I had 4 games to start: Super Mario Bros. Duckhunt, Contra and Lifeforce. The Konami code is etched into my brain forever. There was a time when Konami meant quality to me, despite the hurdles Nintendo threw at them. It's sad to think of how many once great game companies have fallen off their pedestals.
And the dumb part, someone at Nintendo of America probably got a raise for their decision to get an extra $0.0183 per cartridge by forcing their own mapper
You’re not going to like this, but NOA made the right decisions here. Given the state of the US market vs the Japanese market, the need to restrict the number of titles was more important than providing the best possible experience. Nintendo knew that if shelves got flooded at any point, they’d have another crash of ‘83 on their hands. The technology was important as well. Japan was a much smaller market, so supplies of chips was never a problem. But in the US everything had to be done at scale. Nintendo was putting their own marketing budgets behind many of these titles, and they wanted them to be available. Which meant they had larger minimum orders and used approved hardware that they knew they could manufacture at scale. (Nintendo tried approving third party manufacturing when there was a chip shortage at the end of the 80s and got royally screwed on the deal.) So how bad was it for Konami under Nintendo’s thumb? Well, Konami became a household game in the US, sold millions of carts, and made quite a lot of money. They benefited greatly, despite the challenges imposed.
That was a Nintendo Co. Ltd. Decision, made in Kyoto to make sure Nintendo got all the profit from making cartridges. Nintendo of America had zero say in anything important in the NES days.
@@thewiirocks the chances of a second game crash if there were too many great nes games available seems unlikely to me. The mappers actively make the game better, not worse. Shit games on the nes don't use the advanced mappers even in other regions. I agree them limiting how many games a publisher could make a year was the right choice but maybe not as restrictive as they had done, but the mappers didn't make any sense.
@@ungabungus01 You're confusing two separate points. Point 1: Nintendo limited the number of games to prevent market saturation and potential crash. Point 2: Nintendo required that cartridges be manufactured by Nintendo using only approved hardware so that Nintendo could be certain of sufficient supply for a game. Better mappers can make a game better, but it's custom hardware that has to be sourced. Japan was a pretty decent market, but it was nothing compared to the size of the US market. Nintendo had to be certain they could obtain enough of whatever chips they used in their cartridges.
You can actually modify the NES to be able to work with the VR6 (and also the Famicom Disk System's extra sound channel). It's because they changed the cartridge port and moved some pins around (as a consequence of making Famicom games not work on the NES). You have to jumper some stuff on the motherboard, and then run the Japanese cartridge with a special adapter, and it will work. It's a lot of work though, when these days you can just use an emulator.
If you're lucky and find the right 5 screw cartridges, it comes with an adapter to go from Famicom to NES due to shortages of certain games for the 1985 Holiday season.
Is there an adapter to let you play Famicom games on an NES without having to alter anything inside the system or solder? And to take the cover off the NES wouldn't you need a special screwdriver? For the SNES two plastic tabs inside the cartridge slot prevent Super Famicom carts from going all the way in. If you could cut those tabs off, then Super Famicom carts will work. I don't think you need an adapter cart for SNES.
@@robkrasinski6217 The SNES doesn't need any adapter, just modifying the case. The NES completely changed the cartridge pins compared to the Famicom so an adapter is required. And, if you want the special sound chips to work, you need to modify something inside the console as well. And opening an NES is just a standard Gamebit driver, you can get those anywhere.
@@robkrasinski6217 You can play Famicom games on a NES with an adapter, but any Famicom carts using enhanced audio won’t play the audio properly on a NES without modding the NES first. And yes, you are correct about the SNES. Cutting out those tabs will let you play Super Famicom games without an adapter. I did that with my SNES many years ago.
@@superuser8636 No. CD and DVD based consoles are just reading data off a disk. They aren’t plugging another piece of hardware into the main board like a cartridge is. It’s very different
Awesome episode! Love Konami's NES offerings. Gradius was my first 3rd party game. I still retain the memory of getting it as a gift from my aunt back in the day. Always wondered what happened with the Gradius II NES release.
Do you know the only Konami games I really played on the NES not even the NES, the wii virtual Console I played ninja turtles on it I also played Contra three.
@@kiwirocket64 nice!! The timing of this comment is perfect. I'm actually playing some Contra later tonight! Also, love the name, "Kiwi Rocket 64". It sounds like it would've been an actual title of a game back in the ol' N64 days.
I also believed they were intending to release Gradius 2 in America. The show Captain N: The Game Master features background music that was exclusive to the Famicom port of that game
The VRC6 not being compatible with the NES was still NOA's fault, because they decided not to put that audio input connection in the NES' stupidly fail-prone cartridge slot. (They instead put that audio input in that weird add-on port on the bottom of the console, which would've been used for the Disk System if that was ever released outside of Japan, but of course, it wasn't.)
Konami is my favorite developer of the era, even more so than Nintendo. Its a shame we never got some of the most interesting, weird, and great Famicom games in the US. Games like Getsu Fuuma Den, Kid Dracula, Konami Wai Wai World, Yume Penguin Monogatari, and ESPECIALLY Crisis Force are definitely worth checking out. This video made me want to start collecting Famicom again lol
Even up into the ps2 days konami was still goated. Ps2 is my favorite system to this day and the two greatest games on that system came from konami. MGS 2 and 3
Correction 2: The MMC5 chip DOES support more sound channels. Not as good ones as VRC6, but it didn't matter. The pins for sound expansion were redirected to the pins on the expansion port on the bottom of the NES, which was never used, so they were forced to remake the soundtrack for the built in sound chip only, ignoring the extra sound channels of the MMC5 chip because they were useless on the NES. You CAN get the expanded sound capabilities of the NES back with a really simple mod, but of course no developers released anything for the NES with extra sound channels, even when using chips like the MMC5. After the mod, though, Japanese games through a Famicom to NES adapter will be able to use extra sound channels without issue.
@@pojr Yup. The NES couldn't use any extra sound channels that any mapper chip had, and it was all on purpose. Nintendo probably wanted to create expansion modules that would plug into the bottom of the NES that would add more features, but no official modules were ever created. One of these modules, presumably, would've added the ability to add more sound channels to games, despite the fact that all the sound related stuff was happening on the cart, anyway, and that all you need to do to re-enable the extra sound channels is to connect two pins with a resistor on an actual NES. Basically, an expansion module would probably have connected these two pins, charging users for a feature that was already built into the console, but they never did it, so the NES never got more audio channels, officially. But again, if you connect those two pins with a resistor, and plug in a japanese cart, the extra sound channels WILL play. A more positive interpretation is that Nintendo didn't want developers, including themselves to HAVE to built these features into the carts, and they wanted to make expansion modules that added the sound channels instead so that ALL devs could use them. But they obviously gave up on that idea, if that was the idea, as well of the idea of using the expansion slot at all. I don't know of any games that used the extra sound channels of the MMC5 chip in Japan, but you can play with them and make music for the chip in Famitracker.
@FlergerBergitydersh Nintendo did early on plan to release the disk system in the US, but that fell through when battery backed cartridges become a thing. There was also the problem with piracy on the desk system, so that's probably another reason it never got released in the West.
Gradius is 1 of my favorite series. I have mixed feelings on Nintento's policies; they curated games, so that almost any game you got would be fun, but at the same time prevented games like Gradius 2 from coming to the USA. To some extent, Gradius 3 made up for it on the SNES.
So now after over three decades i got my answer. I drooled over the pages of the game magazines back then of Gradius II only to never get it. Superb video.
Yea, Nintendo has been a terrible company and never has not been. Their recent actions have been over the top. I own 3 switches and many games. But the recent lawsuit against Palword, attacks on fair use, and war with emulation. I will no longer give them any more money. It's on "principle" now... if I play a Nintendo game... it will only be in a method that Nintendo does not get a dime from me.
@@CD-vb9fi yeah I’m kinda irritated with the lengths people will go to defend Nintendo despite them releasing subpar games and straight out being anti consumer.
@@CD-vb9fi Nintendo is the D-sney of gaming. They don't care, there's money to be made. Shigeru Miyamoto is also a manchild who is known to throw tantrums if a dev outshines him. (I.e. Rare's Donkey Kong Country fiasco. Shigeru threw a tantrum and is the reason why SMW 2 Yoshi's Island looks like a coloring book.)
The NES designers were genius. The fact that they brought the address lines to the cart is what allows mapping. It was some forward thinking that really made the difference and allowed NES/Famicom to rule the roost for many years.
I recall renting Super Monaco GP for Genesis based on the incredible looking graphics on back of the box and when I played it at home the game didn't look anywhere near as good. Those scammers put the Arcade Graphics on the back of the box. I felt scammed and ripped off.
@@gunengineering1338 Yeah, the sad thing was Super Monaco GP was a pretty good game but it didn't matter because they set the expectations way to high by showing arcade screen shots. Surely if somebody took Sega to court over that they would have easily won the case.
