I had to look it up as it's been quite a few years, but there's a "Central Control Area" after the two VR levels. You fight the boss "Gal Gryphon" at the end then move on to the Seabed level. Storyline-wise the VR levels were some kind of training and the Central Control Area is the "final test" at the end, then you go to the Seabed and fight Episode II's final boss at the end. Yeah, that one did feel off. I've removed it from the article.
Yes, thus the "after the two VR levels" and the clause 'Storyline-wise the VR levels were some kind of training and the Central Control Area is the "final test" at the end' two sentences after.
Sega Retro can help you win stupid internet battles. If someone tells you Sonic Adventure sucked, you can do this: Sonic Adventure/Reception Here's 50 contemporary reviews from gaming publications all over the world, and they all thought it was great. Suck it down, etc.. You can even claim the original Japanese release with its extra bugs was well received. But what you can't do is easily visualise time. Is there enough data to suggest that opinions changed as the years passed - was Sonic Adventure still loved by the end of the Dreamcast's run? (spoilers: yes) Presenting my latest invention: Template:RatingsGraph. It's missing labels at the time I write this, so it's just a bunch of dots and lines, but this will let you easily see if opinions were consistent. At least, as much as Mediawiki will let me - I can only make graphs with <div> tags and patience. Case in point: that example is actually showing Daytona USA on the Saturn. By the time the US and PAL versions came out, there had been more exposure to Ridge Racer (and the PAL version's black borders), so you would expect the scores to be lower, but they're kinda... not. Same applies to Saturn Virtua Fighter (and most games I've tested), though for what it's worth, there's a slight drop-off for the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Really slight. There is a bit of a problem though, and one maybe not solvable - it can only plot points if we have a precise publication date. For most magazine issues, we can only say something like "it came out in 1999". Just because it's the September issue doesn't mean it was published in September, and very few publications bothered to tell their readers when the next issue was due* How many magazine issues recorded on Sega Retro have full, usable dates? Right now, 20,830. How many don't? 116,497. That's about 85% of all the issues we know about. Granted in some cases we'll be missing data just because people have yet to add it, but it's still going to be tens of thousands of magazines without release dates. It limits my graphs, but it also represents a missing part of history - if we don't know when a magazine was published, we don't know how relevant its contents are - is it a cutting edge story, or something printed five months too late? *British, Japanese and German magazines were good at this. The US woke up by the early 2000s, but France, Spain, Italy and virtually everyone else never bothered. We've got some Brazillian magazines that don't even have years!
I don't know how common the practice is, but often the exact publication date of a particular issue can sometimes be found on the last page of the previous issue - ie "Look out for next month's issue, on sale X date" Or was this a mostly British thing?
That's not what your original message said. Here's the relevant part (emphasis mine): Here, you imply that there are "a few other VR levels" between VR Spaceship and Central Control Area, and that's what I was asking about.
Right, I thought the "I had to look it up as it's been a few years" clause of the second reply followed by clarification that there were only two VR levels covered that?
This is an obscure but long-lasting bit of SEGA stuff that I've known about for years, but never been totally sure how much to do with it. Sometimes I feel like breaking it all down as a list page, kind of like our magazine pages. https://web.archive.org/web/20091219123904/http://sega.jp/segamoba/about/column.html For most of Sega Mobile Friends's existence, it hosted a column. A bi-weekly column where some developer (usually within SEGA but sometimes guests too) signed a bit of merchandise related to them and gave them out to one or more people who answered some quiz questions, and then were chosen by lottery. The columns ran from 2002, starting with Takenobu Mitsuyoshi giving out 2 Crackin' DJ Part 2 T-shirts and ending with Shun Nakamura who gave out sets of stickers based