This is pretty cool! Randomly came across this tidbit, regarding one of my favorite Apple II games: "While Karateka only takes up Side A, Side B contains a copy of the game modified to play upside-down. According to Jordan Mechner, this was a practical joke by Brøderbund so tech support could have the delight of telling someone that their game was upside-down because...they put the disc in upside-down. Duh."
Were you aware that Mechner released an ebook that was basically a compilation of his journals while he developed Karateka? Considering it's one of your favorite Apple II games, you might find it interesting. I did just as a game developer. I never even heard of the game, I think I ran into it because he did the same with Prince of Persia.
It's called "The Making of Karateka". You can find it on Amazon. (Also "The Making of Prince of Persia")
All of my favorite games ever are the 2D-era RPGs that I didn't play when I was young: Fallout 2, Chrono Trigger, Zelda Link to the Past. While CT and Zelda are relatively polished, Fallout 2 stands out as a piece of programming crap: buggy and crashes every so often, contents were cut left and right -- but boy, do I love that game. I feel like 30% of the contents were cut in the final version.
Thankfully that game has an incredible amount of people who love it, and it must be known to most people who play Fallout 2 by now: the "recommended" way to play Fallout 2 was to install the Restoration Patch. It restores all the cut contents back, and makes the game feel way more completed. Fallout 2 RP is one of the best examples of community patches I have seen.
You could write almost the exact same post for Knights of the Old Republic II. Great game, but it's clear where they ran out of money.
Obduction seems like it ran out of money at the end as well. It's really well designed and polished, with logical Myst-style puzzles and Dark Souls-style shortcuts. And then the last "level" is 30 seconds long and followed up by an awful looking cutscene. I still recommend it if you like Myst, but it is incomplete.
In that case also go and have a look at Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. It was released 14 years ago and fans are still working on and releasing patches for it.
Re: Fallout 2, I never played it, started at Fallout 3, but one thing Ive observed playing Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, Oblivion and Skyrim, Bethesdas quality sucks. They may be good at creating a good rpg world and story, but the stability and quality of the underlying software sucks. From the crashes (which made New Vegas nearly unplayable at launch) to the stupidity of the AI followers (I need your help-wait where are you? Did I accidentally kill you? Nope, followed randomly shows up half our later like nothing was wrong).
Oh you absolutely have to play through the first two Fallout games, with appropriate restoration/community patches in place, of course.
They are milestones in CRPG storytelling, visual style, gameplay design and dark humor.
And if you want another game that follows in the same footsteps, give Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura a try. It's set in a fantasy world undergoing an industrial revolution, with all the friction between magic and tech that would result in. Like with FO1 and FO2, there are community patches to tweak the gameplay balance a bit (especially the one to boost firearms a bit, otherwise they're a bit weak compared to spells).
I agree with your point regardless but just a side note that New Vegas was actually dev'd by Obsidian and not Bethesda Game Studios like the rest of your examples.
But they used a lot of tech (like the game engine) from Bethesda Studio to develop New Vegas. (a bit like they developped KOTOR 2 and NWN 2 using tech from Bioware)
This site has an impressive collection of in-game anti-piracy measures that is worth checking out [1].
From Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES):
Checksum Verification - At the beginning of a level, a checksum is run on 544 bytes worth of code and data which includes all of the above tests, the PAL/NTSC region check and various initialization routines. If the checksum generated doesn't match the hardcoded value it compares against (i.e., the anti-piracy routines were tampered with), RAM address $7E0AFD, which holds the total number of screens in the level, is decremented by one. This punishes the player by causing the screen to stop scrolling just before reaching the goal in a level.[2]
Hm, interesting. Long time ago, I intentionally tried cracking games to detect anti-piracy methods, and Donkey Kong Countrty 2 was one of those, and I triggered the empty SRAM check while doing so (and added that to the TCRF page). I checked the game with more SRAM than the cartridge normally has, and... nothing??? Checking that is a very typical routine in SNES games, and yet... I simply assumed due to that it's the only check, and an incompetent one at that -- first, it would be more evil to let the game continue with no save RAM only for saves to not work, second, why not check for more RAM.
But then it turns out there are actually were more anti-piracy methods, and they are quite evil. Wow. I'm not surprised I did not find those considering how those worked however, I had no reason to change the ROM to add a crack intro.
Yeah, I've been a member there for a few years now. Great site, lots of interesting information about unused content in games. I personally worked on the pages for Wario Land 3, Wario Land 4 and Zelda Breath of the Wild, and will contribute a few more things later too.
