As I've said before, I regularly check archive.org for Sega-related things, just in case something juicy has popped up in the last few days. There have been issues of Japanese magazine Comptiq going up recently (which we ought to be mirroring, but I've been busy with other things, and Retro CDN's uploader maxes out at 1GB), so I thought I'd check the June 1988 edition uploaded today, on the off-chance there might be photos of prototype Mega Drive hardware. There wasn't, but I did spot a thing: https://archive.org/details/comptiq-vol.-43-june-1988/Comptiq - Vol. 43 June 1988/page/n173/mode/1up Coverage of the Master System game Super Racing. I was adding lists of Formula One constructors to game pages a few weeks ago, but apparently I'd missed this one. And who can say no to a "McRallen"? Predictably, this game doesn't have a license... but odd that they didn't bother to mask the others (unless you count spelling errors). Anyway I hunted out the ROM to make sure there weren't others hiding off-screen and... uh... It's great when you find prototype coverage by accident. Turns out, once upon a time Super Racing had real constructors before it decided to swap a few letters around. The Brabham (Brabam) car was replaced with a March (Murch) one... but it's not a very accurate colour scheme for either. I'd be curious to know if the tracks match their real life counterparts. As one of those racing games where you don't really "turn", it would take a bit of imagination to work out.
Today on "guess my YouTube subscriptions" Here's a weird oddity - when a non-Sega game compares itself to OutRun in its marketing. OutRun sucks because it doesn't have "armed destruction", although as pointed out, it does have hilly roads. In fact... OutRun pretty much invented hilly roads... although fair play, they're not "stomach churning". Of course the home computer versions of OutRun aren't particularly great, and neither is Overlander. Elite seemingly recognised this because the Amiga version was delayed for a year... and it's still rather middling. Incidentally this takes place in the space year 2025 after the hole in the ozone layer forces humanity underground. Damn those CFCs, we'll never solve that problem.
Oh, what a coincidence, I scanned this the other day. "Stomach churning hilly roads" ... serious business.
On the same Sega racing games and Comptiq tip, a few 1987 issues have some coverage of Mach Vision, as well as Communication Carnival Yume Koujou '87, including this nice preview of the former from June: There's a few details mentioned about the actual development of this version with Nissan, Makoto Kobayashi and chums, but I'm not sure if/how it all ties into Sega's side of things re: the later Super Circuit version yet.
Alright so if you remember my rambling from last year you might recall that I mentioned how in Clackers there were a pair of voice samples that weren't used anywhere. TCRF has since been edited to say that these were actually from Tournament Fighters by Konami, so I got two of the ROMs and tried to find the data. But uhhhhh I was unsuccessful. The voice samples don't seem to be in TF at all and my blind searching for the sprite data has proven fruitless since I'm not experienced with romhacking and both Clackers and TF use compressed data. I tried blindly hex searching to no avail. So can someone help a homie out because I'm PRETTY sure I saw some data on Sonic Cult over a decade ago.
So hey, come February 2024, Google is going to stop hosting stuff on Google Groups going forward. They say they will keep the previous stuff for historical purposes but we can't really trust that. At any point in time they can just say they are getting rid of it too. Anything that uses a Google Groups link on the wikis should be using archived links from today.
Funny that considering the only instance im aware of is it archiving Sonic's release date. But Wikipedia says that's a nono because it's "user generated content" so eh
Recently on "werid stuff added to archive.org" https://segaretro.org/Promotions#Sugar_Puffs_.281993.29 In 1993 there was a Sugar Puffs promotion thing in the UK. We had this noted, but as there aren't any good scans online, it's not something I bothered to look into. (I don't think there's enough outrage that we're not allowed to buy Sugar Puffs anymore because "sugar", but we can eat Honey Monsters) Anyway https://archive.org/details/buster-index/page/n5/mode/2up?q=sega A book covering 35 years of a comic I've never heard of(?) suggests on the 13th November 1993, a "Sega Monster Challenge Card" was included in a issue of "Buster". They were half right. I think this is the same "challenge" as the above. But uh... why?
