also the Megadrive had lazy ports :)

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Huh? Sending checks via mail? In Germany we could drive to many shops that were selling import games, this all started at the end of the 80s.

Or you could call the shops directly, phone numbers were in games magazines all over the place. You got the packages via cash on delivery. Not really a problem, even for teenagers. I personally bought a lot of import games since 1989. Ordered some Amiga games via phone too. Mostly much cheaper than in normal malls. Around 1991/1992 video stores also started to rent import games. So, it was easy enough to get access here.

Maybe it depends on background and upbringing. Having been around the 10-12 age range during the Amiga/SNES/Megadrive era, and not old enough for even a paper round for most of it (my first console came later, when I could afford it for myself). Thus, ordering through mail order was something that needed parental approval, and I lived in a small town with only quite 'formal' shops, in a fairly cautious serious family - even owning a console rather than a computer would have been a big step. I did get to join Special Reserve, the UK mail-order catalogue company, and bought lots of Amiga games through them, but ordering from small ads which sometimes looked quite shady, to buy products whose legality might have seemed questionable to parents without much technical knowledge, might have been a bridge too far. I suspect my upbringing was quite extreme, but maybe some people can recognise these as issues that limited uptake of imports for some people.

[kremiso]

def the birth country influenced in this matter

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by kremiso

def the birth country influenced in this matter

And the age also. Because I'm pretty sure that not many Megadrive owners in France could "drive" to a shop to get imported games by 90/91/92.
People born before 1978 in my hometown were more intro hunting and fishing rather than playing what was largely considered a toy for kids here by the early nineties.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Maybe it depends on background and upbringing. Having been around the 10-12 age range during the Amiga/SNES/Megadrive era, and not old enough for even a paper round for most of it (my first console came later, when I could afford it for myself). Thus, ordering through mail order was something that needed parental approval, and I lived in a small town with only quite 'formal' shops, in a fairly cautious serious family - even owning a console rather than a computer would have been a big step. I did get to join Special Reserve, the UK mail-order catalogue company, and bought lots of Amiga games through them, but ordering from small ads which sometimes looked quite shady, to buy products whose legality might have seemed questionable to parents without much technical knowledge, might have been a bridge too far. I suspect my upbringing was quite extreme, but maybe some people can recognise these as issues that limited uptake of imports for some people.

I was regularly buying Amstrad games via mail order from the UK from 1988 onwards, no parental consent needed as could do it via postal order, but they took forever to get delivered, 4 weeks lol. Eventually i was doing orders for my class, copying the games when they arrived before passing them on.

The main magazines i was reading at the time were CVG and ACE and i was well aware of the grey import market for consoles from these magazines, i was just not interested in it as i wasnt really interested in consoles until the PS1.

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I suspect my upbringing was quite extreme, but maybe some people can recognise these as issues that limited uptake of imports for some people.

Sounds pretty standard to me basing it on my own experience and that of everyone I knew.
I lived near a largish town of around 70,000 in the south of England near London. Went to a big school of over 1000. People with more well-off parents (looking back, that included me) were lucky to have a computer like an ST or Amiga. Console owners were a rarity. The idea of importing console games and having the setup (imported console, special TV) to play them was incredibly exotic. There was nowhere to rent games. There were no arcade machines. I saw arcade machines occasionally on visits to seaside towns. Games came from Boots, John Menzies, and some department stores.
I saw megadrive and snes carts in woolworths for £40+. My parents were not strict, but the idea of dropping that kind of money regularly on a game was absurd. I don't even know what the price of imports was. I got games on magazine coverdisks, budget games, and sometimes the odd pirated game off a mate.
I had a mate who's family was from Singapore, and one time he came back from his visit with an Asian megadrive and a copy of Sonic. As far as I know that was the only game they had for it, with no way of acquiring more carts. We played it on a crappy UK 14 inch telly over RF with the colours corrupted and the picture rolling. Sound only worked through the headphone socket through a pair of partially broken headphones. We played it anyway. We were children!

[roondar]

The discussion regarding imported games seems a bit weird to me

Gaming magazines served a small percentage of the gaming public. This is simple to verify because they had their circulation numbers widely published. Even the absolute juggernaut multiplatform magazines had Europe-wide circulations averaging well under 250,000 copies a month, while the consoles & computers they represented were present in homes in the millions. The Sega Megadrive alone sold around 7 million units by 1992, there were millions and millions of PC's in use, etc.