@Wallyworld30 i was actually referring to the makers making their games too hard in order to counter game rentals. At least where i lived which was one of the areas Nintendo targeted for market trials and for a reason, us kids rented games in order to try them out and see if it was something worth saving up for and buying. In those days, you had to save up for a month or 2 to buy a game. So we didn't spend the money lightly and we didn't have the internet to look up reviews. So we either borrowed them from a friend or rented them to try them out. A lot of games became obscure because everyone rented them and discovered they were either full of unsolvable puzzles or were so difficult that we pretty much said, "screw that" and passed on it. So basically making games hard to counter rentals had the exact opposite effect they intended due to a fundamental lack of understanding of how us kids were utilizing game rentals. That and the fact that finishing a game over the weekend was usually a non-factor in whether or not we were willing to buy them. Games in those days were the equivalent to $100 today. No kid is going to spend that kind of money on a game they know can be finished by a skilled player within an hour (which is pretty much everything on the nes) if they expected to toss it the moment they finished it for the first time. Game rentals would have been an asset to game makers had they not fought against them. Nintendo power also had the same reverse effect. Most of us thought Nintendo power was for suckers. Either one kid had a copy and shared all the secrets with everyone which meant that no one needed the magazine or no one had it but someone tried the game and told horror stories about the brick wall they ran into and no one would buy the game as result. I can think of quite a few games that probably would have been big hits had they not pulled the Nintendo power gotcha.
First time viewer here. I find this video to be insightful, factually accurate, informative and aligns with my nostalgic interest in my childhood memories. Oration was clear with a positive tone. Gameplay footage and b roll was edited nicely. Overall I'm left with a positive first impression. I think I'm going to see what other videos you got. Also I just drank a pot of coffee.
Mappers were such an interesting thing. I know other consoles used them for memory mapping, but I don't know of any other consoles besides the NES (and SNES) that extended the graphical (and sound, in Japan) capabilities so significantly via cartridges.
I think part of the reason is because just how much could be altered on the NES with addition of a low cost extra microchip. Even if the PS5 supported ROM cartridges its unlikely you would be able to add much to the vanilla hardware with any cost effective chip. Certainly not anything that would stand out to general consumers. On the NES however mapper chips were able to mod in impressive new gimmicks like XY scrolling, simple parallaxing backgrounds, large scale background tile animation, etc.
@@mresturk9336 My sense is that they originally exposed the PPU bus to the cartridge as a cost-saving measure: instead of needing RAM in the console, it could be put in the cartridge, and as ROM for earlier ones. If so, it's ironic that this became a big strength that allowed the console to rise above others. It also neatly solved the configuration problem with PC gaming, where each person's system differs and might not have the required hardware. Here the required hardware was shipped with every game.
The main reason was that other consoles didn't need them. Nes was very primitive. The master system, turbographic 16... Heck even the Gameboy already had the ,rather simple, capabilities mappers were used for. With snes it was a different story thou. With nes, Nintendo essentially was making money both ways. Both selling the console and making cartridges for third parties. They actually never wanted to make a snes, but they were forced by the competition. Still on snes they wanted to keep the same idea... The end result was a cheap crippled system that was almost purpose made to be extended by cartridges. And it becomes obvious when you compare it to the turbographic16 and genesis which had more well rounded specs
@@affegpus4195you're right to some point. But at the end the final result is what matters. Adding chips to a cartridge is a good way to improve the output quality of an aging console. The customer shouldn't care if good graphics and sound are results of the console or cartridge architecture.
Ended up playing the Japanese versions of many many games on the mutli game (200 games in one or some such) bootleg nes cartridges that were like gaming gold back in the day.
@@alexwarner3803 omg that is the one! I recall playing it (or some rip-off maybe) on NES at my friend's in the 90'ies. I was looking for the title recently, but the only scrap of memory I had about the game was that there was a guy shooting stars from his forehead. I failed to persuade Google to tell me what it was, they've been concealing this title from me for at least 5 years. Thanks a lot!
Konami was my favorite NES developer in the 80's and learning this is shocking and sad. I never truly got to experience my favorite games :'( Props to Konami for clearly doing their best to port the games to the US under this unfortunate draconian rule.
You seem to have missed a gameplay change for the US release of Castlevania 3 where Grant the acrobat uses a stabbing knife instead of a throwing one in the Japanese version. Also in Salamander when you're in 2 players mode you each can have 2 Options unlike in Lifeforce with one each. Is there any particular reason why Nintendo of America banned game developers from using the mapping chips for NES? I don't why they would do this. Aren't they a subsidiary to Nintendo of Japan? I could somewhat understand censorship in US released games but for hardware I'm somewhat baffled.
Nintendo has always guarded their technology zealously. They go so far as to try and sue independent software developers from trying to run emulators on 35-40 year old equipment.
@@sarcasticguy4311 That has nothing to do with it. Konami was a trusted third party game developer for Nintendo back in the 80s and 90s and they are approved by Nintendo of Japan. This is clearly Nintendo of America's meddling in its pathetic attempt to cater to the US market by downgrading gameplay features.
In the Famicom version of Castlevania 3, different enemies deal different amounts of damage. In the Western versions of the game, every enemy deals the same amount of damage, and there’s a notable damage spike in the late stages of the game that makes every enemy significantly stronger. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Western versions of the game also feature more enemies and replace a very useful flying dagger attack with a basic short-range dagger attack.
@@robkrasinski6217 Well, The Famicom version of Castlevania III is better than the NA version. After playing Castlevania III for a while, I decided that it just wasn't fun. The difficulty was so high, and it was for all of the wrong reasons. I decided to try out the Famicom version of the game. To my surprise, it's actually fun. It's still not great, but I can say it is good. I think it is superior to the North American version in every way. Here are things that I noticed that made it better: Bosses and enemies are weaker. They take fewer hits to kill. Serpent statues which took 5 hits before now take 4 hits. Knights which took 8 hits before now take 6 hits. This fixes the problem I had of their projectiles being thrown in between my whips, so I can now intuitively run up to them and whip them to death. Just the way I like it. Grant has a different weapon: a dagger that he now throws across the screen. This makes a lot of sections easier because you can attack things from a distance. The Cyclops fight to rescue Sypha is made a piece of cake by this change. The Cyclops behaves differently than in the NA version. In that version, it would randomly pace back and forth beneath you to try to trick you into coming down at the wrong time. However, now it keeps it's distance from you while you are up on the platform. It's almost like a real fight now, where the Cyclops is aware that it can't hit you up there and is waiting for you to come down before engaging. In the NA version, the Cyclops there acted more like it was aware that it's own life didn't matter because it's just a game, and it only cared about killing you. The most interesting change was the water serpents boss. In the NA version, their fire breath would extend almost all the way across the middle platform. This forced you to stand at the other end, too far away to hit them with the whip. Sypha's spells could hit them if you had them, but if you didn't, then it was a slow battle where you only have minimal opportunity to hit them. In the Famicom version, their range has been reduced, but with the addition of being able to fire the flames diagonally at you. This actually makes the fight more fun and interesting. You still have a pattern to learn, but you can stand close enough to hit them with the whip. The golden demon boss now jumps around differently in a way that conveys its patterns to to player. It shows early in the fight that its toes fall through the platforms above, meaning that its entire foot must be above the platform in order for him to land up there. He also fires his projectiles for the first time while up on the platform, letting the player safely observe the pattern from below. The final level is a much smoother experience. That section where you are blocked by a serpent statue while standing on crumbling floor can now be gotten through because you can kill it fast enough before the floor breaks. The bats that appear while swinging on the pendulums are no longer there. Not only that, the game starts you at the stairs before Dracula as long as you have lives. The candle that contained a Dagger before the battle area in the NA version now holds a Cross. This makes so much of a difference in the final fight, it's almost as if it was designed with the Cross in mind. The most important change of all was the reduced damage that you take from enemies. Now most enemies only do 3 bars of damage and enemy projectiles do 2 bars of damage. In the NA version, enemies did more damage on average, enemy projectiles dealt the same damage, and by the end levels all enemies would do a fourth of your health per hit. For the Famicom version, certain enemies only start dealing damage on par with the NA version when you get to the final levels. All of a sudden, taking damage isn't so much of a problem when you don't die in four hits. It makes it so that you can still clear stage sections while making a few mistakes here and there. The battle with Death is still exactly the same as in the NA version, but it's now less of a chore to get to Death in the first place. The punishment for failure is now much more fair.
Well, us US players were gypped of a superior version. Can you play it in a US system with an adapter or do you need to mod the inside of the system for the game to work because of the sound chips? I got the US game in 1990 as a gift from a late grandmother when it was new, we got Castlevania II Simon’s Quest in late 1988. I think though the Japanese version is on the Castlevania collection on Xbox. Why are Family Computer carts shorter than NES ones? And the first NES in fall 1985 was front loading unlike the Japanese version, they later released a top loading NES in the US.
@@robkrasinski6217 Short answer, the name for the series is 悪魔城 (Demon Castle) or 悪魔城ドラキュラ (Demon Castle: Dracula) depending on who you ask...But it tends to vary from game to game - some titles play with it. For instance, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest's JA name drops the Demon Castle bit and is just "Dracula II: Sealed Curse" more or less, whereas Castlevania III is "Demon Castle Legend". Some of the later games, as well as the Netflix series, outright used the name Castlevania (or kanaized, Kyassuruvania キャッスルヴァニア.)
MMC5 actually has two pulse wave and one PCM sound channel. There is no way to send audio from a cartridge to the output of the NES, though, so these are not hooked up inside the cartridge. Only five Famicom games utilize this aspect of the MMC5, with Just Breed being the best example.
