#warmpasture

[blazehedgehog]

Do we know why 80's and 90's games used the passcode system to return to your progress as opposed to a save file you can load?

This one's easy!

Saves required specific hardware on the cartridge.

Here are some example boards of Super NES cartridges. Those black things are ROM chips where game data would be stored. Sometimes those black chips would also contain extra processing units (SuperFX, SA-1, CX4).

But those two top ones? That big round silver thing is a coin cell battery. When you play a cartridge based game, electricity flows through the circuits and creates the live game data. But when the electricity is turned off, that data decays and fades away. So when you turn the console on the next time, it's starting over from fresh data because all the old data disappeared.

Unless you have a battery. The battery will keep a tiny portion of the data "active" even after electricity stops flowing to the circuit board. And these batteries can last for 10-20 years.

But batteries are not free. And neither is the additional other hardware needed to store and retrieve the battery-powered data. Both of those top two circuit boards are a lot bigger than your standard SNES circuit board. That increases manufacturing cost, sometimes significantly!

Usually, the more special chips and backup battery storage needed for a game, the more that cost would get passed on to the consumer. Games with save batteries cost more to buy! Which could mean they were less likely to sell versus the competition.

It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of developers back in the day had to go through Nintendo (or Sega) in order to manufacture cartridges. Often, Nintendo was the one charging extra for manufacturing save battery support.

Which is why most Nintendo games (Super Mario World, Zelda, Metroid) had save batteries. They were making the cartridges for themselves! It was like they had a special discount. But for most third parties like Capcom or Konami, it made more financial sense to just stick to a password system -- unless the game was really long or complex, like an RPG.

In Japan, Nintendo solved this problem on the NES. The Famicom Disk System (FDS) basically allowed games to be published on rewritable floppy diskettes. You'd simply save to the same medium the game itself lived on. A lot of FDS games had to be converted to use a password when they came to America, because we never got the Disk System add-on.

Sega also tried to solve this with the Sega CD, which saved game data to internal storage.

The issue there is that this depended on you maintaining the battery inside the console itself, and since the storage had to be large enough to store data for multiple games, that battery drained much more quickly. If the battery on your console went dead, you lost all of your save data.

To get around that, Sega sold memory cartridges.

But again, there was still that battery issue. You can see the big coin battery right there!

With the Playstation, Sony used flash memory, which allowed data to be written to their memory cards without needing a battery to keep the data "alive."

And once the Xbox introduced the concept of an internal hard drive, worrying about save storage became a thing of the past.

Traditional battery backup saves were still an issue on the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, and even the Nintendo 3DS, if you can believe it. The 3DS eventually gained the ability to transfer saves to internal storage, but the system did not launch with it!

[blazehedgehog]

What did Sonic mean by the words "fake hedgehog" and "faker" in SA2? Is it just a way to describe Shadow as a Sonic impersonator or was it meant to imply that Shadow isn't actually a 'real' hedgehog the way Sonic is, but instead some kind of unidentified creature that only looks like a hedgehog? Or maybe the words means something else?

Shadow, according to Sonic Adventure 2, is a "biomechanical android." By the definitions of those terms, an "android" is a synthetic or artificial being. There are multiple sub-types of androids, but one of them includes robots that have been built using "a combination of living and dead parts."

So Shadow is an extremely advanced robot that may actually have a real brain or a real heart beating inside his machine body.

So no, Shadow the Hedgehog is not actually a real hedgehog. He's an android. This is why, despite the accident on the Space Colony Ark occurring 50 years ago, Shadow has not aged a day.

Now the question is: does Sonic know all this? Probably not, no. But I guess we don't know. Sonic does spend some amount of time locked in Gerald's old prison cell, so maybe he gleaned some information from the writing scribbled on the cell walls.

The reality is it's probably just one of the game's many translation errors. Sonic knows Shadow as an impersonator. Shadow is going around stealing Chaos Emeralds and getting up to general mayhem and everybody goes "that's that guy who saved Station Square from the water monster!" So Sonic takes the heat.

The line gets localized to "fake hedgehog" for whatever reason.

Like, I don't speak Japanese natively, but the actual line from Sonic and Shadow's first encounter is:

何とか言え！　このニセモノ野郎！！

That second part, depending on which machine translator you run it through, changes quite a bit. Japanese is a language that depends heavily on context and the tone it is spoken in, but a lot of the translations I get are always something like "you fake jerk" "you phony" "you impostor" etc. He is not specifically referring to Shadow as a fake hedgehog, he's referring to the fact he's getting blamed for Shadow's crimes.

So, to recap:

No, Shadow is not actually a real hedgehog.

Sonic probably does not know this and is just mad at getting arrested (twice!) for the crimes Shadow is committing.

[blazehedgehog]

You've mentioned before on this blog that doing Shadow for the third Sonic movie would require some lore drops that the movies haven't set up yet. Is that why you think the third movie could "fall apart" as you said when asked about the Sonic Central a month ago? I just want to confirm the meaning behind that particular set of words.

No, I think the third movie could fall apart because I don't think the second movie was very good, I don't think the Knuckles series was very good, and the bulk of writing and preproduction on the third movie took place during the writer's strike, something that's been a killing blow to all kinds of things over the years.

And, as the Sonic game franchise gets all of its ducks in a row and finally seems to care about continuity and long-term lore and getting everything to "make sense", having this movie thing over there making up it's own, separate, ramshackle version of Sonic's history is starting to annoy me.

I've said it before, but in the wake of the Mario movie, I wish we got that for Sonic: a normal movie and none of this overdone "Sonic comes to the REAL WORLD" junk.

I am finding I am losing good will towards this whole ordeal and the third movie is dancing on a knife's edge as it is.

[blazehedgehog]

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

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

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

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

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

For the other information:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[blazehedgehog]

How is progress on your Ghostbusters RPG?

Almost dead, unfortunately. I think about it from time to time but I haven't done any meaningful code work since my Mom died. At some point in the last year I decided I'd write out the entire game script, since I was coalescing around a story idea.

With making an RPG in Clickteam Fusion, planning ahead is your best friend, so knowing every story beat ahead of time would give me a clearer picture of what needed to be coded on the back end.

But naturally, the opening to the game is going to be the most text heavy, outside of the ending. I wrote about three chapters, encapsulating a teaser and a recap of how the original Ghostbusters ended, and have been too distracted with other things to write more.

The general gameplay flow I was gravitating towards was something like Metal Max. Not long after starting this GB fangame, I watched somebody stream all of Metal Max NES and the bounty system in that was really interesting. Basically, over the course of the story, you'll hear rumors about special creatures and bandits roaming around the overworld, and if you can kill them, you earn a big reward by turning in the bounty.

If you ignore bounties, it cuts the gameplay length in half and you lose out a lot of level ups and gear. Taking/ignoring bounties almost ends up being kind of a difficult selector. Like doing a three heart run in Zelda.

For a Ghostbusters RPG, all of this just made sense, and it'd make it easy to reuse areas. You get calls about ghosts to catch, and you can either go catch the ghost (your bounty) or you can follow the story. Maybe the bounty is along the way to the next story event, maybe it's in a previous dungeon. It's up to you where you go.

I dunno if the game will ever get finished, but I'll let you peek on what I'd decided story-wise:

So it bothers me that a lot of recent Ghostbusters movies are kind of hero worship. Ghostbusters Afterlife is all about how these four guys were total legends that saved the world, and what a tragedy it is that they've been forgotten. "omg you kids don't know who the ghostbusters were? let me, paul rudd, educate you on the coolest, strongest and most epic titans to ever dress like sweaty service industry workers."

That's dumb. The Ghostbusters are working joes. They stumbled into this job, and saved the world kind of by accident. They are barely heroes and could have ended all life on earth as we know it just as easily. They just wanted a paycheck and were looking for a niche to fill.

