In the name of research, namely
for my Perfect Dark total conversion,
I decided to make a short list to
describe the changes made to the
Japanese region build of the
Nintendo 64 game, Perfect Dark.
They consist of the following:
() Bodies fade soon after death
This could be either a violence
reduction method, or it could actually
be a valid means of improving memory usage
by the game. Even if it were intended
only as a means of lowering percivable
violence, I put forward that it would
have the effect of freeing valuable
system resources, of which Perfect Dark
was perpetually running short of.
And trimming violence never hurt
anything. (Not that magically fading
bodies is a logical idea.)
() Joanna Dark reskin.
Her face has been redone. By whom, I
don't know. It could have been the
original Rare Team, or it could have
been a third party re-jigging team.
It could also be that this was
actually Joanna's original face, and
the one appearing in the English
language versions was a replacement.
However, given that in every screenshot
shown during the three years of development,
she has seems to have her classic face,
this seems unlikely. This issue does
merit investigation.
() Text translation.
All the text in the game is translated
into Japanese, naturally. The audio
was not altered, which from a videogame
designer's perspective is quite admirable.
The select agent profile texture was
also changed, to reflect the new look
Joanna.
This is where it ends:
This 'list' is not very long, but
not many others have catalogued
the changes, so this isn't bad. What has
been written is from Robert-33's
investigation through testing a copy of
the game, not parroting someone elses'
opinions. (Robert-33 never does that,
though his proxy might, but doesn't
anymore after the fiasco aka. Three
Issues Thread.)
Perhaps there are other changes.
I don't know. When a development team
has access to the raw source of a
videogame which has been already
released for a few months, I do think
there would be a strong temptation to try
to squeeze more performance and such
from the struggling game engine.
Is is worth pointing out, however,
that well-known bugs, such as the 'Janus'
AI glitch, are apparently still
present in the Japanese build. I
cannot solidly confirm that, however.
Lucern tower is still completable
in six seconds, but the dev team
most likely would not have known
about the physics glitch at the
time the build was finalised. All in
all, it would seem that very little
was changed code-wise in the Japanese
build, other than what seems to be
a rough hack to quickly remove dead
bodies, which would have been a
single variable.
I hope this information helps
someone. I do always try to provide
accurate, hard-to-find information
to people who need it. (I can't
imagine everyone who knows of me
agreeing there...)
Remember: the truth is there,
you merely need to change your
axiom, then:
"And like a crystal changing
position, everything becomes
suddenly clear."
- Unknown author.
HERE ARE SOME SCREENS:
