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brad808:
--- Quote from: shponglefan on July 15, 2012, 11:13:33 am ---
--- Quote from: nitz on July 14, 2012, 04:34:40 pm ---5) Street Fighter II (all versions?): Japanese versions have different AI.
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I hadn't heard this before. What is the difference exactly? Are the Japanese versions more challenging?
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Japanese version of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is easier AI then US version. If you play the two of them for a few rounds each you will see it right away. The US version is hard to the point of not being fun at all, just feels "cheap".
Haze:
99% of the time for Japanese developed games the Japanese versions are by far the most complete / best to play.
The US/World etc. releases often have bastardized (cheap!) AI, cutscenes ripped out, important gameplay elements missing all and are generally more 'quarter suckers', and don't really play how the games were really designed to play, but were modified to what the non-japanese arcade ops wanted to see (shorter playtime, bigger profits)
nitz:
Thanks Guys! :applaud: I've updated the list.
--- Quote from: Haze on July 15, 2012, 11:46:16 am ---99% of the time for Japanese developed games the Japanese versions are by far the most complete / best to play.
The US/World etc. releases often have bastardized (cheap!) AI, cutscenes ripped out, important gameplay elements missing all and are generally more 'quarter suckers', and don't really play how the games were really designed to play, but were modified to what the non-japanese arcade ops wanted to see (shorter playtime, bigger profits)
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That's really helpful, thanks! I just added "Japanese versions of most games " to the list. Had no idea that those quarter suckers were actually made that way specifically for us. ::) Think I'll be playing the Japanese versions from now on.
I wonder how many of the bootlegs are necessary to keep. I know in some cases the game is changed, but I think in a lot of cases the changes were mainly cosmetic, such as a different title screen. What are some of the notable bootlegs?
Haze:
Konami are probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to 'cheap' US / Euro versions; their Japanese versions are often a LOT fairer.
Anyway as for bootlegs, the majority of bootlegs aren't THAT interesting from a user point of view, they're usually more interesting to study for devs (if they've been modified to use different hardware, had the protections patched out etc.) Some are really dull and simply have copyright changes.
There are a couple of cases still where the bootlegs give a better experience due to emulation issues (Mustang comes to mind, the sound on the original isn't properly emulated, the bootleg has sound ripped from Raiden instead, but at least you get music!)
Of course a lot of people like all the wacky Street Fighter (and other fighter) Plus hacks etc. (to the point where there are builds FULL of user made hacks like that, which never hit the arcades) Where these hacks did end up on arcade boards MAME does support them, and they're not limited to just fighters either, you've got things like "1945 Part-2 (Chinese hack of Battle Garegga)" which as the title would suggest is based on Battle Garegga, but makes the game significantly easier / unbalanced by giving you a much more powered up ship. I wouldn't really suggest playing said versions, but there are times when they can satisfy a 'what if' type curiosity.
Then you've got the more advanced hacks / bootlegs where significant parts of the game have been reworked, and/or redesigned graphically, although MAME usually treats these as individual releases, not clones. Things like 'Donkey Kong II' and 'Beach Festival World Championship 1997' (which is really a heavily reworked and disguised bootleg of Power Spikes)
There is also a further category of games, where they seem like bootlegs, but opposite of the above case have actually been rewritten from scratch. 'Crazy Kong' and 'Kong (Brazil)' would fall in to this category, as would the Zig Zag bootleg of Dig Dug running on Galaxian hardware. MAME doesn't typically treat these as clones either tho, which is why they show up as parent sets (much to the confusion of some users)
Translated bootlegs are another category; one famous example is "Wonder Boy in Monster Land (Galaxy Electronics English bootleg)" which presents you with a (rather badly) translated English version of the game. The actual game was apparently never released in English, although has featured in the news lately because the Wii virtual console version was created from a fully complete English version which WAS ready for distribution back in the day but seemingly never left the factory.
Some bootlegs are designed to work with alternative control systems, for example there are "Ikari Warriors" bootlegs designed to work with a regular joystick instead of the rotary one, obviously because it was cheaper / easier to convert a generic cab to use such versions. The game was never really designed to be played that way tho, so feels very broken in places.
