I just bought eight Watara Supervision games on eBay. This is despite the fact that I don't own a Supervision, and have no money with which to buy a Supervision. I also didn't have any money to buy the games, but hey. Maybe I'll post something about them here, even if I just end up taking the piss out of the boxart.
Got most of the stuff back, thanks to the MSN Search cache, of all things (Google seems to have dropped 90% of the site, for some damn reason). The only thing missing was the The Dragon page, but I had a local copy of that which I'm pretty sure is (nearly) identical to the last version on the site.
Seems like Serverway got hacked. Bloody hell. All files starting with "index" have been replaced by some "fuck Israel/America" page ("IF You Stop War We Will Be Stop Hacking" because, of course, no one has more influence over the US and Israeli governments than a small hosting company) - 505 and Simple pages still work (except the developer pages), most of the other things don't. I'll try to get everything back up tomorrow, assuming Serverway don't fix it themselves.
update: serverway are doing precisely fuck-all. also i don't seem to have local copies of some of the files, so i may have to try and grab them from the caches of other random computers i've used to view the pages. bollocks.
So I went off on another weird tangent, said tangent being The Dragon, a (predictably shite) Taiwanese game about Bruce Lee using sprites ripped from Mortal Kombat and sounds ripped from Sachen games. I'd say something about other things that may be on the way, but that would be bullshit.
okay, maybe it's not as fucked as I thought. disregard that.
computer's fucked. doubt this place will see any updates for a while.
Alright, I'm tired, so I'll make this quick. That thing I said about an update having to do with Taiwan? Yeah. I expanded it to cover pretty much all unlicensed Asian console development though. It's all entirely preliminary and a work in progress and whatnot, eventually I'll at least have pages for all the developers.
It seems, judging from the Rule of Rose coverart here, that 505 GameStreet is planning a name change to "505 Games". Which is fair enough, really - the original name always seemed a bit stupid to me. Their recent acquisitions, though - Rule of Rose, Steambot Chronicles, Wild Arms 4 - all seem to indicate somewhat of a change in direction for the company. Having lost the Simple series to D3P Europe, they're becoming less of a budget publisher and more of a European equivalent to the likes of Atlus USA. Which can only be a good thing, really. It'll be interesting to see where the Simply 20 series goes from here, though, if anywhere - personally I'd like to see it continue as a home for the more quirky, low-budget, obscure titles from tiny developers, stuff that'd never really shift at full price. Like Midas used to be, back when their budget line included the likes of Xtreme Express, Battle Construction Vehicles and that Grappler Baki game (which, by all accounts, was shite, but that's not the point) - games you'd never expect to see the light of day outside Japan. Maybe that's too much to ask, though.
(by the way, sorry about that last update. I'll get my computer fitted with a breathalyser or something. And, for the record, I have no problem with blogs. Blogs are great. At least, when they're done well, and actually used as blogs instead of a half-arsed substitute for a proper website.)
you may noticed that i'm making some half-arsed political statement on my stupid website about video games. might not do much, but if one person under some repressive government can read snippets of banned websites while looking for information about cheap japanese games, it was worth it. maybe. what? no i'm not updating while somewhat intoxicated. i would never do that. shame on you for suggesting such a thing. super next update might have something to do with taiwan, but don't count on it. there are other things i might be inclined to say here, but this isn't some damn blog or something. maybe i c⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮⋮these drunken ramblings are now lost in the mists of time...
Whatever I said about not doing the Simple1500 series because it would be too much of an undertaking? Yeah, forget that. As it turns out, a couple of years back, I actually covered the entire 1500 series for a site that didn't get off the ground. Then I forgot about it. So rediscovering that has certainly made things easier, and as such this. No developer info as yet, because I want to double-check that.
