For all big Viewpoint (Neo•Geo) fans

[Gemant]

Good morning to everyone.
I would like to inform the international Neo·Geo community that I created an in-depth analysis research document, about the notorius shoot'em up Viewpoint for the Neo·Geo system.
I planned to use all of the knowledge at my disposal, matured since 1992 to realise a complete document, titled "All about Viewpoint", with which I examined in depth any possible aspect, both the commercial and the historical ones, to the most hidden details on playability and score system.
This work had been originally conceived with the purpose of being presented just to an Italian audience, therefore an ample window is dedicated to details pertinent to the Italian distribution of the product. However, later on, I developed several topics further than I initially expected, finding rare information through a heavy translation work that was extended to dozens of different sources. Approximately a hundred magazines have been examined, coming from Japan, USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy. Given that a good ~85% of content could be previously unknown to a Western audience, I decided to take one step forward and present the project in English language too, to make it available to an international public.

Have a nice read.

https://www.mameretroavengers.com/doc/A ... rsion).pdf

[Steven]

Cool. I skimmed through the English version briefly, and I'll go about reading it properly eventually, but I found something that might be worth mentioning.

In this part

A system of bonuses, more often hidden ones, that rewarded the player with a higher inspiration to find them, thanks to a bonus resembling a golden star of the increasing value of 500, 1000, 3310 [iconic Sammy score: that is san (3) from Chinese, mi (3) from Japanese, i (1) from Chinese], 5000, 10000, 33100, 50000 and that could reach the top at the unusual value of 81.560 points [iconic score of the software house Aicom / Aigom: ha (8) from Chinese, i (1) from Chinese, go (5) from Chinese, mu (6) from Japanese.

Those number readings are actually all from Japanese, and what you are actually looking at is the onyomi and kunyomi readings; onyomi is derived from the original Chinese readings, but it is still a Japanese reading and it is very common for the onyomi readings to differ from the actual Chinese readings, and that does actually seem to be the case with numbers.

[Mero]

Thanks for doing this, this game has a lot of secrets.

[spmbx]

Thanks, interesting read and still a great game!

Fixed link: (pdf is 380mb)
https://www.mameretroavengers.com/doc/A ... rsion).pdf

[Gemant]

I'd like to do a thorough job like this for all my favorite games (I've already done a book for Golden Axe of 100 pg. but it's not translated into English). Unfortunately, it takes a long time to make such accurate work. Furthermore, it is necessary to recover original documents and magazines not present on the web which can take months to be found.

The next work will be Pulstar.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

The next work will be Pulstar.

Wow, I'm looking forward to that. Used to play that a lot in the late 90s, it still holds up extremel well.

[spmbx]

Great, pulstar/blazing star/Last Resort are still some of my go-to casual games. Would be great if you could focus on reducing the filesize though, 380mb is a bit too excessive for a pdf with a few pictures I'm guessing you used some hugeass uncompressed images or something?

[gray117]

Keep it up

... Not a viewpoint fan but still an interesting dig, travelling so will likely read on the plane a bit more.

Pulstar version would be very interesting.