PLASMAAA!!! The Mystical Ninja returns in Goemon 64: Recompiled

Huh. I didn't plan it, but ROM may accidentally be turning into a Ganbare Goemon fan newsletter. I'm as surprised as you to see the big blue cactus-headed ninja at the top of the news again just six months after last time, but I guess sometimes these things just happen, huh? Goemon rules, and the most exciting thing I've seen the last two weeks is a new recompilation project starring the big fella, so here we are — that's our main topic this week, alongside a cool new fan translation and your usual raft of notable emulator updates!

Unlike a whole sea of overeager (or downright misleading?) YouTube channels, you're not going to read about BLOODBORNE PC PORT WITH CRAZY FRAMERATES here in the newsletter, except in this sentence telling you you're not going to be reading about them. I do plan on checking back in with the developers of emulator ShadPS4 before long, because they have been making amazingly rapid progress since our interview in July. So, yes, some people are currently running Bloodborne in the emulator. It boots! Amazing! It is absolutely not in the kind of shape you want it to be to actually play it. That is still, at minimum, quite a few months away.

In other recurring topics, we're still waiting to see Taki Udon's budget MiSTer FPGA board drop, but he's currently teasing what his more premium handheld is going to look like. Meanwhile, here's one entire person on Reddit saying the PS5 emulation of Sly Cooper "runs so much better than how it did when it launched" which we wrote about in June being not great. I'm not gonna call that conclusive, but I hope it's true, since improvements to official emulation offerings are all too rare.

That's about going to do it for our intro this week, as I'm short on time with some big personal projects cooking in the background! Issues might be a bit light over the next month or so as I clear some big deadlines, but look forward to more focus on interviews and breaking news in ROM come the fall!

Oh, and P.S. : If you, too, are a Goemon fan, consider grabbing Bakeru in a couple weeks, as Spike Chunsoft has seen fit to localize this spiritual successor to the Goemon series even though few of the Goemon games themselves actually got English releases, and longtime series director Etsunobu Ebisu is back in the saddle for this one. Most opinions I've seen of Bakeru have been "eh, it's aight," but between this and Natsu-Mon, Spike Chunsoft is really doing us a solid localizing Japanese games that do not exactly hit the mainstream. I hope they both at least recoup the cost it took to make them.

The Big Two

1. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in: Your Personal Computer

Now this, my friends, is what I call a treat. Back in May you may recall I interviewed Wiseguy, the creator behind N64 Recompiled, a new way of making native "ports" of Nintendo 64 games without emulating the console itself. The big advantages, as evidenced in the initial release, Major's Mask, are higher resoultions and framerates and easy control remapping all in a package that runs on extremely humble hardware while opening them up to extensive modding. The pitch is that this should be much easier than creating decompilations of the entire original game, but Wiseguy is still in the process of fleshing out all the documentation that other creators will need to take advantage of the technique themselves.

Apparently that didn't stop one Goemon fan, though, who barreled right ahead and created our first static recomp project since Majora's Mask: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. You can download it right now from the Ganbare Goemon Discord fan server, and it just works. Widescreen resolution, ultrawide, 4K: yes, yes, yes. In the words of Plasma Man: PLASMAAAAAA!!!

I'm really excited about this one for a few reasons. One, that it's early proof of Wiseguy's pitch that this techinque could see many, many N64 games eventually "ported" to PC and made playable and moddable freed from the blurry hell of that console plugged into a modern TV. Two, because I quite like the Goemon games in general; it's a quirky series that I've written about before, like in an issue this March speaking with fan translator Acediez about one of the Japan-only PS1 entries in the series. Few of the Goemon games made it to the west, and there were a lot of them; thankfully a wave of fan translations in the last five years have wittled that number down considerably. Three, I think this entry in the series, released on the N64 in 1997, is underappreciated and a fascinating stepping stone for that era of 3D gaming as it evolved towards the great Ocarina of Time, released 15 months later.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is a free-roaming 3D game with an overworld much like Hyrule Field, though in keeping with Goemon tradition it's much sillier, with lots of modern jokes about classical Japan and a farcical plot involving dancing, a laugh track, and Oedo Castle being turned into (gasp) a European style castle.

I'm not going to tell you you'll be blown away by it in 2024, but playing it you can really feel Konami grappling with the same questions Nintendo did as it tried to figure out how best to thread together "dungeons" in a 3D world, how to control the camera, and how to stage cutscenes. Nintendo obviously did the better job there in the end, but it had Miyamoto, Aonuma, and I'm just completely fabricating these numbers here but probably double or triple the development time and budget. I mean, Konami cranked out a sequel to Mystical Ninja just one year later, aka one month after Ocarina of Time, and that game played completely differently to this one; it was less ambitious but also really fun.

If you love Ocarina of Time, I'd say playing, or at least watching a playthrough of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, is well worth your time. And this is a really nice way to do it, running much more smoothly than it did on original hardware and looking so much clearer, too; it's like going from an old 8mm home movie with vasoline applied to the lens to freakin' 70mm IMAX.

I've messed around with this release and it runs like a champ, but developer klorfmorf has said in the Discord that they have updates planned, including an improved camera, which would be a godsend. Unlocked camera controls would solve the clunkiest element of this game, as the biggest thing Nintendo figured out that Goemon didn't, Z-targeting, makes a preeeety big difference to how smoothly you can boogy around this world. Autosaving is also planned, and I have a feeling some dedicated Goemon fans are likely to release an upscaled texture replacement mod eventually that would be welcome. The game uses simple enough textures that I have a feeling they'll look nice and clean and not lose much of their original character when blown up.

