Retronauts - 518: Mega Man Feature Phone Games

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

How do you archive Japan's unique feature phone games when so many—like Capcom's many Mega Man titles—are bound to dead overseas networks? Preservationists RockmanCosmo and Naoya Shinota talk all about it. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by ExpressVPN and My Sheets Rock. This week on Retronauts, do you got games on your phone? We'll get them out of there. Game preservation is king. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Retronauts. I am your host for this week, Nadia Oxford of the Axe of the Blog God RPG podcast. If you are all hot and heavy about game preservation like I am, oh, do we have a great show for you today,

is all about the fascinating gaming ecosystem of Japanese feature phones, which currently in danger going extinct. And preservationists are working very hard to keep that from happening, to keep those games on feature phones preserved. And that is why I have two such preservations here today. One is Cosmo. Go ahead and say hi to us, Cosmo. Hi, everybody.

Thanks for having me on. Oh, it's great to have you. And our second guest is Nayaoa. Go ahead and say hi. Hi, my name is Nalia Shano. Cool. And basically, I think all three of us have a really deep history with Rockman. Like, of course, I've been a fan since I was a young girl.

I've written or helped write the Mega Man X-Afric Hunter Field Guide and Mega Man Robot, Masterfield Guide, and, you know, I've been to the fandom since 1995. I'm kind of poisoned. But what was your entry into the Mega Man fandom? And Rockman Cosmo, go ahead and start telling us about what got you into The Blue Boy. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing where I wasn't really like a big Mega Man person and I was like a kid. Like I was actually more of a Mario guy. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was very much deep into the Nintendo platformers. I would usually play ton of Mario like RPGs kind of scared me you know just I guess just like the pure simplicity of Mario you know jumping and you're jumping on things getting to the end of the level that was very

simple to me so basically Mega Man was kind of in that vein where I had that same you know simplistic like yeah there's platforming then I got this other thing which is shooting so the classic games were my first exposure to it actually like my first like when I even realized Megamon was a thing I was actually um looking at music like on YouTube for example right and yeah and like one of the recommendations is like a while back but it was like wily two from megaman two oh the classic and then and then and i was clicked on it i wasn't to it and i was like oh my god like eight bit music can go this hard like this is so good i got to find out what the game this is so then from there i discover megaman two try to play megaman one get pissed off at bombsman

stage i just jumped to two and then i was pretty much just enthralled from there went from classic to x and then just kind of slowly went throughout the series and now it's just having a wild ride and all of a sudden now i'm here doing megan man preservation and things like that and it's just yeah that it's a great series it really is now how about you uh for rockman um what got me into rock man was etz i used to watch rock man etc on i think kids wb showed it yeah the anime yeah overseas and then i remember gained some of the DVDs as well at time and then i didn't really get much back into it until after i met uh cosmos and he introduced you know more of um the rockman stuff i got i got the pts and i played some of the bound network games and i've

slowly been being more and more into it as i go on really fun series do you have a favorite game yet uh so far uh the first battle network game, that's my favorite one so far, but I'm still looking to the other ones. You must be really excited about the collection coming out at the time it's recording, coming out pretty quickly, pretty soon. Yeah, that'll be really, that'll be really interesting. Yeah, that's going to be really great. What makes me curious is actually, especially for you, Cosmo, like what kind of drew you to

feature phone games? Was it the Mega Man lost Mega Man game element, or was it just more to it in general? Yeah, the whole thing with the feature phones is a little interesting, too, and that, like, for a while, I knew that the games existed. Like, when I got into Ball Network, I had, like, the art book, and I was, like, at the art book. And I was, like, oh, interesting. I can never seen these characters before.

Oh, flip phone games, oh, sucks, you know, and I just kind of move on from there. Or when I got into Legends, like, you know, five islands, I heard about it. And I was like, okay, you know, it's too bad. It's on the flip phone. Cool, I guess. But once I got, like, formally involved with the Mega Men community and, like, same. Well, actually, this is going to be, like, a whole, like, brief, minster, I haven't gotten to the Mega Man online community because it kind of leads up to the whole feature phone thing.

In 2020, I had like so much time on my hand. So I made this Lego model of the Flutter for Mega May Legends. And I put it on Lego ID, which is kind of like a crowdfunding platform. And if you get a certain amount of votes, Lego can consider to make this a set. So being the Lego fanatic I was, I decided to make that. And I was like, well, I got to market this somehow. So I decided just to make an online account for the sake of that. Yeah.

But as I got deeper into the Megamay community, I came upon this thing called the Rockman Dash, Great Adventure Guide, which is like, yeah, it's an old, old 20-year-old guidebook on Mega Man Legends. Japan only has a ton of concept art. And I was looking at scans of that. And I was like, man, these scans are of terrible quality. And like, you know, I want this to be in English. So I thought to myself, how about I just go buy a book off Japan, scan it it and just

scandal it into English? You know, it shouldn't be too bad, right? but that turned out to be like so that took over my life for a lot like the Lego project kind of went back into my mind I just started to focus on this for preserving this Rockman Dash guidebook

and actually this past summer we were able to finish it the whole thing in English including all the concept scribbles we were able to discover some new development bills thank you yeah so that was like that kind of got into Mega Man preservation

and then from there I kind of jumped on to the out of print Taiwan Rackman-Dash Manhwa comic. And then in December, let's see. In December, Brian, he retweets and replies to this now-deleted tweet that basically showcased Fentive Network on this AU phone. And I just kind of saw that and I was like, huh, you know,

maybe I want to help him out with this stuff because, you know, Brian's a cool guy and I always want to help out with this kind of stuff. You know, now that I'm already starting that guidebook. So I do some research on the phone and then I DM him, about it. And he's like, oh, this is such cool information. So he adds me to this tiny group chat on the 30th of December. It's almost at the beginning of 2021. There's like two other people in there. And then it just kind of kickstarts from there. We talks about, oh, we got this phone with the game. And then I just kind of started researching the phones. And then a billion

things happen. And eventually we find, well, one of the team members knows someone with the games. And then through a bunch of shenanigans and a fundraiser by the Megamain community, we were able to cover the cost of indefinitely renting that phone. So then the project kind of starts. And since Ryan's a super busy guy, like I initially was the guy who recruit people, did research, but as he started to become occupied with other things due to the blog, I just kind of started becoming a de facto leader. And now I'm just kind of the leader of the team.

But in doing so, I've become exposed to so many other types of flip. phone games that came that went on at this time and in doing so it's just like you know the final fantasy seven ones you got like um you got devil my cry you've got katamari and it's like this is like a brand new world of gaming that i had never heard of before you also have uh sorry interrupt i was going to say you also have the after years final fantasy four which is my horrible baby which i've talked about many times i think on retronauts i have a show entirely about the after years which square did bring off feature phones and brought onto the we and then several other systems and Yeah, that's a... Square is one of a few companies that did that actually did bring out those feature phone games.

So as much as we said, oh, gross, this is like a real cash grab. It's really good if they did it, except now it's on the Wii and it's stuck there. Unfortunately. Yeah, but, yeah, so basically that's what happened, where I got into the Mega Man feature phones, that I'd become more aware of other feature phones. And then last year, the Imoad website, which was like the last online storefront that hosted these games, it shut down. So before then, I wrote an open letter.

to video game preservation organizations. And it eventually led to an effort by the Game Preservation Society to download as many of those games as possible. Wow. And they were able to download over 800 games. And unfortunately, thousands were lost at time. But through that effort, I realized, you know what? There's more to feature phones than just Mega Man, you know?

It's like at a point, this, like, our Mega Man project doesn't just affect, you know, our Mega Man games. You know, our findings affect other feature phone games that need preservation. And that's definitely something that we're going to go into depth later on in this episode. But yes, a little bit of a ramble for me. I'm sorry. No, no, that's totally like, this is kind of new territory for a lot of people. Like, Naomi, do you work with Cosmo closely or do you work on other games as well?

Or just how did you get involved in all this? So it started with back to like the end of 2020, I decided to get the P90IV, the Final 57 Advent Children cell phone. Yes. And then I thought to myself, well, there was a Final Phase 7 cell phone game before crisis. And I wonder if that's ever made any progress because remake was on the hype and everyone just got finished playing remake. And I looked back into it and I went on the, I Googled it. And I found that the FF7 mobile initiative page on livestream that Shedempt started.

And I let's further into it. And I'll just find all those info about before crisis. And I wanted to play the game, but then I found out that the game was at that time, at the time of 2020, it was shut down. And I wanted to play the game because I was, I was hungry for FF7 stuff. Of course. I'm always looking for FF7. And then I started looking deeper into it, and I found out the game was shut down. And at that time, there was no way to play it. And I was like, dumb.

