 Hello and welcome to part 3 of this series where I talk about old rumors and such primarily regarding Super Nintendo games, like for example, in the past I've talked about how Hegane was never actually a blockbuster exclusive or how there's no actual blood code in the Super Nintendo version of the original Mortal Kombat, or even nonsense rumors like how you can totally play as Shang-Long in Street Fighter 2 if you beat the game with Ryu without taking any damage or whatever. The thing is though with a lot of these schoolyard-type rumors, there's no actual way to disprove a lot of them without actually digging into the programming code itself and saying, See? There's nothing there. So in the meantime, you're always gonna have weird rumors like how there's a secret platinum sword you can find in Link to the Past if you throw just the right sequence of stuff into the Fairy Pond, guess what, it's not true, or how you can unlock Luigi as a playable character in Super Mario RPG because hey, Kamani's right there in the parade at the end of the game, so there must be a way to unlock him. Nope! It's never happened. I'm sure someone out there has made a fake video of it, but there's no actual way to do it. Or here's one that was really popular at my school when I was a kid. You can unlock all the bosses in the SNES version of the original Street Fighter 2. All you gotta do is some absurd sequence that also happens to unlock Chun-Li's secret fireball attack. Again, there's no real way to disprove any of this without tearing apart the code, but even then you'd need an adequate way to explain and demonstrate what you're actually looking at, then you'd need to explain what that kind of code would look like, and it's just an endless rabbit hole. All I can tell you in the meantime is there's no platinum sword, there's no way to play as Luigi in Mario RPG, and there's no Chun-Li fireball, it doesn't show up on Super Nintendo until Street Fighter 2 Turbo. These were just stories made up by kids at school just because they're fun to imagine and it was an easy way to deal with all the limitations we had to deal with back then. There's even goofy stuff out there in the emulation world that simply comes from someone ripping a ramen naming it something weird, like Rockman and Forte, mislabeled as Rockman 9 or something like that, and there's also random weird stuff that people insist on tossing around as fact, like quote, Nintendo did not allow most third parties to use custom sound drivers or make their own samples, only certain companies were allowed. Meanwhile, there's just no evidence of that whatsoever, so I don't understand that one at all. Thanks to Kular for pointing that one out. Let's get back to stuff that can actually be disproven, like this story about how the US and NTSC regions were supposed to get Secret of Mana 2, otherwise known as Sekinden Setsu 3 and now known as Trials of Mana, but instead we ended up getting Secret of Evermore as a replacement. This is complete crap and it was not an either or situation. We were getting Secret of Evermore no matter what. According to an interview on Nintendo Life with the games lead programmer Brian Fadrow, Square put together a team out in Redmond, Washington to specifically work on Secret of Evermore and nothing else. Nobody else on the team even touched Sekinden Setsu 3. So why didn't the US get that game? According to the February 1996 edition of Next Generation Magazine, it was scheduled for a North American release, but it was canceled because of programming bugs they deemed too costly to fix in a timely manner. The February 2011 issue of Retro Gamer elaborates that fixing the issues wouldn't have been worth it because by the time it could have been ready for release, fifth generation consoles like PlayStation, Saturn and even the N64 would have been in full swing. This is just pure speculation on my part, but if I had to guess what the issues were, it's the actual text and translation. According to the team that worked on the fan translation of Sekinden Setsu 3, they had to create a brand new kind of text editor from scratch just to get past all the layers of compression. And even then, the fan translation wasn't ready to roll until 2000 due to the amount of work it required. Anyway, the point here is the reason the US didn't get Secret of Evermore is because of time and money. Not because someone thought Secret of Evermore would make an adequate replacement. We were going to get that game anyway. There's a similar story out there regarding Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Now, some people resent the existence of a game like Mystic Quest, not just because it was made for a particular audience, namely people that were not already familiar with turn-based RPGs, but because some people were under the impression that Mystic Quest was a replacement for Final Fantasy V. Again, these two games were completely separate projects made by completely separate teams. The June 1994 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly states that Final Fantasy V wasn't going to get localized in North America because Square deemed it to be too difficult and too complex for the time. Ted Woolsey, Square's go-to English translator at the time, said in a 1992 issue of Ogopogo Examiner Newsletter, quote, that the game just wasn't accessible enough for the average gamer, unquote. Regarding Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Woolsey said in that same interview, quote, action adventure players tend to be younger and like the idea of jumping straight into the action with a sword in their hands, but with more traditional RPGs, it takes a good 15 or 20 hours of playing before you're finally hooked, unquote. In this particular case, I can see how this could have been an either or scenario based on the US market at the time, but the fact remains that the US was getting Final Fantasy Mystic Quest anyway, and it wasn't a replacement for Final Fantasy V. Now, here's a really goofy one that I don't even know how it got started. It involves Star Fox and unlocking some kind of secret level in the asteroid section of the hard path where you just shoot at this random asteroid on the right side until it blows up, and it warps you to another dimension where you fight a giant slot machine. I mean, come on, that sounds totally made up. And holy crap, it's actually real. What the hell? Yeah, you blow up that asteroid and out comes an egg in front of you. Something hatches and this bird warps you to another dimension where you fight paper airplanes and letters. But yeah, you can actually beat this slot machine. You'd keep shooting the arm on the right and hope that you get three sevens in a row and it self-destructs. It's one of the most random. What the hell was that things I've ever found in a game? And I needed to point it out here. So yeah, if you ever hear about a slot machine in Star Fox, it's a real thing, believe it or not. Speaking of Super FX games, here's another weird, unsubstantiated rumor regarding the game Vortex. When the Super FX chip first launched, it really got people's imaginations racing as to what was possible on a home console. For instance, this sort of 3D format could have blended itself perfectly to a franchise like the Transformers. And in fact, there was a game that was briefly in development based on Transformers Generation 2. However, what we ended up actually seeing on the shelves was this game, Vortex. And as you can see, it has nothing to do with Transformers. Some people were under the impression that Hasbro pulled the license because they didn't like the game. But Vortex and the Transformers game were completely separate projects and the Transformers game was simply canceled, as confirmed in a 2015 interview with Argonaut Games programmer Michael Wong Powell. So yeah, Vortex is not a quote unquote failed Transformers game. It's just kind of a mediocre 3D shooter platformer hybrid, I guess. Last but not least, here's a really funny one from NBA Jam. I like to end these videos on sports games because anytime you're playing against the computer, you always get the feeling that it's just messing with you and it can win anytime it wants, right? Well, in NBA Jam for Super Nintendo, it's not just a feeling, it's reality. It was confirmed by lead programmer Mark Turmell in an interview with ESPN a few years ago that when you play as the Chicago Bulls against the Detroit Pistons, Scottie Pippen's ratings would drop across the board. His dunk rating is three point shooting, everything. He just absolutely sucked against the Pistons and only the Pistons. And not only that, anytime, and I mean anytime the Bulls had the ball with time running out and they take a shot from anywhere on the court, even from close range, it never went in, but only when they were playing the Pistons. Why? Because Turmell was a Pistons fan and he hated the Bulls, so he actually wrote a special code in the game just to screw with them. Man, the first time I read this, I was like, I knew it, I knew programmers were doing stuff like this. And it proves once again that yes, sometimes the computer really does cheat. All right, I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.