Un-Worked Designs - Popful Mail and Lunar: Eternal Blue Romhacks

[matteus]

A conversion to PAL would be much nicer would save me having to modify my md then!

[lumclaw]

A conversion to PAL would be much nicer would save me having to modify my md then!

Isn't that difficult for Sega CD? It'd be creepy if FMVs have audio out of sync, or whatever.

[Bottino]

@Supper

Don't get me wrong, I think that your initiative is fantastic; thanks to it, I finally got around in trying Popful Mail and while I found the game to be pretty average, being able to play it at the proper difficulty level, as intended by the creators of the game, made the experience much more enjoyable.

The changes made by WD didn't really made the game more challenging, instead making it just downright annoying; obviously, WD didn't had the know-how to mess around with the balance of games created by the experienced and talented game designers found at Game Arts, Falcom etc. However, in Working Design's defense, it was somehow standard practice to make western releases of japanese games substantially harder. There are lots of interviews in which game designers, producers etc. talk about this; this interview with Sega's Ryoichi Hasegawa is especially insightful in that regard.

[Raijin Z]

I always got sick of playing WD's offerings and abandoned the games before even getting halfway through any of them. Problem is, the well is pretty poisoned at this point, and I don't think I can enjoy even the fixed versions now.

[IrishNinja]

yeah, i love WD, but let's not pretend gameplay "tweaks" ever really went well...Lunar 2 was tough but bearable, others like Exile 2 were broken. Silhouette Mirage had the fun sucked right out of it.

[Supper]

@Supper

Don't get me wrong, I think that your initiative is fantastic; thanks to it, I finally got around in trying Popful Mail and while I found the game to be pretty average, being able to play it at the proper difficulty level, as intended by the creators of the game, made the experience much more enjoyable.

The changes made by WD didn't really made the game more challenging, instead making it just downright annoying; obviously, WD didn't had the know-how to mess around with the balance of games created by the experienced and talented game designers found at Game Arts, Falcom etc. However, in Working Design's defense, it was somehow standard practice to make western releases of japanese games substantially harder. There are lots of interviews in which game designers, producers etc. talk about this; this interview with Sega's Ryoichi Hasegawa is especially insightful in that regard.

Thanks for the link -- that was a very interesting read.

Like I think I mentioned earlier, deciding on one "correct" difficulty for everyone really isn't possible. From the interviewee's comments, it sounds like Sega based their difficulty changes on surveys or focus testing that determined regional "tastes" (color me surprised if Working Designs did any such thing). From a commercial perspective, yes, you obviously want the game to be as appealing as possible to the target audience, and regardless of what I think of their practices, I don't fault Working Designs for trying to stay in business.

On the other hand, I think many of the alterations were completely unnecessary, even from a commercial standpoint. Honestly, the only real difference between the Japanese and US Eternal Blue is that in the US version, you'll probably have to drop whatever you're doing and grind for an hour on a few occasions, and I find it hard to believe most players enjoyed the game more or that it sold better on that basis. My opinion is that a lot of the changes were based on Victor Ireland's own perception of how difficult a game "should be", and he appears to have a taste for hard games -- see the interview with him in the Lunar TSS strategy guide, where he mentions how he used to roll over the score counter in Defender.

It's interesting to me that these kinds of regional difficulty changes are pretty rare nowadays. I assume it's because of the general broadening of the gaming audience ("casualization", if you prefer) since the '90s.

I always got sick of playing WD's offerings and abandoned the games before even getting halfway through any of them. Problem is, the well is pretty poisoned at this point, and I don't think I can enjoy even the fixed versions now.

Yeah, I know where you're coming from. Gameplay aside, I don't even read the English dialogue anymore unless I have to, because it sickens me knowing how horribly butchered it is. Honestly, beyond finding the hacking work interesting, one of my motivations for doing this is to try to get people to consider games as, if not "art", then at least something that deserves to be accurately represented in translation. The games Working Designs sold were not the ones the original developers created, and I think that's a travesty. I hope that in the future, it won't be an acceptable practice. (Of course, surprise! -- Gaijinworks is up to almost exactly the same shenanigans in their "translations"!)

yeah, i love WD, but let's not pretend gameplay "tweaks" ever really went well...Lunar 2 was tough but bearable, others like Exile 2 were broken. Silhouette Mirage had the fun sucked right out of it.

The RPGs fared better than the action games, IMO. The shorter the game was, the more motivated WD seems to have been to crank the difficulty up to absurd levels.

[Gryson]

As I recall, one consideration when localizing in the US was video game rentals. I think Maegawa may have mentioned this in an interview when discussing why the difficulty in Dynamite Headdy was raised for its US release.

Publishers did not want games to be able to be beaten over one rental period (3 days usually). Therefore, somewhat short action games would have their difficulty revved up.

