I just learned that recently an English patch has been made for the PC-88 version of this game! Never expected to see that. nebulous.group/index.php/projects/translations/mirrors/

The live performance had a very "Enjoy the Silence" riff. Definitely Depeche Mode inspired.

Just found out about this game while reading through archives of the Depeche Mode fan club magazine, BONG. From issue 13, released in 1991: "DM are featured in a CD-ROM adventure game for the Japanese PC-8801SR computer. The game, 'Mirrors' also incorporates Max Headroom and Duran Duran. The game costs around £40 and is currently being transferred to the FM Towns." While I doubt it was authorized, it seems like at the very least the fan club was aware of the band members' likenesses being used in the game and did not publicly disapprove of it.

@BasementBrothers

8 ай бұрын

Haha! Interesting. I seem to remember they actually used a different band for most of the digitized images, but can't remember the band name.

So the band may be based off Depeche Mode, but the main character is quite clearly David Sylvian from the band Japan in the 70's/80's, and then a solo artist after that, as well as a long time collaborator with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Some of the images are even directly ripped from his video for "Red Guitar," I think they even swiped an image of photographer Angus McBean as well, who made a cameo in that video.

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

Wow. That is definintely where the images are from! They match exactly! I knew they weren't original photos taken for the game. Glad someone could finally place them. I've been waiting for this comment! How about the music video in the game? I assume that's probably another video of the same band?

That was a real hot track at the end there lmao

Imagine paying a lot of money thinking you will be ditching those pesky floppies to then having the game requiere 3 of them and constant switching for saving. But hey, at least you have cd quality tracks lol. Btw, good video. There is something charming about early PCs, specially the Japanese ones for us in the west, it’s like watching an alternative timeline in computer development (until IBM machines finally caught up to them).

@CptJistuce

2 жыл бұрын

Honestly, using the floppies is smart. And not just for the obvious "we aren't interrupting the music every thirty seconds to load more data" angle. The game could be developed entirely with floppy disks. Each "copy from CD" could be a unique disk in the development environment. This has a couple advantages. Remember, there's no cheap and readily-available CD-R drives for burning test disks, so if the system has no hard disk you have to develop on floppy anyways. There's few ways to test the loading-from-CD functionality without paying to set up a CD press. You want your code to have as little to do with that as possible, because it is costly to test. And "copy a floppy image to a floppy" will involve much less change to the code after getting the floppy-only version developed. And that last sentence hints at the second advantage. If a CD-ROM release proves unfeasible for some reason... they've ALREADY developed a floppy disk version. They just need to add music, and they can release their twenty-floppy(random guess) adventure game to the wild and pretend the CD-ROM drive never existed. Or they could just sell a too-many-floppies version alongside the 1CD version(I know of a few late MS-DOS games that did that, as well as the legendary Windows 95 foot-tall-pile-of-floppies release).

Epic performance at the end there!

Dude, no way! The detectives are Phillippe Noiret and Thierry Lhermitte taken directly from 1984's classic French comedy "Les ripoux". Gotta love those Japanese developers cutting corners on copyright, hahaha.

Japanese pcs are a lost frontier when it comes to games, I can only imagine how many undiscovered and forgotten visual novels and text adventures are there.

@zazxazza

3 жыл бұрын

It's even more sad that the Japanese generally prefer not to dump abandonware due to copyright laws, which is understandable, however still a shame.

I'm one of those weirdos that also likes to hear floppy drives loading.

Gotta say man, I appreciate the effort to catalogue and preserve all of these oddities. Wish this channel was more well-known.

awesome video yet again. thank. you for making these videos! 9:18 that's just a straight-up image of David Sylvian hahaha! Also that song is def an enjoy the silence knockoff.

I keep finding great Mr. Jakes performances in these videos! It's always a treat.

I remember reading about Mirrors years ago and thought it looked really interesting. However, I don't know any Japanese so this overview was really helpful in finally fully understanding what this game was about. A while back I also looked into the game's developer, Soft Studio Wing, and they seem to have a cult following in Japan where they were famous for their atmospheric adventure games (as far as I could tell anyway). Thanks for the great video!

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Yes, they seem to have made quite a few, but Mirrors is the only one I have played. By the way, I loved your Falcom and Arcturus documentary videos. I can only imagine how much time and effort those took to make.

@bowloflentils

3 жыл бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Oh, thank you very much! I'm happy to hear that you liked them because I've been enjoying your Falcom videos for years (the Falcom Museum video is one of my favorites).

@DragoonEnRegalia

3 жыл бұрын

Studio WING mastered a style of subversive, more esoteric but engrossing horror adventure game that few others could match at the time. Onryo Senki gained a huge following in particular for how well it blended ghost stories & cult intrigue with commentary on bubble-era Japan. Mirrors seems to have killed the studio, sadly (no surprise given its hardware limits for a late late PC-88 release), but I wonder if WING's games ended up influencing the likes of Twilight Syndrome later on.

Another splendid video/debut performance as a singer. :)

This game looks pretty neat. I kinda hopes it gets like a remake and hopefully an English translation.

