R-Type III for GBA--- released WITHOUT Irem's permission??

Zweihander · Post by **Zweihander** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 1:59 am

A friend of mine (highly knowledgeable on shmups) said something which gave the impression that R-Type III's horrible GBA port was in no way approved of by Irem; that the worthless hacks who ported it had NO idea what they were doing. Is it possible the game was so old, they managed to steal the copyrights to it from Irem, since Irem (last i heard) is only making pachinko machines at this point?

Any help or clarification would be appreciated. This has been bugging me for a while, and I can't find any other information online about the GBA port travesty.

Dylan1CC · Post by **Dylan1CC** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 2:18 am

One of the devs who worked on the port made a lengthy post on the last forum. He said the "support" from Irem was horrible and they had no source code for the game (other than sprites?) and they had to recreate it from the ground up. I don't think they stole anything, I mean Irem stil owns the rights. They would have sued and it surely wouldn't have gotten an official release. Heck, I visited the booth for the game @ E3 '02 and there was at least one Japanese representative there. Dunno if he was an Irem rep or what but it looked pretty "official" to me regardless of the port's quality.

Recap · Post by **Recap** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 2:21 am

Zweihander wrote:A friend of mine (highly knowledgeable on shmups) said something which gave the impression that R-Type III's horrible GBA port was in no way approved of by Irem; that the worthless hacks who ported it had NO idea what they were doing. Is it possible the game was so old, they managed to steal the copyrights to it from Irem, since Irem (last i heard) is only making pachinko machines at this point?

Any help or clarification would be appreciated. This has been bugging me for a while, and I can't find any other information online about the GBA port travesty.

Irem died. The company using Irem's name and IP's these days (Irem Software Engineering) is other different people, but they're still "Irem". I suppose Irem Software Engineering licenced R-Type III for that Euro company, but it may well be otherwise, you never know with this stuff. Japanese companies aren't really concerned about what happens to the licenced products for foreign markets, since they're not their games, just look at the recent Taito Legends case.

landshark · Post by **landshark** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:23 am

I think he posted that they didn't even get the sprites. I thought they had to rip them from the SNES version (emulation?)?

Zach Keene · Post by **Zach Keene** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:31 am

Yomigaero!

landshark · Post by **landshark** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 4:10 am

Looks like my memory didn't fail me for once

Nice find Zach.

Thunder Force · Post by **Thunder Force** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 1:30 pm

Zach Keene wrote:Yomigaero!

Strange that archive.org kept a copy of that topic but virtually none of the others.

Minzoku · Post by **Minzoku** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 2:11 am

Archive.org manages to save a lot of the pages I want to see without what I'm actually looking for

like, an art page, without the ONE image I was looking for

Post by **Icarus** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 2:22 am

Thunder Force wrote:Strange that archive.org kept a copy of that topic but virtually none of the others.

Heh. Bakraid high scores from waybackwhen (and the bar has been raised considerably since then). The topic discussing Edge's article on homebrew shmups - "wallet-friendly fire". And the old highscore forum, with inaccessible threads (I like the title of the Batrider one - "MODE7 DETHRONED" ^_- Garegga got a lot of play back then as well, by the looks of things).

I doubt it'd be possible to save all of the threads from the old forum via archive.org. The amount of data would be too huge to sift through.

extrarice · Post by **extrarice** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 4:48 pm

Dylan1CC wrote:One of the devs who worked on the port made a lengthy post on the last forum. He said the "support" from Irem was horrible and they had no source code for the game (other than sprites?) and they had to recreate it from the ground up. I don't think they stole anything, I mean Irem stil owns the rights. They would have sued and it surely wouldn't have gotten an official release. Heck, I visited the booth for the game @ E3 '02 and there was at least one Japanese representative there. Dunno if he was an Irem rep or what but it looked pretty "official" to me regardless of the port's quality.

Explains why it was such a piss-poor port. I was thrilled when I found it used, cheap at a game store...but was horribly disappointed within 30 seconds of turning it on.

highlandcattle · Post by **highlandcattle** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 7:26 pm

Your friend is a moron

extrarice · Post by **extrarice** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:59 pm

Sucks that Irem isn't really doing much more beyond Pachinko these days. I was poking around their Japanese website when I stumbled across their April Fools 2004 page, and it struck me that Irem's Japanese arm has a great sense of humor about themeslves, kind of like Blizzard.
I mean, Bydo-Burgers? "Fresh Cooking" (FC) and "Special Fresh Cooking" (SFC) Burger? Freaking hilarious.

Thunder Force · Post by **Thunder Force** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 12:52 am

extrarice wrote:Sucks that Irem isn't really doing much more beyond Pachinko these days.

Apparently they're currently working on an "action-adventure" Playstation3 game

shmups.system11.org

R-Type III for GBA--- released WITHOUT Irem's permission??

R-Type III for GBA--- released WITHOUT Irem's permission??

Re: R-Type III for GBA--- released WITHOUT Irem's permission

Re: R-Type III for GBA--- released WITHOUT Irem's permission