Not only that, but the magazines only had very small (and often infrequently featured) sections on import games. It seems reasonably to me that if import games were a big thing, they'd likely would have had far more pages dedicated to it.

As far as I can see, the truth is that almost all computer and console users, whether you want to use hyperbole like 'nobody', 'tiny fraction', or things like that seems less important to me than the underlying point, seemed to have had no idea about import games, didn't go to specialty stores (which is why those stores were so small and often in out-of-the-way places) and didn't even read magazines.

They also had, on average, only a small numbers of games.
In the MD/SNES era, AFAIK game to console tie-ratio was fairly low, I personally didn't know anyone* who had more than say 3 or 4 games for their console of choice.

We're the exception, we're the people who care about games and who loved them then and now
Most people didn't see it as we do (or did). As for import games, I personally couldn't even get a game imported from the UK by my local gaming store, let alone from Japan. Where I lived there was one of such stores that I could reach and it didn't even sell import consoles.

Maybe things were different over in the UK or Germany, but here all the people I knew either didn't have a console, or had one with like 3 games - all of which they bought at the nearest store that carried any. Usually without reading any magazine about them. Often they hadn't even seen any adverts and bought them because "that Zelda game has a gold cartridge, it must be special" or "wow, a game about my favourite sport".

The stuff people like us did was really the outlier

*) I did have a lot of (original) games (to the chagrin of my parents, who allowed me a computer for all the non-gaming stuff they imagined I'd exclusively use it for and didn't like me spending most of my pocket/birthday money on games ), but I was the only one in my circle like that - all my friends and kids I knew at school either didn't have a console/computer or had a console with very few games. I do remember one guy renting a game once though, but that was a "wow, he was allowed to do that crazy thing for his birthday" thing, not something I saw happen all the time.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by roondar

Gaming magazines served a small percentage of the gaming public. This is simple to verify because they had their circulation numbers widely published. Even the absolute juggernaut multiplatform magazines had Europe-wide circulations averaging well under 250,000 copies a month

What a bizarre take. This isn't how media works - if, let's say, some big TV station reaches 10 mil people in a country with 50 mil population, it doesn't mean that the remaining 40 mil don't know anyting about current affairs.

This has changed a bit now, since everyone has a media center in their pocket, but back in the day magazines bought once would be perused by others, seen in libraries and, most importantly, talked about.

If mags really had such low influence, and most people bought Zelda because of a shiny cart, then it should follow that sales are mostly impulsive and should be randomly distributed. So why is that that the beloved Hybris et al didn't sell in equal measure to Xenon 2?

For the record, this whole angle is a bit pedantic because I don't find the whole "they could compare to import games" argument particularly relevant anyway, as I said earlier. But, hyperbole or not, saying that all console owners were just a bunch of clueless preteens seems rather far fetched.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

If mags really had such low influence, and most people bought Zelda because of a shiny cart, then it should follow that sales are mostly impulsive and should be randomly distributed. So why is that that the beloved Hybris et al didn't sell in equal measure to Xenon 2?

There is also a little thing called "marketing" and sales forces. A Nintendo or Sega published game was a bit more (this is an euphemism) pushed in front and massively distributed in general stores than an SHMUP published by a little company (in the case of MUSHA, not even officially published in Europe).
There is also a reason why some games sold in huge quantities despite low reviews by magazines. The whole business of some companies was buying expansive licenses and sell crappy games, most of them slashed in magazines.
It didn't prevent people to buy them thought.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

What a bizarre take. This isn't how media works - if, let's say, some big TV station reaches 10 mil people in a country with 50 mil population, it doesn't mean that the remaining 40 mil don't know anyting about current affairs.

This is getting a bit off-topic, but suffice to say that people being uninformed/misinformed is a well known issue throughout modern day history and is still a pretty big deal. And that's talking about 'big issues'. When we're talking about hobbies and certainly the more niche aspects of those hobbies, it stands to reason this effect is stronger.

Note: I'm really not trying to be negative about people, the truth is simply that the number of people that are engaged with any topic (especially niche ones like importing games from Japan or the US) is just a lot lower than most of us who are engaged with said topics think.

This has changed a bit now, since everyone has a media center in their pocket, but back in the day magazines bought once would be perused by others, seen in libraries and, most importantly, talked about.

I can obviously only speak about my own experiences, but I have can count on one hand how often my friends at the time ever asked me about the pile of gaming magazines I had, or brought up magazines they read. They weren't all that keen on hearing me harp on about it either. They were just not that much into the whole gaming thing (even though they did have a console and some games).

