Konami may have already had a whip-wielding adventurer at the forefront with Simon Belmont, but that didn’t stop them from aping Indiana Jones with this Famicom project. At least the people in Japan got to play a 3D game or two that weren’t completely colored in red. Sure, it was a failure, but the US did receive Virtual Boy (that other failed 3D visor from Nintendo) a few years later. Unfortunately, the 3D peripheral was a bust and was never released outside of Japan. It was also available to play with the Famicom’s 3D visor accessory. Maybe North America was better off without that insane 8-bit adventure from the psychotic principal in Battle Royale, but there were hundreds of other Famicom games that never made it to the NES, and that list includes some real gems. For instance, there’s the infamous 1986 Taito release Takeshi no Chōsenjō: a vanity project from Japanese actor Beat Takeshi that was not only intentionally obtuse in its design but featured a section where you had to sing karaoke into your Famicom controller’s microphone. Sometimes, the games were held back due to cultural differences or hardware restrictions. So many games appeared on both the Famicom and the NES, but a surprising number of titles never made that journey across the world in their day. Of course, not all of those developers’ ideas made it to the West. by 1985, they definitely had a grasp on both the hardware and some crucial console game design principles. That gap gave Japanese developers time to work out some technical kinks and build up enough of a library to ensure that. For gamers in the US, the two-year gap was a godsend. Two years later, it was released in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), just in time for the console’s first true crown jewel release, Super Mario Bros. In 1983 Japan released the Famicom, which changed gaming forever.
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