Here's the second batch of photos, from 1993 and 1994:
AM Show 1993 The guy in the middle is supposedly Jaleco's Jun Saito. Not that I could recognize him...
I think this is some kind of fortune teller machine
Space World 1993
AOU 1993
CSG 1994
AOU 1994 Only one tiny image for this one, unfortunately.
Tokyo Toy Show 1994 This is the oldest photo where I've ever seen the classic bathing suits on a video game event.
Super Famicom Earth World 1994 Earth World used to be the counterpart of Nintendo's Space World, not open for the public but only intended for the press and industry. Lord British was there, too, probably to promote some Ultima SNES port.
Too Many Games is a small-ish video game convention that's apparently been around for quite some time, although I only found out about it three years ago. It's been expanding considerably, having moved from the almost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere location of Reading, PA to the slightly more suburban Oaks, PA, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Rather than running a single day as in conventions past, this year's ran for three days...kinda. Friday was only available if you ordered a weekend pass, and since Sunday (today) is Mother's Day, I can't imagine too many people would show up.
The crux of Too Many Games is still the dealers' room, which has tons upon tons of stuff for sale. As is typical of places aimed towards collectors, it can get pricey, although you can find some deals if you look.
These guys were awesome, they had a ton of Japanese titles for reasonable prices. I almost grabbed that complete copy of Popful Mail for the SFC but ran out of cash. Apparently they are called Lucky Funtime Video Games and set up shop on the weekends at the Wind Gap Flea Market in Wind Cap, PA. They are worth checking out.
This is the stand of Next Level Video Games, which runs a store in Blackwood, NJ. It's an excellent place, definitely one of the best in New Jersey. They also run the recently launched Mech Taco.
I also took a picture of the Mad Gear booth but it came out terrible. If you've ever been to a convention, you've probably seen these guys around - they have tons and tons of excellent import stuff in fantastic condition. I saw some guy walk away with a complete copy of Metal Gear for the MSX. It was $200, sure, but it's a helluva collectors item. They have a website, but you can probably find more on their eBay store.
Last year at Too Many Games introduced some concerts, but they were just on a separate part of the show floor. In this year's larger venue, they had the whole "bar" to themselves. I only sat in on one and I forget their names, but they did a fantastic rendition of the ending theme to Journey to Silius.
There were a few indie developers there too, this one being Island Officials, who made the DS games Hands On! Tangrams. A few other companies were demoing their iOS and Xbox Indies games.
The main guest was the Angry Video Game Nerd, who showed one of his more recent episodes, then took some questions and signed some autographs. I had picked up a copy of the awful Transformers Famicom game on a whim and thought it would make good signing material (did he ever cover that? I think he did) but the line was just way too long and it was approaching dinner time.
And here's my haul. I haven't been collecting anything specific in awhile other than just grabbing cheap stuff. (Of course, it doesn't end up so cheap after cleaning out the local Gamestops of their decent GBA games during a sale a few weeks back...) At any rate, nothing I bought was more than $10 each. There's a copy of Down from the Top of its Game: The Story of Infocom, a book which deserves a write-up in a later post, and an issue of the Nintendo Fun Club, the precursor to Nintendo Power. I got a lot of Famicom stuff, including boxed copies of Final Fantasy III and Fire Emblem Gaiden ($10 each), that Transformers famicom game and Konami's Getsufuu Maden ($5 each), and Binary Land, Thexder and Legend of Valkyrie for a total combined price of $10. JB Harold was an impulse purchase from Mad Gear just because it's a fairly prolific Japanease adventure series (or so says Japan Adventure Attack, and was, again, $10. There are a couple looses Japanese HuCards, including Yokai Dochuuki, Wonder Momo and Kato and Ken, plus a beaten up copy of Rockin' Kats for the NES ($3 each for the PCE games, $5 for Rockin Kats). The boxed copy of Crackdown for the Mega Drive was $5, and that copy of Idolmaster: Live for You (which I think is the rhythm game?) was free with some other stuff I bought.
I love buying boxed copies of old PC games, so these copies of Might and Magic II and Full Throttle ($10 each) were pretty cool. Even more random are those two Disney games - they were early education titles developed by Sierra, and both were designed by Al Lowe, who later went on to do the Leisure Suit Larry series. One of them is still shrinkwrapped! They were kept in a box below the tables along with various ancient 80s business software. Got them both for $7, which makes for an interesting historical curiosity. (Coincidentally, look out for an expansive article featuring Donald Duck games, including another interview with Al Lowe himself.)
There was some vague talk on the show floor of this possibly being the last show...the folks behind it are obviously trying to grow it, but they aren't quite sure if the attendence is improving enough. It would help if it were in more of a populated area - I would think northern New Jersey, closer to NYC, would be better (though maybe I'm biased since it would probably mean a shorter drive for me.) Still, I hope it continues.
