MonkeyPaw Reveals Why The English Version Of Tomba! 2 Isn’t On PSN In North America

Posted by chat Annette and Ashley www.shensugor.com on May 20th, 2014 | 7 Comments | Tags: MonkeyPaw Games , Tomba! 2

Earlier this year MonkeyPaw Games started the Retro Rush on PSN that concluded with Tomba! 2. While the lineup consisted of unaltered PSone Imports, Tomba! 2 was the only one of the bunch to have originally received a North American release. The decision to go with the Japanese release confused some as the game’s puzzles and various tasks require knowledge of the language. A recent interview with Ryan Olsen, MonkeyPaw’s Pubic Relations Manager, on the Power Button podcast explained the situation:

Interesting thing about imports is that when you try to bring them into modern ages and emulate them you run into issues. Issues all over the place. Issues that you might not even be expecting. There’s some well documented issues with Tomba’s North American release when people have tried to emulate it through other means, and those are similar to what we’ve encountered. In addition to some other things, just based on getting these running on different sets of hardware other than computers. So we ran into a lot of challenges. We’re not giving up on the North American release of Tomba, but at the same time we’ve been promising this game for over a year. We had the opportunity to bring the Japanese version out and rather than keep twiddling our thumbs hoping all of these technical issues get worked out soon, we said, “Hey, here’s this awesome game, it’s a lot of fun. Let’s bring it out. Here‘s a strategy guide on our website on how to get through the critical path of the game”. It wasn’t ideal, but the game is brilliant and we wanted to deliver on our promise while still working on the version that people are still looking for.

There you have it, emulation issues prevented MonkeyPaw from releasing the English version of Tomba! 2 on PSN.

Are you still holding out hope for the English release or have you succumbed to the desire to bash evil pigs and purchased the import version?