Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 576 Location: confirmed
Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:52 pm Post subject:
Not that I really wanna be part of any drama, but I always find it annoying when people start removing their old posts. It's like tampering with history and established information... :(
I'm all set with drama, and if these release aren't something people are interested in, it's totally understandable. It's not like I'm locking these away unless people kiss my ass, but if people here aren't interested, they aren't interested.
They're still getting put out there, anyone who wants to download them can do so without any difficulty as the ROMs are spread over a bunch of different sites.
Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 4192 Location: Oakland, CA
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:30 am Post subject:
Smeg wrote:
MrMark0673 wrote:
if people here aren't interested, they aren't interested.
Please don't take Frank's (non-inflammatory) response as representing anyone else's opinion but his own.
Apparently my honest response that was posted in an effort to make him feel better meant that we all hate him and his stupid ROMs. From now on I'll just post "cool thanks!" and not bother downloading the thing, like people do on the other boards.
Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 2103 Location: I hate you.
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 6:24 am Post subject:
TheRedEye wrote:
MrMark0673 wrote:
No love for a Castelian ROM with known differences I see...
Don't take it personally, most of us have been doing this for like nine or ten years now (any of you old timers remember how long ago that Mega Man 3 dump was? It might have actually been ten years!). I lost interest in "prototypes" a long time ago, I just don't care unless it's unreleased or a game I'm in love with.
I remember being so excited to win that fucking thing. Barely care now, man, I think it WAS ten years ago. Christ we got old.
Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 2103 Location: I hate you.
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 6:27 am Post subject:
MrMark0673 wrote:
Totally understandable, I got rid of the links for you.
I assume that your feelings were probably a little hurt, or you think Frank was being a dick, and I know you've posted since then and seen other people's responses and blah blah blah, but you really did overreact. Who cares of one guy cares or not? I thought it was interesting, even if I wasn't downloading either.
(Please don't take my post to be an attack, I don't mean it that way. And I am a dick.)
(Also, I hate it when people wipe out their posts, that sucks.)
I love the fact you are releasing these games, but as someone who spends a lot of time delving into prototypes for articles, I can't help but think that these things will become nothing more than an afterthought in some GoodNES torrent unless you put some efforts into documenting them. Hell, I have received prototype ROM images where the only difference was that they forgot to include the "licensed by Nintendo" line on the title screen, yet that information was found and put on my site. For example, I must have played Pirates of Dark Water (the one I am talking about in the previous sentence) for about 3 hours side-by-side with the final version just to be sure they were the same otherwise. Believe me, I hate Final Fight style games, and Pirates of Dark Water isn't exactly a high quality clone, so I take this pretty seriously.
But really, when it comes down to it, I suspect MrMark and BeaglePlus are only doing this because it strokes their ego to get attention for their releases. I love attention too, but I have found that such things are too niche to get a lot of response, especially if don't give people a reason to bother playing it over the final version (and really, most prototypes aren't worth playing over the final version).
But really, when it comes down to it, I suspect MrMark and BeaglePlus are only doing this because it strokes their ego to get attention for their releases.
Totally reasonable, but in all honesty, people will buy those releases regardless. Coin Heaven has been selling CIB repro's of ROMs that have been available for years without trouble and NGD is about to "release" Free Fall as a CIB. If that thing lasts a week without selling out, I'd be shocked. Don't get me wrong, I'd be pumped if this helped me sell copies of Kitty's Catch, but it's not the intent.
The reason most people don't dump and release their stuff is the "devaluing" of their protos. Since Matt and I have no intentions of selling our protos, we don't have to worry about any perceived value, so we just release them. The only reason we dump just one game a month is to attempt to keep some continued interest in prototype collecting and analyzing. That, and if we released them all together, we'd have little else to contribute to the community. I guess that could be looked at as selfish, but I'd like to contribute instead of just leech, and well, this is all I've got to contribute for the most part.
I'm not getting defensive, people over here honestly seem to care more about cataloged data than proto ROMs, and like Frank said, it's probably because you've been doing this for upwards of 10 years and countless ROMs that are much more interesting than these have been released. I'm guessing that the other communities seem to get a bit more excited about the protos because they rarely see this stuff, so it may be new and exciting.
I'd still like to contribute to the community, and I have some good stuff I can share, I'm just changing some of the stuff that I present. I have a VERY early Monster in my Pocket proto that I plan on taking a bunch of screen caps of and posting the differences here, and I can do something similar with all the other unreleased games I have.
As for posts I deleted, trust me, they were totally irrelevant. Many were just "bumps" for a new month and a new release. Nothing of historical significance was deleted, trust me
Anyway, sorry for the commotion. In the big scheme of things I don't think it's much of a big deal.