When he mentioned the userdisk and I realised "This PC has a CD-ROM, but no HDD..."...

0:57 wow, that is literally a screen grab straight from the lunchtime news on BBC1 here in the UK circa mid-late 80s! Somehow I doubt they paid for the copyright :P ...yes, I have posted this before watching the rest of the video. I dont normally do that though lmao

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Wow. That doesn't actually surprise me very much though. I wonder about some of the other graphics in this game as well...

@whatamalike

3 жыл бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Oh yeah, looking at a lot of the images throughout it is very similar to a lot of PD stuff you'd see on the Amiga and atari ST. Assets literally ripped from copyrighted material with no regard haha.

Retro Japanese pc game rarities are always cool. Thank you for letting us discover those great games that have few to none coverage at all! Great video, as always.

10/10 vocals at the end.

Rad dude. You definitely have the most interesting video game channel on youtube.

Love that outro track! That's a hit!

The song at the end. 😂 Great video.

These games for me are the most horror experience one can have in a media. Not even movies have the feeling of Mirrors or Phantasmagoria II

@Vulpas

Жыл бұрын

I'd say more traditional Silent Hill/Resident Evil style games are the scariest types of media. I literally can't even play the remake of Silent Hill 2, it's just too much.

Very cool use for the PCE CD! Rather fascinating game too, thanks for showing!

They really should have called this game Policy of Truth

Nice interesting video! Just for info, the two policemen in the game are Phillipe Noiret and Thierry Lhermite from the French movie "The Ripoux". This game is ripping off everywhere.

Greatreview I recognize the likenesses of Philippe Noiret at 4:30 and Roger Moore at 13:00, I'm sure the rest of the characters are taken from other actors.

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, while playing the game, I really had to wonder where some of these graphics came from. I find it kind of hard to believe these were all photos they own and used with permission. Thanks for watching.

r/unexpectedDepecheMode

You get thumbs up and a sub for that beautiful cover of "Get, Get, Get". When is the tour and album?

Woo, PC-88 Paradise!!! Great video, thanks for posting!

You wonder if they got permission to put David Sylvian in this game, how awesome thanks for sharing.

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

They didn't.

Quality content as usual 👍

Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 seems to get used a lot in Japanese games. Or at least I remember it being in Persona 2 and Mother 3. And man I know 8 colors is not a lot to work but this does not seem like one of the better examples of digitization and art direction within that space...

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

The piece is universally known in Japan as generic calming background music. Whereas "Auld Lang Syne" is usually used when stores are closing, I hear "Gymnopedie No. 1" often used at concerts and events in order to signal to the audience that all encores have finished and it is time to go home.

Awesome singing!

Pretty interesting way to shuffle the data around for sure.

Cool stuff.

Soft Studio Wing ❤

Really great videos about the PC88. Enjoyed them, since my japanese only is sufficient for menus and stuff. Thinking about a PC88 but my FM Towns, x68000 and PC9821 take too much room already ^^

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Have you tried the PC-88 emulator for PC-98 called "P88SR"? That's what I used to use before I had a real PC-88 and I really liked it. It's a lot harder to set up than GUI-based emulators, but I loved that it used the PC-98's FM soundboard for the FM. Sounds exactly like a real PC-88 since it's the same soundchip(s).

Groovy!

Man. Imagine being stoked to play a cd rom game for the first time on your PC and this is all you have. Reminds me of the Sega CD game Sherlock Holmes. I hated that game so damn much....

The atmosphere reminded me of Gabriel Knight a bit. Very cool. We know Sierra was paying attention to Japanese games with their ports so who knows if they played or read about this game.

Now if only the FM Towns version was translated to English , like the PC88 was ...

If the developers wanted to make music that resembles CD redbook audio, they should have used Casio MT-32 MIDI module instead of redbook audio.

Great video! I love discovering these rare artifacts. By the way, the "DIOS" game looks intriguing, specially considering that, in Spanish, "Dios" means "God". Would you review that one in the future?

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

I'd like to, but I'd prefer if I could add it to my collection first... and the CD version is unfortunately quite rare.

@RodrigoGarciaCarmona

3 жыл бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Then I pray for your financial success. Think about it this way: with that CD, you would have a complete PC88 CD collection. ;)

@DragoonEnRegalia

3 жыл бұрын

@@RodrigoGarciaCarmona Sadly, not even the most ardent PC-88 collectors have found working copies of DIOS on CD. It may well be lost media unless the Game Preservation Society has a copy of it.

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Didn't realize it was THAT rare. Darn. Guess I'll probably never even get to play it.

This video look like preaure at all. It made me want to something day by day.

wassup Bill Pullman (14:04)

Hey, have you ever done a video on the demo disc yet?

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

No, but the demo disc will probably make a brief appearance in my next PC-88 Paradise video.

@cabbusses

Жыл бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Thanks for responding! On my channel I dug into a large amount of 32-bit era demo discs, but I feel like it is difficult to get information on demos that predate those or a good, comprehensive history of the demo disc, so I am interested in seeing the demos on retro PC systems.

