But that's by the by. Unless this is your first visit, you can hardly have failed to notice the re-structuring that's been going on. I've decided to expand the remit of this site - as well as Twinbee, I'd like to give coverage to several other overlooked, comical Konami games. Some of them will be things I've already touched on - Parodius, Konami World and Konami Krazy Racers. Other games and series I'd like to feature are Bishi Bashi Special, Rakuga Kids, Bio Miracule Bokutte Upa, the Taisen Puzzle Dama series and some of Konami's old, strange Arcade titles. 'Coverage' could, depending on the context, mean anything from a review and some screenshots (Bishi Bashi Special), to a full-blown mini-site (I'm hoping to do this with Krazy Racers).

I'm also completely open to suggestions as to which games should be included. They have to be comical - designed in the same kind of spirit as Twinbee & Parodius - that means Kid Dracula rather than Castlevania, if you get what I mean. No serious franchises - Contra, Metal Gear and the like are all out. And obviously they have to be made by Konami. That's about it...I don't know how far this will actually go. But I really feel that these games do need a stronger presence on the internet. At the moment, all I've actually done is a couple of pages on Bishi Bashi Special, and some stuff on another Taisen Puzzle game I found. The latter can be downloaded from the emulation section, if you're interested.

Otherwise, I hope this change of priorities doesn't bother anyone. I'll still continue to update the Twinbee section, of course. For now though, why not look round the site to see what I've added?

One final thing - the 'Duck' from Taisen Puzzle Dama turned out to be a Penguin all along. I should have worked it out...Konami never do ducks.

21 / 06 / 2001 -

Feeling very conscientous, I made a section covering the two Konami World games. Find it here or at the bottom of the Twinbee Games page. Konami World 2 is really good fun BTW...everyone should play it. I'll try to stick the rom up sometime soon. What I'll do next, I don't quite know...wait and see, I guess.

13 / 06 / 2001 -

Made a new section today - Twinbee versus the World which details which games got ported to which countries. But it also lists all the little differences and things that got left out - there's quite a lot of stuff actually. This was all inspired when someone at Gamefaqs pointed out to me just how limited the European version of Rainbow Bell Adventure actually is. Also made a couple of minor cosmetic changes to various pages - you'll never notice them. And I added a 'last updated' thing on the title page to entice return visitors looking at this updates section. I'm beginning to plan some major presentational improvements to the site, as I'm beginning to find my feet a little in terms of HTML, Adobe Photoshop and that sort of thing. It's a learning experience!

Added a second characters page here which I'm very pleased with. The scans came out much better than I'd hoped, and the layout is IMO better than the original characters page which I've decided to change as well. Whether I bother doing that today is anyone's guess...I'll be using a different set of pictures though, so it may take a while. And, of course, more minor characters will get profiled as and when I think of doing so. I should also add that I'm indebted to Kurt Kalata of The Castlevania Dungeon fame as some months ago he translated several of the character names for me.

Second Update for the day: Nothing too special. But I realised I should probably check out how the site looked in higher resolutions than the 800x600 I'd been using. I discovered that some pages looked odd...Stinger was the worst, so that's been altered. To be frank, it needed it anyway...I'm still not entirely happy with it, as the 2 screenshots down the bottom of the screen look out of place. I'll sort it out eventually. But this site is never going to win any presentation awards.

Made some minor changes to the Characters page. I had intended to totally rework the layout and add a second lot of characters as well, but various Microsoft products kept on shafting me over in ever more imaginative ways, so I couldn't do it. I'm really pissed off with the whole thing. The new stuff will probably get added tomorrow.

The roms and with it the emulation section went up today. I'm storing them at a geocities account, though to all intents and purposes it's a normal part of the site. I hate uploading roms on a dial-up connection...i've done most of them by now, but I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone. For reasons I can't quite fathom, the larger downloads are extremely slow to get started - it almost looks like the links are broken. They're not though...no matter how sluggish, everything does actually work. So...grit your teeth if necessary, and get your Twinbee & Parodius roms now!

Joy! I hadn't really intended to update today, but thanks to the kindly Vic Rattlehead, I got a chance to play Wai Wai Racing - and it's really great. Anyway, I've added a Wai Wai page in the games section, which you can find here. It should give people some idea of what to expect from the game, at least in terms of the Twinbee content. That's almost certainly it for the day...this evening I'll be wanting to watch the further decimation of the Conservative Party. One last thing - why not check out Vic's Castlevania: Circle of the Moon site - that's another game that's going to be big.

Very small update - Added the Updates section to make it clear that this site is only a day old, and that's about it. Except for that I found another picture of the Duck from Taisen Puzzle Dama, and was so pleased with it that I scanned the thing then and there. It's now gracing the Taisen Puzzle Dama section - check it out...he looks funny. Tomorrow I'll probably be too distracted by the UK General Election to care much about this site, but I'm planning to do a bigger update soon with cover-scans, manuals and that sort of thing. It'll be less boring than it sounds, I promise. On the other hand, i've still got to upload the roms...it's not much fun to do, but I'll get round to it.

Twinbee Land went live on this very day.

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