One last exciting bit: klorfmorf also plans to work on a static recomp for Goemon's Great Adventure, that sequel I mentioned. That one's a blast and has co-op, and not having to play it with an old busted-ass N64 controller? Bliss! You can bet I'll mention it when it arrives.

2. Telefang translates cell phone monsters to English

Natsume's Pokémon-alike Telefang for the Game Boy Color just got a translation, apparently a whopping 16 years in progress! Here's a description from the translators:

Released in 2000 for the Game Boy Color, Keitai Denjuu Telefang is a role-playing game where you befriend sentient monsters called Denjuu. Riffing on Japan's unique Keitai culture at the turn of the century, Denjuu are called into battle using cell phones, when defeated share their phone number with you and further pester you via text messages. Despite initial infamy in the west for the unrepresentative bootleg releases titled Pokémon Diamond and Jade, the game has gained a cult following owing to inspired creature designs by Saiko Takaki, a killer soundtrack by Kinuyo Yamashita, its humorous monster-of-the-week story, and solid, if light, gameplay. No fan of Pokémon or Game Boy games should miss it!

Our translation patch features fixes for multiple bugs in the original game, longer nicknames, improved name entry, no-RTC mode (for RTC-less flash carts), restored and fully coloured SGB functionality (complete with original borders), multiple variable-width fonts, automatic text narrowing, and everything translated into English of course (including the title screen voiceover).

If you're a Telefang head, you've probably known about this project for years — it's been a work-in-progress for ages, and playable in incomplete form up until this point if you were hot to trot. Otherwise, this is the first real chance to play a game that was once passed off as a bootleg. Its sequel on the GBA doesn't have a translation of this caliber, though there is one made based on the bootleg ~10 years ago.

As for this patch: it looks great!

You can grab the patch here and should be able to run it on a real Game Boy Color, an Analogue Pocket, etc.

Patching In

DuckStation gets deflicky with it – The latest DuckStation release includes tons of tweaks, as usual, including being able to handle disc speed changes while reading and a toggle for the DualSense controller LED. But also, big respect for the granularity of per-game settings applied for the following extremely well-known and loved games just to fix flickering issues: 360 - Three Sixty, Addie No Okurimono - To Moze from Addie, Adiboo & Paziral's Secret, Air Management '96, Extreme Snow Break, Magic Carpet, Omiai Commando, Soul Blade, Soul Edge, and Street Fighter EX2 Plus. (I'm sure you, esteemed reader, have heard of every single one of them!)

PCSX2 shows your cheevos on Discord – Retro achievement hunters, here's a fun update! PCSX2's Discord Rich Presence integration will now show an icon for the game you're actively playing while you chase that dragon. Note that this will only work if the game has achievements and a Rich Presence profile, but there are 500+ PS2 game on RetroAchievements, so that's a pretty good bucket to pull from. Here's an example of how the icon looks, via contributor kamfretoz:

A healthy serving of Flycast fixes – I don't keep the closest eye on Dreamcast emulator Flycast, but checking up on its updates from the last couple months, the devs have solved a freeze when firing in Virtua Cop 2, getting Cool Boarders Burrrn to boot, and graphical glitches in Castle Fantasia. Some corrected math also made invisble Chaos Emeralds in Sonic Adventure reappear. Magic trick!

Lime3DS coming to Google Play Store – Citra fork Lime3DS has been quite active in recent months, and according to the devs a Google Play release "is currently being prepared." Updates in the latest build fixed crashes in Shin Megami Tensei IV and Fire Emblem Fates; you can frame advance in a paused game on desktop; and on Android you can customize the layout and save separate portrait/landscape setups.

Core Report

Genesis does MIDI – The MiSTer got a new core named GenMidi, "a sound module/synthesizer for sending midi data to the sound hardware of the Sega Genesis." You can plug in a USB, DIN or UDP MIDI device to jam out, or use a gamepad. There are apparently 127 FM patches to pick from. Make somethin' that sounds like Sonic 2, Streets of Rage 2, Shinobi 3... 🎹

PC Engine's minor promotion to 1.0 – PC Engine for the Analogue Pocket hit 1.0, though with just a few small fixes to what was already a mature core.

Mortal Pocket gets ready to fight – Looking pretty good there, ninja boys. According to atrac17: "There's very little VRAM flicker for a first attempt. We'll start debugging the one-hit death, FMV playback, and implement ADPCM for sound."

Translation Station

Team Hilltop gets into the rhythm gain – While still working on their translation of Rowdy Princess, Hilltop and Cargodin have dropped a bonus: Mini-Moni. Shakatto Tambourine! da Pyon!, a PS1 rhythm game that has the distinct honor of being made by Sega. It came out in 2002, a bit after the death of the Dreamcast, and of course Sega would go on to put plenty of games on the PS2, even after it dealt the DC its deathblow. But PS1? Definitely an odd one — but also pretty cute, and I know there are some Samba de Amigo lovers out there who'll vibe with a tambourine rhythm game. You can grab the patch at the link above.

Lupin III visual novel translated – I'm not sure whether to call this one complete, exactly, but I love me some Lupin, so I'm excited to see this 2003 visual novel for the GameCube get an English patch! My understanding is that some but not all of the text was translated seven years ago by Peter Lemon, but this one's been polished up and translated the rest of the game. One catch is that some of it was done with machine translation, which the GitHub notes will hopefully be replaced by someone with Japanese > English skills at some point. It's fully playable now, but fingers crossed that last third gets some proper human TLC.

Good pixels

After the luxurious excess of PC-98 beach last issue, I'm dialing it back with a few more screenshots of good ol' Goemon in his new recompiled adventure. 🥷

Until next time. 💽

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