Nicole Express: Hobbyist video game development, examinations into old consoles, and more!
We’re back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that’s probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers. And there’s something interesting going on here– Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2-R-4 Special re-releases the final three games in the…
What do you think about gaming in the late 90’s – early 2000’s? The PlayStation? The Nintendo 64? Maybe later SuperFX SNES games like Yoshi’s Island? Well, too bad. You’re not getting any of those, but you can get a portable game console in a church fundraiser. No, it’s not a Game Boy Color either, but hey, it’s got hundreds of games built right in! How bad could it be?
The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design. But there’s something else about it. The picture is a bit… wobbly. Well, over composite video anyway. Let’s dig in and learn a little big more about the nitty-gritty of composite video.
We’ve seen a few test PCBs now; games that were only sold alongside Japanese arcade cabinets to satisfy a law requiring a minimum amount of functionality. Sega gave us Dottori-kun, a remake of Head-On; Taito gave us Mini-Vaders, another retro throwback. But what about Konami? Let’s test out our system with Target Panic!
I’m bringing out the truth about TMSS! Admit it! Sega never made a game console that can’t play that region’s release of Phantasy Star II, and it’s time to show exactly what that means and why. Let’s dig into the technical nitty-gritty of one of the biggest flops in console licensing history. Spoilers: It’s a little more complicated than you think, at least in Japan.
There’s a problem with my current series on mahjong games– when I say “mahjong”, people in my home country of the United States of America probably don’t think of the 2-4 player competitive game. They think of the single-player tile-matching game, Mahjong Solitaire, also known as Shanghai, beloved of office-workers and casual gamers everywhere. And that’s popular in Japan too; popular enough to…
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites. So therefore you might be surprised to hear that Sega’s plucky underdog Master System could do it. Well, don’t get your hopes up; this is far too limited–…
Imagine, if you will, a young man. So desperate for a cure for his disease, that he seeks out a time machine to travel to a future where a cure might exist. But whenever he approaches someone, they insist on playing the tile game mahjong, and for some reason the women start interrogating him about their bodies as they take off their clothes. Will he ever find his cure? This is the story of Mahjong…
There is a major issue with video game consoles and even some computers prior to about, say, 1985 or so; nearly all of them lacked even composite video outputs and required RF. This is a huge pain; composite mods require effort and reverse-engineering, while RF demodulation usually relies on old machines as modern demodulators can be questionable at best. And now, finally, we have what promises to…
That’s right. We all know about Lock-On Technology, the secret dark art of Sega used to turn Sonic & Knuckles into what it should have been if Sonic the Hedgehog 3 hadn’t been rushed to release. But what if I told you that that wasn’t supposed to be the first game with Lock-On Technology? What if Sega had intended Lock-On Technology for an entirely different game, on a different console? Also,…