BIL wrote: I also get the feeling that 1995's relatively rough Dracula XX was them hastily retreating to the proven ground of Nintendo consoles. No idea if there's any official commentary to back that up, though.
I always assumed that
Dracula XX, like
Snatcher on the Sega CD (which was released a year earlier), was only made so they could have some version of
Rondo of Blood localized for the overseas market, despite the end-result being much closer to something like the NES
Metal Gear than a faithful port of the original. They didn't even bother to make up new promo art for the U.S. version like they did in the other regions (the packaging and manual artwork are reused from the PC Engine version).
Konami's respective catalogs on the Mega Drive and PC Engine are pretty reflective on the popularity of those consoles in certain regions. Since the Mega Drive never quite took off in Japan, their games for that system were more catered towards western tastes: you had a couple of TMNT games, Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, a Contra, a Double Dribble, the two Lethal Enforcers games, the Sparkster series (which could be seen as a reaction to Sonic) and
Sunset Riders (which never had a console port in Japan). In contrast, their PC Engine library, which was Japan-exclusive, was all about the STGs (Gradius, ect.), with a single FTG (a genre that admittedly Konami was never strong at) and Tokimemo. Both consoles had their own Castlevania game (one of Konami's few IPs that was popular in every region) and their own version of
Snatcher, but the latter never really took off in the west as it did in Japan and only got some retroactive recognition later on due to MGS.
It's funny how Konami teased the idea of releasing a Mega CD version of
Snatcher as soon as they announced they would be supporting the Mega Drive in Japan, but they didn't even bother giving it a JP release when they finally got around to make it.
Metal Gear 2 was also teased around a bit in Beep! MD (at one point it was the most requested Konami game in their monthly column).
BIL wrote:Sumez wrote:
PCE Gradius and Parodius are both really cool in my book, as is Detana - but Gradius does require a minor slowdown caveat. It's nothing intolerable, just disappointing given the game's seniority over the others. I wonder if it was a hardware teething issue on Konami's part? My favourite aspect is the much warmer soundtrack - it's rather like PCE Tatsujin, in that regard.
PCE Gradius has an exclusive stage based on the MSX version if I'm not mistaken.