games. I think this anti 2d policy was dropped by 98.

[Anonymous No.10685606]

>>10676290
Apparently, the policy you're talking about was only a thing for SCEA, and only for the first year of the Playstation's lifecycle, so it was from 1995-1996.
So the only Mega Man game that got axed because of it was probably the port of X3.

[Anonymous No.10685645]

>>10685606
It's hard to tell because to the extent that there was a rule it was arbitrarily enforced from the start. Mortal Kombat 3 was a timed PS1 exclusive on PS1 and that came out either at launch or close to it.

[Anonymous No.10685675]

>>10685645
To my understanding, the policy was more about filtering out PS1 game releases outside of those that came off as more "advanced" than older systems. Mortal Kombat 3 got a pass probably because its port read as this kind of "advanced" SCEA was looking for.

It apparently wasn't to do with gameplay, because half-baked Star Fox clones like Jupiter Strike got through as well.

[Anonymous No.10685870]

>>10685675
Yeah, it's like Nintendo's anti-violence stance on the SNES. They made an exception for Mortal Kombat II because the first game bit them in the ass but that didn't stop other games from getting censored. The policy always had the implied exception for games that were known to make money. Though it does make you wonder why if that was the case they gave Capcom so much shit over Mega Man. Maybe they were just annoyed by the sheer number of 2D games Capcom was sending them. Street Fighter The Movie, Street Fighter Alpha, and Darkstalkers were all early longbox PS1 games.

[Anonymous No.10685926]

>>10685870
I don't think Megaman played any role with it. X3 and Battle & Chase seem just as likely to be Capcom USA calls as they do SCEA bullying Capcom out of it. Like I said. Jupiter Strike.

The only thing I can speculate is that Sony got annoyed at Capcom, because Capcom was making the Saturn upstage the PS1 at basically every turn. That RAM cart might've been japan-only, but it basically made the Saturn versions of Capcom's arcade games just about arcade perfect, while the PS1 versions basically had to reformat themselves to work more like Darkstalkers.

[Anonymous No.10686395]

>>10679634
That's not a picture of Bernie, and Bernie would've had nothing to do with this since it didn't even get released in Japan. Your story simply doesn't make sense, anon-chama.

>>10679739
There's two sides to every story and Vic claims the Arcade Card on PC Engine was his idea, so take his side with a dump truck full of salt.

>>10683043
Bernie led the PlayStation and the Dreamcast to two of the biggest launches ever in the West.
>mandatory Windows CE use (that ended up optional)
Citation needed

[Anonymous No.10687132]

Don't forget we know RS would have been downgraded on PS1. Sony threw a lot of money at multiplatform releases where the PS1 outperformed the Saturn. I can see why Sony was hesitant to approve something niche that would only be used for Sega fans to have bragging rights.