I've been seeing these Sega Press DVDs pop up on ebay. From the description: "SEGA PRESS SP ~ NEW TITLE INFORMATION was a series of promotional fan DVDs sold at retail in Japan from around 2004 onwards until at least 2020, with volume numbers for each year of publication. Each disc features video footage of upcoming SEGA games on the various the various formats they supported as a third -party publisher including the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii & DS, Microsoft XBOX etc. They are hard to find outside of Japan, and early volume now quite rare. Certain discs may also be highly desirable to collectors as they feature footage from in-development and sometimes unreleased games. They were orignally distributed by mail with a small brochure / leaflets." Anyone know anything else about these? Searching "SEGA Press" on the wiki just takes me to the magazine. Just wondering if they might be worth archiving. I'm not the seller btw lol
Everything is worth archiving. These are promotional DVDs with trailers for upcoming games. I think I briefly looked into making sense of all the "SEGA PRESS" stuff but l ikely got sidetracked. There's a load of them - 17 years' worth from 2003-2020.
RE: Comptiq October 1988 and still no signs of proto-Mega Drives but the Sega Super Circuit story continues.
That should really give me a kick up the backside in covering the as-yet-undocumented-on-the-wiki Joy Square in Hamamatsu, which the piece details - it's where Super Circuit's defacto location test happened. Game Machine inevitably did some stuff on the place too. Apparently Beep had a piece on the earlier Mach Vision incarnation as well in their September 1987 edition, but I can't seem to find that specific one... despite a bunch of issues of that magazine also surfacing. Either way it seems to have been an even bigger deal than previously thought.
Because I know how to live, I've spent the last few days trying to reduce the size of Category:Use ProductionHistory template. Once upon a time, if you wanted to list all of the games or albums or whatever that a person worked on, you had to maintain a list by hand. These lists can now be generated automatically... but only if the game/album/whatever pages themselves have credits. So for example, for Yuji Naka's page to say he was a producer on NiGHTS into Dreams, there needs to be a list of credits which then puts details in a database. We can then query that database and generate a handy dandy list. It's a long process because modern game credits are huge, and sometimes they need to be typed out by hand. And sometimes the lists are in Japanese. And sometimes there aren't YouTube videos for reference. But there's just over 300 left and... I'm running into a wall. If I take Hideki Abe for example - all the auto-generated contents come first, then there's three games that were added manually x years ago: - The SADX credit is awkward so ignore that. - New Roommania: Porori Seishun is a Japanese PS2 exclusive which is impenetrable if you don't have a Japanese keyboard - Idenshi Shindanri Ryoko-sensei, a Japanese mobile phone game. And I have no idea how anybody knows who worked on it. I'm not even sure it's playable anymore. And the latter is a recurring theme. There aren't enough references or clues about how we know person x worked on game y. Can anyone prove or disprove what's left in this category? Some of the big omissions on Sega Retro right now are Yakuza games post-Yakuza 4 (and the Japanese-exclusive ones), Valkyria Chronicles 3 and 4, later Sakura Taisens, Hatsune Miku, relatively new releases like Team Sonic Racing. But as you'll also see, there's a whole bunch of games that either don't have in-game credits, or there's seemingly no footage or dumps online that can be used to prove things.
Spotted on my YouTube travels last night, Nigel Mansell takes on Damon Hill (and David Gowar and Sally Gunnell) at 4-player Virtua Racing!
Loved watching it, great find - almost as cool as that one photo of Hill crowded around a Virtua Formula unit with all the AM4 engineers from Japan on one of his visits to Sega headquarters.