I think its just that a lot of us are only really fascinated by a proto of a released game, if it has significant or interesting changes. The Ducktales, Darkwing Duck, and early Batman with different cinema scenes are examples. Its not that we don't appreciate you releasing these, but when the games have minimal to no differences its kind of hard to really comment on anything other than "cool thanks for releasing it." I didn't post anything since I didn't really have anything constructive to say.
That Monster in my Pocket proto you mentioned sounds right up our alley. That proto sounds pretty awesome and I look forward to your postings about it. I love Konami Nes stuff so this will surely be fascinating to me.
Necro-bump, but I thought I'd chime in here as someone who's largely given up on beta-hunting.
I admit that I started my website primarily as a way to gain fame and fortune. I didn't really see eye to eye with Assembler and wanted to steal all of his readers. Creating a "popular" website based on unreleased gaming items is possible, but it's insanely expensive and ridiculously time consuming.
Everyone wants to see that cool pre-beta copy of Halo, but when you follow it up a month later with NBA 2K3 where the team stats haven't been implemented yet, people are going to be disappointed.
As Evan said, nobody wants to do the work for you. If you want people to be interested in your releases, you have to explain to them why they're special. If you're not willing to spend the time going through a game that you just spent hundreds of dollars on, why would anyone else? Even the people who do document this stuff do it as a sense of duty, not because it's any fun. Example: I have a copy of Morrowind here that's listed as pre-beta. Who wants to sit there and document all of the differences for a 500+ hour game?
To top it all off, only about 100 people on the planet are really interested in beta games for beta's sake. These are people who are genuinely interested in Yo-Noid before they changed the sky color from gray to blue. Unless the game is popular enough to have it's own following, nobody is going to care. When I released the Final Fantasy 7 concept art, I pulled in 150,000 unique visitors, Starcraft: Ghost had over 100,000. I got maybe 200 people when I put up the concept work from Marc Eckos' Getting Up. Nobody at all cared when I put up Disney's hand drawn concept art catalog from the 90's, even though it was probably the most interesting of the lot.
The audience is incredibly difficult to cultivate. The person who came to see halo doesn't give a flying fuck about Final Fantasy 7. And when you boil down the costs, it's just not worth it. I've spent thousands of dollars buying betas that turned out to be byte per byte identical to retail. Once I know the game matches retail, I can't resell it to make back some of the loss. The first thing any buyer asks is "What's different compared to retail?". Obviously no one wants to get stuck with a review build, and I'm not going to lie to them and say "I don't know".
A perfect example: I have an unreleased Xbox game, Kameo for the Xbox1, but the disc doesn't read. There's no physical damage, I just can't get an Xbox DVD drive to acknowledge the disc. I tried to get some donations in order to send the disc to a recovery specialist, but not one person supported the idea. It's an unreleased game made by Rare on a console that everyone and their mother could buy modded for $35, and nobody cared.
Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 576 Location: confirmed
Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 8:18 pm Post subject:
ProgrammingAce wrote:
A perfect example: I have an unreleased Xbox game, Kameo for the Xbox1, but the disc doesn't read. There's no physical damage, I just can't get an Xbox DVD drive to acknowledge the disc. I tried to get some donations in order to send the disc to a recovery specialist, but not one person supported the idea. It's an unreleased game made by Rare on a console that everyone and their mother could buy modded for $35, and nobody cared.
Find me a new paying job and I'll gladly shell out the money for that and other stuff again. But what you say is indeed true. It's absurdly hard to get people to actually donate/contribute to things like that. I've had some failed attempts at stuff, and I've pretty much gone into the task of doing everything myself (and out of my own pocket) after a few incidents were people agreed on sharing the tab on something, but then people started pulling out last minute. Leaving me with a slightly larger bar tab to pay than expected (someone had to fill in.)
Anyway, you pretty much gotta put on a show to drag in people for that kinda stuff it seems. I think it's 'cause people are more so there for the ride (or "experience") than the actual release itself. Like some sort of twisted combination of the movie Rat Race and an ARG.
Joined: 22 Dec 2005 Posts: 216 Location: baltimore, md
Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 10:38 pm Post subject:
good points, programmingace. in fact, i kind of touched upon a lot of these points in my introduction post on nintendoage, but sadly got even more emo about it with the walltext. its actually a real humorous read in the long run with a little bit of friendly venom involved just to test the waters there, i spoke with my feelings but i think i got the point across as to what a lot of us are feeling about that.
If I remember correctly, and I may not, I repaired 2 xboxes for free but took a month to send them back. I sold a guy 2 xboxes but forgot to include a dvd dongle (he thought one of them was broken, but later recanted when he realized he had the icons sorted wrong). And one guy sent me two xboxes to mod, both showed up broken, I replaced one of them for $10 when he got the other one back it didn't play dvds anymore. And I owe portnoid a copy of hoppin mad.
If I owe someone something, either post here or send me an email at ace@hackur.com and I'll do what I can. I don't seem to be able to login at DP.
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