And in the wider view of producing the first Ghostbusters movie itself, that too was kind of an accident. The movie got rammed through production, the script was an unfinished mess so they adlibbed a lot of it, and basically nobody expected it to do as well as it did. It is the very definition of lightning in a bottle, and it hasn't really been replicated.

So I wanted to push in on that. These guys aren't looking to save the world. They aren't actually that strong or cool. They don't have a sense of duty. They're just regular people, and they can (and do) make mistakes.

When Egon says crossing the streams is like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light", I imagine that means it's more than just a really big explosion. Ray calls it "total protonic reversal", which makes it sound more like the creation of a black hole, or something.

When the Ghostbusters crossed the streams and directed that into the doorway to Gozer's world, in my story, they effectively collapsed an entire dimension. Erased it, and whatever it inhabited.

I wanted there to be consequences for that. It was an impulsive action they made out of desperation to save themselves, and though it worked in the short term (sealing the door, almost certainly killing Gozer) I wanted there to be much worse long term consequences. They more or less punched a hole in reality, and there's really only two things that happen with holes:

They get bigger and deeper

They get filled in with debris

Ultimately I wanted to say that when the Ghostbusters crossed the streams, it was a mistake. They didn't know any better. They were messing with forces vastly beyond their comprehension. And the thrust of the game would be them figuring out what they did wrong and trying to come up with a plan to do a better job at fixing it.

But they don't know if they can do it. What happened with Gozer was a happy accident (that turned out to be not so happy). The scale of this problem literally dwarfs them. They are so small that they are barely even specks of dust. This is a supernaturally cosmic issue.

To me, The Ghostbusters are screw-ups that were in the right place at the right time and did the wrong thing. But not maliciously, just ignorantly. And the decision to take responsibility for that mistake is the grease that turns the gears of the narrative.

[blazehedgehog]

How much have you read Marvel or DC comics? And if so, who were the characters or teams (X-Men, Avengers, Justice League) that you read?

I did not read a lot of traditional Marvel or DC comics growing up, and there's a few reasons for that.

One, those comics always felt very dense. They were always in the thick of some soap opera event and I'd never read the story leading up to it. And when it got especially bad, they'd spread an entire story arc out across multiple different series.

So Wolverine would hop between X-Men, Spider-man, and three or four other books... but I never went into comic stores, so my supermarket would only get the X-Men and Spider-man parts of that story. So on top of not knowing what was going on, they were telling me I had to track down and go into a specialty shop.

Two, I want to say those books were comparatively expensive. I almost exclusively read Archie's Sonic comics growing up, but even then I didn't always have the $2 for a single issue of those. Archie was known for being a lot cheaper than Marvel or DC. For example, here's pages from Sonic in the year 2001:

Pay special attention to how flat and simple the coloring is here. Meanwhile, Marvel was printing comics that looked like this:

But there was a reason for that: Marvel's books were also more expensive. And when you grow up so broke that even $2 for a comic book can sometimes be more than your mom is willing to spend, $2.25 or even $2.50 for a Spider-Man comic is out of the question. You paid for that extra production value.

Ultimately it never made sense. Marvel and DC comics had multiple barriers of entry that made them harder to justify versus something like Sonic that was comparatively more simple and more affordable.

To this day, most of what I've absorbed about these comics comes second hand from friends who are more well-versed.

[blazehedgehog]

Which of the Rareware games after the Microsoft buyout did you play and what were your thoughts on them?

Let's see... if we can count GBA games, it's:

Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge: Played and finished. The first Banjo game that really hooked me, weirdly enough. I usually hate isometric perspective stuff, especially platformers, so the fact this hooked me so well is pretty special.

SabreWulfe: Charming, I guess, but I never put more than a few hours into this. Strictly fine.

The DKC GBA Ports: Almost all universally bad. They're ugly, washed out, with nasty music and sounds. I still think the SNES versions look great, but this amplifies all the worst parts of their aesthetics. All of the new content (more dialog, new bosses) are awful. It feels like the worst parts of DK64's presentation retroactively applied to games that don't need it. DKC1 GBA is by far the worst because when they scaled the game to the GBA screen they weren't super careful about preserving controls or item placement, so it's like walking through your house after everyone's shifted your furniture around by a couple inches. DKC3 GBA is probably the best, and I may have enjoyed it more than the SNES version.

