The other day I suddenly remembered the old 4Kids version of One Piece and felt like it’d be something useful to have someday. So I picked this up from Amazon for surprisingly cheap! For some reason, Volume 8 or 9 or something sells for hundreds of dollars though. I dunno why.
I’m always on the lookout for things that could be useful in future projects, articles, and books, so if you see anything cool or have anything to share let me know!
Aw yeah, baby. We finally got this hot issue of Nintendo Comics System! Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for pointing us to a reputable seller~
I wasn’t lucky enough to grow up with these little comic books. Do y’all have any cool childhood memories of these?
Continuing with scans from the January 1998 issue of the French gaming magazine Consoles, here’s a spread on Mario Artist. The short description of Mario Artist is that it’s an upgraded version of Mario Paint. But really, it was an ambitious project that would have been composed of 8 suites of creative fun, if the N64DD hadn’t crashed and burned. Unfortunately, Mario Artist never left Japan.
Featured in the article below are Picture Studio, Polygon Studio, and Talent Studio:
The other suite that got released was Communication Kit, where you could connect to the internet to share your creations. There were four other suites planned, but they were never released: Game Maker, Graphical Message Maker, Sound Maker, and Video Jockey Maker.
Thanks to a friend who’s obsessed with Mario Paint, I actually got to play Polygon Studio for a bit. I had no idea what I was doing.
Here’s another article from the January 1998 issue of Consoles, a French gaming magazine. Looks like at Space World 1997, Paper Mario was announced as Mario RPG 2. And it looks like it was originally slated to be released on the N64DD!
It was a good thing they changed the name to Paper Mario, as I expect a lot of fans would have been upset that it wasn’t a direct sequel to Super Mario RPG by Square.
We recently picked up a copy of the January 1998 issue of the French gaming magazine called Consoles. It covers Space World 1997, and boyyyyyy there’s a lot of neat stuff in it! First I want to share this spread on Ocarina of Time, where you can see some beta screenshots of the game:
That house-looking building in the market town was later changed to the Happy Mask Shop, and I’m pretty sure that blonde Kokiri in the corner didn’t look like that in the finished game.
These screenshots are probably old news to hardcore Zelda fans, but it’s always really cool to find beta stuff in a tangible thing rather than on the internet. Can you spot any other differences in the screenshots above to the finished game?
I’ve been reading a lot of current Japanese gaming magazines for research purposes and I’ll probably share things here and there from them, but for today I wanted to share this new list of the top 20 RPGs of all time as ranked by Famitsu’s readers.
20. Witcher 3
19. Final Fantasy VIII
18. Final Fantasy IX
17. MOTHER 2
16. Final Fantasy VI
15. Dragon Quest IV
14. Persona 4 Golden
13. Xenogears
12. Final Fantasy X
11. Xenoblade
10. Final Fantasy XV
9. Persona 3
8. NieR Replicant
7. Suikoden II
6. Dragon Quest V
5. Final Fantasy VII
4. NieR: Automata
3. Chrono Trigger
2. Dragon Quest III
1. Persona 5
With “all time ever” polls I’ve always wondered if the recentness of a popular game has some sort of sway on its ranking. It looks like I’m terrible at keeping up though, I still got 12 of these to play someday 😯
While working on my academic paper about Funky Fantasy IV I noticed something familiar.
First, the game was obsessed with fluoride for some reason:
Then, while looking through another really badly translated game, I found this:
I can only assume that Google’s old machine translation system considered dentistry as fantasy.
Here’s a peek at the LoL research room. We have all the Japanese materials on the left side, and all the English ones on the right.
One thing we needed for our latest (currently unannounced) book was the earliest example of English appearing in Japanese media that we could find. I scoured auction sites looking for old Japanese magazines from the 1960s and 70s, and I found a few neat things. None of these examples ended up in the book, and it’d be a shame for these photos to go unseen.