And then I just, I got in and I bought the P90V, and I love the design. I love the shape of it. I love just, it's a very unique phone. And they were saying, oh, we're still looking for the lost game. I thought,

yeah, I could help. And we tried looking, can find it. But then as I got in more into looking into eye mode, AU,

and SoftBank, the three services that distributed before crisis, I also found out there were other games for it. Like,

I eventually found out about the Rockman games and Persona and many more other mobile games. And what draw me closer to it was that I looked further into B4 crisis and it was just it was a cell phone game but square ants looked at it or number I looked at it and said just because it's a cell phone

game doesn't mean it has to be like limited he pushed it to its limits and what it could do and it can do far more than what Western cell phones can do yeah I'm going to be able to be. Folks, as a podcaster, you would not believe the incredibly twisted things I have to look up on the internet just to bring you the content you crave. When my ISP saw the amount of hours I spent researching the Noid alone, I feared they were on the brink of sending the police to my apartment to do a wellness check. The digital paper trail I leave behind just to do my job as more than incriminating. It's downright embarrassing. I know most of you are probably thinking, why don't you just use incognito mode?

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Protect your online activity today with the VPN rated number one by Business Insider. Visit my exclusive link, ExpressVPN.com slash Retronauts. And you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-S-V-N.com slash Retronauts to learn more. For sure. We will actually get into that right now, talk a little bit about feature phones, West versus East, because it's very, very different situations here. Basically, when we talk about feature phones, quote unquote, dumb phones, apparently I had no idea that was actually a name for them. So I learned something there.

Basically, when we talk about it in the West, we talked about those, like, kind of those brick phones, that old Nokia you had, like, or the flip phone you had. And you didn't really have games for them. You had Snake. When you think about games on feature phones in the West, unfortunately, you think probably of the N-Gage for anything else, which is where a lot of those weird feature phone games ended up. But in Japan, it's kind of like there was an extra step in cell phone evolution between feature phones and smartphones,

which eventually came and obliterated everything anyway. Japanese feature phones, they were, as you were saying, so feature-rich and some of the games were actually extremely impressive. Like, I've looked at footage and, you know, watch footage for some of these games. And of course, not all them are winners, but a lot are certainly, certainly playable, more than playable. And you'll probably have to educate me on the reasons why this happened, why Japan came what is known as kind of a Galapagos zone in terms of their cell phone development, because as I understand it, it was all contained to Japan, hence

the use of Galapagos. But even though there was some attempt to expand into the West, it just did not work out. And moreover, when I hear when Westerners had their phones and they brought them over to Japan, they wouldn't work on Japanese network. So it was a very, very closed in and closed space where some really cool features and cultures and games have evolved, basically. Do you want to tell us a little bit about why those games were actually quite good versus Western phone games, which were kind of miserable because controlling with a dial pad does, it's not great. It's not fun. yeah yeah so yeah i think just all the support from big publishers like squarionics and capcom i think

those were really the main things that made um feature phone games what they were because you got big franchises like we just said met rock man final fantasy seven all of those franchises they all have these unique outings as well as ports onto these cell phones and as you said some of them definitely are better than others but i think it's just that and then also the way these phones are made um i've had the pleasure of actually meeting now in person he was able to show me and give me a few of these um feature phones and now i've now i now i now have too many of them i've like 12 and then i got i got this nice lithium ion battery bomb that's in my drawer but uh basically all of all of these phones are just like when you hold them in your hand like they just feel so

premium you can tell they got a lot of care put into them like the like some of the phones have these unique features like for example one of them opens up and then you can flip the screen sideways yes i've seen that i think so like one of them like the Fujitsu made a phone and what you can do is you can snap your hand sideways and the screen goes to the side like like physically like a hardware thing instead of just said it's like a physical thing oh that that'd be incredible I want that yeah there's another one it opens up like uh like you close the phone and then you open it sideways, kind of like a book. There's even a Windows 7 one where it was like half, it's literally like half Windows 7,

half whatever, whatever was the ecosystem was the Java ecosystem. Symbian, there we go. Yeah, and it's literally two halves of a phone stuck together, so it's super thick. And like, it's like half phone and then the other, it's like one board is a phone board and the other one is a mini computer. Wow. Yeah. So as you could see, those kinds of leaps and balance.

they made really enabled the games to be really crazy because some of the phones that have like a sideways screen they the games use that like you got cart racers that maximize that horizontal side he got a third person Gundam shooter that runs really well like 30 FPS really smooth wow and that and that uses the phone pad like sideways so you use like the arrow keys as like a kind of like a D pad basically so I think those are the two main things there's just the unique effort and architecture of these phones. Unfortunately, the locked off parts at big disadvantage, but what they put into the phones is a lot. And then just having the support of major game publishers like Bandai, Square, Capcom, Taito, et cetera. Now, when you had a bunch of these models of feature

phones out there, would Square, like, support them all, or was it like a network thing? Because you wrote a whole thing about Japanese networks here that looks like is very interesting, if not a little bit in depth. Oh, yeah, yeah. We can look at it. to that. So basically there were three main telecom providers that provided these games. The most prominent one was NTT Docomo. They had something called iMode, which is actually the world's first like wireless, sorry, mobile internet service, the first ever, 1999. And it's actually just still going to this day. It's going to shut down in 2026. So yeah, very, very, very surprising. It's still going on. But yeah, so that one allowed users to download things like iAply. And iAply is basically

what you call downloadable games or applications. They have like a McDonald's app. That's for some reason pre-installowing a bunch of phones. Welcome to your phone. Use McDonald's. Exactly. Yeah. So a lot of people use the term iMode games as like a blanket term for Japanese feature phones. But I like using Japanese feature phones because there are other services like another telecom proviser decided to compete with Docomo and their name was AU or KDDI and they made something called EasyWeb and that's basically just a copy of what Docomo did except now you got a different architecture that games run on most games ran on something called JME or J2ME and that was Java micro edition so anytime you see these feature

phone games it's usually on the Java software platform however the easy web games they actually ran on something called Brew, which is, which is actually different. It was like, it's a platform that has native code. It's, and they're more capable than the Java games, although they're harder to program for, but they're more capable in terms of graphics. Yes. And then the third provider, which last but not least, unfortunately, the one that's the most inaccessible to us is SoftBanks, Yahoo K-Tai.

It went under two different names, but for the sake of simplicity, we're just going to call them SoftBank Games. They're the most locked off of all of them, because to start, a game up, you have to have 3G service, which... Oh, no one has that anymore. Yeah, rest in peace. Yeah. So basically EasyWeb and Yahoo K-Tai from SoftBank, both of those are shut down, but IMOD still

exists. However, the storefronts, like the websites, they used to host the storefronts for games on I-mode, those are now shut down. So, yeah. And also regarding compatibility with certain foam models, Naya, you can talk about that because I think you know a little bit about, like, you know, certain phone model supporting certain games and things like that. Oh, like what game supports, like what phone model or something?

Yeah, basically. Like, it doesn't seem very integrated. It seems, is it like kind of pieced off kind of separate? Or is it more like, if you have an iPhone, you can play all these games? Oh, well, the, the iMode, for iMode, they have iAply, and IEPli has Doja, Docomo Java, and then Star, which is a successor to Doja. and for example Final Fantasy 1

it's a very simple game that once can be played on nearly all the IFC phones but a game like Durgh Kerva's Lost episode or Rockman the Five Islands game that's a 3D one right

Cosmos? Yes yeah that's that would most likely even though it wasn't it wasn't on Dogemon to my knowledge it would have been a star game where it started doing the 3D API if you wanted to chat

the compatibility list for, say like, before Crisis Final Fantasy 1 or a Rockman game, you would have to go to that page on the storefront. So, for example, I mode, they would have a compatibility list page. And you could check whether P-N-I-V, SH-10, or whatever device, and it'll say either it works, it's still being worked on, it does not support it. And the sad thing is the only way to view this is, if you have a i-mode cell phone, a use off-bank cell phone, and then you go to that page,

which requires a contract, and then you have to check. So in a weird way, you have to pay for all this stuff just to see if it's compatible or, you know, go find someone else who has it. But either way, it was way too, it was way too inclusive. It's actually funny to think about how obsolescent sneaks up on us in the weirdest way, like Cosmo.

You mentioned you needed a 3G connection. I said, well, good luck finding that. You're never going to find it. And I have recently, I dug up a netbook that I had in the 2010s, and the only way to connect with it is through WEP that doesn't support WPA. and it's like there's an update somewhere out there, but it was Linux base, so I couldn't really figure it out. But there you go.