I always wanted to include soundtrack samples with the Korean article in some form, but uploading and linking files for a few hundred different games seperately isn't very feasable to do.
Well, I finally got something together and uploaded a package of 49 tracks from various (non-online) RPGs. I chose to start with that genre as it's among the most impenetrable without language knowledge. Some games are already covered with text and screenshots in the article, eventually all of them should appear there in the future.
Mind that the first dozen or so tracks are directly recorded with dosbox, and there's a few midi conversions later, so don't expect the highest fidelity from those.
Last month we mentioned about the impending release of Tree of Knowledge, a tribute album to PC-98 eroge with some absolutely fantasy FM music. Well, it's now available to order at http://yogurtbox.com/, complete with mocked up pictures and a cool sample interface. You can buy it at Bandcamp, with $10 for a digital download and $12 for a CD. Original Sound Version also has a review.
To celebrate, I'm posting a handful of other rad FM music, although these are all from shooter games - different genre, technically, but still some excellent stuff.
First up are two tracks for Revolter - not technically all that great of a game, but it's the first with music by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who's also joined by Masuhara Iwata.
Flame Zapper Kotsujin - Into the Last Battle (Stage 5) - (composer unknown)
And finally, we're cheating a bit with two tracks from Eschatos - it's actually a fairly recent shooter (it was released last month in Japan for the Xbox 360) but it's done in the class FM style.
Back in 2003, a poster on the Japanese board 2ch posted a story about how he was playing Shin Megami Tensei on his Super Famicom when the game suddently froze momentarily at the logo, before the screen was flooded with a sole message repeated over and over: すぐにけせ, or "sugi ni kese" which translates to "turn it off now". He was suitably creeped out. Indeed, the intro to the original SMT is pretty damned creepy, as various bits of computer code pop up, which are supposed to be words that summon demons into the human realm. He assumed it was just a very disturbing bug.
The previous year someone on the 2ch occult board had made a similar claim, this time regarding Shin Megami Tensei 2, wherein the message would pop if the game was powered on at night, specifically mentioning the red text.
In 2004, a man claiming to be a programmer for the original game stepped up and admitted he stuck the spooky trick in intentionally. Originally he wanted it to happen 1 out of every 256 times (I'm not clear if this was meant to happen every time you start the game, or every time you hit the reset button), but it happened too frequently, so he ended up changing it to 1 out of every 65536 times. However, this was only present in the initial batch of cartridges, as it removed in all subsequent releases. The use of his terminology makes it almost semi-plausible, especially since he denoted the probability through the use of an 8-bit integer, then a 16-bit integer. If he was lying, then at least he knew how to trick people. There's also been some conjecture that this was an anti-piracy measure, but I haven't found anything that supports that.
Of course, knowledge of this became more widespread with the above video, which was posted on NicoNico Douga a few years back. As far as anyone can tell, though, it's just a "recreation" and not the actual phenomena in action. The only way to verify it is to have a hacker break open a ROM, and assuming it's part of the "initial batch" (which makes this sound all kind of shifty because it's hard to trace), the text should be in there somewhere. (There's a post over at Assembler Games with a more accurate translation of the original messages.)
So indeed, it sounds like most of this is fake, but man does it make a good ghost story, and it would be cool if TURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFFTURN IT OFF
A couple of days ago, someone over at the assemblergames.com forums posted a couple of archived Quinted homepage ruins with photos from Tokyo Game Show in 1997 and 1999.
There's some nice pictures, but more importantly, it reminded me that I had a crapton of even older photos scanned. This is mostly a pic dump with only little comment in between, but those definitely have to be preserved and spread around. All photos are from GameWorld (the good, scanned ones) or Game Champ (the bad quality photos-of-photos).
This post covers all I have from the years 1991 and 1992. There's more to come presumably next week.
Tokyo Toy Show 1991 ('91東京おもちゃショー)
GameWorld reporter Kim Jongbae
The Sega CD was introduced for the first time
The Tokyo Toy Show is actually a general toy expo not specialized in video games. The Tokyo Game Show wasn't around before 1996.
CSG 1992 The Computer Soft Group was an association of Japanese game developers, which regularly held exhibitions of new software. Before TGS, this was apparently one of the most important industry events in Japan.
This game caught my attention. The caption calls it "Sore Yuke". There is a Famicom game called Sore Yuke! Anapanman - Minna de Hiking Game!, but that is a board game and looks quite different, at least judging by what can be googled. Is this scene in that game, or is it a different game? Was this released at all?
Sega World 1992
The Games City I lied. Not all images here are from exhibitions. These two are Naomi and Ikeda, the hosts of the TV show The Games City, which was first aired on October 4th, 1992.
The guy in the middle is supposedly Jaleco's Jun Saito. Not that I could recognize him...
I think this is some kind of fortune teller machine
This is the oldest photo where I've ever seen the classic bathing suits on a video game event.
Lord British was there, too, probably to promote some Ultima SNES port.