Viva Pinata: I didn't put tons of time into this. Once it got to the point where getting new pinatas to join your farm (or mate) involved super complex, circumstantial things, I got bored of it because it felt more difficult and luck-based than it needed to be.

It's Mr. Pants!: A strange distraction but I never played it more than one or two times because I barely understood it and it felt overly simple.

Banjo-Pilot: I think I beat it once and it vanished from memory.

Diddy Kong Racing DS: Could have been a really good game but just like with the DKC GBA games, it had this vibe of like... being cheaper and more cutesy than the original. They changed a lot of the vibe and really amplified the "we think this is a game for very young children" tone that was originally a little more ambiguous in the N64 game. And in the case of Diddy Kong Racing, it really didn't need that. They messed with a very good game and made it worse in most aspects. Also the touch and mic stuff feels so dated and awkward now. They took a timeless game and made it very... uh, timeful?

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: I am a defender of this game, but only to a point. I'm not in love with the aesthetic but building vehicles and completing missions with them is incredible fun and I love the game's meta sense of humor. Unfortunately I think as you get close to the end of the game it kinda falls apart. The Colosseum and Terrarium of Terror are just too big and boring to navigate. I never finished the game because Terrarium of Terror was such a pain in the ass to get through.

Sea of Thieves: I played this a little when I had a free Game Pass sub a few years ago. I think this was right after the update where Sea of Thieves started getting proper questlines and a real narrative. I tried to solo what I could but it's a very difficult game to solo when you run into other players that are out to kill you. Quests are designed to be slightly random too, so I'd fail a quest, try again, and have completely different stuff to do. About the time friends heard I was struggling and were telling me they'd hop on and help me out, I actually started to develop sea sickness. I never got nauseous, but I did get dizzy, and even when I closed my eyes I could "feel" the motion of my boat rocking back and forth. Which is a shame, because as a terminal sufferer of video game wanderlust, I love the idea of sailing around and exploring islands.

Shoutouts to the Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark remasters on XBLA. I finished those games happily. I even did the 101% clear on Banjo, something I hadn't done in a Rareware game since DKC2.

[blazehedgehog]

With this talk of a Generations remaster, It's got me thinking about how recent Sonic games (Colors Ultimate, Superstars, even Frontiers in a way) feel like 'safe bets' on both a creative and brand-management level. Would you say the 2000's era of Sonic games were a creative and/or financial gamble for Sega, or is all of my analysis wrong?

To me, Sega's creativity died after the Dreamcast. When Sega was developing their own hardware, they were really swinging for the fences on all fronts, really pushing for new and innovative and artistically interesting ideas. They were really crystalizing the concept of a "Sega Identity" as much as possible.

PSO? Samba De Amigo? Panzer Dragoon? House of the Dead? Rez? Space Channel 5? Jet Set Radio? Crazy Taxi? These are key games that only Sega could make. They are Sega's entire personality.

And that spirit almost entirely vanished when Sega became a software-only company. What few games came out (like Jet Set Radio Future) were technically already in development for the Dreamcast and got shifted over to platforms like the Xbox after the fact.

Post-Dreamcast Sega was trying to compete in a much wider market and kind of homogenized their house style in trying to appeal to more people across more platforms. I mean just compare Sonic Adventure 2 to Sonic Heroes, you know? That punchy pseudo-realistic "Sonic hates cops" vibe is gone as they basically went back to the Sega Genesis Aesthetic of bright colors and checkerboard hills again, a well they would go back to over, and over, and over, and over in the years to follow.

The entire point of Sega's big multi-game announcement a few months ago was to try and bring back that "Sega Identity" again.

To some degree Sega's had its tail between its legs and licking their wounds over the Dreamcast for 20+ years now.