I couldn't connect to the internet on this computer that was meant for the internet because the format simply didn't exist anymore. It's like when we think about obsolescence, we think about hardware, most of all, but software and contracts and stuff like this. This is a whole new level of trying to get game preservation done and it looked like a nightmare.

But the fact that you're trying so hard at it is just really, really commendable. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. But, yeah, we're making good progress. Is there anybody on the Japanese side over there in the cell phone land who's kind of working with the guys and helping you out? There is one, a kind of one person on Twitter named Sosi, he has been helping me with uncovering more info and data on before crisis.

He still has footage that he slowly shares of other Turks and characters that, too, to stay we still don't have video footage of and so far that's really it we've we found people who do have the IMO games of various like titles even ones I never even knew existed but they don't seem to be helping mainly because they it would involve having them to send their phone to us and then we would have to time with a hack it and you know they just some from what I've met like so see so see would love to help preserve before crisis but But that involves giving up a phone. And what I didn't, I haven't also concerned is that the phone also holds a lot of memories,

not just of what the data is on there, but the physical item itself that they've had through the years. And so far, he, he's kind of the only one who's been helping with that. But in terms of video game preservation in general, not many. Some, some do want to help. But I think they're afraid of legal, possible legal backwards. Yeah, I've heard of that. Even though there has been no proof or evidence that anyone's gotten busted for doing it, but I think it's a lingering fear that will pop up when you bring it up to them, no matter what your goal is.

I have heard of that. So I think I understand what you're coming from. I certainly understand not wanting to mail out feature phones willy-nilly because these things are now basically precious. They're lost items. And as you say, full of like pictures and music and stuff that is not easily replaced. So it is a very tricky situation. But let's talk a little bit about the games you're interested in preserving. I'd like to start with Crisis Core because, sorry, not Crisis Core.

Shoot, I'm sorry, I'm blanking. What's the name of the Final Fantasy 7 game we're just talking about? Oh, before Crisis. Before Crisis. Thank you. Everything's Crisis, the Square Enix. Before Crisis, I remember reading about it, and it seemed very interesting to me. It really did seem like a continuation or a prequel, I think, of the story of Final Fantasy 7.

I think Red 13 has even has like a girlfriend in it or something. There's another cat dog, whatever he is. Mm-hmm. What kind of game... Is it an RPG? Is it like... It's a real-time network action RPG game. Okay, okay.

So how do you... Do you know how it is played? Like, I know it's coming to modern phones, I think, very soon. So I am definitely curious about it. Yeah, to my knowledge, until we get any further evidence, ever crisis just seems to be more of giving the fans the opportunity to experience the story side of before crisis. Yes. We still don't know.

The gameplay mechanics... from before crisis will come into play. I hope it does, but as so far, until I'm proven wrong, I don't think so. So before crisis, Final Fantasy 7 takes place six years before the events of Final Phase 7. And so it also takes place during Crisis Corps. Yes. The game consists of 26 chapters, which are the main story.

And it is also two special episodes, which is a Reno, which takes place during the events of Crisis Core. So if you remember when Zach was in Medgar and he was about to help Cisnais the Turk and got stopped by Reno and Rood saying that sector 8 is Turks district district I forget the line. And then that event when when Reno and Rood run off, you get to actually experience that story mission before crisis. Right. And it's plays Reno and to stay it hasn't been archives. And that's for the story term. Then there's free mode.

And in free mode, you can you as a term. you get to explore various maps of Final Fantasy 7, such as like I'd Circle Inn, Medgar, and you get to go to the Underground Sewers, and you get to visit all these places, and there's various different types of new things you could do, you could fight new monsters, you're fighting enemies.

Even some enemies appeared for the first time in the Final Fantasy 7 universe, such as Ice Bomb. Oh, really? That was a, that's not about that enemy, appeared in before crisis first and then appeared in crisis core but we don't have a footage like video footage of that we have like i have info data on that that i right relations in but and besides from those little negree details and then during a mission when you die when you when you die in a

mission it's not game over what happens is when you die you have two options one you get sent at to the camper you're being held hostage by avalanche and you wait there and your friends in the real world Turks, they get to go to that avalanche camp and they have to rescue you by fighting a whole bunch of avalanche members and they can rescue you. And by doing this, yeah, you get extra rank points,

ESP and AP, or you can decide not to get sent to the camp and you can spend rank points to get revived. Right. That's pretty cool. So it definitely had a social element, which is something that Japan has always been excellent with their portable games, of course, Monster Hunters on the PSP is a great example of that. But I like the idea of my friends rescuing me and me just kind of sitting there and waiting

and no one ever comes to get me. That would be really sad. Well, and they do have it and they actually have it so that if no one comes to rescue you, Reno will actually come and rescue you. That's amazing. He's like, I'm bored. Just get out of here. So, and they have other things such as you can generate material with your camera.

And if you're in battle and you need some assistance, you can ask for, material from your friends and then you'll get it and then you'll get a email like an actual email from your phone you open it and it's a son saying um name of the turk needs materia and then you go to headquarters and you get to select with material send and the material you send depending on what one it is you uh will determine what summon you can perform so for example four red materials will be for it. For blue would be

Shiva. For light blue would be Leviathan and so on. And many of the summons from Final Five Seven appear in the game as well. And there's just, the more you dig into it,

the more there is for before crisis. Yeah. It just sounds like a really meaty game. Like when I think about actually Crisis Corps and how they all communicated to each other during that time when the game was first initially made,

it really does come across as they're all just, using a bunch of feature phones and using like the kind of subscribing more to the Japanese culture of cell phones than we had in the West. And now thinking about it in that light, it's like, oh, that's actually pretty interesting. That's pretty fun, actually. How much memory was in the average phone? Because it says here before a crisis, it had 26 chapters, but an auto-deleted old chapters

to save space. Owie. Yeah, so they were really good about data delivery, like from what I understood is that they were able to what they took advantage of the um the way i mode was and they were able to do it so that in a way you were streaming the game and you would um it would download the um the files and it would put it to the scratch pad it which is like a temporary storage um area and then they were able to take the data put in there temporary until you want to do something do something new and so with this they were able to basically make a full-fledged cell phone game

that's cool for cell phones um you have your also dirger serveris the last episode i'll be honest djuris is a really terrible game how is the feature phone game if you know on i i have the demo it's it comes pre-installed on a p903 i so if they wants to oh wow buy it yeah if you buy p903 i you may or may not have the chance to play it if it's on there um honestly this

game is it's decent it's pretty cool for for a flip phone game and it's not the best but it is honestly a very unique game and while although it was distributed in north america it didn't you know last long but then again that was during the iphone uprise but either way it's fun it's interesting and it's really it's a unique experience i'll say that it's definitely yeah it seems like it would be like it's a shooter on a feature phone and did work out for it i think it did yeah because i was able to have fun with it and you can go walking from three-person to first-person shooting. And then also, you are able to dodge or able to switch out your weapons.

And overall, it's just, it's a fun game. They have cutscenes and it really is like a full, full-fledged Final Five-seven game. When Spuriance came to the mobile games, they really didn't. They brought everything. They did. They just, yeah, they pushed it to its limits. Yeah, Derger's server's last episode is, it's really fun. I can also attest to it.

It's like a, yeah, as you said, it's like third person, the graphics are like PS1 graphics, you know, it's quite, it's quite smooth. And the transition, the transition when you get to first person mode and you're shooting, like, it's a little clunky because you can only move left and right and you're kind of slow at that. But like, just like, it has an auto walk on and then you're running around, you're grabbing stuff. You can go up ladders. You can move the camera too. You can. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's true.

Yeah, you can move the camera. It's just, it's a little bit bizarre. But they were, yeah, they were able to do that. Yeah, I think if you face one direction for long enough, the camera auto rotate to go behind you. So it's like, it's almost like they, even they thought of that, like even they knew, yeah, controlling this third person, you know,

it's going to be kind of click on a cell phone. So let's just, and design the little extra thing for the camera just to make your life a little easier, you know, so that's, yeah, very, very sophisticated. Everyone, it's Jeremy, and the older I get, the more I find that there is no feat of household engineering more complicated than achieving comfortable sleep. I'm cold nature to want to sleep under a pilot. of blankets, but my hot-natured wife wants to turn down the thermostat and eventually kicks all the blankets over to my side, night after night. The one thing we can both agree on is that our sheets

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Let's talk very briefly, or as long as we want, actually, about other games on these feature phones because I'll be honest, I didn't know what half of these. Like, uh, it's mentioned there's a lot of ports. What ports of what? Like DS games or, um, other games? GBA games. Yeah, usually like, yeah, I, I'd say, yeah, GBA games like, like the Mega Man games. They're, like the Ball Network, um, rock metal EXC games on the feature phones.

