Ura Zelda was the 64DD project that got rolled over into the GameCube release or at least that's how my memory of checking about it on GameFAQS weekly was. 90% of what you read about it online was mostly fan theories. Master Quest was never an actual release, at least not in America. It was the pre-order bonus for Wind Waker that got months early even. It was also given out in Nintendo Power promotions like bundle of Zelda 1, 2, OoT, and MM. That said, MQ isn't the finished Ura Zelda or what it was intended to be. It was just something released to encourage Wind Waker/GameCube sales.
Oh definitely wasn't finished, I'm just quoting the line given. (Also, Majora's Mask was an entirely different game called "Zelda Gaiden" and was also a 64DD game that was supposed to use a real 24-hour clock).
But the problem with video game trivia is that things are either misquoted, lied about, inaccurate, or just plain wrong...a lot of these myths persist today.
- Officially, Miyamoto has denied the quote about Donkey Kong Country (something about "Americans don't care about gameplay if the graphics are good") which was allegedly an off-the-cuff comment from an interview done in the mid-1990s. It was never published officially (just mentioned off hand in "Ultimate History of Video Games") and Miyamoto denied it...but he could've easily retconned it out of existence or forgotten he said it or it was mistranslated or taken out of context.
- Since the rise of YouTube, a lot of crazy theories that get tossed around have more or less been canonized despite being complete bullshit, like Giygas being an aborted fetus or some such.
- Even things that aren't misquoted were never true to begin with--a quote originating from either IGN or Nintendo Power discussed that Ocarina of Time was built off of Mario 64's code that was found to be false.
Also, Majora's Mask was an entirely different game called "Zelda Gaiden" and was also a 64DD game that was supposed to use a real 24-hour clock).
But the problem with video game trivia is that things are either misquoted, lied about, inaccurate, or just plain wrong...a lot of these myths persist today.
Yeah. There were two parallel projects after OoT: an entire redo of OoT that became MQ after it went nowhere that there exists screenshots of it in a Japanese magazine but nothing of it's actual content outside of the Unicorn thing and something with the masks was ever talked about publicly. Zelda Gaiden was the one that was to be not a sequel but same engine with a new overworld/map and yeah, the clock. I think that's all I remember ever being truly mentioned.
It's just one of those nostalgia things for me because I happened to read all that shit two decades ago as some far too young to be given unlimited access to it. Every time there's a new autistic talking point about it, it's never even close to reality or even sourced. In a way, it reminds me so heavily of that era of online discussion where confirmed information was always scant but there would still be forty pages of forum posts about it. The game as somehow become a myth for zoomers that are nostalgic for the 90s and inventing their own fiction about something that was already mostly fiction.
Edit: The amount of unhinged schizo theories about Ura/Gaiden I've seen by zoomers or people that are older than me is truly astounding. I remember seeing like a 200k view video talking about how the "parallel games" thing from the fucking N64 somehow became the Oracle games, that were not even made by Nintendo. It's retarded but also nostalgic because it's like we never left 1999 forums that your account age and post count is all that mattered in how correct your schizo takes were.
It's just one of those nostalgia things for me because I happened to read all that shit two decades ago as some far too young to be given unlimited access to it. Every time there's a new autistic talking point about it, it's never even close to reality or even sourced. In a way, it reminds me so heavily of that era of online discussion where confirmed information was always scant but there would still be forty pages of forum posts about it. The game as somehow become a myth for zoomers that are nostalgic for the 90s and inventing their own fiction about something that was already mostly fiction.
Edit: The amount of unhinged schizo theories about Ura/Gaiden I've seen by zoomers or people that are older than me is truly astounding. I remember seeing like a 200k view video talking about how the "parallel games" thing from the fucking N64 somehow became the Oracle games, that were not even made by Nintendo. It's retarded but also nostalgic because it's like we never left 1999 forums that your account age and post count is all that mattered in how correct your schizo takes were.
The problem is a lot of this stuff was sourced from video game magazines from the late 1990s and a lot of that was either speculation, mistranslations, or straight-up wrong...then you've got boomers like me who know they read that 15-20 years ago and can't remember what was speculation and what wasn't...then you've got zoomer e-celebs who make up their own bullshit theories (affecting N64 and SNES games, primarily) that gain traction because they're so widespread...then you've got Japanese devs who will straight up revise the past to fit the current thing.
As a result, it makes parsing what is true, what is probably true, what is probably false, and what is complete bullshit difficult for even the non-retarded.
The problem is a lot of this stuff was sourced from video game magazines from the late 1990s and a lot of that was either speculation, mistranslations, or straight-up wrong...then you've got boomers like me who know they read that 15-20 years ago and can't remember what was speculation and what wasn't...then you've got zoomer e-celebs who make up their own bullshit theories (affecting N64 and SNES games, primarily) that gain traction because they're so widespread...then you've got Japanese devs who will straight up revise the past to fit the current thing.
As a result, it makes parsing what is true, what is probably true, what is probably false, and what is complete bullshit difficult for even the non-retarded.
I know Famitsu has online archives of just about everything they've done but did anything else even get scanned and archived? Or even accessing those archives that are probably on some autistic preservationist's (but only for him) personal computer. Lost media sites almost always list substantial numbers of demo disks from Playstation/Xbox magazines that were issued in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands.
I have a new found appreciation for the first F-Zero game thanks to 99. Played the first one for the very first time on the SNES Switch Online feature and i can see why everyone loves this game, although the expert difficulty is no joke. Golden Fox is a bitch to catch up to, at least when you're using Fire Stingray (my preffered main).
Those old magazines were great to get you excited for a new game thst never came out. The old advertisements for 8 bit games that were nothing like the actual game.
I rarely get Mad At Video Games™, but this shit in particular infuriates me greatly. There are so many people who simply do not get that Japanese developers are liars and their word about their own games cannot be trusted. They will change what they say based on who's asking, when they're asking, and the phase of the moon they are so autistically obsessed with.
I rarely get Mad At Video Games™, but this shit in particular infuriates me greatly. There are so many people who simply do not get that Japanese developers are liars and their word about their own games cannot be trusted. They will change what they say based on who's asking, when they're asking, and the phase of the moon they are so autistically obsessed with.
Dunno if you really mean to single out Jap devs here... western devs do the same.
Translations of contemporary Japanese interviews and reviews are relatively hard to come by. I don't watch any retro game youtubers but they seem to feel free to either make shit up or appeal to "common knowledge". Blame zoomers but even boomers only know what they directly experienced and even then, not that well. Games journalism isn't a real job so even the more credible ones aren't accountable.
Dunno if you really mean to single out Jap devs here... western devs do the same.
Translations of contemporary Japanese interviews and reviews are relatively hard to come by. I don't watch any retro game youtubers but they seem to feel free to either make shit up or appeal to "common knowledge". Blame zoomers but even boomers only know what they directly experienced and even then, not that well. Games journalism isn't a real job so even the more credible ones aren't accountable.
Generally Western devs are better documented by old games magazines and other sources so you can't straight-up say "that was a mistranslation" or something.
While they might disavow their old games because they don't line up to sensibilities of Current Year, the only example I can think of was Dylan Cuthbert going from "no, the Star Fox 2 prototype is nothing like the real game" to "yes, Star Fox 2 [which is only slightly updated from the build floating around on the Internet] is definitely the real deal we wanted to release".
I have a new found appreciation for the first F-Zero game thanks to 99. Played the first one for the very first time on the SNES Switch Online feature and i can see why everyone loves this game, although the expert difficulty is no joke. Golden Fox is a bitch to catch up to, at least when you're using Fire Stingray (my preffered main).
The OG F-Zero is my favorite racing game. It was a running joke when I was in high school that during the summer my friends and I would buy mushrooms and I'd get high and just fuck off to play f-zero for hours tripping lol everyone would be watching weird movies or whatever and I'd lock myself in my room and just play f-zero for my whole trip. I never had a bad trip because of it.
