whatever he's done doesn't sound good, so i won't ask
but what New PCE projects? I know of english translations or whatever but are there new games in development or something else? ports of some kind?
The guy who led the Drac X translation and Ys IV dub projects made it clear for a very long time that if anyone physically published anything he worked on, let alone tried to sell them, he would be done working on anything PCE related. Other PCE dev scene members have made similar comments, with the least reaction being that they would second think working on anything copyrighted, be it ports, translations or misc. This was made clear to Tobias before he went ahead and began selling the works of PCE dev teams. The Rockman disc was downloaded for free from the guy who developed a method to get NES games to run on PCE hardware. Tobias then sold it as a long lost super rare PC Engine game, just as he sold his Sapphire bootlegs as a "confirmed" official second print run by Hudson Soft... which was long lost and therefore ever more rare and valuable than the "original" print run.
He first sold his "rare" Sapphire bootlegs direct from his site for $160 each and lots of copies were sold simply as originals on eBay from his location. Space Fantasy Zone, which might be one of the games that is actually a burned cdr, was $200 I believe.
Many of his bootlegs were sold on Japanese auction sites for hundreds of dollars or more and there was a steady stream of these "super rare" lost PCE games.
He actually responded to the guy who hacked/misc the Xak III translation and said that he was simply a poor artisan who could barely afford to give him as much as $1 from the sale of each copy. This was after he had already created his latest in a string of aliases: PCE Works, which claimed to be a team of PCE fans who did the work themselves for the community.
I remember at one point before the PCE Works alias, it looked like he must have made at least $100,000 from his bootlegs. It now looks like it's his full-time job.
He knows how ignorant and immoral the retro game "collectard" community is and how they value stupid packaging and gimmicks over actual games, so he manipulates the weak-willed with free copies, which wannabe internet celebrities are all too happy to gush over and advertise, without doing so much as a google search of research into their history. It doesn't help when most of them don't know anything about the PCE in the first place (one guy actually bought his first PCE
after receiving free bootlegs). Some of the influential youtubers have blindly said in their "reviews", that PCE Works is great and everyone should support them, because they would never try to pass off bootlegs as authentic copies and you can
trust them. This level of trust was based solely upon the receipt of free bootlegs.
Topic: PCEWorks ? (Read 617 times)
