Thread:Velt211/@comment-2003:D6:4722:2E2A:DD17:3F8A:F36C:2C58-20190924042015/@comment-2003:D6:4722:2EEF:2CFC:A6F7:5561:EDC7-20190926162843

Absolutely. Seems like they want to screw me over in the shipping costs, despite also collecting a fee. Hehe, good old Mega Man. Only ever played one of the Game Boy games but I remember it being pretty low resolution and jumping anywhere was thus always a risk. I'm fine with the slowdown, as I said, part of the game design.

Worst will be drawing the maps when it comes to those kinda games. Urgh, one really needs the time for that and also have the proper mindset. At least it should get easier over the years in that genre. By the way, did you back or read that CRPG book? Oh, we are of the same mind then. I come from the countryside and basically lived all my life in a 600 pop village. Honestly, living there was so good...if not for the fact that I had a three-hour daily commute. The internet connection wasn't the best either. Apart from that, I was fine with everything since I don't need entertainment, night life, a shopping mall or other such things. First thing you notice when you move to a city: the dirty air. Can't compare that at all to the clean air you get in the countryside. And yeah, Japanese cities are that, taken to the exreme.

Were there that many racing games on the PC back in the day? Most were arcade/console IIRC. Sega ported their games to the PC in the late 90s and then there were some Need for Speed and such but otherwise, not much comes to mind. Then again, as I said, not much of a racing game player. (Though, I did like the ones that I played, mostly.) I do think I would be more of a Rally player though as standard racing does seem somewhat boring and I just tend to go through the campaign/career and then be done with that. I wouldn't race for "fun". And yeah, PC makes it pretty easy to cheat. For consoles, you always need some extra devices. To be fair, a lot of those are artifically hard. I've played none of the Souls games but I think they did it right. Something like Super Meat Boy (no idea if that is actually hard) or Kaizo Mario is meh. So, I like the difficulty to be baked into the gameplay or at least be natural.

Nope, NTSC or fan-translated NTSC-J. IV has no proper release because it's the censored stuff they already had in I-III. But for those titles, they released them properly on the GBC, with a new translation etc. And yes, I'm pretty picky when it comes to gaming these days *cough* I would say it had a natural curve. After all, PCs were also there for work. In the UK, the ZX81 sold a good amount before the crash and the ZX Spectrum also sold a lot before, during and after that one. Here, it was always the C64 that was most popular but that, too, was a natural progression. I think part of the reason is that the gaming boom wasn't really a thing in Europe (arcades were only 18+ here in Germany for instance) and publishers stuffed the shelves full of games in the US, rather than Europe (or elsewhere). So you could say that our market was too immature (the language barrier helped) and not many US publishers cared about us which made the crash not relevant to us. And the people who programmed cheap clones were also just individuals most of the time. There are also whole system that are super interesting objects. I mentioned the Gundam PC before but Sega, too, had PCs once. Doubt anyone will ever bother with those though.

To be fair, that has changed too. Germany used to have a lot of nudity in the 90s, even complete nudity, no censoring. Nowadays, they censor some somewhat lewd Japanese games while allowing Gear of War 4, for instance, to be released without any censorship. Seems like we have shifted to a more American position which I am not a fan of (no censorship at all would be ideal of course but censoring somewhat lewd content, pah). Japan is getting screwed over now too, since Sony US is calling the shots now, they are censoring games left and right and Japanese developers have to submit papers in English, not Japanese, even if they don't even know the language. It's pretty insane. (You may have heard of that.) And yeah, Enix has to give a big thank you to Toriyama. I agree. Popcorn cinema, popcorn games these days too. Play what's popular and talk with your friends the next day about it. So yeah, while the 80s and 90s used to be much more a time for enthusiasts (the internet as well of course), nowadays, every Joe can access everything or get into PC gaming. Back then, you had to think, tweak and work things out which was an artificial barrier to keep people out. But yeah, I think the internet is still definitely the best example for that. I only got DSL in 2005 but even around then, the internet was a much better, cleaner and friendlier place (at least where I was). Now, stupidity and insanity reigns and you have to find some hole or niche to "normally" converse with other people. It's a shame. (Though, it's also a reason why I like IRC, lots of knowlegdable people around.) Autobahnraser was super popular here. I played several of their titles because it was in some gaming magazine...and I was young and tried everything. Not too familiar with the casual market, so I don't know Zylom. Germany had tons of studios in the 90s but they all died out in the mid 90s and late 90s. Some managed to pass into the millenium but then died in the early 00s. Nowadays, there is pretty much nothing left. Crytek, Daedalic and not much else. Blue Byte, Black Forest Games etc got bought by publishers. In general, I'm pretty unhappy with how the gaming market in Germany looks. We were once number 2 in competitive gaming (after South Korea) but our organizations and structures crumbled because not many people bothered with it. The government was always against gaming, same with the press, so eventually everything died. ESL, the world's biggest esports organization got bought by some Swedish media company for basically nothing, great. Koch Media, one of the biggest European publishers got bought last year by THQ Nordic (another Swedish company), also for very little. So we have very little left, maybe browser games -.- But considering how much we had and where we stood, it's really sad to see where we are now. Also, gaming culture has become pretty bad. We used to be a country full of PC players. That has shifted way too much (Steam played a larger role in that as a lot of us weren't happy with the platform) and now, we have tons of console players instead which is a shame (I do regard PC gaming as the best possible gaming experience). Add to that the general trend of mobile gaming and meh. The only good part about Germany now is the very active retro community. (I also often listen to a retro podcast which is about 80s/90s PC gaming.)

It's more an issue of relying a lot on search engines. A lot of gems when it comes to websites are really hard to find if you aren't looking for them. Back then, websites linked each other, so grabbing a part of the chain would help you see a lot of the other links which were similarly interesting. And yeah, absolutely. That's why it was also a tragedy when Geocities Japan went down some months ago. So much information lost.