Gaming Historian/The Story of ME-Tan's World

in 2003, Microsoft released a game for their competitor, ME-Tan's World, the game has some neat minigames once you beat some levels, but it wasn't originally on GBA, it was on the SNES, but we must dive all the way back to 1998.

This is the story of ME-Tan's world.

Part 1: The origins

in March of 1998, Kirby's Dream Land 3 was released in Japan, America got the game earlier all the way back in November of 1997, after this release, some fans are wondered if there will be a 4th Kirby's Dream Land game, so Yoshitake Yumezumi decided to develop Hoshi no Kirby 4 for the Famicom, they choose that console because it sold more units than most recent consoles at the time, except for the Game Boy, so they choose Kirby as a placeholder, they pitched it to Sakurai, Sakurai loved the idea, so Yumezumi decided to continue working on the game, but however, the system was so limited, with the biggest limitations being that it can only display 3/4 colors per tile/sprite piece, lacking semi-transparency and multi-layer support, only 5 channels for music and that only 64 sprites are shown on screen with 8 sprites per scanline, so they reworked the project on the Super Famicom, and turned it into a Stickventures game in order to avoid lawsuits, so in May of 2000, Super Famicom Stickventures 2 was released on the Satellaview, it was a demo for an upcoming game.

Part 2: The new stickventures

As mentioned earlier, Super Famicom Stickventures 2 was a demo for a 2003 game, the game was completely different from Hoshi no Kirby 4, the game was more advanced, thanks to the SNES's enhanced power, the game is in black and white, they originated the jumping paper piece of garbage from some levels, but the service got shut down a month later, which made the game fell into obscurity until a ROM was dumped on the internet.

Part 3: A big introduction

After the service got closed, Yumezumi decided to rebrand the game again, in 2001, Futaba Channel was founded and bought Gaming Game Japan for a million yen, so Gaming Game Japan was renamed to Futaba Games, the first game released by Futaba Games was Gamepholio for the Super Famicom, it is a localized version of a game in Chile called Juegofolio, which came out (almost) 8 years earlier, one of the biggest change is that Mahjong was added in the Japanese version, so on August 6th, 2003, ME-Tan appears in Futaba Channel, she was an OS girl with green hair, a cowlick, and an exclamation mark, so they added her in the game replacing the stickman, they would call it "their new mascot made to compete against the pink puff from HAL", the pink puff, which is what we know as Kirby, was replaced by a stickman, and later on with a new rival, the jumping evil stickman was replaced by a possessed teddy bear, the robotic paper was replaced by a monster with a baghead named RAUGH, and the king stickman was replaced by a green turtle, they also used Hi-Res mode to create the illusion of semi-transperency as well as more colors, on August 12th, 2003, ME-Tan No Boken was released for the Super Famicom in Japan for 2500 yen (and Hong Kong for 180 hong kong dollars), A TV series named ME-Tan No TV was aired in TV Tokyo and RTV-1 on Japan and Hong Kong respectively, merchandise was made, a contest to promote the game was made, some stores even sold all of the stuff in a pack for a much higher price, which includes the game, the console, merchandise, and a VHS of the show.

Part 4: The localization

in 1999, the SNES got discontinued worldwide, except for Japan, Nintendo of Japan announced that the Super Famicom would go out of production in September 25th, 2003, so they must port the game into a GBA game, and to save time, they used the source code for the Super Famicom original, and converted it into the GBA format, they compressed graphics and removed some unused content, but with new unused content made to fill up space, some extras were also added, the music was converted to the MOD format used in the commodore amiga and some trackers, which decreased the number of music channels from 8 to 4, and since the GBA can't handle Hi-Res mode, the resolution for Hi-Res backgrounds was decreased, color math was also replaced by an alpha value of 128, and new minigames were added on levels, on August 30th, 2003, ME-Tan No Boken+ was released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan, well, how about in the west? well, the game was published by Microsoft outside of Japan to avoid copyright issues, and the game released on September 12th, 2003 in America and September 30th, 2003 in Europe, It wasn't until August 6th, 2008, that the Super Famicom game was localized with changes from the GBA version, via the Virtual Console service, and it would later appear in the Nintendo Switch Online SNES app, but this isn't the first game from Microsoft to be released on a Nintendo console, that title belongs to Microsoft Entertainment Pack for the Game Boy Color.

And that's about it, I remember buying this game from a Blockbuster, I really loved the look of the game, when I purchased the SNES original on the Virtual Console service, I noticed how different it was.