I now understand why the KGB was seen running after the president of Nintendo of America in the Tetris movie: they actually wanted to hold him to account for the downgraded games.
Doesn't Nintendo of America operate under the Nintendo corporate umbrella? What specifically was the problem with using 3rd party mappers in the US but not in other countries? If there were mappers that were approved by the main Nintendo in Japan, why not in the US? Also, why are they called mappers?
Most Japanese companies like to operate with a relatively high level of regional autonomy, on the basis that the local branch knows the local market better. Some valid reasons for disallowing custom mappers would be to streamline the production process and reduce the risk that a cart couldn't be made because of supply constraints, since it's a lot easier to keep large stocks of a small number of custom chips than a wider range. The "mapper" designation comes from "memory mapper" - the earliest versions just used a latch and just mapped one of n sections of ROM into a specified address.
MMC5 technically has... One additional sound channel? But it only works in famicom which has wiring for it much like konami's chips. GIMMICK or Batman or some other SunSoft game got approval to use it's own mapper, likely because it was late days of NES, the quality of the game and company, and they still had to remove additional sound channel usage to be a full experience on American systems.
It's more that it likely wasn't anticipated that sound expansions were going to be performed by chips in cartridges and in setting up copy protection for the NES, the audio expansion pins were moved to the expansion port on the bottom of the system. The MMC5 chip actually is capable of providing two additional sound channels, but only for the Famicom. It may also not be the copy protection, but also the plan for the Disk System to come to America, since Nintendo was betting the future of its games was floppy disks. I don't know the exact reason the pins were moved.
Really great and insightful look at the goings on of Nintendo and Konami as companies. I’m just glad I was too young to know or care, and I enjoyed Gradius and Contra just the same. Keep up the great work.
European Arcade version of Contra 1 Renamed Gryzor for no real reason is Single player only if you play it two players it switches to 2nd player if first player loses a life. But Konami in arcade from 80s to Just before 3D PS1 Era was infamous for making their Arcade games way harder in the West compared tpo Japanese versions of same game. Sometimes changing the entire rules of games for the west most of times making them just stupid hard or near impossible. See Dark Adventure and Haunted Castle (the 80s arcade castlevania game)for good picks of western versions just made to hard to be any fun.
Fair. I caught it right before it was time to upload, and didn't want to fall behind in my upload schedule, so I decided to include a subtitle. I figured the subtitle would still get my point across.
Well in at least one of these cases, the chip was literally not compatible with the NES. I know a story about Big Bad Nintendo being evil gets more clicks than "there were minor technical differences in some NES games", but the latter is most of the actual story here.
11:40 - those graphics could be from an early Genesis game. The (fake) parallax scrolling and the clever use of colors look awsome for a NES title. What's the name of the game?
9:46 That "residue" is a side effect of imperfect timing for the splitscreen effects. Likely the top of the status bar of Kirby's Adventure was designed in a manner to hide that for a cleaner looking picture.
You forgot to say that Castlevania III was made harder than the japanese version in the Worldwide release, berfing some characters attacks and changing the level design to be harder, and that's bad, really bad. They also did this with Super C, removing the 30 Lives Konami Code and Contra: Hard Corps on the Genesis, removing the life bar from the characters. I guess that happened because the video stores wanted people to actually buy the games, so they wouldn't have any chance to just rent it for a weekend and beat it in one seat. And that's cheap. I don't like it :(
I remember playing both gradius and lifeforce and had a great time as a kid. i never managed to finish them but still have fond memories, might grab a emulator and finish them sometime. Thx for the video, appreciate ya
I consider it downright criminal what happened to Castlevania III. The Japanese version is fun, nicely balanced, and the character you select as your partner was essentially a difficulty level choice. But for the American version, they ramped up the difficulty to a ridiculous degree and changed the characters so that Sypha was the only partner worth a damn.
They increased the difficulty to actually sell games overseas. If you could easily beat the game over a weekend as a rental, people wouldn't buy the game, as they were expensive
Correction, they didn't make the game harder, they removed the normal mode, and left only the hard mode. You can play the Japanese game in hard mode too.
@@thinkhector Not true. All 3 versions (JP, US, EU) have a normal mode and hard mode. There are a lot of differences between these versions that affect the difficulty, both in normal and hard modes, but the US normal mode is not the same as the JP hard mode. Also, the EU version is a little bit easier than the US one, but still not as easy as the JP one.
Hmm. So, that is why Life Force felt so barren. I also noticed that a lot of Konami games would force the NES's graphics to stutter. At the time, I didn't know that it was a limitation of the hardware (I do now.) It's sad that Nintendo was so restrictive because, for me, the company who made the game was the decider. If I heard that Konami made a game, I knew it was a good one just by that name alone. I really think Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by being so limiting in U.S. releases.
So how does a mapper dictate what intro screen or how many options you can use? (Life Force) It doesn't. It's just rebalancing difficulty and changing the game name for something else.
What was the nes game that was similar to bubble bobble, but you could eat powerups and transform into dinasours and what not. I remember playing it but can't figure out the title.
Quality video bro! Very nicely edited and great sound production. My only gripe is the green screen thing at the begining, it makes your hair look crazy lol
Personally, I think Castlevania II's US soundtrack sounds a lot better than the Japanese version; they reworked the songs significantly so some of them have much more interesting melodies and counterpoints going on.
Well technically they have the same melodies, but they use different waveforms and composition structure if that’s what you mean. Yeah I like the sound of the US part 2 better as well, especially the added drum samples and flourishes. For part 3 though, the JP is better hands down.
As someone that recently played and beat Castlevania 2 for the first time, I agree that the U.S. soundtrack is better, but boy does that gameplay suffer. I tried VERY hard to beat it without any how-to guide, but it proved impossible. (Didn't realize you could show the boat captain a different body part and he would take you someplace else.) The odd thing about Castlevania 2 is that it actually has more in common with modern Castlevania games then the other better 80s titles.
There was only one mention and photo of Gradius II in Nintendo Power but reason they stated it was never released in North America was because it's chip set was incompatible with the NES if I remember correctly. They also mention how it was graphical monster on the Famicom.
Interestingly, the only third party developer who had their own mapper approved was Sunsoft, with their FME-7. It was only used in Return of the Joker, but it was used in one other game in Europe - Mr. Gimmick. Mr. Gimmick was also meant to be released in the US, but was a scrapped prototype.
Nintendo of America was very strict about who could release what because they were coming out of the video game crash on Atari. The crash was caused by allowing anyone to publish games, so a flood of badly made games was released.
Nintendo of japan also managed to make rentals illegal without permission from the publisher, they tried to do that in the US but failed so companies like Konami jacked up the difficulty of the western releases. Some titles that are infamously hard? Are much easier in JP.
@TokyoXtreme No Simon's quest is just as cryptic in Japanese as it is in English. The cryptic stuff was kinda the point, though, because it's part of the games story if you read the manual. The game just really wasn't translated very well. On another note. The line one of the villagers says is "Don't look into the death star or you will die," which was supposed to be a fist of the North star reference, but it was badly translated.
I have one question, what made tjhose map chips be aloved to by use in Japan? Why didn't Nintendo of Japan have a problem with them? And why couldn't the nes run a few of the chips? Is the nes less powerfull then the famicon?
They had the same limitations as the NA versions, if they came out at all. Some like Contra were changed even further, because of stricter laws about depicting war and violence in humans, so they changed it all to robots instead.
Great and interesting video! I never knew about the nerfing except for the sound chip in castlevania 3. I have the Japanese version and play it on famicom toploader for that same exact reason! I love the soundtrack. Speaking of soundtracks was is that song in minute 12:44?
Amazing, I didn't know about this disparity of expansion chips on Nintendo consoles in Japan and the US. Can anyone tell if the Japanese cartridges worked in the famiclones spread around the world?
Mostly yes, although some of the clones didn't have the audio mixing circuits that the original Famicom did and hence missed out on the extra audio channels. There were also some models that did nasty tricks with the CPU timing to allow games designed for 60Hz NTSC to display on 50Hz PAL TVs - this typically worked find with simpler games, but messed up with some of the ones doing fancier tricks (like the Konami mappers that faked up a scanline counter using the CPU clock).
@@TrimeshSZ Well then, there are even those clones with dual cartridge slots for 72-pin and 60-pin. This is the case of the Milmar Top System, the CCE Top Game, and the Dynavision 3 and Dynavision 4 from Dynacom that were manufactured in Brazil. Do they have all the necessary hardware to run the Japanese cartridges?
@@PONTOCRITICO IIRC, Brazil used a 60Hz PAL variant called "PAL-M", so it would use the standard NTSC timing, as used by the original Famicom. The extension audio support could be a problem - it certainly won't be supported on the 72 pin carts because they don't have the necessary pins and it may not be connected on the 60 pin socket either. The only way to know for sure is either testing it with a cart known to support expansion audio or opening it up and seeing if pins 45 and 46 on the 60 pin socket are connected.
@@TrimeshSZ My biggest doubt is whether these Konami cartridges would run well on them. They are dual-slot consoles, so they are designed to work with both standards, but the issue of Japanese chips being incompatible with the NES is that I wonder if they would work correctly with the cartridge hardware.