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

I have to wonder how many people would click on a youtube video about a demo disc. Good to know someone might be interested...

@cabbusses

Жыл бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Demo discs are an underappreciated facet of retro game history. Going by what I can understand based on the info I collected, they are an evolution of Famicom/Megadrive/Sufami Sample carts (or perhaps there are demo discs way back in the retro PC scene on some floppies somewhere I have no idea about.), and one of the major ways they evolved was on their ability to be distributed to a much wider audience than Sample carts which were limited to press or retail/event displays. Demo discs could be distributed way more easily to a large percentage of the potential customers to entice them into buying a game with, ideally, a playable teaser. Besides how they heavily influenced the culture of the Playstation, demo discs frequently had demos constructed from earlier game builds than the final game that has differences prototype collectors often seek out. Sometimes there are even demo discs for cancelled games. Demo discs were also used to distribute disc-exclusive custom demos with content specifically designed for it, or low budget and short yet wholly complete games. Then there's Capcom basically letting anyone who gets a Street Fighter Zero 2 Taikenban the entire Vs. mode which would make me wonder who would bother buying the full game after that. But aye, I rambled a bit much here. Basically, I want to know more about the history of the Demo Disc, especially from the Japanese side as most of the western history starts at SCD/Playstation/Saturn rather than PCE/PC88/???

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

Maybe I really should do a video about the demo disc someday! As for the early history of demo discs, Compile's "Disk Station" series definitely comes to mind. That dates way back to 1988 on the MSX.

Open and expandable were not a part of design considerations? Stange amount of main ram 1.5Mb. Wonder if the built in cd rom drive memory was accessible

@BasementBrothers

2 жыл бұрын

The CD-ROM drive doesn't have any memory.

I think that building you showed when you said "Rome" is in Greece. I might be wrong though...

@BasementBrothers

7 ай бұрын

They don't go to Greece in the game though...

@xnamkcor

7 ай бұрын

@@BasementBrothers Oh... PS: I wonder if it's possible to patch your own CD versions of games that normally use more than 3 floors. And then burn it to a CD. Like how that one game you could install to a HDD.

Wondering if you have some stuff like the original Thunder Force or the Super Mario games made by Hudson Soft.

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

I have neither of those. The Nintendo games are super hard to find and expensive. Thunder Force I also don't think I've seen for sale.

@DragoonEnRegalia

3 жыл бұрын

Thunder Force was first made by Tecno Soft, specifically by Kotori Yoshimura before she led development on Star Cruiser & other Arsys Soft games.

@BasementBrothers

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah. I want it.

God I love the aesthetics of this game. I really don't know how to put it into words, but it's simply beautiful in my eyes. Honestly the FM-towns version looks less appealing to me, something about it just loses it's charm

hey there, I noticed that the disk you wrote to might have been for the 270 Assembler 88VA, do you happen to have any other disks that might be for the VA?

@BasementBrothers

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, one of the used packs of blank disks I have looks like it used to belong to a VA owner. All of them are copies of system software and utilities. That particular disk actually says "Macro Assembler Version 4.00". The original would have looked like this. images.app.goo.gl/1TpQ2EyQtiqsWeZc7

@zazxazza

2 жыл бұрын

​@@BasementBrothers thank you for your response! Is there any chance you would be willing to dump them at any point in the future? I am currently working on obtaining as much 88VA specific utilities to be available for preservation. So far I've collected and dumped: Record of Lodoss Alantia VA Special Instant Music VA Upgrade ROM BIOS Death Bringer I understand if you are not interested for time, personal, or legal reasons, thank you very much for your time!

Did the system not have expandable RAM? would be cool if they'd let you just use a RAM disk if you had a RAM expander.

@BasementBrothers

2 жыл бұрын

No. Unfortunately not expandable. :(

Isn’t the CD-ROM drive 1x or something? Might prevent some amount of chugging. But then again it’s a totally linear game so you’d think you could hide away load times.

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

Yep. This was the 80's, and all CD-ROM drives were still 1x.

That has always been odd to me. That yen compared to other currencies is like comparing dollars to pennies. Why use such huge numbers. It really is like basing your currency on the lowest denomination. To me it is like instead of saying this thing cost a dollar you say it cost 100 pennies. I suppose in a way that does simplify it. You just have to get used to more 0's at the end of a price. I guess that is just a difference in how different cultures quantity their currency. Instead of currency denominations like dollars quarters dimes nickels and pennies. Which is a lot more to remember. They just have one. You don't have to break down dollars to cents. It is all one denomination the numbers just get bigger the more expensive things are.

@BasementBrothers

Жыл бұрын

Whenever you see a currency where they use a lot of zeroes, you can bet it's the result of historical inflation. 1 yen used to be a lot of money 100 years ago. And they even used to have the "sen" which was a smaller unit than the yen. But, yeah, I suppose by now if they wanted to they could just create a new currency unit equal to 100 or 1000 yen or something. Instead we're just used to using a lot of zeroes in our prices here in Japan.

"No. Ew." 😂

I like how you couldn't pronounce the word linear correctly.