Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Golf - AAAGG - 70% (5)
Power Mission - BAAA - 38% (4)
RoboCop (GB) - BBGAAA - 42% (6)
Space Invaders (Japan) - AAAABB - 33% (6)
Sunsoft Grand Prix - BBAABB - 17% (6)
Tetris - GGGGGGGGGGGG - 100% (12) (3 SR)
It was nice to see Tetris getting a lot of votes and some SRs. As I mentioned in the final results for Saturn, not many SRs were given out in those topics, so I hope we'll see more of them here.
Games for this topic:
Astro Rabby
Boxxle
Final Fantasy Legend
NBA All-Star Challenge
Revenge of the Gator
Shanghai
It's interesting to me to see how many of these early Japanese titles eventually made their way to the US, sometimes years later. On other systems you wouldn't be surprised to see something like Boxxle or Shanghai remain exclusive to Japan, but they both have US releases, the only Japan-exclusive here is Astro Rabby (and it has full english text). I guess the relative simplicity of many GB games probably made them somewhat easier to localize.
Monday, October 13, 2025
GAB PS1 #200 - Catan, Chris Kamara's Street Soccer, Tomorrow Never Dies
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Afraid Gear Another - GG - 100% (2)
Courier Crisis - GGAB - 63% {4}
Divide, The: Enemies Within - AAG - 67% (3)
Surf Riders - BB - 0% (2)
Xenocracy - AB - 25% (2)
ZeiramZone - GA - 75% (2)
I thought Courier Crisis rated much lower on Saturn, but it actually rated 60% {5} there. It seems like it's always divisive.
Games for this topic:
007: Tomorrow Never Dies
Catan
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer
Soccer Kid
Team Losi RC Racer
Tozan RPG, The
Yeah, I don't really have anything too crazy for topic 200. PS1 is the first system to reach this milestone, the previous longest-running system, SNES, only made it to topic 180. Don't worry though, we've still got lots more to go.
Last Topic's Ratings:
Afraid Gear Another - GG - 100% (2)
Courier Crisis - GGAB - 63% {4}
Divide, The: Enemies Within - AAG - 67% (3)
Surf Riders - BB - 0% (2)
Xenocracy - AB - 25% (2)
ZeiramZone - GA - 75% (2)
I thought Courier Crisis rated much lower on Saturn, but it actually rated 60% {5} there. It seems like it's always divisive.
Games for this topic:
007: Tomorrow Never Dies
Catan
Chris Kamara's Street Soccer
Soccer Kid
Team Losi RC Racer
Tozan RPG, The
Yeah, I don't really have anything too crazy for topic 200. PS1 is the first system to reach this milestone, the previous longest-running system, SNES, only made it to topic 180. Don't worry though, we've still got lots more to go.
GAB SAT Final Results
Last Topic's Ratings:
Dark Seed 2 - GB - 50% (2)
Willy Wombat - 83% (3) -> GAG - 83% (3) (1 SR)
In the end, the score for Willy Wombat stayed the same. This is actually a fairly common result for the revote topics. I kind of like it, it shows that we remain largely consistent even as the years go by. It gives GAB an enduring quality that makes me think even if we did this 10 years earlier or later it wouldn't change too much.
GAB Stats for Saturn:
- We rated 621 games over 105 topics. This took almost exactly 4 years.
- Of the 621 games rated, 248 (40%) were in the high range, 175 (28.2%) were in the medium range, and 198 (31.8%) were in the low range.
- This is an above-average amount of games in the high range, but also a fairly high number of games in the low range. This was the first GAB where the medium range was the least-populated.
- My first thought was that this was probably mostly due to low-effort PS1 ports clogging up the low range, so I did some digging to see if this was the case:
- Of the 248 games in the high range, 111 of them are also available on PS1. Of the 198 games in the low range, 101 of them are also available on PS1.
- So it does seem to be the case that Saturn's exclusive games are of higher quality on average than its multiplats, though I was surprised that almost half of the games in the low range are exclusive. I guess Saturn actually has more exclusive games than people sometimes think.
- 17 users gave a total of 76 SRs to 60 different games. The game with the most SRs was Bulk Slash, with 4.
