W_PG is back with an informative video clearing up some commonly-traded bits of gaming information. (27 minutes)
Some of the corrected facts therein:
- Metroid’s famous JUSTIN BAILEY password was not a secret hardcoded password included by the developers, the fact that it worked was completely accidental.
- Secret of Evermore didn’t use Secret of Mana’s engine (despite apparent simularities), and was never intended to be a sequel to Secret of Mana, nor did it replace Seiken Densetsu III in Square’s US release schedule.
- The Mega Drive II (released in the US as the Genesis, as opposed to the Sega Genesis) did not remove the original’s Z80 co-processor, it just used a smaller version of it in a different package.
- The Atari Jaguar didn’t claim its system was “64-bit” by adding up the bits of two 32-bit processors, it was a lot more complicated than that and the system contained 16, 32 and 64-bit components. (Measuring by bitness is often misleading anyway.)
- There was a claim that Satoru Iwata himself implemented compression in Pokemon Gen 2 (Gold/Silver/Crystal) that allowed the Kanto region from Gen 1 to be included as well. Iwata did implement compression for Gen 2, but it was to increase decompression speed, not to save more space.
- Eternal Darkness: Challenge From the Dark Side on Sega CD didn’t use an Amiga-like Hold-And-Modify mode to display 256 colors at once. This game doesn’t display that many colors anyway, it uses dithering to increase the apparent number of colors onscreen.
- And finally, a pretty well-known fact now: the mirror room in Super Mario 64 doesn’t reflect the room that Mario is in, but just renders another copy of Mario that echoes his movements, reversed.