If mags really had such low influence, and most people bought Zelda because of a shiny cart, then it should follow that sales are mostly impulsive and should be randomly distributed. So why is that that the beloved Hybris et al didn't sell in equal measure to Xenon 2?

Market size at the time, differences in marketting, etc (Zelda for one was advertised to death on TV where I lived).
Of course I'm not claiming word-of-mouth didn't exist or had no impact (indeed, it was quite important!), just that when it comes to niche aspects of a market it's not nearly as effective.

I guess a good question would be: if importing games was at all popular, why was it that only subset of often the smaller specialty stores ever offered it? And then only as a side-hustle to their main specialty of selling the local consoles and carts? To me that is exactly what you'd expect of a niche aspect of a hobby.

In fact, I'd argue that Xenon 2 and Hybris are good examples of exactly what I mean - both had good review scores, one was and still is beloved by people like us (i.e. those who love good games), the other was bought by vastly more people despite how poor the game ended up being.

Come to think of it, it's been known for a long time that it's quite common for games to receive great or excellent reviews and still do very poorly in the market.

For the record, this whole angle is a bit pedantic because I don't find the whole "they could compare to import games" argument particularly relevant anyway, as I said earlier. But, hyperbole or not, saying that all console owners were just a bunch of clueless preteens seems rather far fetched.

To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying console owners were all a bunch of clueless preteens, I'm saying that they were not nearly as much into gaming as people like we are. Not knowning about imports or not buying games based on reviews doesn't mean to me that you're clueless, just that you're not as invested.

Anyway, I should try to make these posts smaller again (or even stop posting), as I'm noting that I'm in that silly mood I sometimes get where I engage far too seriously with stuff about my hobbies. My apologies if that comes across in my posts, I'm not trying to be negative or unfriendly

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by roondar

Anyway, I should try to make these posts smaller again (or even stop posting), as I'm noting that I'm in that silly mood I sometimes get where I engage far too seriously with stuff about my hobbies. My apologies if that comes across in my posts, I'm not trying to be negative or unfriendly

It's all good mate, we're just doing our perennial bicker about good ol' Megadrive

It all doesn't matter much anyway (hence a lack of blow-by-blow rebuttal in this post), it's just sometimes I like to squabble about details. All I will say that Xenon 2 really isn't as bad as people like to paint it nowadays, and that's the mainly answer to all the gripes in this thread.

[Retro-Nerd]

I don't get this "you had to be 10-12" when you were playing video games at that time. This is nothing i can't even remotely confirm. I was 17 when i got the Amiga 500 and 19 when the MD started to be a thing (including imports). A lot of my friends with gaming interests were around the same age (or 1-2 years older).

As i said, video game magazines had a big impact (and literally the only source for proper infos/reviews) for gaming enthusiasts back then, video rental stores too. The latter especially for MD and SNES, later PSX too. I don't think we can do generalization here.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

It's all good mate, we're just doing our perennial bicker about good ol' Megadrive

Which, considering I own and quite regularly play a whole bunch of Mega Drive carts (and yes, a whole bunch of those are from NTSC regions), is actually quite funny

It all doesn't matter much anyway (hence a lack of blow-by-blow rebuttal in this post), it's just sometimes I like to squabble about details. All I will say that Xenon 2 really isn't as bad as people like to paint it nowadays, and that's the mainly answer to all the gripes in this thread.

It's simple really, we all like different things and that's all that really matters in the end. I noticed that during last month as I really rather enjoyed Starfield, yet the internet told me I should hate it

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

I don't get this "you had to be 10-12" when you were playing video games at that time. This is nothing i can't even remotely confirm. I was 17 when i got the Amiga 500 and 19 when the MD starts to get a thing (including imports).

Not that it matter much, but just for the record: I was 16 at the time I got my Amiga, which is the time I was talking about. My friends were mostly my age, so all around 16-17. Ahh, the good old days

[dreadnought]

[QUOTE=roondar;1655375I really rather enjoyed Starfield, yet the internet told me I should hate it [/QUOTE]
Ah, don't start me on Bethsoft hate, this is one of the silliest/unfairest things that came with Internet groupthink

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by roondar

...Anyway, I should try to make these posts smaller again (or even stop posting), as I'm noting that I'm in that silly mood I sometimes get where I engage far too seriously with stuff about my hobbies. My apologies if that comes across in my posts, I'm not trying to be negative or unfriendly

i hope you don't
never read something unfriendly in your posts

always a pleasure to read your cuts, as other back in the day memories

---
these latest posts let me remember the crazy phone call i did in the UK, to order Microprose Soccer for the c64;
i mean directly at the Microprose offices

now that was really funny, considering mine almost zero english level

yet i reached lol

[petran]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

What a bizarre take. This isn't how media works - if, let's say, some big TV station reaches 10 mil people in a country with 50 mil population, it doesn't mean that the remaining 40 mil don't know anyting about current affairs.

