Naka has talked about how messy the code is for NiGHTS and Burning Rangers before (here, in Japanese). Basically, they did everything in pure assembly to push the hardware to its limits (at a time when most Saturn games were being coded in C). Due to the Saturn's dual CPU architecture, that involved a lot of finagling to get the two CPUs to multitask. According to Naka, because of that, ports of NiGHTS were extremely difficult to do. It's easy to believe that no other programmers - especially programmers who only had experience working with the Saturn in C -- would be able to penetrate the NiGHTS code. I also just noticed in that interview that Naka brings up this story again, perhaps with more detail:
Oh wow. It's good that we have clearance on the whole engine situation. For years I believed that Naka really "sabotaged" X-Treme, because of the NiGHTS engine. And I do believe, I'm not the only one in this fandom. I hope the info will spread from now.
Definitely based on the western art, and possibly the early Greg Martin art where they have buckles around the gloves. I know that it looks "cursed" as the kids say, but while your attention may be drawn to the freakishly large head, you might forget to look at those horrific feet proportions. I want to see one of those "realistic takes" on this statue pose. Haha.
not just the difficulty, but assembler code tends to be platform specific. a NiGHTS port would be less a port and more a straight remake, like how the mobile Sonics use no Genesis code. Additionally, back in that era of gaming, 3D was very much an unsolved problem, and every team or company seemed to have their own way of doing it (did you know crash bandicoot used LISP of all things?). Even teams doing stuff on the same console would have radically different ways of approaching the same problem, and reuse would only really happen on a team-wide basis at best. We didn't really have frameworks or "universal" engines back then for easy distribution across multiple consoles.
According to the video description, it's one of those machines where you'd get a super ball (bouncy ball) as a consolation prize if you didn't win the capsule toy. https://twitter.com/fufufami/status/921178282048888832?lang=zh-Hant https://twitter.com/yamapen3/status/878153629881909248 Is the "1999 Design" on the wiki page not a completely different and unrelated machine?
That's true! Looks like it was mislabelled. Was it labelled that way in the Japanese version of Gems Collection? This is what it actually is: https://sega.jp/history/arcade/product/18060/ ぐるぐるっちょ Guru Guru Cho ("Guru^2 Cho") Google Translated:
Well, this certainly makes things interesting... how do we correct this in a way that shows the original was mislabeled? This feels like a seasoned wikisysop situation here, @Black Squirrel