on Sonic and the Secret Rings and Samba de Amigo. They also always noted down where the developers came from, since it started in the era when the subsidiaries existed, but kept the same format when they were reincorporated into SEGA and turned into divisions/departments. So, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi was, in his first appearance, listed as being from Hitmaker, but when he returned in 2007 to peddle Galaxy Force II & Thunder Blade Original Sound Track, he was part of Sega AM3 (2005-2008)]. I've never been that interested in merchandise, even in my personal life, so I'm not raring to cover all of those, but I hope someone does. This is nice for a diverse pool of stuff and at least a couple of the images have been archived, like. The Sonic Adventure 2 dubbing script for 1 person, from Shiro Maekawa of Sonic Team USA "Candle de Moro" (from Space Channel 5) for 3 people, from Mayumi Moro of United Game Artists Jet Set Radio Future badges for 5 people, from Masayoshi Kikuchi of Smilebit or this hunk of stuff Asahiko Kikuchi from Global Entertainment R&D Dept. 1 was offering, calling it the "Superstars Set" after Sega Superstars. For anyone who would like to tackle the merchandise, the full list of archived images are 10 激レア！『ソニックアドベンチャー2』アフレコ台本を1名様に！ 12 非売品「キャンドルだモロ」（サイン入）を3名様に！ 13 非売品「スペースチャンネル5 パート2」携帯ストラップ（サイン入）と、非売品「うらら SPACE ID CARD」をセットにして3名様に！ 14 激レア！佐々木朋子さん手作りの「メオトチビネジ」と「エスマルさんポストカード（サイン入）」をセットにして2名様に！ 18 非売品『SpaceChannel5 Part2』プロモーションDVD-Video（サイン入）を3名様に！ 19 激レア！手作り『吾作が掘るモン』缶バッジ4個SETと、「うららのクリアファイル」をセットにして4名様に！ 24 非売品『JSRF』缶バッジセットを5名様に！ 44 『スペースチャンネル5』非売品Tシャツ（女性用）＆うらら携帯ストラップのセットを1名様に！ 46 非売品『スペースチャンネル5 パート2』携帯ストラップ＆CD『スペースチャンネル5 パート2 ウキウキ★ノンストップメガミックス』のセットを2名様に！ 47 非売品『Rez』ネックストラップ(サイン入)/CD「ニュールーマニア ポロリ青春 名曲アルバム」/CD「おニャン子パンクラブ」/VIDEO「ヤング100Vの1,800円」の激レアセットを1名様に！ 48 ポンチャックポンポンチャチャッキーTシャツ(jrMサイズ）/和柄螺子(ネジ)悟りのTシャツ（Mサイズ）/音楽CD：非売品「ポロリふろくCD」（※『ニュールーマニア ポロリ青春』セガダイレクト特典）/音楽CD：『RADIO DC ポロリ添え ～ニュールーマニア・ラジオDCドッキンぐ計画～』 62 豪華絢爛！！名付けて“スーパースターズセット”（PS2版ソフト『セガ スーパースターズ（EeyToyカメラ同梱版』に、「ソニック/チャオ/アイアイの抱きつきエアマスコット」「ソニックグッズ（ニットキャップ・リストバンド・ネックストラップパスケース・ヨーヨー・ミニフィギュア・フィギュア・ウエストポーチ・メダル）」「さよならソニックチームピンズ」「ジャイアントエッグ ころころシール」「アイアイ ハンドタオル」「スーパーモンキーボール シール」）の詰合せをアイアイ巾着袋に入れて1名様に！ 100 【絶版】セガコミュニティ雑誌「SEGA JACK」～「SEGA MAGAZINE」～「SEGA MAGA」全29冊のフルコンプリート＆定期購読者限定配布小冊子「実録セガマガジン（通称：「実マガ」）」フルコンプ＋ポストカードを抽選で1名様に！ A majority of the archived merch photos are actually of Space Channel 5 merch, so I guess that fandom was especially interested in the column for some reason. And, while no photos of them were archived, a merchandise for Psy-Phi was released even though the game never made it to full release. I'm personally more interested in the people aspect. I've already used this page as a reference for which departments/companies they were all working for at the time, used it for some unknown kanji names, but that's about it. The order of the people is notable though, because in pretty much every case, you can see that the people have direct connections to the previous person, which makes me think they were nominated by the columnists. As an example, here's 10 people. Hiroki Nunokawa (Mechatro) is the 81st person, and is followed by 82 Masanori Ohe (AM3), they both worked on Virtua Cop 3 and Ghost Squad, who is followed by 83 Misako Hamada (GE1), they both worked on Shenmue 1 & 2, who is followed by 84 Hideo Choumabayashi (AM2), also both worked on Shenmue 1 & 2, who is followed by 85 Masaya Saida (AM Plus) (same as before), who is followed by 86 Kazuyoshi Terada (AM Plus), both worked on Shenmue II and Virtua Cop 3, who is followed by 87 Kazuhiro Fushimi (Family Entertainment), both worked on Shenmue II and Virtua Cop 3, who is followed by 88 Toshimasa Kubo (Character Marketing), both worked on Love and Berry, who is followed by 89 Yosuke Kudo (Domestic Sales), breaks the streak of known connections, although neither of them work in R&D. 90 Shunsuke Kitayama (Domestic Sales), both worked on the Sega Ages 2500 series in 2006 only. Sometimes I've thought about noting down these connections for the people in particular, but I dunno. It's an unexpected help when you know who has history with who.[/sega]
Looks like Sega's LaserDisc arcade hardware briefly had an official name before... not having one: https://archive.org/details/play-me... 18 - October 1st 1983/page/9/mode/1up?q=sega "LaserAge Video System" This was for Astron Belt shortly before Sega Electronics was bought by Bally/Midway in 1983. Bally seems to have kept the name in use for a bit in marketing, but I'm not sure it made it to the hardware itself.
