Tecmo added different sets of omake images on the Japanese and US versions of Dead or Alive 2. Tina to the left there and the seven pics below the jump are from the US version of the game and the next five are taken from the Japanese Limited Edition release. I’ll need to see if the Japanese standard edition of the game has the same bikini shots as the US version, but I actually prefer the art from the LE disc a lot more.
More updates to come later tonight and tomorrow – stay tuned…
Aha… some US Dreamcast games got omake files after all. Here’s a two-page comic and two gorgeous posters from Elemental Gimmick Gear (E.G.G.), Hudson Soft’s interesting Action/RPG which originally started life as a Sega Saturn game before being moved over to the DC. The US cover art was pretty terrible and it’s surprising to me that neither of the two posters were used instead. Ah well – the game is actually really well done, featuring hand drawn art, polygon boss battles (added to beef the game up a bit to Dreamcast quality visuals) and a nice mix of puzzles and combat reminiscent of a Legend of Zelda game. The intentionally odd localization is a bit off-putting if you’re a grammar purist, but I like the way language is used throughout the game as it adds to the feeling of being on another world.
Want more? OK, below the four E.G.G. illustrations are four CG images from The Lost Golem, Caramelpot’s super-cute and quirky puzzle game (also never released outside of Japan). This one’s a bit rare, but can be found for not too much money these days (well, the last time I checked it was pretty inexpensive compared to the more in-demand DC imports out there)…
While doing a bit of computer maintenance today, I decided on a whim to dink around with a few Dreamcast games by popping them in my PC and seeing if there were any hidden art or music files. I’d been curious about this for a while, as a few years back I wrote an article about Redbook audio tracks on CD games for Digital Press and was thinking about doing some sort of update. Back when the Dreamcast was released in the US, I popped a few discs into my PC at the time and found only text files with copyright info and occasionally, a game credits listing, and after a few of the same bunches of nothing, I retired the idea.
Flash forward to earlier today and I’m looking on my Japanese copy of D2 for cool stuff, only to find nothing except the usual three files. Then, I grabbed my copy of Seventh Cross and “bingo!* omake surprises galore, all some interesting (and intentionally amusing in a few cases) CG artwork that was removed from the US version, Seventh Cross Evolution. Below are the images from the hidden gallery (the second image gallery file on the disc features some of the same images, but in a higher resolution). I went through a bunch of other DC games as well, but I’ll run those images starting sometime next week… or sooner, if I knock out enough reformatting work to take a break.
Oh, I actually DID find some cool D2 stuff on an import disc or two, but not where I thought it would be. More on that in a bit…
Well, it’s weird, I’ll admit it, but I have to say that both my 360 and PS3 collections are VERY fluid. As in games come in, get played and traded/sold faster than with anything else I’ve collected. I’ve probably owned close to 200 – 250 games for the console, but here’s what I have at the moment, minus about 15 titles out on loan. I have a few region-free imports as you can see, but I’m not much interested in a Japanese 360 at the moment (other than a ton of cool shmups we never got here that I’m not too interested in playing and a few interesting titles I might like, I’m not urgently pursuing an import console). Yeah, that Shadow Ops DVD should have gone in the Xbox library, but it was on the bottom of a stack of games that I just got around to relocating (oops).