@@PONTOCRITICO If you mean generally, they should - the core chips in the Famicom and the NTSC NES are the same - the CPU is a Ricoh 2A03 and the PPU is a 2C02 in the retail machines. Electrically the signals on the cart port are nearly identical - out of the 60 signals on the Famicom cart slot 58 are present and identical on the NES (the two missing signals are the ones used for audio expansion) - there are also 14 new signals - 4 of them are connections to the CIC lockout chip and the other 10 are just wired to the expansion port on the bottom of the NES. The only things I've found not to work with Famicom carts on a US NES with a disabled CIC chip is the expansion audio.
Look up an SNES game called Biometal...the Japanese version featured an amazing electronica inspired soundtrack...but that wouldn't fly here in the states (and apparently Europe) instead...we got remixes of 2 unlimited...I kidd you not...
I'd be curious as to the reason for the mapper restriction.. however.. I can *maybe* get the released game limits IF it was a matter of them needing to review the games before release. It might have been a control measure to make sure they didnt get overwhelmed by a flood of games for review. Back then, the Nintendo 'Seal of Quality" actually meant something. (today, not so much).
You aren't far off. The restriction on how many games could be released per year and that the cart manufacturing had to go through Nintendo was to prevent another video game crash that happened because of how many companies had popped up flooding the market with terrible games for stuff like the Atari 2600. I can't say I'm a fan of draconian policies but this particular one made sense for a market that was almost dead before Nintendo manged to show up with their "interactive toy" that came with a plastic robot and just so happened to also play games on a TV. If you could only release 5 games a year you need to make sure they were as good a possible to compete to make money in the market because you couldn't just throw out the same game 5 times under different names at different stores to try to boost total sales.
-Correction 3: It was, again, the same mapper that Super Mario Bros used that allowed Zelda to scroll smoothly horizontally, but choppily scroll vertically. I don't know why the status bar would affect that. It was games like Kid Icarus and Metroid that were finally able to scroll vertically and horizontally smoothly, thanks to a new mapper, and they flaunted it greatly with a vertically scrolling title screen on Kid Icarus, and prominent vertically scrolling gameplay on both titles.- Edit: Again, I was misinformed. Zelda had a different mapper, but I'm not sure it had anything to do with scrolling. Maybe it could scroll vertically smoothly; it just chose to "cache" opening the menu for smooth scrolling instead of the next screen vertical overworld screens. Kid Icarus got away with smooth scrolling without issue because they never did both in one stage; the stages either scroll horizontally or vertically. Metroid would have no problems either with its MMC3 mapper, but the FDS version makes me wonder how they did it with Zelda's FDS version, since that has choppy vertical scrolling too. Again, I'm blaming the smooth scrolling menu for Zelda's issues. Either way, Gradius would have to scroll both horizontally and vertically AT THE SAME TIME, which wasn't going to happen until a better mapper came out.
Kid Icarus and Metroid don't have stationary status bars (while Zelda does). So both of those games can scroll vertically without it being super choppy. You're definitely right though about games that can scroll freely in more than one direction.
The big question though is WHY? Why did NOA crack down on chips when NCL did not? I remember I always thought that Life Force WAS Gradius II, especially when we did get Gradius III on the SNES. I never saw the arcade versions of those at all.
Consider this: who exactly would be manufacturing the chips in question? If I'm remembering things correctly, Konami may have *designed* the VRC2 and whatnot, but Nintendo was the one who *manufactured* the chips when it came time for the games to press. Another thing to consider is that NoA didn't have a sizable dedicated manufacturing arm as NoJ did back then, so making the standard ROM chips and the special order ones like the VR2 may not have been financially feasible for NoA.
The NES was also redesigned, so that you could not play Famicom games on it. This means those mapper chips couldn't just be copy and pasted in. They need to actually be redesigned for NES compatibility.
Another reason was that many 3rd party developers, including Konami, actually manufactured the cartridges themselves for the Japanese market. This is why Famicom cartridges varied in shape and design. Konami also manufactured this chip in-house themselves. For games sold outside Japan, all manufacturing was done by Nintendo (at least for legally licensed games), so they had to use Nintendo’s chips for markets outside Japan.
In life force you could get three options in two player mode...if the other player had options & died, you could capture the options as they drifted off screen.
According to an article I read a while back, it was said that the arcade version of Gradius II didn't sell well outside of Japan. With that in mind, I understand why Konami went out of their way to avoid putting Gradius II on the NES.
Gradius I - Never had vertical scrolling in the game. It Was Vulcan Venture/Gradius II that changed the Angle of play with the "Go Up!" levels :) I have completed Gradius I, many times.
So where did @5:32 come from? It looks like Gradius 1 but scrolling vertically. I think what the video creator is referring to is level that can scroll horizontally AND vertically.
@@StriderVM Ahh I see my mistake, I took the playfield orientation change from Horizontal to Vertical. The "Screen wrap" method ain't quite the same, Vulcan Venture Level 2 I think it is the game orientation changes so it plays like a "Galaxian" type SEU. You are correct however, I did not take the "Screen wrap" as true move up the screen. Sorry for any confusion
The VRC6 chip is documented to add 3 more audio channels. Maybe the info is wrong, but I checked different sources. Though, I'm wondering if you're confusing output channels (mono, stereo, etc.) with internal audio generating channels.
I was expecting a mention of how Konami made Mad City substantially more difficult (mostly by about doubling enemy HP) when they brought it to the US as Bayou Billy. They did this because in Japan video game rental is illegal, so you just make the best game you can to build brand loyalty, and the challenge is there to lend replayability. In the US where video game rental was legal they wanted to make it ball-bustingly difficult so that players wouldn't beat it in a weekend and would feel compelled to buy the cart.
I had 4 games to start: Super Mario Bros. Duckhunt, Contra and Lifeforce. The Konami code is etched into my brain forever. There was a time when Konami meant quality to me, despite the hurdles Nintendo threw at them. It's sad to think of how many once great game companies have fallen off their pedestals.
And the dumb part, someone at Nintendo of America probably got a raise for their decision to get an extra $0.0183 per cartridge by forcing their own mapper
You’re not going to like this, but NOA made the right decisions here. Given the state of the US market vs the Japanese market, the need to restrict the number of titles was more important than providing the best possible experience. Nintendo knew that if shelves got flooded at any point, they’d have another crash of ‘83 on their hands.
The technology was important as well. Japan was a much smaller market, so supplies of chips was never a problem. But in the US everything had to be done at scale. Nintendo was putting their own marketing budgets behind many of these titles, and they wanted them to be available. Which meant they had larger minimum orders and used approved hardware that they knew they could manufacture at scale. (Nintendo tried approving third party manufacturing when there was a chip shortage at the end of the 80s and got royally screwed on the deal.)
So how bad was it for Konami under Nintendo’s thumb? Well, Konami became a household game in the US, sold millions of carts, and made quite a lot of money. They benefited greatly, despite the challenges imposed.
@@thewiirocks great points!
That was a Nintendo Co. Ltd. Decision, made in Kyoto to make sure Nintendo got all the profit from making cartridges. Nintendo of America had zero say in anything important in the NES days.
@@thewiirocks the chances of a second game crash if there were too many great nes games available seems unlikely to me. The mappers actively make the game better, not worse. Shit games on the nes don't use the advanced mappers even in other regions. I agree them limiting how many games a publisher could make a year was the right choice but maybe not as restrictive as they had done, but the mappers didn't make any sense.
@@ungabungus01 You're confusing two separate points. Point 1: Nintendo limited the number of games to prevent market saturation and potential crash. Point 2: Nintendo required that cartridges be manufactured by Nintendo using only approved hardware so that Nintendo could be certain of sufficient supply for a game.
Better mappers can make a game better, but it's custom hardware that has to be sourced. Japan was a pretty decent market, but it was nothing compared to the size of the US market. Nintendo had to be certain they could obtain enough of whatever chips they used in their cartridges.
You can actually modify the NES to be able to work with the VR6 (and also the Famicom Disk System's extra sound channel). It's because they changed the cartridge port and moved some pins around (as a consequence of making Famicom games not work on the NES). You have to jumper some stuff on the motherboard, and then run the Japanese cartridge with a special adapter, and it will work. It's a lot of work though, when these days you can just use an emulator.
Yeah, that’s why I actually have a Famicom 2 instead of a NES. I have to use an adapter to play NES games, but I don’t mind.
If you're lucky and find the right 5 screw cartridges, it comes with an adapter to go from Famicom to NES due to shortages of certain games for the 1985 Holiday season.
Is there an adapter to let you play Famicom games on an NES without having to alter anything inside the system or solder? And to take the cover off the NES wouldn't you need a special screwdriver? For the SNES two plastic tabs inside the cartridge slot prevent Super Famicom carts from going all the way in. If you could cut those tabs off, then Super Famicom carts will work. I don't think you need an adapter cart for SNES.
@@robkrasinski6217 The SNES doesn't need any adapter, just modifying the case. The NES completely changed the cartridge pins compared to the Famicom so an adapter is required. And, if you want the special sound chips to work, you need to modify something inside the console as well. And opening an NES is just a standard Gamebit driver, you can get those anywhere.
