#MobyGames

[53v3nfrn5]

Manual for Seiken Densetsu 3 ‘聖剣伝説3’ (SNES, 1995)

[hanakogames]

Searching futilely for something I half-remember, but interested in the very-old computer games aimed at girls I’m stumbling across on the way, things I never knew existed.

Like Jenny of the Prairie, an early survival game for a girl abandoned by a wagon train in the west.

Or Lauren of the 25th Century, where she’s managing some kind of space desert ecosystem thing?

[smbhax]

[haveyouplayedthisgame]

BioShock Infinite

[magichats]

Man it really is a shame that as of this date (July 5th, 2023) that Cookie's Bustle is all but scrapped off the web at large.

There's only two videos discussing it directly (and that more about the take downs and not directly the game itself), with everything else turning up no results.

I know some people on twitter were thinking that it was for some sort of relaunch, but at this point I really don't think it's some sort of modern reboot.

This is really a bummer for game preservation. Also a bummer as a person who just likes weird obscure games.

[thefloatingstone]

*squints* wait...

has NOBODY scanned and uploaded the unique art from the Mass Effect 3 Pre-order Steel book to the internet???

Mobygames even has the insert pamphlets for the multiplayer packs but NOT the unique art?

Listen.... it's 2:39am but remind me tomorrow to get a high res image of mine and upload it here because this is scandalous.

[demonfox38]

...you remember when I said this game shares vibes with "Tales of Symphonia"?

[castleinthemist]

no lie as someone who played the dog island game to death the ost is severely underrated but specifically this track was everything to lil' old kid me

Game was actually a lil' jank but for 'never really played an rpg before' kid me this was like...a gold mine...story, characters events that were affected by your actions SNIFF LEVELLING, "combat" etc etc oh yeah there was bug collecting in it too....YUKES didn't need to make the game like that but they did pop off a little for something that was in tandem with a picture project/toy line

[foone]

Mobygames keeps suggesting I play Sisters hypnosis sex 2 but I've not even played the first one

[blockygraphics]

Various BMP files representing scenes from the CD for the German game Virtual Corporation (1996). According to MobyGames the 3D animators were Alberto Morales, Adrian Williams, and Peter Vlahakis, with additional graphics by Martin Dolgener.

Intro to the game (translated from German):

"The year is 2028.

All trade and business transactions are conducted on the NET, an evolution of the Internet from the 1990s.

Access to the NET is via Brainstorm TM, a user interface developed by Google Plex Industries in collaboration with governments around the world. Brainstorm transmits audio and visual inputs directly into the user's brain while complying with legal regulations.

Chris Qwerty, a promising young programmer at Pogodyne Systems, Google Plex's main competitor, developed the concept of virtual teleconferencing. This revolutionized the way companies around the world did business and a global cybercity developed on the NET.

Pogodyne became the most successful and powerful software company in the world.

And then suddenly a job opened up..."

[blazehedgehog]

Man, that's crazy and unfortunate what happened to that level designer on Sonic Heroes. Is there a source for those stories you could share?

Unfortunately it came from a Game Informer interview on their website back in 2016. Thanks to the efforts of Gamestop, everything about Game Informer was basically wiped from the internet about a little over a week ago.

Digging around a bit I found this Wayback Machine post for the article, titled "Where Sonic Went Wrong", written by Brian Shea.

Iizuka recalls the development cycle of Sonic Heroes, the first multiplatform mainline Sonic console game, as the most stressful of his career, in part thanks to deadlines. He was based in the United States while the rest of the development team was in Japan, and mismanagement took its toll on the team. "The level design for Sonic Heroes was made by two people: me and one other person," he says. "As we got to the later stages of development, this other person got pretty sick and didn't show up to work, so level design was made by one person! So for those very last stages of the game, I didn't sleep at all and I was constantly working. I lost about [22 pounds] because I was just cranking away and it was just work, work, work. I didn't sleep because I had to finish the game on my own. Almost dying!"

From what I've heard, this isn't the first time somebody has mentioned this about Sonic Heroes, just the first time in an English interview.

For the other information:

The information about Sonic 2 comes in the wake of Hirokazu Yasuhara's Digital Dragons talk in 2017, where he revealed a significantly different and more ambitious early design for Sonic 2 that was scrapped in favor of something they could do faster and easier.