- This is by far the fewest number of SRs given for any GAB. It's also the most widely distributed set of SRs.
- The most voted game was Panzer Dragoon, with 12 votes. Sonic R and Die Hard Arcade tied for second with 11.
- This is also by far the lowest of any GAB.
- There is a 3-way tie for the game with the most amount of ratings to have a 100% score, between Panzer Dragoon 2, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, and Shining Force 3, all with 9. Panzer Dragoon 2 had the most SRs with 2 of these three.
- The game with the most votes and a 0% rating was Revolution X with 7.
Final Thoughts:
Saturn was an interesting but also challenging system to run. Of all the GABs we've run so far, this was the one where I had the least experience with the system coming in, so much of it was new to me. This was also the system where we covered the most Japan-only titles, both because the system has so many and because I was more permissive with what types of titles I would allow. As the lower vote counts can generally attest, these sorts of games remain inaccessible to many, which is unfortunate. Almost all of my favourite finds from the Saturn library are Japan-exclusive and I wish more people could play them. However, during the time we've been running the Saturn GAB we've seen huge advances in AI which may eventually render these sorts of localization barriers a thing of the past. There's definitely quite a few games I'd like to come back to here if they ever received a fan translation, but maybe the day is coming where we won't have to wait. Of course, AI will never be perfect, but even the translation tools I have on my phone are a huge game-changer compared to where we were a decade ago. When translating Dark Seed 2 and then later comparing footage of the PC version, I was surprised how many times the phone translation was word for word accurate to the official English script. There's definitely a lot of potential there and it's one of the areas where I'm most excited for future developments.
Of course, the mission of GAB continues on. If you enjoyed Saturn GAB, I'd recommend taking a gander over at Gameboy GAB, which has just begun. Like Saturn, Gameboy has a ton of obscure Japanese exclusive games, and this time when making the Gameboy list I allowed virtually everything, even moreso than with Saturn, as the simplicity of these games and the general lack of Kanji makes them easier to translate than ever before. It's over on the Gameboy Color board if you want to check it out.
Dark Seed 2 - GB - 50% (2)
Willy Wombat - 83% (3) -> GAG - 83% (3) (1 SR)
In the end, the score for Willy Wombat stayed the same. This is actually a fairly common result for the revote topics. I kind of like it, it shows that we remain largely consistent even as the years go by. It gives GAB an enduring quality that makes me think even if we did this 10 years earlier or later it wouldn't change too much.
GAB Stats for Saturn:
- We rated 621 games over 105 topics. This took almost exactly 4 years.
- Of the 621 games rated, 248 (40%) were in the high range, 175 (28.2%) were in the medium range, and 198 (31.8%) were in the low range.
- This is an above-average amount of games in the high range, but also a fairly high number of games in the low range. This was the first GAB where the medium range was the least-populated.
- My first thought was that this was probably mostly due to low-effort PS1 ports clogging up the low range, so I did some digging to see if this was the case:
- Of the 248 games in the high range, 111 of them are also available on PS1. Of the 198 games in the low range, 101 of them are also available on PS1.
- So it does seem to be the case that Saturn's exclusive games are of higher quality on average than its multiplats, though I was surprised that almost half of the games in the low range are exclusive. I guess Saturn actually has more exclusive games than people sometimes think.
- 17 users gave a total of 76 SRs to 60 different games. The game with the most SRs was Bulk Slash, with 4.
- This is by far the fewest number of SRs given for any GAB. It's also the most widely distributed set of SRs.
- The most voted game was Panzer Dragoon, with 12 votes. Sonic R and Die Hard Arcade tied for second with 11.
- This is also by far the lowest of any GAB.
- There is a 3-way tie for the game with the most amount of ratings to have a 100% score, between Panzer Dragoon 2, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, and Shining Force 3, all with 9. Panzer Dragoon 2 had the most SRs with 2 of these three.
- The game with the most votes and a 0% rating was Revolution X with 7.
Final Thoughts:
Saturn was an interesting but also challenging system to run. Of all the GABs we've run so far, this was the one where I had the least experience with the system coming in, so much of it was new to me. This was also the system where we covered the most Japan-only titles, both because the system has so many and because I was more permissive with what types of titles I would allow. As the lower vote counts can generally attest, these sorts of games remain inaccessible to many, which is unfortunate. Almost all of my favourite finds from the Saturn library are Japan-exclusive and I wish more people could play them. However, during the time we've been running the Saturn GAB we've seen huge advances in AI which may eventually render these sorts of localization barriers a thing of the past. There's definitely quite a few games I'd like to come back to here if they ever received a fan translation, but maybe the day is coming where we won't have to wait. Of course, AI will never be perfect, but even the translation tools I have on my phone are a huge game-changer compared to where we were a decade ago. When translating Dark Seed 2 and then later comparing footage of the PC version, I was surprised how many times the phone translation was word for word accurate to the official English script. There's definitely a lot of potential there and it's one of the areas where I'm most excited for future developments.
Of course, the mission of GAB continues on. If you enjoyed Saturn GAB, I'd recommend taking a gander over at Gameboy GAB, which has just begun. Like Saturn, Gameboy has a ton of obscure Japanese exclusive games, and this time when making the Gameboy list I allowed virtually everything, even moreso than with Saturn, as the simplicity of these games and the general lack of Kanji makes them easier to translate than ever before. It's over on the Gameboy Color board if you want to check it out.
Monday, September 29, 2025
GAB GBC #2 - Golf, Space Invaders (Japan), Tetris
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Alleyway - AGAGGAGA - 75% (8)
Baseball - AGAAAGB - 57% (7)
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle - AAGAAAA - 57% (7)
Master Karateka - ABA - 33% (3)
Super Mario Land - GGGGGGGGAGGGAA - 89% (14) (1 SR)
Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen - B - 0% (1)
The turnout for this topic was great, 14 votes for Super Mario Land bodes well for future topics. Well, except for Wizardry, maybe having an untranslated RPG in the first topic was too ambitious. I wish I could help people set up the fan translation, but Gamefaqs literally won't let me. Try to figure that out though because there's loads more Wizardry where that came from.
Games for this topic:
Golf
Power Mission
RoboCop (GB)
Space Invaders (Japan)
Sunsoft Grand Prix
Tetris
And here's our first encounter with one of the biggest annoyances of the Gameboy GAB. There are quite a number of games on Gameboy where there are several different games that have the same name. In this case, we have Robocop and Space Invaders. For Robocop, this is the original Gameboy game by Ocean, not the Gameboy Color game by Titus. Space Invaders is even worse, as there are THREE different games all called Space Invaders, this is the original Japanese-only release from 1990, not the new version that came to the US in 1994, nor the Gameboy Color reimagining of the series. Yeesh. That took so long to explain I almost forgot to mention that Tetris is also in this topic.
Last Topic's Ratings:
Alleyway - AGAGGAGA - 75% (8)
Baseball - AGAAAGB - 57% (7)
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle - AAGAAAA - 57% (7)
Master Karateka - ABA - 33% (3)
Super Mario Land - GGGGGGGGAGGGAA - 89% (14) (1 SR)
Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen - B - 0% (1)
The turnout for this topic was great, 14 votes for Super Mario Land bodes well for future topics. Well, except for Wizardry, maybe having an untranslated RPG in the first topic was too ambitious. I wish I could help people set up the fan translation, but Gamefaqs literally won't let me. Try to figure that out though because there's loads more Wizardry where that came from.
Games for this topic:
Golf
Power Mission
RoboCop (GB)
Space Invaders (Japan)
Sunsoft Grand Prix
Tetris
And here's our first encounter with one of the biggest annoyances of the Gameboy GAB. There are quite a number of games on Gameboy where there are several different games that have the same name. In this case, we have Robocop and Space Invaders. For Robocop, this is the original Gameboy game by Ocean, not the Gameboy Color game by Titus. Space Invaders is even worse, as there are THREE different games all called Space Invaders, this is the original Japanese-only release from 1990, not the new version that came to the US in 1994, nor the Gameboy Color reimagining of the series. Yeesh. That took so long to explain I almost forgot to mention that Tetris is also in this topic.
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