last nite i fired up "quarth" for the first time in mame & couldn't believe my eyes:
the game has a cool steampunk-ship (introduced in a neatly animated title-screen) opposed to the generic spaceship that is used in the western version that is "block hole" - now the whole setting of the game (the moon w/ face etc.) starts to make sense to me!
the only other arcade-game i can think of where different sprites were used for the market outside japan is "demon's world / horror story" - can anyone name some other games that got their ingame-grafics changed to appeal more to us westerners?
Not sure if you're looking for arcade games only here, but there's a whole bunch of cases like these in NES/Famicom games. Though some of them are more about removing offensive content (Bionic Commando with its nazi imagery) or working with technical limitations (Castlevania III lacked the VRC6 chip), there's also a good bunch of games where graphics indeed changed just to appeal to westerners more. There's Panic Restaurant where the main character was changed to look like Chef Boyardee, in Wrath of Black Manta the manga-like cutscenes were replaced with more "realistic" looking ones, in Power Blade the main character looks more like Schwarzenegger than the Mega Man-esque man he originally was, in Journey to Silius the player sprite is different...and so on.
No matter how good a game is, somebody will always hate it. No matter how bad a game is, somebody will always love it.
sorry for not making it clearer: i am just looking for arcade-games (as i'm aware that these kinds of changes were quite common in home-releases e.g. "contra / probotector"-series)
There are different sprites for both the original JPN & USA versions of Daioh arcade PCB, especially the American Sammy version of the same name. Just use a 2-pin header on a certain jumper and check it out for yourself.
That ship (it features on the X68000 release of Quarth) and a number of other funky ones (one looks like Bullwinkle's head...) are available in the European GB Collection release of Block Hole. The cover art shows the original ship too, I think. This was a Game Boy Color (colorized) release of a Japanese release, with the game order switched around some. I'll be interested to compare that to the original European release.
I already knew that the "Probotector" release (and probably the Castlevanias as well) in the GB Collection release was actually the Japanese version, because it had the usual characters instead of the European robots (I wonder if they dodged the standards committees there).
Ghegs wrote:in Wrath of Black Manta the manga-like cutscenes were replaced with more "realistic" looking ones,
"Business reasons." Best reason for kidnapping kids ever given. (I have that one memorized.) Worth mentioning that the original is Ninja Cop Saizou.
It's been mentioned in the past with the changes to the U.S. version of Gun-Nac on the NES platform compared to it's original JPN Famicom cartridge counterpart. Crazy Gunhed//Blazing Lazers shmup clone infused with parody elements on the ol' Famicom/NES.