Those are not ports, but they're very close to their counterparts, but we're not to we're on to make a man yet. We're going to focus on each other guys first. Um, yeah, so Capcom was. As we'll see, they're a really, really big supporter of future phone gaming. So they got, they got Devil May Cry, they got Lost Planet, they got Monster Hunter, they got Ace Attorney. They got Ace Attorney ports. They also got a Street Fighter 2 port.

Naya hates how it plays, but I kind of find it cool because the pound key is the Hadoican button. So if you just spam pound, all you're going to do is Hedukins. How do you forget? That's so easy. Metal Gear Solid is also on it too. Really? Like the original? Like the PlayStation version?

Yeah, there's like one. brew, there's one brew phone that does come up with a pre-installed Metal Gear Solid game. It sounds like a lot of these providers had a lot of deals to just shoot their games as exclusives on their phones.

Is that the right impression that I'm getting here? Yeah, to some extent. Yeah. The W-5-1H for the, it comes pre-installed with a B-Ford Crisis Font-A-7 demo and the demo was placed on the African phone so that it should help with the sales of the W-5-1-H cell phone. Right.

Cool. So how playing street fire on a phone, that sounds like a nightmare. I think I'll pass on that one. But I mentioned here, Katamari Damasee Mobile, which I can't play original Catamari because it makes me motion sick. But I like the idea of using, it had tilt controls apparently through the camera. Yeah. Yeah.

So it came preloaded on this Docomo phone called a P904i, but of course it was distributed long after that. But P904I, that was released in 2007. So basically, they didn't have gyromators inside the phone. So what they did is they used this technology called JesterTech Mobile. And basically, it would use the camera to detect vibrations. So you have to have a lot of light in the room. But basically, based on like a camera and everything, it can detect like how you rotate the phone left, right, up, down, things like that.

And it's actually, I got a copy myself. It is really accurate. I'm really surprised at how accurate this is. You've got to hold down a button to start that, kind of like recalibrating it. But when you tilt it, it's very good. And it's interesting, like the company behind that camera technology, they also worked on like the Xbox Connect and other different kinds of devices. So they definitely know their stuff, the guys who developed that technology. But it was also used in Western phones too.

Like I found a commercial for it, like for Verizon phones. And it's more pathetic. Like, oh, look, I'm rolling this ball around this track. Look at the ball go. But here, no, I'm rolling a ball and I'm rolling stuff up with the ball. So, you know, it's been better. I'm rolling my dad into this ball because he destroyed the universe because he's a drunken idiot. That's a better pitch.

That's certainly better pitch. Ease. Like, I love E's games. But are these like the older ones that you would find on the phones? Or were they like the more bumping, bump into enemies, older ones? Well, let's see. I'm shit Ease one. I actually got a 3D remake, a unique 3D remake on these phones.

Cool. Yeah. And then they got Shin East 1 3D Guidon, which is a totally original full-length game starting the character named Doji. Dogey. Oh, I love Dogey. There we go. Yeah. And then they also had some, like, miscellaneous games. And that's kind of a trait with feature phone games based on IPs. Like, you get those nice original games. And then you get stuff like East Pinball and East, like a billion different types of Solitaire. East Solitaire sounds kind of nice. Yeah. There's also Final Fantasy seven snowboarding, although I think, that was released on Western films too, right? Now, yeah. It sounds familiar. Yeah.

I love some boring in that I have seven. So yeah, East got those ones, a lot of them. And they also got this thing called East Nexus, which is apparently an MMO, but I can find barely any info on it. But I have heard, when I, when I browse through old stuff for, like, say artwork for old games, like one thing I can say off the top of my head was Final Fantasy adventure, you know, aka Sagan Densetsu, the first one. I know that had a feature phone remake that we never got here, but it has some new art. And I think was like one of my realizations that like, oh, there's a whole market going on in Japan that I know next to nothing about. So I would read through, sorry, I would pursue these images and notice I don't recognize these at all.

And then I'd learn much later. These were from some network game that was involved in Japan and it was all connected and it was a whole separate thing. And it just sounded like such a such an interesting, but it's disappointing. that I missed out on it all. But you do have Sonic here, and I have to say, we did not miss out on Sonic on feature phones. He was here.

He was bad. He was Sonic. I like Sonic very much, but sometimes he does. I mean, I would hope to God that this wasn't the version that was on the GBA, because that was just,

whoever did that version to the game should go to jail. Yeah. Yeah, they did Sonic ports. They had Sonic 1 and 2. One of my phones that's now, well, it died, rest in peace.

It's like 20 years old anyway. that had a Sonic 2 port on there And it plays, I mean, it's like 10 frames a second But I mean, the controls are snappy with 10 frames a second at least And the music is also a little remix too They add a few like extra, you know, you know, side melodies in there So Sonic had some ports There's also something called Sonic 3D Golf

That's preloaded on there And that's a 3D game That sounds fun actually I guess Sonic's a ball and you hit him It's actually pretty cool. I don't think Sonic's a ball, though. I don't think it's like that one Kirby game. I think it's just really Sonic with a golf club.

And you just... Oh, Sonic's playing golf. He's not the golf ball. Yeah, you get to play as Sonic, Knuckles, Tails, and Amy. And, yeah, you get to play golf. It's actually, it's a pretty decent game. It sounds like it might be fun. Like, I think one benefit to maybe these feature phone games is even though some of them can be very

impressive, if you're not exactly expecting them to be like God of War the next chapter. You're just like, these are fun to. distractions, kind of like Snake, but on a much higher level. So if you hold them to a certain standard, I can see these being like a lot of fun on a long train ride, which I've heard Japan has many opportunities for. Yeah, that's true. And then also quickly, before we get to another game, we got to quickly jump back to Final Fantasy. They did port Final Fantasy 1 and 2 in their entirety as preloaded games on, like, the earliest, earliest on feature phones. So like the P-900I or cloud cell phone, P-900 IV.

That's from 2004, so who's almost 20 years old at this point. But yeah, it's, yeah, but like early on, they're much more generous of what they gave you in demos. Like later on, like, they just give you like one stage of song, for example, and then, you know, that's it. But here, they just gave you the whole entirety of Final Fantasy One, but it's like a port, too. It's not even emulation. So it runs really smoothly. The music is also slightly remixed. It's really nice.

And then, of course, Final Fantasy II got the same treatment on the successor to that phone. Yeah, there are a lot of RPGs I find on feature phones because they don't move very quickly. They're not like Sonic. They don't really, who can go at 10 frames per second probably shouldn't. So that would actually be very appealing, actually. I don't know, we said it was 2004. That would be like, holy crap, I can play my childhood game in my hand right now. Like that would be mind blowing.

So I could see that really pushing the phone to some new heights in terms of sales, at least if I was there, which I wasn't. You also wrote down Kingdom Hearts Coded. Now I know almost next to nothing about Kingdom Hearts, but I do know by God it was on everything. So what did that involve if you know? So coded. So originally

Coded was released on IMO Docomo phones and it's pre-installed on the P-01A and it was and everyone's know what recoded is basically. That's just the remade version of

coded and it's a decent game that it ran for a while the gameplay is interesting i'll say because you know you're playing a kingdom hearts game on a uh a flip phone or at least in this case one of those phones where it can you can close it and turn it into like a um a landscape right right and uh and then i forgot who someone found it on the internet started making an uproar about you know, Kingdom Arts coded being found on this cell phone and there were some other Kingdom Hearts games for IMO, but there wasn't really

they weren't like anything like nothing lore important to my knowledge. I mean, if it was that Esquare would have obviously put it out already. Yeah. But yeah, it was a decent game that had story, dialogue mode, everything

and the graphic cutscenes were nearly similar to what you would see on the DSI. So it was great. Some people actually managed to find someone who had the full game and try to move it to the SD tar, but that one's encrypted and we need some people to help find a way to get that unencrypted so others can play it.

Right, right for sure. That's, I guess, one topic we'll be going into. It's just like, why is it so hard? What could you to help? But before we do that, did you want to talk about a little bit about the Mega Man games in particular? Are there any other games you guys wanted to shout out on the good old future phones.

Before we shout out of Mega Man, he's the man the myth of the legend himself. But I want to quickly touch on, well, yeah, if now he wants to touch on anything else, he can. But for me,

I want to touch on him some freeware. There's, I mean, we were talking about commercial games here, but there was a ton of, like, freeware, you know,

varying quality, of course, but like, there are some, there's some many developers, you know, like, like,

maybe like one guy, right, or single person, and teams, and they would develop their own games, and they would just distribute them for free. And those ones are really, really hard to come by. And there's this user named Memory Hunter, and he's actually found over 1,000 freeware,

iAply and easy appley games. And like, this is all just coming from, like, intelligently and cleverly scouring websites and finding their data and archiving them. Because a lot of these websites have just got a bunch of Java files on there. They're just kind of left to rot, and they're all forgotten. You know, and who knows when they could be gone.

So he is really the main guy who's trying to start this, but it's a good incentive for people who want to get into preservation, but then we're getting ahead of ourselves. We've still got a few more games to talk about. No, for sure. Go ahead and mention anything else you'd like to. There's also some Professor Leighton games. Right, right. I was going to ask about that.

Yeah, there were, so as far as I know, there are two DSP. ports that are on there and as well as a i mode exclusive professor lane game that we to the stay still have no release proper release um definitely mirror i believe it's called and that one actually was actually found recently by someone and and we're looking into trying to dump and preserve the game because once again the company even though we've asked about you know releasing the game you know they still have said anything or you know give the excuse of oh well that's just a cell phone game uh that is is that an attitude you guys come up against a lot like we're trying to preserve these like oh they're just distractions not really meant to be oh god 100% it's this is exactly what

we're trying to come back you know with this kind of thing i think these are more than just snake but it's interesting too because you know because recently nintendo just started finally implementing the whole you can play game boy advanced games and Game Boy Tour games officially on your Nintendo Switch and G mode archives, a company in Japan. They're porting cell phone games to Switch, and they're actually doing well enough to the point where three lost iMode games from Atlas, the last Bible, got ported to Switch and PC. So slowly, you know, it's becoming less of, oh, it's a, you know, it's just a mobile game. it, you know, slowly there's there should be really no excuse to say

no, if, you know, if there's, if there's a big fan audience for it, go for it. But I don't know what it. Even Square Enix has realized and that's why we're getting like before a crisis and stuff like that. And I'm glad to see Atlas had a little bit of a hand in that as well. That's stuff that's very important.

Accessibility is everything when it comes to preservation. For the, and one last thing for the persona game, there was a online mobile persona game where you would go to DecorCon, high but you're not the persona three protagonist you are your own protagonist and you could go with friends to Tartarus

you can fight shadows you can go to school level up social links and all that stuff and it was in the persona three universe but little info is available on this game at all and it didn't seem to last long to my knowledge but either way

it was still saying that existed for flip phones in general so that's yeah right now games as a service in general don't last long if they don't really perform and that's a shame because that's how a lot of games are lost yeah How did Monster Hunter look on these phones? Were they ports?

Were they something else entirely? Because I imagine that would have been a huge, huge thing for Japan. It looks okay. It looks to play okay. Someone on YouTube already covered this subject. And, I mean, to my knowledge, like the gameplay looks decent and everything. But I don't have much knowledge of interest on Monster. Yeah, and Ace Attorney, of course, was the series on the Game Boy before we got it on the DS.

Were those ports, or was that, did they get something separate as well? Not sure. I'm still like, I believe that there are, I believe there are ports. They were ports. Yeah. Yeah. I know Capcom, at least, did a lot of early ports on the iOS when it first came out. And eventually they got better at it, but the first batch of games was pretty miserable. And to make things worse, along comes iOS 8, which destroyed their library. I don't know exactly the technicalities of why, but everything broke, and they had to re-upload it. And here comes iOS 11, destroy more games.

I think Capcom was better this time. But stuff like this is a really, you get a lot of speed bumps when it comes to preservation. That's for sure. And with Mega Man, can you guys explain a little bit more about the games maybe starting with the Legends ones? I think it's called Five Islands. Like, is it Canon? Is it, I know it is a side story, but I know there are the bonds. There is a translation online.

and you can find it like a play-through that's been professionally translated or fan-translated. It sounds really good, actually. Yeah, so, yeah, so Ruckman Dash, Great Adventure on Five Islands was released in 2008 for Docomo devices, only for Docomo devices. So you were talking about exclusivity there. This is only exclusive to Docomo phones. And it is canon, I think, because, well, it takes place between Legends 1 and 2. And it was obviously released, like, way after 1 and 2 came out. And, well, rest of peace, three.

But, but, but, but, but, but like there, there is like a, at the last island, because there are five chapters and they're released on a biweekly basis. Right. And each chapter is a different island. And the last chapter does have an elevator to Elysium that's broken. So, you can kind of see, like, yeah, you know, Vovona has no idea what Elysium is yet. So that means it must take place between one and two. It also features, um, Denise Marmalade, who's a character.

Oh, Denise, the, yeah, the top. She was hilarious. Yeah, she's pretty funny in this game, too, although I have reduced capacity. Yeah, she, I just remember playing the game with my husband before we were even married. This was me just hanging out with him, and we bought Tron Bond together. And we played that chapter, and I was playing as Tron, of course. I picked up a car or something. Denise is running around everywhere.

She's, like, on fire. I pitched the car. No, sorry, it was a mailbox. I pitched the mailbox from, like, a long distance, and just slowly, slowly, totally fall, like just beautiful shot, just hits her, it explodes. It was the most, she just lying out on the ground, sprawled dead. It was, I couldn't stop laughing for like half an hour. It's just too perfect for me.

What a great series. Yeah, so, so yeah, the gameplay is very similar to how it plays on the PlayStation. You still got those great tank controls. I will still say if you get used to them, they're not so bad, you know, but I can see some people getting turned out for the series because of it. For sure, for sure. Like the graphics are very similar. You got, you got, like, Hemaroo doll as, like, the final boss, I think.

But also, like, the, the, the sprites for the faces and everything, like, the faces have multiple expressions. They're very expressive. You know, you got Vonne rubbing his head, and he got a, you know, shocked, like, a shocked face. He's absolutely hilarious in this game. It looks so silly. It does, it does. But, yeah, so you're mentioning online, there is one guy, 2011, I think. His name is Suzu Kaze.

He's since disappeared off the face of Earth, unfortunately. I don't know where his whereabouts are, but he recorded, like, a four-all play-through of the game. Yes. And that's on YouTube now. And then, like, the fan translation, that, yeah, that's 100% fan-made. And, like, Get Me Off the Moon is organization that does a lot of this stuff. They're great guys. Oh, right.

Just get me off this moon. Yeah, yeah. They're great. Yeah. And they were the ones that set up this thing where, you know, we're going to translate the script the game, but then we're also going to voice it over. So they got some great voice actors. They did

three islands, and then it went on a hiatus for like five years. And then like, I think I got a year ago, a year and a half ago, I was talking to Chomp, who's the head of getting me off the moon. And I was like, you know what? If you need a video editor, like, apparently like most of the lines are already done. So like

I was able to edit videos with this other user named Tredge from Mega Man Legend Station. Remember when we get the fourth island uploaded? And the fifth and sixth island are kind of in development held because all the voice actors are busy doing their own thing, right? And then, of course, we're also busy with our own things. But hopefully we'll be able to get those last two islands in English so people can understand what the characters are saying. Yeah, yeah, for sure. How does it play? Like, it is a shooter,

of course, a third-person shooter, Megaman Legends generally is. But it seemed to be running a little bit chopply when I saw the video, but I guess that's standard for a lot of feature phone games. famous? Yeah, it doesn't seem to play the best. I was like one of the translators on my great adventure guide project. I'm Midori. Oh, yeah, I know Madori for a while. Yeah, really, really nice person. Yeah, she actually had the game herself. It's actually her copy that we have. It's on SD card, but yeah, she was, she lost it. And then I told her like, maybe you could look one more time and then she found it in her old residence. So. Oh, beautiful. But then I asked you how to play and she was like, it sucks. Like, I like the EXD games better, but she never had the EXE

games apparently. I only like a demo for one of them. But yeah, so basically, like, everyone has not played the game is like, wow, this looks so awesome. But I'm someone who plays the game. It's, it's okay. It definitely strikes me as the kind of game game where, of course, it needs to be preserved. Of course, it needs to be out there in a while because it should be. But I would watch a YouTube video of the translation and call it a day and skip ahead from even the gameplay parts because that makes me a bit nauseous the way you kind of hitch through those hallways. Exactly, yeah.

And what about the EXE games? So I know less about them. Like it's, even the name is sliding off my brain right about now. Yeah. So there are two EXE games. There was rockband.e.exe Fantive Network and Rockmont Ea.exe Legend of Network.