There are also times when the bootleggers couldn't bootleg the original version of a game so chose to bootleg a console one instead 'Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers (bootleg of Japanese MegaDrive version)' is a typical example; the security on the original CPS2 SSF2 was effective enough to prevent bootleggers from copying the game so they copied the home version instead and sold that (I'd argue they were lazy mind you, they'd defeated more complex ones earlier!) Again MAME doesn't really consider these to be clones tho, because technically they're clones / bootlegs of the HOME version, which isn't supported in MAME, not the arcade version. There are a couple (Aladdin, Final Fight 2) where the games didn't actually have arcade releases, but ended up as arcade games anyway thanks to the bootleggers, although often in a broken / unbalanced form in order to make them 'cheap' enough to be arcades (console games were typically easier)
Finally there are some odd multi-game collections, "Puzzle King (includes bootleg of Snow Bros.)" contains 3 'new' games as well as a bootleg of Snow Bros, while "Shinobi / FZ-2006 (Korean System 16 bootleg)" contains Shinobi and the rare System 16 version of Fantasy Zone 2 which Sega released in 2008 (although the original release is supported as of 0.146u2 so the bootleg becomes less noteworthy) Again tho, in these cases we don't class them as clones, because they don't have a natural parent. Combining the previous 2 points, NES based multi-game bootlegs were just as popular in arcades as they were in those cheap 'TV Game' units, especially in Korea.
Of course if you dig deeper into the games in general you'll find a lot of games use borrowed / stolen code but present a VERY different game. Things like Woodpecker and Sega's 'original' Alibaba allegedly use large parts of the Pacman code! You're unlikely to know this as a user tho, because again MAME shows them as unique games.
Some people like certain bootlegs because they're the ones they grew up with "Bobble Bobble" is a typical example, it appears to have been produced in larger numbers than the original Bubble Bobble and has it's own set of quirks / brokenness due to the way in which the bootleggers attempted to work around the protection. If you grew up playing a certain version, and are used to patterns / enemy behavior on a certain version then you'll be naturally drawn to it. The 'Bubble Bobble (bootleg with 68705)' is another good example, instead of hacking the program code the bootleggers here clearly realised there were deep defenses against doing such in the code and instead replaced the protection chip with their own implementation of it, designed to simulate the behavior of the original. For a long time MAME / MAMEdev actually thought this WAS the original, until it was found that real Bubble Bobbles don't have a 68705 at all, but a different type of protection chip entirely. Upon more detailed study (once the original chip WAS dumped) it has again been determined that there are various AI / event handling differences between the actual original and the bootleg. To confuse matters further several re-releases of the game were based on the behavior from the bootlegs leading to a decent number of people preferring the subtle behavior differences the bootlegs offer.
The above scenario is actually quite common for Taito games, mainly due to the wacky protection schemes Taito employed. Operation Wolf has the 'Operation Bear' bootleg (and it is argued that the protection simulation for the original in MAME is wrong too; the original chip has not been dumped) Get Star (bootleg set 1) / Get Star (bootleg set 2) are broken in various ways due to checks the bootleggers missed, Rainbow Islands was bootlegged as 'Jumping' which again has various glitches due to things the bootleggers missed. KiKi KaiKai ended up as Knight Boy, again with a 68705 chip replacing the original protection (chances are it was done by the same people who made that Bubble Bobble bootleg) Again it suffers from some AI / player-enemy interactions not being quite the same as an original.
As a casual player you're probably not going to care about such things tho :-)
Moving beyond the regular 'game' style arcades, you've got the various bootlegs / hacks of Fruit Machines, often adding extra game modes, rigged payouts, or even backdoor mechanisms used in organized crime to 'empty' machines (get all the cash out of them by entering a secret code) but again beyond studying them and seeing what was done, and it acting as a warning to anybody thinking of buying upgrades from unscrupulous dealers they're not going to be that interesting to a casual MAME user.
lettuce:
Great post, very informative! :applaud: