Oddball game trivia

[Sephiroth]

also, to the videogame cutscene thing, the ending cutscene to Final Fantasy 7 is 25:34, it's the reason why there was a disc 3, you will also note that Yuffie and Vincent do not appear in the final Cutscene, Squaresoft, in it's infinite stupidity, announced FF7's release WAAAAAAY too early, and had to drop the scenes due to lack of time

 

[Kibbin]

Can't find referance to this so far, so.
The reason Yuffie and Vincet don't appear int he cutscenes is because they couldn't be bothered to program in multiple cutscenes, these are both optional characters that the player is not required to get and thus may well not be in the party.

 

[Sparky]

Got another bit of Sega trivia. Some of the music in Sonic 3 was actually composed by Michael Jackson (via humming over the phone, as far as I know), but he wasn't satisfied with the sound of the Yamaha YM2612 so he either didn't want to be credited, or he quit and they used his music anyway without permission (not sure about the last part).

Heh. I was going to post about the MJ connection to Sonic 3 but it has never been 100% verified so I chose not to

Here is another Sega tidbit. The Japanese version of the Master System was called the Mark 3. A lot of US Master System games were just the Japanese ROM with english text and a couple bits or 2 to let the system know what version was inserted in the system. You could get the Mark 3 BIOS and Japanese version of the game to show up if you did certain tricks like pound the reset button or hot swap cartridges.

The Japanese Mark 3 also had an FM sound chip that was left out of the US Master System so there are quite a few games that sound extremely good on the Mark 3 but sound very tinny and poor on the Master System. (Phantasy Star is a great example.)

The Cartridge Hot Swap trick worked really well on early Sega Genesis games. You could unlock Japanese versions or things like unlimited lives/weapons/shields etc.

Ok. That's my Sega tip for the day.