Beggar Prince

Beggar Prince, originally known as Xin Qigai Wangzi Chinese: 新乞丐王子, Hanyu Pinyin: Xīn Qǐgài Wángzǐ, Wade-Giles: Hsin Ch'i-kai Wang-tzu, literally The New The Prince and the Pauper) is a Taiwanese game for Sega Mega Drive, originally released in 1996 by C&E, Inc. An English translation of the game was done by the North American company Super Fighter Team, and began shipping to pre-order customers on May 22, 2006, at the price of $40USD per copy. Beggar Prince was the first game for the Sega Genesis to be commercially released in the United States since 1998.

For a Sega Mega Drive game, Beggar Prince is rather large, weighing in at 32-megabits (4 megabytes) in size. Players could record their progress to any of the four available save slots. The game shipped within a plastic clamshell case along with a glossy, full-color 27-page instruction manual.

Although it received critical acclaim upon its release, gamers soon discovered a few glitches in the game. While Super Fighter Team had spent over a year working out the bugs left behind by C&E, it was simply not cost efficient to fix them all. While most of these errors were trivial, one or two could result in the game's main character getting stuck in a certain place where he was not supposed to be, meaning the player would have to backtrack by loading a previously saved game. Fortunately, the majority of the glitches present in the original Taiwanese release have been fixed.

As of September 8th 2006, the first Super Fighter Team release of this game (600 copies) completely sold out. On October 18th, 2006, Super Fighter Team announced that they had begun taking pre-orders for a second production run (300 copies). On the 19th of June 2007, that production run also sold through.

Orders for the third and final production run have begun as of October 2007. The final copies are to be sent out in November, 2007. The third production run is notable as the box and manual art is changed and, more importantly the game's save feature has been re-programmed to allow full functionality with all Genesis, Megadrive and compatible systems (such as the Nomad, 32X, CDX, X'Eye, Laseractive and so on).

Compatibility
Beggar Prince works with any Sega Genesis, Mega Drive or Nomad system, regardless of its region (NTSC and PAL are both supported). Due to the manner in which the game's save function is programmed, it is impossible to save on systems connected to the 32X or hybrid CD systems such as the Multi-Mega/CDX and Wondermega. Playing the game with a Sega Mega-CD/Sega CD attached to the Mega Drive/Genesis works. On a European Multi-Mega, the game resets itself after the introduction scenes, making it unplayable.

In the third production line, the save feature works with all systems.