I say the same thing about "tate", it literally just means vertical, why the fuck does every sideways tv have to be "tate". I don't hear about how everyone's TV's are yoko most of the time. Just call it horizontal or vertical.
I say the same thing about "tate", it literally just means vertical, why the fuck does every sideways tv have to be "tate". I don't hear about how everyone's TV's are yoko most of the time. Just call it horizontal or vertical.
The reason n00bs like Fire Stingray is that it always starts in first and has the highest speed. Once you get the speed up, you just have to watch corners. Fire Stingray corners like shit.
I never liked Blue falcon, it died too easy. It felt like it was magnetically attracted to the death barrier.
Wild goose is barely worth a mention. Stupid xeno piece of shit.
I don't think I've ever really spent time with SMS all that much. I should probably try to do more research but I want to say that it and Luigi's Mansion were either supposed to be one game (and they both feature the Mario Bros. with stuff on their back) or have some sort of compatibility/crossover with each other.
Okay moving this EFFORT POST here about the game Mysterious Murasame Castle which was released on Famicom and the second title after Zelda that was original work. It plays similarly to Zelda in many aspects. It is difficult as fuck and I only have hope of beating it because I am Asian.
The game takes place in Edo Japan, user @SSj_Ness in a DM chain asked for autistics about the history of the Edo period and weapons shown in order to get a better idea of the game itself. @Pissmaster insisted I move it here so it gets lost in a thread on an internet hate side instead of a DM on an internet hate site.
"nazo no murasame shiro"
--
EDO HISTORY & THE GAME MYSTERIOUS MURASAME CASTLE
So the game takes place in the Edo era (1603-1868 ) for reference, America was not yet in the colonies (not until 1606) when the Edo era started and the English were saying goodbye to the Elizabethan era and hello to the Jacobian/Stuart period.
Some brief-ish history of the Edo Era. It's predecessor was the Sengoku Era or "Sengoku Jidai" this was the warring states period when Japan was in tiny little mini-states each run by a feudal lord who had samurai under him. This was united by lord Oda Nobunaga (another title that started retro is "Nobunaga's Ambition" as well as "Sword of the Samurai" amongst others). But Nobunaga died in the Honno-ji incident before ever taking final power so it was given to lord Tokugawa Ieasu who was his right hand man. All these previous eras are where all the cool ass weapons come from and majority of the content. In the set plot, Tokugawa actually sends you out to defeat the demons so it's important to know who he is, he's the Shogun aka the biggest dick in the land.
Basically all these kingdoms of note from Sengoku had castles, castles that sometimes dated back to the Heian era because we are good at reusing castles.
Theres also another retro japanese game called Tenshu but that's beside the point
in the game you're basically ascending the castle to fight the daimyo (local lord) of the castle who has been posessed by demons.
Most Japanese castles are built in layers of 3, 5, or 7 stories tall. Your earlier castles aren't as complex as your end one for example. But this explains why you have to go up the stairs. Real castles from war times do indeed have "secrets" that are fun like certain steps meant to creek if someone steps on it to alert to intruders or secret rooms etc. Many of these castles are hundreds of years old irl too.
the barricades in the center screen are Tansu which are laquered Japanese chests
the pink shit is a shoji screen covering a wall the demon statues I think are supposed to be screens.
The rooms with the characters that give you points are actually princesses (hime) in Japanese wearing a traditional Junihitoe (12 layer kimono worn by noble women, note this hairstyle is still popular modernly and you see it a lot in games and anime as well).
WEAPONS
I did not spoiler this part because weapons are COOL and everyone enjoys COOL shit.
Samurai use Uchikatana/Uchigatana (it's the same shit) or Wakizashi. There is no standard "katana" really. Samurai could carry two swords at once in edo and this distinguished them from the common folk. The Uchikatana was longer than the Wakizashi. There was only an approximate length for these swords and sometimes swords that were broken were filed down to make shorter blades. In the game you see traditional Kendo poses and what is probably an Uchikatana being used.
note: long tachi is called otachi and "short katana" is tanto. Uchikatana can also be spelled "ugchigatana". There's also lengths in between tachi and "long tachi"
Spoiler: all the tachi sizes, the biggest were for dick measuring contests and not for fighting
So Important side-sperg is that the Uchikatana looks very similar to the Tachi as both are 2 shaku (old unit of measurement) or more but there's very important differences in their time period and history.