In Japan, on the other hand, video game rentals were/are illegal (Nintendo had a lot of legal sway!).

[Supper]

As I recall, one consideration when localizing in the US was video game rentals. I think Maegawa may have mentioned this in an interview when discussing why the difficulty in Dynamite Headdy was raised for its US release.

Publishers did not want games to be able to be beaten over one rental period (3 days usually). Therefore, somewhat short action games would have their difficulty revved up.

In Japan, on the other hand, video game rentals were/are illegal (Nintendo had a lot of legal sway!).

Yeah, that point was also raised in my RHDN thread. By the same token, Working Designs also wrote "official" strategy guides, and some of the changes are pretty clearly aimed at getting people to buy them (like moving around the bromides and removing the hint for a puzzle in the Lunar 1 remake). Again, it's a valid concern from a business standpoint, but that doesn't mean it's not scummy as hell.

Actually, it's kind of interesting, because making the game more difficult essentially shrinks your target demographic from a general audience to devoted enthusiasts who won't get frustrated by the repetition. Would releasing the easier versions of the games internationally really have driven sales down, or would it have broadened the audience enough for rentals to be a non-issue? Given the state of the market today, I'd say it's the latter, but I suppose the '90s attitude of "games are for teen and preteen boys" prevented any such approach.

And Japanese law is pretty crazy when it comes to this kind of stuff. Game rentals are illegal, DS flashcards are illegal, some game modding devices are illegal (vis-a-vis the Tokimeki Memorial memory card case)... It's a great example of corporate interests being totally at odds with those of their customers.

[Bottino]

As I recall, one consideration when localizing in the US was video game rentals. I think Maegawa may have mentioned this in an interview when discussing why the difficulty in Dynamite Headdy was raised for its US release.

Publishers did not want games to be able to be beaten over one rental period (3 days usually). Therefore, somewhat short action games would have their difficulty revved up.

Yeah, great points there.

Also, when a game was planned to have an international release from the get-go, It would generally be made harder as well; Gaiares went through such a process and ended up being much harder than the designers had originally planned.

In Japan, on the other hand, video game rentals were/are illegal (Nintendo had a lot of legal sway!).

Interesting, I didn't know that Nintendo had anything to do in that matter. Where did saw/read that?

[xelement5x]

I remember reading that for a long time resale/recycle/thrift type shops in Japan were not legal either. In the late 80s I think regulations were relaxed and you got the boom of resale shops like HardOff and the like which were filled with older products at very cheap prices, hence the cheap JP game boom of the 90s to early 2000s. Now many people know and can find the value of their older goods and so they are resold higher. Wish I could find the article I had as the source for this though.

[Gryson]

Interesting, I didn't know that Nintendo had anything to do in that matter. Where did saw/read that?

That was just speculation I heard somewhere! I just looked it up and there's no evidence that Nintendo had anything to do with it. The law went into effect in 1983 around when the Famicon was released, but it seems that the law came as a result of PC developers complaining that certain stores were basically promoting piracy through software rentals.

[Team Saber Rider]

That was just speculation I heard somewhere! I just looked it up and there's no evidence that Nintendo had anything to do with it. The law went into effect in 1983 around when the Famicon was released, but it seems that the law came as a result of PC developers complaining that certain stores were basically promoting piracy through software rentals.

But even if Nintendo had nothing to do with it, they propably really liked it. There was the Famicom Disc Drive and the games could quite easy copied.

[IrishNinja]

Oh, sorry, you're actually using the very first version of the patch, from before I reworked the patching procedure to be a lot simpler. Get version v3 from here, then move your BIN/CUE to the patcher's directory and drag-and-drop the BIN onto binpatch.bat. That should spit out the patched ISO/WAV. Let me know if it doesn't work for some reason.

I'm keeping my original post at ROMhacking.net updated with the latest versions of all the patches.

okay, so..thanks for this, but i still can't get it working.
it's easy enough to simply drag into the binpatch.bat like you said, but burning the PopfulMailUnWorked.cue file that results ends up in garbage that fails upon starting the game proper. i tried following the readme for xdelta & other files, but it's all crap. really bummed out.

i will straight up paypal a few bucks to whoever can just get a proper image file of this patch up on dropbox/etc to let me burn & play. cause i've been a this too long & i clearly don't know what i'm doing & it's still too difficult to get running. thanks in advance for any help here.

[Raijin Z]

More incentive to patch out WD's nonsense:

[IrishNinja]

okay y'all - i'm increasing the bounty!

i will paypal/whatever $5 (FIVE WHOLE DOLLARS, NO FEES) to whoever uploads a working bin/cue of popful mail to their dropbox/etc and links me. i don't even care, i can't get this working & just wanna play this version. bonus points for lunar/vay and such but really just want to get this going! PM me if you're worried about internet police.