Filling in the gaps is a great reminder of how unlikely full sets of scans really are: Hong Kong magazine 電腦遊戲月刊 (or Compu-Game Monthly as the page stands right now) liked to cover game copying. Very few of the (at least 65) issues have been photographed online but they're filled with bootleg consoles and dubious accessories, of the sort Nintendo and Sega would have liked to crush. They even have side-by-side advertisments for floppy disks.
If little else, the branding appears to have made it onto this rare cockpit version that has just revealed itself.
So I have a pretty good feel for video game magazines now - I know roughly which ones were important, and which are "better" than others at certain periods of time. Obviously it's tough with non-English language mags but for the UK/US/Australia, yeah, I can usually point you in the right direction, depending on what you want. You know what isn't a particularly good magazine? GamePro. Massive caveats here: during the 1990s, GamePro and EGM were likely the two biggest video game magazines in the US, and EGM wasn't good either. The problem, and it's very easy to forget this, is that in America, this was all about the money. Video games were a thing you sold to children, and so magazines, funded by a ridiculous amount of advertising (seriously try and read these things), spent their days telling you how great video games were in the hopes you'd buy more. It took a while for these publications to grow a backbone, so as far as 1990s editorials go, I'd always say go British. Yes CVG and Mean Machines were sloppy at times, but they're built on a long heritage of journalists telling you how bad the world was. This means if they say a game's good, it might actually mean something. Or it's the other British thing of typing a load of nonsense for a paycheque. But the thing about GamePro was... it a brand. And it spread like a sickness: We're up to ten separate iterations now: US, Australia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, South America, the Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey and the UK. And there's half a dozen minor variants of "GamePro en Espanol" because each Spanish-spreaking country in South America used a different currency. And I think it went to Germany twice. And there might be more.
Another quirk of history: Sonic & Tails (Sonic Chaos) is the cover story to this January 1994 edition of Game Boy (magazine). Game Gear in Game Boy? What is the world coming to? This magazine actually pre-dates Nintendo's Game Boy by quite some margin - the first issues apparently went on sale in 1985, which means you could find Sega (and PC Engine) games in something called a "Game Boy" before Nintendo released any "Game Boy games". It's a bit of a tricky publication to find online though, for obvious reasons. It went out of print in the tail-end of 1994, so 9-ish years. I was hoping I could say "it was supported longer than Nintendo's console", but the very last original Game Boy game (as in, grey cartridge, not black) came out in 2001 (the system debuting in 1989). Pokémon Yellow was the last first-party game in 1998/1999 though, so that's pretty close. Yes we do need scans.
Here's an oversight: Category:Magazines in Hong Kong Right now according to us, there are only five sets of video game magazines published in Hong Kong that we might care about. And I mean okay, Hong Kong is quite small and maybe China meddles - perhaps there just wasn't much out there to read. ... or we don't have pages. So what are we missing? A fair bit, mostly because I can't translate traditional Chinese to English, and thus have been reluctant to make pages, but I did a bit of hunting: Here's a magazine called "Game Station". At least 187 issues of that, so quite the gap we're missing there. How about this one? "Game Watch!!" has at least 256 issues. Undocumented in the Western world - perhaps we should fix that. At least 520 issues of "Game Next". That's uh... more issues than I think any Western video game magazine reached. No doubt there's fewer pages but even for cover scans this isn't an insubstantial amount of work. ... and at least 637 issues of "Game Wave". I should point out the only photos online are from auction sites, so there's a skew towards older issues than newer ones. Sorry did you think Famtisu was the only long-running weekly magazine? At least 1250 issues of "Game Weekly" - that's some proper deforestation there, and it's still in print! Yeah so in the space of about half an hour I've uncovered about 3500 undocumented issues of magazines. Just in Hong Kong. Granted they'll not all be useful to our wikis but when people claim they understand all of video game history or culture, here's a top tip: they don't.
Grrr stop you're only making me want to dig up ancient Canadian magazines to find gaming info to satiate my need of learning history