@@robkrasinski6217 You can play Famicom games on a NES with an adapter, but any Famicom carts using enhanced audio won’t play the audio properly on a NES without modding the NES first. And yes, you are correct about the SNES. Cutting out those tabs will let you play Super Famicom games without an adapter. I did that with my SNES many years ago.
the killer for me is the trees in the background in contra. Seeing them sway is just beautiful!
Have you seen the final (alien) level, where you're surrounded by a living pulsating walls and floors? It's simply mindblowing and genuinely scary.
This is one of those things that people forget with cartridges. They were both software and hardware.
shoarftdware
Absolutely rughr, Essentially the game was firmware
All consoles outside of a digitally download game has that combination
@@superuser8636 usually we make a distinction between data on storage medium and software baked into hardware. But I agree the line is fuzzy
@@superuser8636 No. CD and DVD based consoles are just reading data off a disk. They aren’t plugging another piece of hardware into the main board like a cartridge is. It’s very different
I'm shocked you don't have more subs. This is some of the best retro coverage I've seen on some of these games.
only 67 videos in 15 years and only talks about extreme niche topics. of course this channel has very few subs.
@@Sebastian-hg3xc Wow, who spit in your Cheerios this morning?
@@hitmangfx7162 What an odd thing to say in response to a simple factual statement.
@@Sebastian-hg3xc I'm sorry, did I say spit? I meant to say "who pissed in your Cheerios this morning". My mistake.
Awesome episode! Love Konami's NES offerings. Gradius was my first 3rd party game. I still retain the memory of getting it as a gift from my aunt back in the day. Always wondered what happened with the Gradius II NES release.
Do you know the only Konami games I really played on the NES not even the NES, the wii virtual Console I played ninja turtles on it I also played Contra three.
@@kiwirocket64 nice!! The timing of this comment is perfect. I'm actually playing some Contra later tonight! Also, love the name, "Kiwi Rocket 64". It sounds like it would've been an actual title of a game back in the ol' N64 days.
I also believed they were intending to release Gradius 2 in America. The show Captain N: The Game Master features background music that was exclusive to the Famicom port of that game
Captain N! Haven't thought about that in decades but it was still in my brain somewhere.
The VRC6 not being compatible with the NES was still NOA's fault, because they decided not to put that audio input connection in the NES' stupidly fail-prone cartridge slot. (They instead put that audio input in that weird add-on port on the bottom of the console, which would've been used for the Disk System if that was ever released outside of Japan, but of course, it wasn't.)
Konami is my favorite developer of the era, even more so than Nintendo. Its a shame we never got some of the most interesting, weird, and great Famicom games in the US. Games like Getsu Fuuma Den, Kid Dracula, Konami Wai Wai World, Yume Penguin Monogatari, and ESPECIALLY Crisis Force are definitely worth checking out. This video made me want to start collecting Famicom again lol
Even up into the ps2 days konami was still goated. Ps2 is my favorite system to this day and the two greatest games on that system came from konami. MGS 2 and 3
@@praise_baby_jesus I never cared for the PS2, I much prefer 2D games. That said, the Metal Gear games are great
I am really fond of Hudson Soft games myself partly because of nostalgia but also because they're quite challenging
Don't forget Ai Senshi Nicol
Also don’t leave out capcom great third party for the Nes/famicom
Honestly never knew about the mappers or restrictions, thank you for helping me learn a bit more about that era!
Correction 2: The MMC5 chip DOES support more sound channels. Not as good ones as VRC6, but it didn't matter. The pins for sound expansion were redirected to the pins on the expansion port on the bottom of the NES, which was never used, so they were forced to remake the soundtrack for the built in sound chip only, ignoring the extra sound channels of the MMC5 chip because they were useless on the NES. You CAN get the expanded sound capabilities of the NES back with a really simple mod, but of course no developers released anything for the NES with extra sound channels, even when using chips like the MMC5. After the mod, though, Japanese games through a Famicom to NES adapter will be able to use extra sound channels without issue.
So it supported extra channels but they weren't used on the NES?
@@pojr Yup. The NES couldn't use any extra sound channels that any mapper chip had, and it was all on purpose. Nintendo probably wanted to create expansion modules that would plug into the bottom of the NES that would add more features, but no official modules were ever created. One of these modules, presumably, would've added the ability to add more sound channels to games, despite the fact that all the sound related stuff was happening on the cart, anyway, and that all you need to do to re-enable the extra sound channels is to connect two pins with a resistor on an actual NES. Basically, an expansion module would probably have connected these two pins, charging users for a feature that was already built into the console, but they never did it, so the NES never got more audio channels, officially. But again, if you connect those two pins with a resistor, and plug in a japanese cart, the extra sound channels WILL play.
A more positive interpretation is that Nintendo didn't want developers, including themselves to HAVE to built these features into the carts, and they wanted to make expansion modules that added the sound channels instead so that ALL devs could use them. But they obviously gave up on that idea, if that was the idea, as well of the idea of using the expansion slot at all.
I don't know of any games that used the extra sound channels of the MMC5 chip in Japan, but you can play with them and make music for the chip in Famitracker.
@FlergerBergitydersh Nintendo did early on plan to release the disk system in the US, but that fell through when battery backed cartridges become a thing. There was also the problem with piracy on the desk system, so that's probably another reason it never got released in the West.
Nintendo should have give free or sold MMC5 on really low prices to developers so that it can boost late life console sales.
Gradius is 1 of my favorite series. I have mixed feelings on Nintento's policies; they curated games, so that almost any game you got would be fun, but at the same time prevented games like Gradius 2 from coming to the USA. To some extent, Gradius 3 made up for it on the SNES.
So now after over three decades i got my answer. I drooled over the pages of the game magazines back then of Gradius II only to never get it. Superb video.
So Nintendo nerfed their games, not Konami
Yea, Nintendo has been a terrible company and never has not been. Their recent actions have been over the top. I own 3 switches and many games. But the recent lawsuit against Palword, attacks on fair use, and war with emulation. I will no longer give them any more money. It's on "principle" now... if I play a Nintendo game... it will only be in a method that Nintendo does not get a dime from me.
@@CD-vb9fi yeah I’m kinda irritated with the lengths people will go to defend Nintendo despite them releasing subpar games and straight out being anti consumer.
@@trumpetmasta92 "anti consumer" that is a great way to say it!
@@CD-vb9fi Nintendo is the D-sney of gaming. They don't care, there's money to be made. Shigeru Miyamoto is also a manchild who is known to throw tantrums if a dev outshines him. (I.e. Rare's Donkey Kong Country fiasco. Shigeru threw a tantrum and is the reason why SMW 2 Yoshi's Island looks like a coloring book.)
@@rionthemagnificent2971That was a rumor, Shigeru Miyamoto actually oversaw DKC1 if I remember correctly
The NES designers were genius. The fact that they brought the address lines to the cart is what allows mapping. It was some forward thinking that really made the difference and allowed NES/Famicom to rule the roost for many years.
I though this was going to be an issue of the rise of video game rentals. Making the games more difficult so you couldn't just rent and beat the game.
I recall renting Super Monaco GP for Genesis based on the incredible looking graphics on back of the box and when I played it at home the game didn't look anywhere near as good. Those scammers put the Arcade Graphics on the back of the box. I felt scammed and ripped off.
Which ironically didn't do anything but discourage kids from going out and buying them.
@@gunengineering1338 Yeah, the sad thing was Super Monaco GP was a pretty good game but it didn't matter because they set the expectations way to high by showing arcade screen shots. Surely if somebody took Sega to court over that they would have easily won the case.
@Wallyworld30 i was actually referring to the makers making their games too hard in order to counter game rentals. At least where i lived which was one of the areas Nintendo targeted for market trials and for a reason, us kids rented games in order to try them out and see if it was something worth saving up for and buying. In those days, you had to save up for a month or 2 to buy a game. So we didn't spend the money lightly and we didn't have the internet to look up reviews. So we either borrowed them from a friend or rented them to try them out. A lot of games became obscure because everyone rented them and discovered they were either full of unsolvable puzzles or were so difficult that we pretty much said, "screw that" and passed on it. So basically making games hard to counter rentals had the exact opposite effect they intended due to a fundamental lack of understanding of how us kids were utilizing game rentals. That and the fact that finishing a game over the weekend was usually a non-factor in whether or not we were willing to buy them. Games in those days were the equivalent to $100 today. No kid is going to spend that kind of money on a game they know can be finished by a skilled player within an hour (which is pretty much everything on the nes) if they expected to toss it the moment they finished it for the first time. Game rentals would have been an asset to game makers had they not fought against them.
Nintendo power also had the same reverse effect. Most of us thought Nintendo power was for suckers. Either one kid had a copy and shared all the secrets with everyone which meant that no one needed the magazine or no one had it but someone tried the game and told horror stories about the brick wall they ran into and no one would buy the game as result. I can think of quite a few games that probably would have been big hits had they not pulled the Nintendo power gotcha.
Luckily in South America we used clones of the Famicom and the stupid policies of the United States did not complicate us.
Only the NTSC regions.
First time viewer here. I find this video to be insightful, factually accurate, informative and aligns with my nostalgic interest in my childhood memories. Oration was clear with a positive tone. Gameplay footage and b roll was edited nicely. Overall I'm left with a positive first impression. I think I'm going to see what other videos you got. Also I just drank a pot of coffee.
Mappers were such an interesting thing. I know other consoles used them for memory mapping, but I don't know of any other consoles besides the NES (and SNES) that extended the graphical (and sound, in Japan) capabilities so significantly via cartridges.
I think part of the reason is because just how much could be altered on the NES with addition of a low cost extra microchip. Even if the PS5 supported ROM cartridges its unlikely you would be able to add much to the vanilla hardware with any cost effective chip. Certainly not anything that would stand out to general consumers. On the NES however mapper chips were able to mod in impressive new gimmicks like XY scrolling, simple parallaxing backgrounds, large scale background tile animation, etc.
@@mresturk9336 My sense is that they originally exposed the PPU bus to the cartridge as a cost-saving measure: instead of needing RAM in the console, it could be put in the cartridge, and as ROM for earlier ones. If so, it's ironic that this became a big strength that allowed the console to rise above others. It also neatly solved the configuration problem with PC gaming, where each person's system differs and might not have the required hardware. Here the required hardware was shipped with every game.
That's because Nintendo have a history of making shitty, overhyped consoles lol
The main reason was that other consoles didn't need them.
Nes was very primitive.
The master system, turbographic 16... Heck even the Gameboy already had the ,rather simple, capabilities mappers were used for.
With snes it was a different story thou. With nes, Nintendo essentially was making money both ways. Both selling the console and making cartridges for third parties.
They actually never wanted to make a snes, but they were forced by the competition.
Still on snes they wanted to keep the same idea... The end result was a cheap crippled system that was almost purpose made to be extended by cartridges.
And it becomes obvious when you compare it to the turbographic16 and genesis which had more well rounded specs
@@affegpus4195you're right to some point. But at the end the final result is what matters. Adding chips to a cartridge is a good way to improve the output quality of an aging console. The customer shouldn't care if good graphics and sound are results of the console or cartridge architecture.
Ended up playing the Japanese versions of many many games on the mutli game (200 games in one or some such) bootleg nes cartridges that were like gaming gold back in the day.
11:40 - what is the title of that game?
Mitsume ga tooru, based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka
@@alexwarner3803 omg that is the one!
I recall playing it (or some rip-off maybe) on NES at my friend's in the 90'ies. I was looking for the title recently, but the only scrap of memory I had about the game was that there was a guy shooting stars from his forehead. I failed to persuade Google to tell me what it was, they've been concealing this title from me for at least 5 years. Thanks a lot!
@@krzysztof_jablonski you are welcome friend
When you’re 37 and realize “Gradius” is almost certainly“Gladius.”
Japan has a sound in between l and r for those letters. They can be used interchangeably their.
@pojr I think you mixed up vertical scrolling and horizontal scrolling at 6:04
Correct, I did mix them up.
Konami was my favorite NES developer in the 80's and learning this is shocking and sad. I never truly got to experience my favorite games :'(
Props to Konami for clearly doing their best to port the games to the US under this unfortunate draconian rule.
You seem to have missed a gameplay change for the US release of Castlevania 3 where Grant the acrobat uses a stabbing knife instead of a throwing one in the Japanese version. Also in Salamander when you're in 2 players mode you each can have 2 Options unlike in Lifeforce with one each.
Is there any particular reason why Nintendo of America banned game developers from using the mapping chips for NES? I don't why they would do this. Aren't they a subsidiary to Nintendo of Japan? I could somewhat understand censorship in US released games but for hardware I'm somewhat baffled.
Nintendo has always guarded their technology zealously. They go so far as to try and sue independent software developers from trying to run emulators on 35-40 year old equipment.
@@sarcasticguy4311 That has nothing to do with it. Konami was a trusted third party game developer for Nintendo back in the 80s and 90s and they are approved by Nintendo of Japan. This is clearly Nintendo of America's meddling in its pathetic attempt to cater to the US market by downgrading gameplay features.
It's sad that some famicom games never made it to the USA because they are extremely well crafted
I can already say without seeing the full video yet, US contra got nerfed big time and we never got Gradius II (which was friggin awesome).
What bugs me is that the North American NES wasn't capable of expansion audio. I say "wasn't:" there are some simple mods that make it possible.
Life Force was one of my favorites as a kid!
Also enjoyed the Gradius games on the NES, but the arcade versions even more. Great episode
Thank you! Yeah both the Arcade and NES titles were a blast to play through for this episode.
@@pojr also enjoyed the Atari clones video as well.
Funny to think back on how strict Nintendo used to be, when their last few systems nowadays are repositories for endless shovelware crap.
Good point
In the Famicom version of Castlevania 3, different enemies deal different amounts of damage. In the Western versions of the game, every enemy deals the same amount of damage, and there’s a notable damage spike in the late stages of the game that makes every enemy significantly stronger. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Western versions of the game also feature more enemies and replace a very useful flying dagger attack with a basic short-range dagger attack.
And what is the exact title of Japanese Castlevania games? Dracula, Vampire Killer or Demon Castle?
@@robkrasinski6217 Well, The Famicom version of Castlevania III is better than the NA version.
After playing Castlevania III for a while, I decided that it just wasn't fun. The difficulty was so high, and it was for all of the wrong reasons. I decided to try out the Famicom version of the game. To my surprise, it's actually fun. It's still not great, but I can say it is good. I think it is superior to the North American version in every way. Here are things that I noticed that made it better:
Bosses and enemies are weaker. They take fewer hits to kill. Serpent statues which took 5 hits before now take 4 hits. Knights which took 8 hits before now take 6 hits. This fixes the problem I had of their projectiles being thrown in between my whips, so I can now intuitively run up to them and whip them to death. Just the way I like it.
Grant has a different weapon: a dagger that he now throws across the screen. This makes a lot of sections easier because you can attack things from a distance. The Cyclops fight to rescue Sypha is made a piece of cake by this change.
The Cyclops behaves differently than in the NA version. In that version, it would randomly pace back and forth beneath you to try to trick you into coming down at the wrong time. However, now it keeps it's distance from you while you are up on the platform. It's almost like a real fight now, where the Cyclops is aware that it can't hit you up there and is waiting for you to come down before engaging. In the NA version, the Cyclops there acted more like it was aware that it's own life didn't matter because it's just a game, and it only cared about killing you.
The most interesting change was the water serpents boss. In the NA version, their fire breath would extend almost all the way across the middle platform. This forced you to stand at the other end, too far away to hit them with the whip. Sypha's spells could hit them if you had them, but if you didn't, then it was a slow battle where you only have minimal opportunity to hit them. In the Famicom version, their range has been reduced, but with the addition of being able to fire the flames diagonally at you. This actually makes the fight more fun and interesting. You still have a pattern to learn, but you can stand close enough to hit them with the whip.
The golden demon boss now jumps around differently in a way that conveys its patterns to to player. It shows early in the fight that its toes fall through the platforms above, meaning that its entire foot must be above the platform in order for him to land up there. He also fires his projectiles for the first time while up on the platform, letting the player safely observe the pattern from below.
The final level is a much smoother experience. That section where you are blocked by a serpent statue while standing on crumbling floor can now be gotten through because you can kill it fast enough before the floor breaks. The bats that appear while swinging on the pendulums are no longer there. Not only that, the game starts you at the stairs before Dracula as long as you have lives. The candle that contained a Dagger before the battle area in the NA version now holds a Cross. This makes so much of a difference in the final fight, it's almost as if it was designed with the Cross in mind.
The most important change of all was the reduced damage that you take from enemies. Now most enemies only do 3 bars of damage and enemy projectiles do 2 bars of damage. In the NA version, enemies did more damage on average, enemy projectiles dealt the same damage, and by the end levels all enemies would do a fourth of your health per hit. For the Famicom version, certain enemies only start dealing damage on par with the NA version when you get to the final levels. All of a sudden, taking damage isn't so much of a problem when you don't die in four hits. It makes it so that you can still clear stage sections while making a few mistakes here and there. The battle with Death is still exactly the same as in the NA version, but it's now less of a chore to get to Death in the first place. The punishment for failure is now much more fair.
The music in the Japanese version is way better.
Well, us US players were gypped of a superior version. Can you play it in a US system with an adapter or do you need to mod the inside of the system for the game to work because of the sound chips? I got the US game in 1990 as a gift from a late grandmother when it was new, we got Castlevania II Simon’s Quest in late 1988. I think though the Japanese version is on the Castlevania collection on Xbox. Why are Family Computer carts shorter than NES ones? And the first NES in fall 1985 was front loading unlike the Japanese version, they later released a top loading NES in the US.
@@robkrasinski6217 Short answer, the name for the series is 悪魔城 (Demon Castle) or 悪魔城ドラキュラ (Demon Castle: Dracula) depending on who you ask...But it tends to vary from game to game - some titles play with it. For instance, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest's JA name drops the Demon Castle bit and is just "Dracula II: Sealed Curse" more or less, whereas Castlevania III is "Demon Castle Legend". Some of the later games, as well as the Netflix series, outright used the name Castlevania (or kanaized, Kyassuruvania キャッスルヴァニア.)
MMC5 actually has two pulse wave and one PCM sound channel. There is no way to send audio from a cartridge to the output of the NES, though, so these are not hooked up inside the cartridge. Only five Famicom games utilize this aspect of the MMC5, with Just Breed being the best example.
what's the music that plays at 12:13?
Blades of Steel seemed like a huge game when we were kids. Was amazing that you could play a quick demo of Life Force in between periods. Very clever.
I now understand why the KGB was seen running after the president of Nintendo of America in the Tetris movie: they actually wanted to hold him to account for the downgraded games.
I just about lost it when Howard Lincoln used the term "Enemy numera"
Doesn't Nintendo of America operate under the Nintendo corporate umbrella? What specifically was the problem with using 3rd party mappers in the US but not in other countries? If there were mappers that were approved by the main Nintendo in Japan, why not in the US?
Also, why are they called mappers?
Most Japanese companies like to operate with a relatively high level of regional autonomy, on the basis that the local branch knows the local market better. Some valid reasons for disallowing custom mappers would be to streamline the production process and reduce the risk that a cart couldn't be made because of supply constraints, since it's a lot easier to keep large stocks of a small number of custom chips than a wider range.
The "mapper" designation comes from "memory mapper" - the earliest versions just used a latch and just mapped one of n sections of ROM into a specified address.
Anyone know what game the song is from that plays at the beginning of the "Conclusion" at 12:12? Sounds like it comes from a Genesis/Mega Drive game.
Pretty sure it's cosmic carnage
@@moondelics You would be correct! Thanks! 👍
MMC5 technically has... One additional sound channel? But it only works in famicom which has wiring for it much like konami's chips.
GIMMICK or Batman or some other SunSoft game got approval to use it's own mapper, likely because it was late days of NES, the quality of the game and company, and they still had to remove additional sound channel usage to be a full experience on American systems.
What song is used at 4:51?
It's more that it likely wasn't anticipated that sound expansions were going to be performed by chips in cartridges and in setting up copy protection for the NES, the audio expansion pins were moved to the expansion port on the bottom of the system. The MMC5 chip actually is capable of providing two additional sound channels, but only for the Famicom. It may also not be the copy protection, but also the plan for the Disk System to come to America, since Nintendo was betting the future of its games was floppy disks. I don't know the exact reason the pins were moved.
Really great and insightful look at the goings on of Nintendo and Konami as companies. I’m just glad I was too young to know or care, and I enjoyed Gradius and Contra just the same.
Keep up the great work.
Imagine if today every game would come out with its own custom unique graphic card, and you would have to swap it every time.
European Arcade version of Contra 1 Renamed Gryzor for no real reason is Single player only if you play it two players it switches to 2nd player if first player loses a life. But Konami in arcade from 80s to Just before 3D PS1 Era was infamous for making their Arcade games way harder in the West compared tpo Japanese versions of same game. Sometimes changing the entire rules of games for the west most of times making them just stupid hard or near impossible. See Dark Adventure and Haunted Castle (the 80s arcade castlevania game)for good picks of western versions just made to hard to be any fun.
Good stuff here. Always wondered why some of these games were different.
9:51 Why not rerecord that line before you saved the video? (Instead of the text-based correction when you said Gradius 3.)
Fair. I caught it right before it was time to upload, and didn't want to fall behind in my upload schedule, so I decided to include a subtitle. I figured the subtitle would still get my point across.
Not sure if i missed it or not but what was the reason(s) Nintendo of America wouldn't allow the special mapper chips?
Well in at least one of these cases, the chip was literally not compatible with the NES. I know a story about Big Bad Nintendo being evil gets more clicks than "there were minor technical differences in some NES games", but the latter is most of the actual story here.
11:40 - those graphics could be from an early Genesis game. The (fake) parallax scrolling and the clever use of colors look awsome for a NES title. What's the name of the game?
Mitsume ga tooru, based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka
9:46
That "residue" is a side effect of imperfect timing for the splitscreen effects. Likely the top of the status bar of Kirby's Adventure was designed in a manner to hide that for a cleaner looking picture.
What game is recorded at 11:45 ?
This was all new info to me! Another quality episode mate!
In what part of the country do you produce your videos?
What game is @11:40? Now that I see it, I remember I played it, but it's far from my memory.
You forgot to say that Castlevania III was made harder than the japanese version in the Worldwide release, berfing some characters attacks and changing the level design to be harder, and that's bad, really bad. They also did this with Super C, removing the 30 Lives Konami Code and Contra: Hard Corps on the Genesis, removing the life bar from the characters.
I guess that happened because the video stores wanted people to actually buy the games, so they wouldn't have any chance to just rent it for a weekend and beat it in one seat. And that's cheap. I don't like it :(
I remember playing both gradius and lifeforce and had a great time as a kid. i never managed to finish them but still have fond memories, might grab a emulator and finish them sometime. Thx for the video, appreciate ya
I liked the video and the editing was really nice. You've got a new sub, I can't wait for the next video.
Does this explain why we didn't get the Final Fantasy collection or why some games where different games like contra Force?
I consider it downright criminal what happened to Castlevania III. The Japanese version is fun, nicely balanced, and the character you select as your partner was essentially a difficulty level choice. But for the American version, they ramped up the difficulty to a ridiculous degree and changed the characters so that Sypha was the only partner worth a damn.
Rental Market.
Agree. I had that one as a kid, then later got the Japanese one and it’s better in every way.
They increased the difficulty to actually sell games overseas. If you could easily beat the game over a weekend as a rental, people wouldn't buy the game, as they were expensive
Correction, they didn't make the game harder, they removed the normal mode, and left only the hard mode. You can play the Japanese game in hard mode too.
@@thinkhector Not true. All 3 versions (JP, US, EU) have a normal mode and hard mode. There are a lot of differences between these versions that affect the difficulty, both in normal and hard modes, but the US normal mode is not the same as the JP hard mode. Also, the EU version is a little bit easier than the US one, but still not as easy as the JP one.
Hmm. So, that is why Life Force felt so barren. I also noticed that a lot of Konami games would force the NES's graphics to stutter. At the time, I didn't know that it was a limitation of the hardware (I do now.) It's sad that Nintendo was so restrictive because, for me, the company who made the game was the decider. If I heard that Konami made a game, I knew it was a good one just by that name alone. I really think Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by being so limiting in U.S. releases.
Why didn’t they just release Gradius 2 on Ultra Games? Or did they get in trouble for that with Nintendo
You didn't mention Gradius III for the SNES which looks like the footage you showed of gradius II.
So how does a mapper dictate what intro screen or how many options you can use? (Life Force) It doesn't.
It's just rebalancing difficulty and changing the game name for something else.
Fantastic video, pojr! Looking forward to seeing more amazing content like this. Cheers!
What was the nes game that was similar to bubble bobble, but you could eat powerups and transform into dinasours and what not. I remember playing it but can't figure out the title.
Quality video bro! Very nicely edited and great sound production. My only gripe is the green screen thing at the begining, it makes your hair look crazy lol
Personally, I think Castlevania II's US soundtrack sounds a lot better than the Japanese version; they reworked the songs significantly so some of them have much more interesting melodies and counterpoints going on.
Castlevania II I agree, castlevania III no way
I too think the US version of Castlevania III sounds far better, heavier.
Well technically they have the same melodies, but they use different waveforms and composition structure if that’s what you mean. Yeah I like the sound of the US part 2 better as well, especially the added drum samples and flourishes. For part 3 though, the JP is better hands down.
As someone that recently played and beat Castlevania 2 for the first time, I agree that the U.S. soundtrack is better, but boy does that gameplay suffer.
I tried VERY hard to beat it without any how-to guide, but it proved impossible. (Didn't realize you could show the boat captain a different body part and he would take you someplace else.)
The odd thing about Castlevania 2 is that it actually has more in common with modern Castlevania games then the other better 80s titles.
Famicom carts are probably the best looking psychical video game media I've ever seen. Multiple colors and great art work on the stickers
Agreed. Salamander is a great example
I think you have a high potential as a youtuber, i'm excited to see your other videos and what you make in the future.
There was only one mention and photo of Gradius II in Nintendo Power but reason they stated it was never released in North America was because it's chip set was incompatible with the NES if I remember correctly. They also mention how it was graphical monster on the Famicom.
Interestingly, the only third party developer who had their own mapper approved was Sunsoft, with their FME-7. It was only used in Return of the Joker, but it was used in one other game in Europe - Mr. Gimmick. Mr. Gimmick was also meant to be released in the US, but was a scrapped prototype.
Nintendo of America was very strict about who could release what because they were coming out of the video game crash on Atari. The crash was caused by allowing anyone to publish games, so a flood of badly made games was released.
But they let LJN put out trash
Nintendo of japan also managed to make rentals illegal without permission from the publisher, they tried to do that in the US but failed so companies like Konami jacked up the difficulty of the western releases.
Some titles that are infamously hard? Are much easier in JP.
That’s the true story behind Simon’s Quest - a game as absurdly crypt as Swordquest: Earthworld. Impossible to beat through rentals alone.
@TokyoXtreme No Simon's quest is just as cryptic in Japanese as it is in English. The cryptic stuff was kinda the point, though, because it's part of the games story if you read the manual. The game just really wasn't translated very well.
On another note.
The line one of the villagers says is "Don't look into the death star or you will die," which was supposed to be a fist of the North star reference, but it was badly translated.
I have one question, what made tjhose map chips be aloved to by use in Japan? Why didn't Nintendo of Japan have a problem with them? And why couldn't the nes run a few of the chips? Is the nes less powerfull then the famicon?