This has changed a bit now, since everyone has a media center in their pocket, but back in the day magazines bought once would be perused by others, seen in libraries and, most importantly, talked about.

If mags really had such low influence, and most people bought Zelda because of a shiny cart, then it should follow that sales are mostly impulsive and should be randomly distributed. So why is that that the beloved Hybris et al didn't sell in equal measure to Xenon 2?

For the record, this whole angle is a bit pedantic because I don't find the whole "they could compare to import games" argument particularly relevant anyway, as I said earlier. But, hyperbole or not, saying that all console owners were just a bunch of clueless preteens seems rather far fetched.

I remember hardly reading any magazines at all. Most effective advertising was visiting the stores and see the games on the shelves, reading the back covers or playing/watching the game on the stores exhibit TV.
TV ads were also important.
Another way to know about new games was playing at friends, borrowing the game or renting

But notice that during that time early elementary school kids had it easier and were more carefree to take the bus, tube or tram to visit the city centre alone.

For computer games though, magazines were mandatory

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by petran

For computer games though, magazines were mandatory

Especially with so many awful ports

[E-Penguin]

I don't think I ever bought a full price MD game, nor did anyone else I know. Certainly didn't read magazines or collect imports, just went down to the local games exchange and see what they had versus the money in my pocket. I can't imagine that was an uncommon experience.

[Kagesan]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Battle Squadron could have been much much better.

Battle Squadron is actually an interesting case, and warrants a closer inspection.


Obviously, the game suffered both aurally and visually. While Rob Hubbard's edits to the songs were quite tasteful, the terrible samples meant that the music sounded much worse when compared to the original soundtrack.
The visuals took a hit, too. While the Amiga backgrounds have ~24 colors, the Mega Drive dedicates only one of its four 16-color palettes to them, so the shading got a little rougher and the result is visibly more drab. They saved massively on tiles, not least through extensive use of the MD's tile flipping ability. Overall, they still did a decent job, even though I’m sure that more experienced developers could have done better.


Gameplay-wise, there are actually areas where the MD version improved upon the original. The altered level layouts are tighter and more interesting, and the fact that bombs can only be earned in the underground levels and the lack of extends (both pick-up and score-based) mean that you can’t just farm the surface level for resources. The balance of the game is definitely better.


Unfortunately, some really bad alterations overshadowed the good ones. They went a little overboard when dialing up the difficulty by making the regular enemies both more numerous and sturdier while nerfing the weapons and bombs at the same time. Also, the newly introduced foreground parallax layers that obscure the action are inexcusable.

[Retro-Nerd]

Also, the newly introduced foreground parallax layers that obscure the action are inexcusable.

Exactly. I can't believe that they did this. Without it i would have called the port somewhat acceptable.

[kremiso]

Originally Posted by Kagesan

Battle Squadron is actually an interesting case, and warrants a closer inspection.


Obviously, the game suffered both aurally and visually. While Rob Hubbard's edits to the songs were quite tasteful, the terrible samples meant that the music sounded much worse when compared to the original soundtrack.
The visuals took a hit, too. While the Amiga backgrounds have ~24 colors, the Mega Drive dedicates only one of its four 16-color palettes to them, so the shading got a little rougher and the result is visibly more drab. They saved massively on tiles, not least through extensive use of the MD's tile flipping ability. Overall, they still did a decent job, even though I’m sure that more experienced developers could have done better.


Gameplay-wise, there are actually areas where the MD version improved upon the original. The altered level layouts are tighter and more interesting, and the fact that bombs can only be earned in the underground levels and the lack of extends (both pick-up and score-based) mean that you can’t just farm the surface level for resources. The balance of the game is definitely better.


Unfortunately, some really bad alterations overshadowed the good ones. They went a little overboard when dialing up the difficulty by making the regular enemies both more numerous and sturdier while nerfing the weapons and bombs at the same time. Also, the newly introduced foreground parallax layers that obscure the action are inexcusable.

great comparison, thanks for this