Well we'll, this sure is up my street isn't it? Actually, I had been working on catching up modern credits over the holiday, just getting them prepped on text files since my computer's not going to be in a Wi-Fi loving area for another 2 weeks. All the games you mentioned are in there, but I see you've done some already like Yakuza: Dead Souls, Binary Domain and Valkyria Chronicles 4. Some other stuff I'm readying: Toaru no Virtual-On; that spree of remakes from a few years ago like Panzer Dragoon, Alex Kidd, Streets or Rage 4 as well; Company of Heroes games (I'll have to add the Warhammer 40K stuff too in the meantime); Japanese credits for Dororo (some individual company credits got reduced to just companies for the west, plus it gives kanji); Endless games; mobile games like Idola: Phantasy Star Saga, Sonic does a sports at Tokyo 2020 and Re:Zero -Starting Life in a New World- Lost in Memories (which I'll have to make a page for too, uh oh); missed Sega Ages 2500 games; Japanese and Remastered version Yakuza credits (New releases of those games always discredit former employees, so it's important every version is covered, especially the Japanese original) Shining Resonance: Refrain; Total War games (I'm still really early); Space Channel 5 VR; Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD; Two Point Campus; Uta Kumi 575; and Virtua Pro Football (I never did capture footage of that since I couldn't get screenshot working in the emulator, but the credits option is on the menu) Oh, and re: some of those Hideki Abe credits. I don't know how some of those Japanese-exclusives like PS2 Roommania managed to get maintained manually. And the Idenshi Shindanri Ryoko-sensei credit will be from an album release for the soundtrack from Wave Master. Hirofumi Murasaki, Yutaka Minobe and Keiichi Sugiyama all participated too if I remember correctly. As for why I'm in the forum while away and off-community... I thought I'd add some production credits that I'm guessing I'm not gonna see video reference of for all the different versions of it. And it's a mobile game, so it feels fitting to add the credits while on my phone. CHAIN CHRONICLE!!!! WOOWOWOW https://segaretro.org/Chain_Chronicle/Production_credits Great to see much-respected veteran artist Taku Makino appear there. And I forgot that like a month ago I found these credits again while looking into programmer Hiroaki Kawamura. And with Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F and Valkyria Chronicles 4 also getting recent credits addition, Ko Ishitoya's seen a lot of love (might need to change his name though to suit the preferred spelling). Chain Chronicle's interesting and maybe a problem still though, because it of course changed credits as it got updates. GameStaff@Wiki had credits for plenty of different versions across 8 years. We do have a little date thing we can add alongside source and console, but... how many games actually use this? The query table looks pretty sparse for thousands of entries in. Think it's gonna take a while to go through the list of every credit, so it's lucky 2Spicy uses it right at the start of the alphabet. I remember adding that, and... I'm... not sure how I knew the date values were a thing back then, 'cause 2Spicy was one of the first games I ever added credits for. Just happened to be used by the credits I was copying as reference? Still good it was there so I could make sure the date value came at the end (Black Squirrel might remember I've mixed up the order of the multicol and creditstable templates before). Still though, I don't actually know what the date values do. Going back to Taku Makino, he started getting credited in Ver.2.6.0 of Chain Chronicle, in 2016. Well, if you go to his page, you'll see it still lists the game in his Production history as being from 2013 per the game's debut (you'll only see it once the cache clears up or you preview the page while editing). Is date meant to affect the Production history template? Can it split credits up, like someone gets credited and re-credited, can it show the game again and again with the different dates? If all of those are things we want it to do, a name or altname value is probably good too for slightly different versions that change names, as happened with each major version of Chain Chronicle. Could be helpful for the arcade games that updated like that (e.g. Border Break, Sangokushi Taisen, Code of Joker) and would be really good for the Yakuza / Ryu ga Gotoku games like I mentioned, since the game name changes between regions and then then Remastered versions add Remastered to the title. Y'know, show when the credit happened in their production history, not just the date of the game coming out on whatever console can show the credit on your screen.
That date field is probably a leftover from a previous implementation - I hadn't even spotted it existed, although it could be handy...? The templates are making a lot of assumptions about how data is spread across the wiki. When you get a line like Chain Chronicle (Android; 2013) — Chief Director - The game is implied from the page name (Chain Chronicle/Production credits, minus "/Production credits") - The format is supplied by creditstable - The date is taken from Special:CargoTables/releases using the two bits of info above, choosing the earliest (valid) date All the creditstable templates on Chain Chronicle/Production credits will be associating developers with "Chain Chronicle" - there's no support for individual versions of the game (and even if creditstable was amended to set a new game name, it wouldn't find a date in the releases table - you'd have to create a similar hack there). If each version of Chain Chronicle had its own page, this wouldn't be a problem, but that could get messy.