Grom the Sengoku era (1467-1568 ) onward Uchigatana was the standard as this was made for all the battalions of samurai during the afformentioned warring states period. However, in the Muromachi period (1333-1573, note this overlaps the warring states period) some famously good Tachi were resharpened and changed to become uchi-tachi, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi (two of the three who united Japan, Tokugawa being the third) were large purveyors of this practice.
Tachis are easily distinguished as different given their tapering in the end. Tachis also tend to have a more extreme curve on the back of the blade Because of the resharpening that happened, they're rarer to find fully intact. It is easy to spot one that has been cut because they also must grind off the base section. On this section of all swords, there is an inscription usually of the maker, the sword's name, and often times who it was tested on (usually prisoners).
So in the game, our samurai could be using swords that were either
originally made in the senoku period as uchikatana which was the standard battalion sword
shortened swords that were originally tachi
Naginata men:
seriously, fuck these guys
Also I should bring up the hairstyle which is just as sharp as the weapon. The chonmage, This was used basically to keep the helmet comfortable, keep sweat minimal, and COPE with male balding. It's basically essential in all Samurai titles to have characters with this hairstyle. This hairstyle was also used before the edo period and continued to the end of the 19th century when Americans came.
So there's two types of polearms commonly used which are Yari and Naginata. Naginata have one sharp end and Yari are double bladed.
But samurai women were trained to use polearms often times as a line of defense for the home. This is an image from a drama made about an all women unit of polearms barers, this was the most realistic of onnabugesha (warrior women) although there were noble lords who were women and fought amazingly well like Uesugi Kenshin.
I bring this up because the pink castle boss in the game is female. Her castle name is "Momosame" (literallypeach castle..) And she is a princess.... who is peach.... HMMmm... maybe Nintendo would do something with this?
The gold items that the ninja drop is currency. This is Ryo which is one of the currencies of the time period (its also popularly seen on meowth in pokemon who is a makei-neko aka waving cat)
medicine and sandals
in the game it drops food boxes and medicine pouches, this is what they looked like during the time period, they're called Inro and all the little slats open up to reveal medicine.
there's also Geta (japanese sandals) above in that image. This was not the usual choice for samurai or warriors in general so it's likely because they were easier to draw in pixel art that they were chosen to be represented like this.
Extra lives are given via shogi pieces. Somewhat of a meta joke because there's castle defenses in Shogi seen above.
Tanuki vases
tanuki statue
real tanuki
Your boxes you break for different weapons are tanuki statues. Tanuki is like a dog raccoon in Japan and is a symbol of luck shape shifting and disguise. they're a trickster but not inherently a bad spirit so it works for ninja. This is a statue of one and those circles are giant testicles. yes this is how all tanuki are displayed and it's an interesting history of tanuki with comically big balls because the animal itself has small testicles
I also believe those packages that have a string on them are bamboo boxes and might be a kasa and cape drop? I cannot tell lol.
This is an well known yokai, it's a demon, this is a hanya mask and you fight one of these
This is the demon lord daimyo, you can see more shoji screen in this castle.
Tengu are japanese yokai (spirits) and fly around hence the wind throwing
from what i've experienced most supernatural ones are yokai (shinto mythological creatures) or liberal takes on ninja powers.
If I missed anything or if there's any Jap questions lemme know
Modern Vintage Gamer did a pretty good video on the interesting look as to how Quake II was ported well onto the PlayStation One. As someone that doesn’t have an issue with the N64 or PC version, I always used to think the PS1 version was probably the best way to play this game if you couldn’t afford a PC.
Either way, it’s nice to see more people showing love to the PS1 version of Quake II. It’s making me want to buy the physical game as a collector‘s gift.
