This little section is for me to look into rumors and/or information that may or may not be accurate or misleading.
Actually, the reason I started this one was to quell down something right away:
ON BANDAI’S ROLE WITH THE SATELLAVIEW:
“BS” does not stand for “Bandai Satellavision” or whatever kind of crazy hogwash some people on IRC tried to tell me last night. “BS” stands for “Broadcast Satellite”. It is actually a fairly generic term in Japan for Satellite-transfered data, and can refer to music, games, anime, perhaps even someone’s webcam? If you look up “BS” on NicoNicoDouga, you will likely see anime recorded from a Satellite Broadcast, footage of people playing Ragnarok Online, porno (uh….) and various misc. items. (On that note, this was the first search term I used on there… needless to say, it took me 20 pages to find the first BS-X game.)
Add the “X” to “BS” and you get “BS-X”. That is an abbreviation for the Satellaview’s BIOs cart, which has the full title of BS-X それは名前を盗まれた街の物語 ,(Sore wa namae o nusumareta machi no monogatari). The “X” does not stand for anything; in fact, it’s apparently a sort of anonymity or a variable. The JP Subtitle of the BS-X Bios cart translates to “The story of the town without a name.” (You can thank Wikipedia for that, check the links.)
Due to the fact that the Satellaview and BS-X are so interconnected (The Satellaview in fact is mostly useless without the BS-X cart), the non-Japanese internet uses the terms interchangably.
As far as I know, Bandai did not do much with the Satellaview at all; The only direct tie I can see from them to the Satellaview is SD Gundam G-Next, which is just one game out of many. Most of the games were developed by Nintendo, Square, Enix, ASCII, and various smaller third parties. The Satellite service was run by St. Giga. Bandai is not noted in any Satellaview packaging or advertising. It would be unthinkable to market a product without crediting yourself for it, don’t you agree?
Hopefully the point’s come across; Don’t credit Bandai for the Satellaview.
Where did this confusion come from? I heard it originated with people thinking the Satellaview and the Sufami Turbo were related… But I’m not sure I follow that. Then again, people still seem to think the Power Glove is Nintendo First-party, so maybe I’m giving them too much credit… Aw, well.
Hopefully, if little else is read of this blog, at least this part comes through.
Right, now to move on. This next one is one I’d actually like to see disproved….
ON NETPLAY:
Most of the games I’ve seen, video footage I watched, and dialogs I heard… they don’t give any hint of an online multiplayer function.
“Online Competition”, yes. But the competition was done via score-runs of games, and was similar in style to things like “Nintendo World Championship”. Apparently, high scores even had to be mailed to the prize distributors! I don’t classify that as a proper Netplay.
I honestly hope I’m wrong on this one. If anyone has any real solid evidence of the contrary, contact me on it? Please?
And one more… actually, this one probably doesn’t need much correction. I just want to do this because the description of the Satellaview on the BS Zelda Shrine seems misleading. (Don’t worry. It will be corrected soon enough. Trust my word on that one.)
ON NON-GAME PROGRAMMING:
St. Giga was a Satellite Radio service. This, combined with the fact that the Super Famicom could not display enough colors or hold enough memory to air a TV show, should suggest that, well, much of the non-game programming consisted of radio shows.
Of course, there’s also the downloadable magazines, books, and other things.
NicoNicoDouga has some examples of the Radio shows that were broadcast on the Satellaview. I hope to post these here sometime.