So Fantive Network was released in 2004 for, for EasyWeb devices. And then in 2009 later for Docomo. So it was initially exclusive to EasyWeb. And then later on, Docomo got it as well. And I think maybe SoftBank, I think at the same time.

time got it but um yes offensive network um that one has eight chapters and they're released on a schedule just kind of like five islands and and they have original characters and navv so if you have like a returning navvy boss like let's say fireman. exc that's explaining us cash data which ties in direct to the original plot so yeah that's interesting i think is like it's like literally cash data i know all the past is kind of being brought back and you're fighting against this it's it's very very hard to explain just look up to synopsis online it's a very very it's a very involved surprisingly involved yeah and actually the a the easy web version of fancived network had an exclusive extra mode called battler's tower and in it you face 10 opponents in a row with the

same battle chip folder and the more you win the more you go up and rank it simulates real-time pvp but it's not really pvp you're just comparing your scores to other online upload scores from players and also had a time attack boss mode so that's cool yeah so that's also really cool and also um the the xc anime was actually airing its final season when this came out so elements from this game were included in the final season of the recommend the xe anime and the episodes that it's in are really trippy like they're they're they kind of go into the you know extraterrestrial whatever whatever I seem to remember that season. Was that the season with Beryl and Duo?

And he went off planet and it was just like, sure, see ya, space cowboy. Maybe. I mean, I think that was stream. This is Beast Plus. Oh, Beast Plus. Okay, that's right. They were both pretty weird. By that point, I wasn't watching regularly.

I don't know if you're familiar with Ryuko, who used to run the, she's run a lot of fan stuff dealing with EXE. And I'd kind of keep up via her screenshots. stuff. And I'm like, I have no idea what's going on. And by this point, I had finished most of the Battle Network games, if not all of them. And I was just like, this isn't really in the game. I know it wasn't really engineered to be like the game from the beginning. But there comes a line you cross. And I'm just like, I got to check out now. Exactly. Yeah. When Beast Plus, I mean, when the original Beast came around before Beast

Plus, I was like, I'm out because he got like parallel universes with like, I don't know what it was Beast versions of themselves. And like, I'm like, okay, you know, that's a little too much for me. I was already a little bit on the edge with the whole cross-fusion, but now, gosh. But yeah, so, yeah, Phantom Network was in the anime. However, Legend of Network was not as fortunate. That was released two years later in 2006 for Easy Web and then, once again, 2009, at the same time as Phantom Network for Docomo devices. And that one also had eight chapters. And this one had an original story that was featuring an ancient civilization with advanced net technology. kind of reminds me of Star Force 2.

But yeah, so like the other one, it has a bunch of original characters. Like the final boss is literally a Trojan horse. Like, it's a giant Trojan horse. I think I've seen that. Yeah, that actually made me. That got a chuckle out of me. And there's also a guy named Rideman who's a cowboy, but then he gets corrupted and turns it into a literal horse.

His name is Reverse, Rideman. Oh, my God. Yeah, it also has a new mechanic called the Trans Arm, which is, It's very similar to Double Soul from Ball Network 4 and 5. You just kind of sacrifice the chip, and then you can use that one ability. And it was released after the anime concluded, and Starforce is kind of starting up. So it's one of the few pieces of EXE material that was not adapted for the anime. So it's kind of forgotten in that sense, because if we look at the wiki page for a legislative network

and compare it to Fentive Network, I mean, there's almost nothing on here except for just named a chapter. so it's very very not documented well however there is one user named ychan i think on youtube and he has both phantom network and legend of network and he has posted full gameplays not direct feed but like really really good on like taping of a phone in a dark room and he's done like multiple playthroughs he's shown all the program advances yes there are program advances in here all of them actually i didn't even describe how they play it's kind of like you take the gba the battle system and you just copy and paste it. It's basically identical. The main sacrifices they had to make were with the real life overworld. That is just limited to like a picture

of a setting and then text boxes. Text boxes. Like like Shinemagani, Tensei. Yeah, yeah, very similar to that. Yeah. But when you get into the cyber world, you can run around the cyber world and go down different paths. However, it's from a top-down perspective instead of isometric because technical limitations. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds pretty cool, though. It sounds like it is. something they put more effort into than the usual kind of, you know, 10-cent game. Was it fun to play? Like, I don't know if you got to play it, or was it kind of like Legends where it's like, well, this is fun for the story, but...

Yeah, unfortunately, despite me being the leader of this project, I've actually touched, I'd never touch any of these games, which is sad. But that just goes to show how hard it is to even find a copy, because you really have to be in Japan. Currently, another correspondent in the U.S. has our phone, and he has tried out, playing it on a stream because our certain phone model does have HDMI out. It's a pretty sophisticated one. So he was able to do some direct feed out. And it does seem like you had a fun time with it.

Like I guess the battle system, it was more like, oh, you know, like, wow. Like I'm really playing like the TVA game on a flip phone. It doesn't seem like there is many compromises as five islands because five islands you got that 3D, the phone's already about to explode handling for 3D. But with this, I imagine it's much worse. simple for the phone so it probably runs much better and like yeah it seems like the rockman games are cursed because i do have like um like the megaman one had a demo on some feature phones and i was able to buy a by a phone that has it on there but like every single capcom demo that i have

they don't require any kind of internet access but the only one that does is the mega man one demo and i'm like why you know it's just it's just it's just come man stage you know like it's not even that big, but unfortunately, like, the Street Fighter 2 demo on the same phone does not require internet. So I think a separate team worked on the Mega Man feature phone. And they decided to be a jerk about it. Yeah, that's very frustrating. I'm sorry for you guys. Yeah, it's too bad, but like this Mega Man games are just such a big rabbit hole because they did have ports of already existing games. So, for example, all the NAS Rockman games were ported and even Mega Man 9. When that came out, that was put on the phone here. And the NES version,

The feature phone version of Rockman actually had a playable role. So you could play as a role. And I think that's the only time you've ever been able to play us her, aside from Powered Up, of course. But like, there's like your NES Sprite and you can go around and play as her. That's amazing. I'm jealous. Yeah. And then they also got Mega Man X games.

They got X1 all the way to X4. X4 actually had two different versions. X version, a zero version. There's some gameplay online. Yeah. I don't know how it plays. I forget what it looks like. Probably not the most impressive thing.

But hey, you know, Mega Man X-4, PlayStation game on a flip phone, I mean, considered me intrigued. There was a time when the novelty was everything, for sure. Like, even now saying, yeah, we put Mega Man X-4 on a flip phone. I'd be like, wow, that sounds really cool. I know it probably doesn't play great, but I'm going to go look that up because that sounds amazing, just that we did it. Like, hey, look, we did the thing.

It's a very human thing to do. So I guess you are a great sort of a great sort of addition to my notes here. just talking about like preservation and the it's many many many problems so let's start there like why is it so hard to preserve these games we've touched on a lot but just kind of like recap what is going on here uh there is just so many variables it seems that are hard to it's like kind of plugging up one leak and then another one spring another one springs up beside you yeah now if you want to start go ahead oh okay um to find at the source is um one of finding a person who still has the game due to the

fact that the stores that exist that hosted this game they do not exist anymore as well as if you try to start it up after services shut down it doesn't seem to work at least that's what I've seen from Twitter

various users on Twitter and then once you find the game or find the person has the game that's stuck on cell phone, it's hard to get off once you find that person then it's a matter of trying to, well, one, if they're on the same page as you about preserving them, two, are they willing to help? And from my experience, you know, it could range from even if you're the most

kind, as nicest person or whatever, you know, if it involves helping out trying to dump the game, regardless of reason, some are most likely not willing to help or some are willing to help. And I will have to say, again, you know, you can be as nice as possible, but if your intention is to preserve or dump a game usually some people will say no right right as many people have said to me oh well maybe you didn't ask nice i said i asked nicely i just you're a very nice person i can tell you that right now in their case you're a nice person until the intentions are taking a game off of a phone even though the game even though what you're doing technically you know you're kind of doing free advertisement by putting the game out and doing free stuff of the puppy but yeah but then let's

say you get the game and it's in your hands, then you've got to deal with the unique hardware as since the phones did not make it to America or North America or worldwide, like how the Nintendo Wii and GameCube hardware has made it to worldwide audiences, we haven't really had much time to investigate and look into what type of hardware they use and the hardware they use is very unique. Yes. And even though it has been shown with things like the Wii and stuff that sometimes data sheets aren't necessarily needed to do so. But also that's it, lack of help, lack of tech people to get involved in help. And then there's also the outcome where it's like, you know, if we were to take a Nintendo Wii game and dump it, we get everything.

Right. But if we were to take a cell phone game with Before Crisis and dump that or a Mega Man game or something like that, most likely you're just getting a, fraction of the data. And then once you get the fraction of data or the game at all, next is once it's on your computer, it's like, how do we even play this game? Exactly. So then also lack of emulators as well.

Right. That's another thing. And then another downside, too, is that some people just, you know, delete the games when they feel like, you know, there's no use into hanging on to them. But not everyone's like this. For all we know, some people,

there could be someone out there that you know that may or may not have the game but they don't like to share about what they do and don't have because, you know, overseas, you know, everyone's very, like, proud and happy to say, you know,

I own Pfe, 7, I own Kingdom Hearts that yetta, yeah, yeah. Whereas in Japan, it's more like, you know, if you ask them, oh, do you happen to have this? They're like, yeah, I do. But that's, you know, they're not as open to sharing

about what they have. Right. Yeah. So it's a cultural difference. largely by the sounds over there because I have heard about like going back to our mutual friend here, Brian slash Proto Dude. I know he has made some efforts in preservation

and kind of run up against some resistance in Japan in particular and it's just a culture thing they're not doing to be mean or cruel or anything like that it's just we talked in the past about how there's still some worrying about how dumping stuff can be considered a legal problem. So I understand but still man that's a

roadblock that's kind of difficult to get around isn't it? There's also lack of data sheets for the CPUs that are in these phones as well as NAN chips. Some docomophones use OMAP, which is like a well-known, like if you ever get into the CPUs of phone world, that's a really well-known and has a lot of data sheets out there for these type of things. And then there's some who use Qualcomm CPUs, and a lot of people know about these too. In fact, most Qualcomm CPUs are actually in various Android phones.

But I'm not sure about some, and not all of them, but some of them. Yeah. And but then there's also the NAN chips. And they also have some exclusive CPUs like Unifere and there's another one. But there's just, there's some very unique chips that nobody has ever seen. Yeah. And they're so old and delicate that even like touching it can destroy it or something like that. It crumbles to dust.

That would be depressing. Kind of like that. It's like it's easy to break off. Yeah, these are, it's not even just a matter of the data. These are very delicate, like, instruments. These are phones that are, most of them are like around 20 years old. Probably not in the greatest shape anymore. I'm sure plenty are sturdy.

But everything sounds so fragmented, I think, is what's the, you know, a big problem here. There's also, you've mentioned that some of the games are in Java. So those are double dead and just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so basically that night and I covered a good amount of it. Yeah, finding the games is hard because just, And the cultural difference over there makes it a little difficult to find things. And also, full games, like, we'll get into this later when we talk about demos,

but full games, they require the user's SIM card, like the same SIM card linked, you know. I have to have I-Mode contract, for example, to play I mode games. And I mode contracts are not being sold anymore. So I can't, I go to Japan right now and go, go, go and say, all right, I know your server shuts down 2026, but I want a contract. No, they stopped doing that in 2018. So basically you need to have that SIM card in the phone to even play a full commercial game, which means like our copy of Phantom Network and Legend Network that does have the user SIM card in there. And that's why I'm really grateful to the person to give it to us because, you know, it's not an easy thing to say,

you know what, I'm going to go send a bunch of foreigners, you know, with my SIM card inside there, you know, for the sake of game reservation. So that's another difficulty. And some of them are network reliant. Like the Mega Man games are not that I know of. of, oh, well, Rockman one demo, but like, like Phantom Network, Legend of Network, those ones are playing just fine

without Wi-Fi, but for example, before, sorry, no, not Wi-Fi Network, but before Crisis, for example, that did rely on network, which means that even if we do get fragments of that game, it's likely not going to be the full thing because that relies on servers. And then

NIA already touched on the data sheets for CPU and NAM chips. Those are all super not documented. It's hard to look into them. And then the other big problem is SD encryption, because some of these phones, you can move the game to a microSD card. However, it isn't like I can just take the microSD and plug it into my computer and then say, wow, and now I got five islands. Unfortunately, there is encryption. It's a C2 Cryptomere Cipher. It's a modification of the DRM used in DVD video discs. And basically, it's like, it's really tough stuff. They're

these, there's a German Danish professors who authored to study on how to crack this, and I contacted them. And this is before we made any progress in, like, getting there. Like, all we had was encrypted data, but no, like, you know, keys or S-boxes or anything. And they both told me, unfortunately, it's mathematically impossible. Like, the heat death of the universe will happen before you can get this. So that was kind of a bummer. However, team member named BinCat is able to find the substitution box because you need an S-box and you need device keys to crack this cipher, whatever it is.

And he was able to find the S-box. And basically, the S-box is the same as the ones used on DVD video disks, but the device keys are different because the key generation algorithm is all screwy. But most recently I learned that the device keys are specific to each device. However, they can work for any microSD, even one written in another device, but they're specific to each data type. And that's a big thing. And I did not know this like a week or two ago, but like maybe we'll get in talking about the Rockman project and specifics later on.

But it's a very, very, very good development as just recently happened with that where like, yeah, if you do get the keys from one device, you could potentially apply this to a ton of other games that are also walked with SD card encryption. And then I briefly brought it up, but emulation is also a problem because once you have these files, how are you going to play them? So J2ME, the Java games, there's one emulator called J2ME Loader, and AU briefly had Java games. Like we call them brew games because most of them are brew. However, a few of them early on were Java. So that supports those games and it also supports soft bank games. However, it does not support Doja. And Doja is basically like a custom profile that Docomo made on top of JME.

So basically, Docomo wants to throw the book in us because they're like, yeah, you can't, you can't. Like, we're not raw Java micro edition. You know, we are Docomo Java. You know, we got some of extra layers. Yeah. So there's a great developer known as Zer, and this developer is working on creating an all-encompassing day two emulator that also includes support for these Docomo Java games.

And that's been development for quite a bit of time. It's just one developer, but, yeah, this user has been really hard at work and helps to have, like, connections to, like, for example, retroarch, things like that. So luckily that person is on our team. So it's kind of like an emulator is being slowly developed in conjunction with the project. And then if you want to get into brew emulation, which is the easy web games, there's only one emulator called Melange. And it's missing some key features like audio. And that's because there's only one user who has been cat, who I talked about earlier. I mean, he's the only person who's developing

it. So it's a one-man job. So as you can tell, this community is not very big. And that's one, another issue that we might get into later. yeah but you're all very good at thinking on our feet apparently solving these problems as they come as there's an endless parade of problems so you really sounds like you really learn to expand your thinking and get over some of these issues yeah yeah as i said they're just throwing the book at us everything just every single little thing they just want to make our lives tougher but we're getting there Yeah, it speaks to the games and the games and just the passion behind game preservation in general that you would go to these lengths for these quote unquote crappy cell phone games. Oh, yeah. It's definitely worth it. Actually, I like to briefly bring up a team member. If you're talking about passion and dedication, there is this team member named Craze on our team.

He's done some great work with, like, there was a brew of Brazilian consul named the Zibo. Oh, I know Zibo. Yeah, the Zibo. Yeah, so he's really like the forefront of that preservation as well as feature phones. And he's actually, he's a resident of Kiev, Ukraine. And at the beginning of the war, he got hit really hard. buy it and he had to go to a bomb shelter but an incredible act of courage in the early months of the war he left his bomb shelter to go back to his home to save our rockman project supplies

that's hardcore and that i mean the level of dedication this this guy has like from his bomb shelter he was like taking photos of you know whatever the phones he was working on and helping the community out so you were talking about passion and and this guy's one of the most passionate guys i just want to no highlight him because that that shows you know dedication That deserves a lot for these games. A big shout out. I mean, stay safe above all else. Yeah, he's doing it.

He's doing okay now. That's good. There's a scary couple of days when he wasn't online. That would, yeah, that would make me kind of nervous for sure. So yeah, I'm just glad to hear just how much effort is put into this. And I think it's been worth it. I think game preservation preserving this particular category of games is just nobody really thinks about it as much as they should, especially in the West, because it was just like an non-existent. entity over here.

So, yeah, thank you for everything you do. You said you want to talk a little about demos. Did you cover that? Not yet. No. Not really. We didn't go fully into that. Actually, before we get into demos,

I might want to talk about, like, potential other, like one other method of cracking these phones. For sure, yeah. Yeah, so they had this internet browser, and it used something called Netfront, and Netfront is the same browser that, like, the Vita and the PSP and the DS. I'll use that.

