What are some misunderstandings about games that you think need to be cleared up?
Not playground rumors or “Mew under the truck” type legends, just things that people falsely assume is true.
Some examples I’m thinking of:
Belief: Doom was installed on a pregnancy test.
Reality: Foone, the creator of the Doom pregnancy test, simply put a screen and microcontroller inside a pregnancy test’s plastic shell. Notably, this was not intended to be taken seriously, and was done as a bit of a shitpost.
Belief: The original PS3 model is the only one that can play PS1 discs through backwards compatibility.
Reality: All PS3 models are capable of playing PS1 discs.
Belief: The Video Game Crash of 1983 affected the games industry worldwide.
Reality: It only affected the games industry in North America.
Belief: GameCube discs spin counterclockwise.
Reality: GameCube discs spin clockwise.
Belief: Luigi was found in the files for Super Mario 64 in 2018, solving the mystery behind the famous “L is Real 2401” texture exactly 24 years, one month and two days after the game’s original release.
Reality: An untextured and uncolored 3D model of Luigi was found in a leaked batch of Nintendo files and was completed and ported into the game by fans. Luigi was not found within the game’s source code, he was simply found as a WIP file leaked from Nintendo.
What other gaming misconceptions do you see people mistakenly believe?
Belief: The original PS3 model is the only one that can play PS1 discs through backwards compatibility.
Reality: All PS3 models are capable of playing PS1 discs.
it is the only model that can play PS2 discs tho. the 20 and 60 GB models had the emotion engine chip and the 80 GB had software emulation at first, which affected some compatibility
My recent comments on the Lunar series are attempts to work through a lot of myths, including some I had believed. Three big ones:
Belief: Working Designs changed the difficulty on all of their games to be harder. Reality: Working Designs did make Lunar Silver Star Story Complete more difficult, largely by boosting some enemy/boss stats and reducing XP/Silver gains from monsters (TCRF). The prior Sega CD games were similarly changed. Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Complete was not changed in difficulty. The current remaster represents the original Japanese version’s difficulty for both games, so to Working Designs veterans, the first game may seem easier but the second is the same.
Belief: Working Designs included elements of Eternal Blue Complete that GungHo inexplicably left out, making GungHo’s version less faithful. Reality: Working Designs added material to the Playstation version that the Japanese developers omitted but that was in the Sega CD version. Some additional scenes have voice acting and some additional musical changes are made in the Working Designs version alone. GungHo is a more faithful reproduction of the Japanese Playstation version, whereas Working Design’s version tries to reintroduce elements of the Sega CD version they liked.
Belief: In the recent remaster, GungHo removed so many of the 1990s references from the Working Designs script. Reality: (Work in progress) Playing through Lunar 2, I have noticed more text included verbatim from the Working Designs version than I thought, including references to The Fugitive, Austin Powers, and related works.
If I had to explain after the fact the editing rule in GungHo, it’s that they removed only explicitly inflammatory language (e.g., “retard”) or allusions that don’t stand on their own for people who don’t get them (e.g., explicitly mentioning Austin Powers by name would be cut, but riffing on lines from the films appears to have been kept). Other things, including PG-13 humor, are generally kept. (There is still a book in Vane that is very sticky for adult reasons.)
Some other things, like a joke about Bill Clinton in Lunar 2, were not cut by GungHo because they were only in the Sega CD version and not the Playstation version. People tend to forget that later Working Designs self-edited more.
I actually looked over the PS1 script specifically to figure out to what extent, if any, Working Designs copy-pasted from the Sega CD script - the Lunar fandom was concerned because they’d done basically that with Silver Star Story. The verdict? They did copy-paste a few things very early on, but otherwise couldn’t have after that point. The games are simply too different to allow it. It is, for the most part, an original translation.
That’s not to say they didn’t fuck up the translation. In fact, they could get prettyweird with their revisions.
As usual, Kimimi (please come back to the forums, @Kimimi!) has some excellent commentary that covers exactly this point
Remember the NES’ utter dominance of the 8-bit era? Or the terrible video game crash 1983? I don’t and unless you’ve lived in America you don’t either; but you’ve no doubt been repeatedly told about the importance of these epochal events even though they are about as relevant to PAL gaming history as fierce playground arguments over the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga are to anyone reading this outside of Europe.
This might be well-known, but I learned recently that “Blast Processing” was actually a real (if non-consequential) thing and not just marketing rubbish SEGA made up for the Genesis.
Okay well sure, but there was a specific application of the Genesis’ hardware that was referred to as “blast processing” in its technical manuals. It wasn’t based on nothing.
In the version of the story that I was familiar with it was a completely made-up term and not a real thing that marketing people tried to gas up to be something it wasn’t.
There’s been a real popular shift against this myth in the last few years. but the intensity of the opposition has stepped up a notch in the last 18 months or so, as people tie it in to other examples of American cultural dominance erasing history.