The information about Sonic 3 comes from the Hidden Palace dump of a Sonic 3 prototype. The creation date on their prototype is maybe three months before its retail release and the state of the game at that point can charitably be described as a disaster, something their news post explains thanks to information provided by the person who offered the prototype.

Sonic Adventure 2 being made by half the people in half the time is original research by me. Sonic Team is on record that the 3D Sonic World in Sonic Jam was a prototype for Sonic Adventure on the Sega Saturn, putting development of SA1 starting around late 1996 or early 1997. If you count from there to when the finishing touches were put on the International (American) release of SA1, that gives it a development time of around 2-3 years. SA2's development started probably around December of 1999, and came out in June of 2001, making for a development time of 18 months. You can compare developer numbers yourself using Mobygames. (Shoutouts to The Golden Bolt for also looking down a similar path.)

Similarly, just look at the production credits for Shadow the Hedgehog, CTRL+F, and search for "Takashi Iizuka"

After Shadow in 2005, Takashi Iizuka was no longer an active developer on the Sonic series for the next five or six games, mostly relegated to distant "supervisor", "concept" and "special thanks" roles. Instead, he worked on NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, another game Sega jerked him around on. He came back to the Sonic franchise and started doing press again midway through the development of Sonic Colors in 2010.

Sonic Unleashed being expensive comes from, to my memory, an IGN Developer Diary that's impossible to find nowadays, where the director admits one of the producers at Sega pitched the Werehog as a way to slow players down and appreciate all the effort they put into environment art. Also they literally developed a whole entire rendering engine just for that game, of course it was expensive.

Here's a 2009 post mentioning a "Sonic Anniversary" leak from Sega's FTP. Details are fuzzy, but a Sega Spain leak a year later clarified that "Sonic Anniversary" was a game coming to Wii, DS, PSP, and PS3. A (physically) broken prototype of Sonic Anniversary for the PSP reveals a very early version of what would become Sonic Generations for the 3DS. And given how much content is shared between Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, it's not hard to connect the dots between Colors being built from the proposed Wii version of "Anniversary" (Generations). There may be a more direct source for this straight from the horse's mouth, but I can't find it right now.

Morio Kishimoto was a game designer for Secret Rings and Black Knight, his first games for Sega, and got promoted to Director for Sonic Colors where he's stayed ever since. He mentioned not being a part of Sonic Forces at first, but was brought in to get the game back on track, and the game's troubled development is corroborated by Takashi Iizuka in the liner notes for the Sonic Forces soundtrack.

You can compare the metacritic for Secret Rings and Sonic 06 to see just how much more favorably Secret Rings was received, despite both games coming out less than six months apart.

Here's an archived IGN interview from 2007 with Yojiro Ogawa describing how Secret Rings was split off from the development resources of Sonic 06. Exact dates would be fuzzy, but it's easy to assume the entire game was developed in less than a year.

Here's a 2010 Eurogamer interview where Takashi Iizuka (not Kishimoto, whoops) says Sonic Colors is a Sonic game meant to appeal to Mario fans.

As for Sonic Lost World being Sonic Colors 2, my source on that is "I mean, just look at it."

(For people many years in the future, this post is in response to this.)

[vimbry]

oh my god someone added information on the old edutainment game "darryl the dragon" to mobygames this year. extremely strong memory of playing this in IT class for me, that has left otherwise No impression on the internet, and I've only been able to find like 2 screenshots from the ancient official site before now.

[smbhax]

Bonk’s Revenge (GB)

GameFAQs credits the developer as "AI," who had done the NES port of Bonk's Adventure the year before (1993 in Japan, January 1994 in the States, the NES's last year--the cart for that now goes for four figures on eBay). In those years AI were mostly doing a lot of console ports. They went on to do, among many other things, four Bomberman games, each on a different Nintendo platform. In their later years--ending in 2013--they focused on Nintendo handhelds.

The game's cartridge sticker and title screen, though, credit just "Red," which would be short for Red Company--also on the title screen of PC Genjin 2, even though GameFAQs credits a small company called Mutech for that one. (They credit Hudson for Bonk's Adventure on both GB and TG16, and for Bonk 3.)

Mobygames lists Special Thanks to "People of Hudson & Red and you!"

[thisisrealy2kok]

WipEout XL (1996) - scanned by MobyGames

one two three four

[thechosenpumbloom]

A collection of random box covers of both notable and not so notable MS-DOS horror games. All credits to people on Mobygames. Feel free to add.