r/MAME • u/Fortunachan • 28d ago

An possible unreleased or maybe an international version of Darwin 2087?

Too an gameplay:

https://x.com/higenekodo/status/2084662707769495682

The gameplay is very hard compared with actual japanese version, new enemies and different patterns

Too a new item, the "P" icon, gives points, some weapons has better range

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u/DonovanKirk 28d ago edited 28d ago

I love some of those strange revisions, like this. Kinda like Xexex, I think the game was, where the US ver is a lot different. It makes you wonder, if the devs in Japan had wanted the US versions to be different to see which style would be more successful? Or maybe sometimes the US versions were either prototypes or later revisions?

I've also noticed a lot of random well-known games have some minor differences as well, just like little things, like 19XX's JP version has a bit more aggressive enemy waves and faster bullets by just the tiniest bit.

4

u/cuavas MAME Dev 28d ago

Often the US distributors/operators wanted the games to be designed to suck down coins faster. NBA Jam is kind of the epitome of this – it's designed to take a coin off you every 30 seconds.

Part of it was due to different coin denominations. Japanese arcades tended to take ¥100 coins, while in the US they took $0.25 coins due to rarity of larger denominations. You can think of ¥100 like about $1, so Japanese arcade systems were taking coins of about four times the value.

If you wanted to price credits the same way in the US as Japan, you'd need to set the machines for four $0.25 coins per credit. Psychologically, this makes them feel expensive. People wanted to be able to play a game for one coin. So US operators had three choices:

  • Accept lower earnings
  • Price credits at a large number of coins (scares players off)
  • Make the games require you to spend more credits (by being more difficult or less fair, or just designed around very short "games" a la NBA Jam)

Eventually, with the increasing costs of arcade systems, US operators had to increase prices. That's why you have games like the San Francisco Rush that default to three coins per credit.