And there are many people who have cracked that version of Netfront, and they've been able to hack the DS and PSP. And this version of Netfront that we got on the phones is like way older than the ones on those handhelds, which means that I think it's incredibly susceptible. Like, because of the small size of the community, there hasn't been a lot of people who've been looking into it. But once someone gets the opportunity to, I think that could be a potentially viable method of cracking into these phones. It's just that, you know, we just need more people. And, yeah, I guess now we can kind of segue into phone demos because there are probably people listening that are kind of like, you know, this is really cool what these guys are talking about. I want to have one of these games myself. And yeah, that's another good question.

Unfortunately, if you want to have like offensive network, like a full paid game, like the entirety of before crisis, like there's no silver bullet to that. Like the only reason we have like the three big Rockman games is just because of luck. We just happened to know people that had them. It took a long time, like a decade, to find somebody with them. But, you know, we were able to find them. But there's no silver bullet. However, preloaded games are a different story. So really, Docomo pre-installed games,

because a lot of these phone models that each had different preloaded games. And I made a spreadsheet that documented every single preloaded game for every single Docomo phone. You can probably link to that somewhere. But basically, those preloaded games, they don't require a SIM card to play, which means that you can just get a phone with no SIM card, and you can boot up, like, for example, Djerja Cerberus lost episode.

That doesn't require anything. Or, like, Katamari Domestic Mobile, doesn't require anything. But other ones, like, let's say, like, someone wants to get before crisis. Unfortunately, that is an AU game, and all of theirs, well, their brew pre-installed games, they require a SIM card in order to play the demo. So, therefore, before, Crisis demo is extremely hard to come by compared to some Docomo demos.

Luckily, Naya was able to find two of them, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah. And basically, to get any of these phones at the games, we recommend you go on Yahoo! Auctions, Mercari, and these people are selling some of these phones for pretty cheap, like about $10 because they don't, they probably don't see the true value of the games, right? Like, they don't think there are Westerners like us look at it, you know? But, yeah, pretty cheap.

can use something like Mercari, not I'm not talking about Mercari, um, Bai to like a proxy to get them here. And that's how we would end up with these games. But unfortunately, if you want to play a game that was on a soft bank ecosystem, those do require 3G service. So unfortunately, you're out of luck with those. But do you want to have like one of those demos in your hand? Like, yeah, by all means, look at the Docomo ones because there are some very good games on there, including, like, the Devil May Cry game and Lost Planet, those Capcom games, those preloaded games, they're actually not demos. They are full games on there.

Like, I recently got a Devil May Cry game, and they got, like, multiple playable characters, billions of levels, a challenge mode, upgradable weapons. So it's not a port. It's an actual tailor-made game for the feature fella. Exactly. Yeah. And that's surprising because usually all of these preloaded games, they are just demos. But there are some few ones.

that are like full games. And yeah, surprisingly easy to do it. If I can do it, then anybody else can do it. Because I was totally new to this a few months ago. And I felt like weird because there is unfortunately a luck element because it's entirely possible.

Like you just spend $30, you know, plus shipping on a phone. And then it comes to you. And then there's like, oh, no game on there. So unfortunately there is luck. But out of the,

I don't know, of all the ones I've bought so far, like only about 25% of only two phones had no games on there. So, you know, maybe there's a real life gotcha. Oh, no. Yeah, real life gotcha. It sucks. But yeah, so those are demos, though, basically.

So let's talk about what we can all do to help with this. I'm assuming you guys have a Discord and stuff like that together. But what else can just ordinary schlubs like myself do? I'd say the number one thing that anyone can do, no matter who they are, is just basically spreading the word about these names. talk about it, share it. The more people that know about it, the more likely it is that we're going to find some more technically skilled people who can assist this future farm preservation community.

Because already the community is small and they have an incredible amount of really, really talented and knowledgeable people, but we don't want to rely on these same people forever. I mean, after all, they're just one person with real life lives, you know? Of course. It's a big burden on them. So if there is one thing that people want to do, it is straighten the word because, yeah, I didn't see a lot of talk about these games,

especially when the IMOB website shut down. No one covered it. There's no statement by the VGHF. There was like no website saying thousands of games were lost of time. You know, they used to be because this was so niche and contained inside Japan, it's only logical that it might get overlooked. And that's definitely something that we would like to, you know, reverse. Because as you can see, as we've talked about,

there's so many different crazy types of games here. They're definitely worth talking about. They're more than just snake. Yeah, no, I'm sure. So, yeah, so that's the number one thing that they can do. And if you don't, like, have a ton of technical experience with chips and things like that, you can't actually help find freeware. And that involves just, like, basically finding websites that portals to these times of Java games,

not all of them are preserved in archive.org. So some of them are up and yet to be discovered. And some of the sites might have Java files inside them. Use Inspec element, Python scripts. There's a really ton of, like, a lot of technical specifics here, but I did write a blog post on Game Preservation Collective named Hitsave. And I plan on updating my posts with information on how to find freeware. So probably when this podcast goes live, I'll have updated that.

So if you're interested in doing that, feel free to check that out. Yeah, for sure. I think having you on this podcast, I'm not going to tweet my own horn or anything. But, like, this will really help your reach, I think. And I hope, and I hope if you are out there and you have any sort of interest in this, which you should, and especially any kind of technical know-how that can help out. Like, I will have information and links and stuff going on in the blog post. So please click on those and please help us preserve this very easily lost piece of game media. Like, it's kind of like on the precipice.

You guys are really heroes because you are pulling it back bit by bit. Not everything is going to be saved, but a lot of important stuff is going to be saved. And that's what matters in the end, I think. And that is it for the And that is it for this bleepily bloopin episode at Retronauts. I trust we've all learned a few things. I've really had a great time with this and I've learned a lot and I knew a little bit about feature foam preservation. I've known it was important, but I really kind of, we really kind of got down to the nitty gritty here and talked a lot about why it's worth preserving as much as basically any game and how much more, how much more delicate the situation is and how easily it can all be lost. And this is actually a good warning for all of game preservation these days because everything's digital, everything's coming and going, especially it'll just blink out in the span of a day. we've learned that through a lot of game companies in this year. They made a lot of service games because they thought, well, oh, when they started, COVID had started.

So they thought, oh, well, everyone's flocking to this game and Final Fantasy 14 and just like play, play, play. So let's make a game just like that. And of course, by the time it came out, you know, everyone was kind of back to work unfortunately. So these games are getting canceled now or shut down. And this is all very big stuff, especially in an age where you don't get physical game releases so much anymore. So, yeah, thank you so much for educators. me and for educating all of us, I really appreciate that. And Naomi, where can we find you?

So I'm on, I'm on Twitter and as well as Reddit and the live stream forum web page. I'm also on Discord as well. So if you ever have any questions about preservation or anything that you want to do to help preserve games such as before crisis, Professor Layton, or any of these games, you're more than welcome to shoot a message. And I'm more than willing to help in any way possible. Yeah, you've been a great guest.

So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much. And Cosmo, why about you? You can find me on Twitter at Rockman Cosmo. That's just Rockman, C-O-S-M-O. I also have a website that's dedicated to, like, my other projects that involved with Rockman Preservation. And that's just Rockmancosmo.

That webley.com. And, yeah, my other contact info is also on that website. So if you do want to reach out, help get involved with this project, or just have any questions about future phone gaming in general, yeah, just like Naya said, I'm more than willing to answer it because, yeah, as you can see, I love talking about this. I love just spreading the word about it. Spreading the good words. Spreading the evangelizing. So if you think this episode is cool, we have a lot more content just like it. Go ahead and visit the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com forward slash retronauts to access to media that's, admittedly, it's not future phone compatible, but maybe we can work on a Patreon tier. Support us at the $3 level to receive early access to weekly episodes.

At the $5 level, you will get episodes a week early as well as two exclusive episodes a month. if you support us at the Magic Number 64 that gives you the opportunity to set the Retronauts topic once every six months. As of this recording, there are two more spots left, so go ahead and grab those. As for me, I am Nadia Oxford. I am the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast, and I am not doing this.

We talk about RPG's old and new, each in and western. Please support us at patreon.com.com. And or follow me at Nadia Oxford on Twitter. I also do Charlene Dropout, which is under the Blood God umbrella. It's a Final Fantasy 14 podcast. please check that out too if you are a fan of the number 14 until then thanks for listening thanks so much for listening and thanks so much to our guests for educating us and don't

let your midi sweet child of mine ringtone go off in class trust me it will not end well your teacher will be so pissed I'm speaking from experience You know,