What’s left of my N64 and Famicom/Famicom Disk collections plus some loose Super Famicom games I didn’t add with the boxed stuff a while back. As with all of the library pics, the collections here are much smaller than they were a few years back, but I’d say the Famicom stuff has been condensed the most overall, as it was around 150+ games at one point. I do miss my N64 imports (Bangai-o, Wonder Project J2 and Neon Genesis Evangelion among others) and most of the bunch of other stuff I don’t have these days, but that’s the way that ball bounces, I suppose. Oh well – once I’m rolling in loot from my world domination plans, I’ll grab a plane to Game Central and clean out a few places again. That is, provided the world doesn’t blow up before then…
This collection is now about 1/4 of the size of what it once was, but still has some nice titles in it along with a few commons and a bunch of duds. *Yes, I stuck in all the NIGHTS demos and versions from the US and UK, but those were in the same shelf space, so I figured I may as well run them here. I’ll get to my smallish US Saturn library at some point. It’s up in a closet with my US Sega CD stuff (also slimmed down dramatically) and I need to see what’s leftover after a few on and off years of whittling it down. Now, if Sega would FINALLY get wise and do a Sega Saturn collection of some of those games I no longer have, I’d be a much happier man…
Oops. I’d forgotten to add these big box sets in the earlier photos, so here you go. With the exception of ZXE-D: Legend of Plasmatlite, everything’s been played. I haven’t actually had the will to snap together those robots in that big box and get someone else to sit down in front on the TV to try the game out, but if I ever stumble across a second box one fine day, I’ll actually play the game. I’m not expecting Soul Calibur or anything resembling a great fighter, mind you. But it should be good for some mindless fun for all the work it takes to build those robots. Oh well. maybe I’ll go track down a copy of Panekit instead. That’s an import I’ve been wanting for a long time. Oh, if you want to know what’s inside that big ZXE-D box, there’s an old, but in depth post HERE, courtesy of NCS. I had a couple more (Mars Story, a few Square Millennium boxes, special Dual Shock controller/game/t-shirt bundles and others, but I had to condense things because I’m out of room here).
Like all of the other libraries here, this was a bit bigger a few years back, but has shrunk a bit over the years. I’ve got a few nice guides that list every game made for the console (outside of demo discs from magazines and trial version discs, which I’d love to see more of at some point). As usual, far too many RPG’s never made it to the US and that’s too bad considering the quality of a lot of the ones here. It’s also too bad horror-themed or other adventure games like Moonlight Syndrome (or heck, the entire Syndrome series), Silver Jiken, Dark Messiah and others. Yes, I do like racing games and almost anything with a mech or mecha in it (which means I still have a lot of stuff to play that I haven’t yet). Super rare stuff like Rakugaki Showtime, Xanac x Xanac, Geppy-X, Double Dragon and a few more have been sold off for a while, but it was great to have experienced all of those while they were here. I think that’s everything I have left, but we’ll see if anything turns up as I get to the rest of the library in 2012…
Yikes. I hadn’t realized that I’d sold off more than half of what I had until I started going through my PS2 stuff. Most of it was budget-priced Simple 2000 stuff, launch/launch window titles and a few oddities. Still, I thought I had a bit more than what’s here. Hey, as long as I have my Chikyuu Boueigun and Onechanbara games plus some of the other fun stuff here, I’m set. Of course, I’ve played a LOT more imports than I actually own and thankfully, my PS1 collection is a lot larger (although it’s shrunk a bit over time from the insane pile it once was). Then again, I’m still nowhere near the back end of the tower of games yet, so a few more PS2 imports may spring up in the coming weeks. We shall see…
Yes, it’s a tiny selection, but hey, I’m working on it (albeit very sloooowly, thanks to not having any spare funds these days). Anyway, the good, the bad and the ugly here, as in Metal Wolf Chaos, Gene Troopers and Muzzle Flash. MWC is simply awesome (and a wee bit controversial, although a US demo was released), Gene Troopers is mostly awful but REALLY interesting as the weapons selection is amazing (and Insomniac Games would be proud of most of the guns here) and some of the visuals shine. Muzzle Flash is quite frankly, one of the worst games I’ve ever played for a few reasons I listed here. At least CT Special Forces, while equally hard and cheap, can actually be completed and is often intentionally hilarious. MF is just a total “m-f” to play and is one of those games it seems ONLY the folks who made it ever completed. When you lend a game out to six people and get it back with almost the EXACT same response, that’s a bad sign. I keep it around because I’m going to keep pecking away until I can complete it past the second stage (but it’s NOT on my bucket list, that’s for sure)…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 