Some more additions on the Simple front - mainly developer profiles and a few more series, including Simple Characters 2000. That one was actually a joint venture between Bandai and D3, combining Bandai's vast collection of anime licenses with the low-budget Simple production values - to quote the official website, "D3 Publisher, of the 65 Million Selling Simple1500 series, and Bandai, the No.1 in the Character Business, are joining forces!". Thus allowing Bandai to churn out licensed games even faster than they usually do, I suppose. Awesome.
That last update? while researching the Simple series developers I came across one by the name of Atelier Double - with only a snowboarding game and a couple of Hello Kitty licenses apparently to their name I was ready to leave it at a "nothing to see here" and move on. But then I decided to look into it slightly. The likes of Moby Games and IGN had credited them with a few NES and GB titles; it seemed odd, though, that they would have done absolutely nothing throughout most of the 90s. Their website seemed to be under construction or just plain unfinished, but a chance visit to archive.org revealed.. well. Games! Lots of them. Including my minor obsession of 2001, a Taito GBC game by the name of Monkey Puncher. I was in shock for a while. Then I did this.
ATELIER DOUBLE
MONKEY PUNCHER
WHAT
Simple series now has developer pages, currently just listing all the games developed by each company, but I'll add sort of mini-profiles sooner or later. Simple GBA, PSP and DC series are probably coming at some point - PS1's Simple1500 would be a huge undertaking, though. Not to mention I'd probably have to add a US release column for those, since quite a few of them were published there by Agetec (at least, more than the two released for other formats). And other things! Because one thing this site has always been is a dumping ground for my miscellaneous internet crap.
edit: see, dreamcast's up already.
Simple page now has some DS action. that's about it.
Turns out Essential Games is a brand name of D3Publisher of Europe, so they're actually self-publishing the Simple series now. I just hope they bother with 60Hz modes, especially if that Global Defence Force game is actually Chikyuu Boueigun 2 and not Chikyuu Boueigun Tactics.
this is the "more to come" i mentioned. the whole site updates and such now being handled by the very same perl script i wrote to handle site updates and such about a year ago. doesn't make a great deal of difference to anyone visiting, at least until the point at which old updates start disappearing off the front page and you absolutely have to see them for some reason, but it still makes my life a bit easier. so there.
front page modification ahoy! i'm quite bored, you see. more to come!
this is interesting. well, i say "interesting", but, you know. it looks like some other publisher is taking a shot at the European Simple2000 market. one of their games is "Global Defense Force", which might possible be Earth Defense Force 2, which I previously had attributed to 505 GameStreet as "Monster Attack: Invasion". Or maybe one of them's EDF: Tactics. Anyway, the Simple2000 page will be updated to reflect this at some point, probably.
well what happened to this post? who knows! i'm keeping the title because i like it.