Note that the arcade version of Salamander was also called Lifeforce in the US.
Apparently the mapper change also disabled the spell check: at 7:04 the Lifeforce title screen says "Nintend of America" 😂
😂
What about European releases of these games? Were they also limited somehow, or were they more identical to their Japanese counterparts?
They had the same limitations as the NA versions, if they came out at all. Some like Contra were changed even further, because of stricter laws about depicting war and violence in humans, so they changed it all to robots instead.
@@alexc836 Thanks for the info, I've got some of these on my Best Of list, so I'll switch some of them with the better Japanese versions.
Awesome and in depth content. You deserve more subs and they shall come. Keep it up. You got my sub my dude
Great and interesting video! I never knew about the nerfing except for the sound chip in castlevania 3. I have the Japanese version and play it on famicom toploader for that same exact reason! I love the soundtrack. Speaking of soundtracks was is that song in minute 12:44?
6:04 you got this backwards. You said it backwards. You sure you know what you’re talking about ? 6:04
It's a shame that Gradius II never made it to the States. At least the arcade versions of Gradius are available on the Switch now.
We did get Gardius and Gradius II in the US, just on the Game Boy Advance.
Amazing, I didn't know about this disparity of expansion chips on Nintendo consoles in Japan and the US. Can anyone tell if the Japanese cartridges worked in the famiclones spread around the world?
Mostly yes, although some of the clones didn't have the audio mixing circuits that the original Famicom did and hence missed out on the extra audio channels. There were also some models that did nasty tricks with the CPU timing to allow games designed for 60Hz NTSC to display on 50Hz PAL TVs - this typically worked find with simpler games, but messed up with some of the ones doing fancier tricks (like the Konami mappers that faked up a scanline counter using the CPU clock).
@@TrimeshSZ Well then, there are even those clones with dual cartridge slots for 72-pin and 60-pin. This is the case of the Milmar Top System, the CCE Top Game, and the Dynavision 3 and Dynavision 4 from Dynacom that were manufactured in Brazil. Do they have all the necessary hardware to run the Japanese cartridges?
@@PONTOCRITICO IIRC, Brazil used a 60Hz PAL variant called "PAL-M", so it would use the standard NTSC timing, as used by the original Famicom. The extension audio support could be a problem - it certainly won't be supported on the 72 pin carts because they don't have the necessary pins and it may not be connected on the 60 pin socket either. The only way to know for sure is either testing it with a cart known to support expansion audio or opening it up and seeing if pins 45 and 46 on the 60 pin socket are connected.
@@TrimeshSZ My biggest doubt is whether these Konami cartridges would run well on them. They are dual-slot consoles, so they are designed to work with both standards, but the issue of Japanese chips being incompatible with the NES is that I wonder if they would work correctly with the cartridge hardware.
@@PONTOCRITICO If you mean generally, they should - the core chips in the Famicom and the NTSC NES are the same - the CPU is a Ricoh 2A03 and the PPU is a 2C02 in the retail machines. Electrically the signals on the cart port are nearly identical - out of the 60 signals on the Famicom cart slot 58 are present and identical on the NES (the two missing signals are the ones used for audio expansion) - there are also 14 new signals - 4 of them are connections to the CIC lockout chip and the other 10 are just wired to the expansion port on the bottom of the NES. The only things I've found not to work with Famicom carts on a US NES with a disabled CIC chip is the expansion audio.
Look up an SNES game called Biometal...the Japanese version featured an amazing electronica inspired soundtrack...but that wouldn't fly here in the states (and apparently Europe) instead...we got remixes of 2 unlimited...I kidd you not...
I'd be curious as to the reason for the mapper restriction.. however.. I can *maybe* get the released game limits IF it was a matter of them needing to review the games before release. It might have been a control measure to make sure they didnt get overwhelmed by a flood of games for review. Back then, the Nintendo 'Seal of Quality" actually meant something. (today, not so much).
You aren't far off. The restriction on how many games could be released per year and that the cart manufacturing had to go through Nintendo was to prevent another video game crash that happened because of how many companies had popped up flooding the market with terrible games for stuff like the Atari 2600. I can't say I'm a fan of draconian policies but this particular one made sense for a market that was almost dead before Nintendo manged to show up with their "interactive toy" that came with a plastic robot and just so happened to also play games on a TV. If you could only release 5 games a year you need to make sure they were as good a possible to compete to make money in the market because you couldn't just throw out the same game 5 times under different names at different stores to try to boost total sales.
You mean the seal of bad quality so many bad games were released in the west by ljn and acclaim
Life force is one of my top 10 favorite games on the NES!
-Correction 3: It was, again, the same mapper that Super Mario Bros used that allowed Zelda to scroll smoothly horizontally, but choppily scroll vertically. I don't know why the status bar would affect that. It was games like Kid Icarus and Metroid that were finally able to scroll vertically and horizontally smoothly, thanks to a new mapper, and they flaunted it greatly with a vertically scrolling title screen on Kid Icarus, and prominent vertically scrolling gameplay on both titles.-
Edit: Again, I was misinformed. Zelda had a different mapper, but I'm not sure it had anything to do with scrolling. Maybe it could scroll vertically smoothly; it just chose to "cache" opening the menu for smooth scrolling instead of the next screen vertical overworld screens. Kid Icarus got away with smooth scrolling without issue because they never did both in one stage; the stages either scroll horizontally or vertically. Metroid would have no problems either with its MMC3 mapper, but the FDS version makes me wonder how they did it with Zelda's FDS version, since that has choppy vertical scrolling too. Again, I'm blaming the smooth scrolling menu for Zelda's issues.
Either way, Gradius would have to scroll both horizontally and vertically AT THE SAME TIME, which wasn't going to happen until a better mapper came out.
Kid Icarus and Metroid don't have stationary status bars (while Zelda does). So both of those games can scroll vertically without it being super choppy. You're definitely right though about games that can scroll freely in more than one direction.
The big question though is WHY? Why did NOA crack down on chips when NCL did not? I remember I always thought that Life Force WAS Gradius II, especially when we did get Gradius III on the SNES. I never saw the arcade versions of those at all.
Consider this: who exactly would be manufacturing the chips in question? If I'm remembering things correctly, Konami may have *designed* the VRC2 and whatnot, but Nintendo was the one who *manufactured* the chips when it came time for the games to press. Another thing to consider is that NoA didn't have a sizable dedicated manufacturing arm as NoJ did back then, so making the standard ROM chips and the special order ones like the VR2 may not have been financially feasible for NoA.
The NES was also redesigned, so that you could not play Famicom games on it. This means those mapper chips couldn't just be copy and pasted in. They need to actually be redesigned for NES compatibility.
Another reason was that many 3rd party developers, including Konami, actually manufactured the cartridges themselves for the Japanese market. This is why Famicom cartridges varied in shape and design. Konami also manufactured this chip in-house themselves. For games sold outside Japan, all manufacturing was done by Nintendo (at least for legally licensed games), so they had to use Nintendo’s chips for markets outside Japan.
That scrolling in zelda was hardly choppy.
Cope.
I see Gradius, I watch. Great video man. Didnt know it was that complex for Konami back then.
In life force you could get three options in two player mode...if the other player had options & died, you could capture the options as they drifted off screen.
According to an article I read a while back, it was said that the arcade version of Gradius II didn't sell well outside of Japan.
With that in mind, I understand why Konami went out of their way to avoid putting Gradius II on the NES.
Gradius I - Never had vertical scrolling in the game. It Was Vulcan Venture/Gradius II that changed the Angle of play with the "Go Up!" levels :)
I have completed Gradius I, many times.
So where did @5:32 come from? It looks like Gradius 1 but scrolling vertically. I think what the video creator is referring to is level that can scroll horizontally AND vertically.
@@StriderVM Ahh I see my mistake, I took the playfield orientation change from Horizontal to Vertical. The "Screen wrap" method ain't quite the same, Vulcan Venture Level 2 I think it is the game orientation changes so it plays like a "Galaxian" type SEU. You are correct however, I did not take the "Screen wrap" as true move up the screen.
Sorry for any confusion
Enjoyed loving something new about my favorite console. I enjoy ypur delivery and editing. Subbed
The NES doesn’t support extra sound channels *at all* there’s no way to create a chip that will give an unmodified NES extra sound channels
The VRC6 chip is documented to add 3 more audio channels. Maybe the info is wrong, but I checked different sources. Though, I'm wondering if you're confusing output channels (mono, stereo, etc.) with internal audio generating channels.
@@JimBob1937 That works on the Famicom but not the NES because of a difference in the cartridge slot. It's too bad Nintendo made that change
This is the content I subbed for!
Thank you! Really appreciate it
I was expecting a mention of how Konami made Mad City substantially more difficult (mostly by about doubling enemy HP) when they brought it to the US as Bayou Billy. They did this because in Japan video game rental is illegal, so you just make the best game you can to build brand loyalty, and the challenge is there to lend replayability. In the US where video game rental was legal they wanted to make it ball-bustingly difficult so that players wouldn't beat it in a weekend and would feel compelled to buy the cart.
Just import the Japanese Famicom Originals and use an adaptor and then see those games still work on the NES.
Such a cool video. i learned about mappers! Your channel is awesome!
What is nerded?