Kinsie

I am internet. Hear me whine.

Mostly just repeats of past exploits from across the wider Cyberverse™. Chase me elsewhere (see link above) for the freshest, goodest stuff.


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

SLG's opened orders for an emulated physical reissue of Parasol Stars, one of many fixed-screen action games developed by Taito and one positioned as the third game in the series that began with Bubble Bobble and continued, however tenuously, with Rainbow Islands. For whatever reason, this game never made it to arcades and was released primarily for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 and, owing to the popularity of the genre and especially Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands, all of the existing ports to other platforms (NES, Game Boy, Amiga, Atari ST) have the distinction of being produced by European developers and published exclusively in Europe.

(One port that never made it market was the Commodore 64 version which, at the time, was reported to have been cancelled after an alleged burglary saw the dev's equipment and code stolen; the developer later admitted that their code was actually destroyed during a drunken dispute with their former wife.)

Naturally, this release bugs me, for all the reasons that SLG releases typically bug me:


Kinsie
@Kinsie

You think they'd at least be able to ask Taito to scan some old planning documents for them like they do for seemingly every second Arcade Archives promotional stream to add a little value and/or historical context, right? I'm not asking for everyone to go full M2 or Digital Eclipse because that'd just be unrealistic, but to paraphrase @jeffgerstmann, they're competing with Free. The bare minimum won't cut it because that's already out there at a price they simply can't match.


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

Their multiple SKU thing is so annoying! I've had a couple times now where I was looking forward to a collection of theirs of some sort, only to learn that the newly launched digital release is like, half of said collection that will get launched a later date, sometimes with physical-only exclusives. Unless you're the type to keep up with the chopped up release schedule, it feels like a bit of a crappy practice.

Yeah this post pretty solidly covers a lot of my feelings on this. Under other circumstances I would be really excited for a Parasol Stars reissue but, well, not like this. It's frustrating because I'm always good with games getting proper reissues but a lot of the SLG stuff is just going about it the wrong way.

Glad you included the story on the C64 version too, only in the European micro oomputer scene!

I stopped working on my SLG/ININ writeup worrying if I was gonna be too mean... but stuff like this makes me wanna start working on it again.

Honestly my biggest issue with ININ/SLG is how poorly they treat these games despite how historically and culturally important a lot of these games are. I think deep down inside, they do truly care about these games to some degree, but whatever higher up that calls the shots doesn't care as much and/or has no idea how successful re-release etiquette works. I think the subtitle I chose for that mentioned post sums it up the best: Enthusiastically Incompetent.

At the very least they addressed a few of my issues recently, but it's gonna take a long time before I start being a regular customer of theirs again...