General Questions and Information Thread

I think I should have checked Discogs sooner


Onna Battle Cop (女バトルコップ), a RoboCop knock-off from Toei Video, circa 1990.

Sega is credited as a main player in its production... but I have no idea why. The whole thing's up on YouTube (at least until someone notices).

 

It's concerning when even Yosuke Okunari didn't really seem to be sure what went on there when asked, besides saying "maybe there's a Mega Drive in there".

We already know Sega sponsored fellow Toei works Choukou Senshi Changerion and Jinzou Ningen Hakaider as they got games and toys out of them, as well as outright product placement in them, but this is an actual "production" credit - what did that involve? Are there any known Sega names in the credits?

 

I was going to make a bigger post, but then had second thoughts, and idk

Sega Retro:Todo

I did a tiny bit of rearranging at the top of our TODO page, so higher prority (and in some cases guess, "actually possible") tasks aren't as hidden. That's not to say the rest isn't important, but for example, when it comes to "venues", we've absorbed most of what the internet has to offer, and are relying on magazine scans or whatever to fill the gaps - you'll likely hit a brick wall trying to expand our knowledge on that subject (though do feel to try).

I thought I'd talk about some of these just in case they prove ~inspirational~


Achievements
Pretty much every modern Sega game has achievements (or "trophies" if you live in PlayStation land) - we only have a few documented. My excuse: it takes too long to upload all the icons.

Bugs
Breaking games is fun. Sonic Retro's coverage is pretty good, but Sega Retro's is bit bare bones in comparison. In most cases, I don't know enough about the games to know how to break them, but I know these things get spread over YouTube and in more dedicated fan communities or whatever, so you may know something we don't. I may be willing to jump in with this task myself if you give me details.

Comparisons
The never-ending task to compare versions of games. The barrier for entry here is really low, it's just... there's a lot of games (especially when you start factoring in prototypes). We already have nearly 1000 pages, but a lot of these are little more than "TITLE SCREEN IS DIFFERENT". I'm confident that most people on this board could contribute something here if they wanted to

Compliance
That wacky idea I had last year to see if Sega games "comply" with the rules Sega set. We can only really do this with Saturn and Dreamcast games - I never finished setting up the former, but the latter is done. Look, a list, except uh... the vast majority of compliance items haven't been tested. Some of this is really freaking dull and I'm not expecting to see it completed in my lifetime, but you can work out a good chunk just by playing the game normally (e.g. Sonic Shuffle/Compliance). Sometimes games do weird things.

Hidden content
Basically copy-edit and verify Bo's work in this topic and/or dig into games to find unused things. I've not been in the right frame of mind to do this task myself, so it's fallen by the wayside.

Maps
You may remember this from that other topic of mine. I think in most cases this is going to need tools that may not exist. I thought vgmaps might be a saviour but some of these have been edited in exotic ways.

Prototypes
Which is sort-of "comparisons again". I've been reluctant to make pages en masse because even Hidden Palace gets the details wrong sometimes. Again, the Sonic Retro side is really good at this, Sega Retro not so much, on the grounds there are a lot more games.

Merchandise
And finally the "not game" stuff. This is a wiki's worth of content in itself - I done bits here and there, but it's one of those "needs someone to become an expert" situations to get off the ground. There is a finite amount of this stuff - it is theoretically doable, but again, it needs a mindset I haven't had recently.

To put that last one in perspective - if I search "Sega" on ebay, virtually everything under "Video Games" has some representation on Sega Retro. You still get oddities, and our coverage might be crap, but for the most part, we're aware things exist.

"Video game merchandise", not so much, and basically nothing under "collectibles". How about "clothing"? It's all in scope, and some of it has stories to tell, but yeah, not a lot on the wiki.


There's no shortage of other tasks, but those are the easiest to point to I guess.


Also if there's something you specifically want covered on Sonic/Sega/NEC Retro but don't know where to begin, provided it's vaguely interesting and documentable, I might be willing to do that for you. Or at least point you in the right direction - it's better if you learn how the wikis work, but I admit it's not the most welcoming of software.

 

I'm currently posting a Dreamcast programming guide on dreamcast.wiki, would Sega retro be ok with mirroring it?

 

If you're not sure, just mirror it. I would say it could just get deleted later, but nothing truely gets deleted from retrocdn anyway, as no active staff seem to have the required permissions to do that.

 

There will be another task to double/triple/quadruple check things we think we already know.


7:21

Mega World Upgrade Campaign. 1000 32Xes to be won, but also 2000... uh... racks.


It's a fairly simple concept - a few games had inserts that looked like this - you cut away the corner and send it to Sega on a postcard. And maybe you'll win. In fact, given I could only find three games that included one of these, I'd say you had a pretty good chance of winning.

There's plenty of 32Xes out there, but the racks weren't sold separately, so weren't documented.



But I found one by accident. Rarer than anything else in this shot.


There's a fair number of these - undocumented "campaigns" with special prizes you couldn't get anywhere else:

25:06

Only 1000 of these Sonic & Tails walky talkies were made.

 

One makes a cameo in an issue of Harmony - I think this was even flagged up in a thread on here before:

 

^ that Harmony scan lists games that (I don't think) took part in the campaign. I mean they should have - they were all released around the summer of 1994, but I can't find proof.


And during my travels I realised there's a few things we're not keeping track of. I assumed most games came with some form of registration card so not so much of a problem there, but we weren't pairing games with promotional inserts. OutRunners came with Mega-Soft Information Vol. 3, which is useful to know since then we can date the insert and then more accurately date any prototype screenshots in it, and everything's great and lovely.

Fun fact: "complete" copies of games on ebay are not necessarily complete. Turns out people only care about the cartridges and manuals - nobody kept a record of what actually came in the box, so games are being mis-sold. However, since nobody apparently knows these inserts exist, nobody knows their "complete" versions... aren't.


Anyway I scavenged the library trying to pair up Mega-Soft Information inserts with games - Sega seemed to publish these things every quarter between late 1993 and mid-1995, but we're missing a scan: "Mega-CD Vol. 4". Surely that's not hard to find - this exercise means we can narrow its appearance down to Sega-published Mega-CD games released in mid-to-late 1994.


except

I still can't find Mega-CD Volume 4. I'm wondering if it was printed for a period where Sega didn't release any Mega-CD games, so there was nothing to pair the insert with. I wonder how common this is.

 

I have that release of Sonic & Knuckles! Now I finally know why it didn't come in a plastic case like everything else.

 

I remember reading in an old gaming magazine that it was some environmental thing.

 

Going all the way back to the 1986 Sega Master System days, my parents taught us to keep all the material. So, while not *all* of my games, the vast majority still have all their inserts, as in truly CIB. That includes all the Sonic games, NTSC-U at least, and also hardware like the Game Gear Sonic 1 pack and the Sonic 1 Sega Genesis bundle.

 

And then we miss things like this: a second disc?!

No, a piece of cardboard letting UK owners know there's an extra audio track on the Baku Baku CD. And I can confirm there absolutely is.

Sega didn't bother to tell non-UK customers this, so happy Thursday: your disc might have "secret" music on it.

 

I shouldn't be surprised - there is more than one dump.


A secret revision of Riglordsaga. I probably wouldn't have spotted it were it not for the two print runs shipping with different issues of Sega Saturn Soft Information.

 

You wouldn't think this was difficult, but they found a way:

https://segaretro.org/File:SegaVisions_subscription_card.pdf

RE: adding things to game releases - a lot of Sega games in 1993/1994/1995 had Sega Visions subscriptions cards. They're all pretty much the same.


except for when they aren't. The "WA 11" version is most common, but there's a few others. What's the difference? uh. erm. Well they have different numbers!

 

670-1564-04; Usually last 2 digits indicate region (04 = New Zealand), but for US it generally indicates revision. So that's probably the 4th revision of that card, so maybe 5 variants of that up to then (including the original).

PAL SMS games always used to come with a catalogue which also changed over time. As many SMS games were in print for a long period of time there's a lot of cover variants too. In theory it might be possible to match which catalogues came with which cover variants, but in practice it's going to be really messy, with there being lots of overlap. Outside of France the only seal was the sega sticker across the clamshell case opening, so it's difficult to know if even "new sealed" games really are packaged as they originally were. I kind of gave up on being able to reliably match these up, but a quick search shows an attempt to do that here.

 

I did briefly look into the Master System, but it can be difficult to determine region from a distance (and not everyone on ebay is nice enough to take photos up close). I think it might be doable, but... well... every other console is easier


We have made a few mistakes too
Mega Drive poster scans
I'd like to know what Sega's terminology here is, because many of these "posters" are also "catalog(ue)s". And just because it has massive artwork of Eternal Champions doesn't mean it exclusively shipped with the game Eternal Champions.

 

I think that's similar to the SMS, where the poster/catalogue was included with many different first party titles. That link doesn't work, here's the correct one.

 

There's an "extras" category where miscellaneous things get dumped. And thats' fine - there's a lot of miscellaneous things.

But I split it up this afternoon to separate the "registration cards". Because most(?) games of the 90s have one, and it's going to get messy. The templates may come back to bite at some point.
Category:Registration card scans
(I remembered the namespace this time)

But doing big text replaces, I discovered that we're really inconsistent with naming these things. Granted, some of these files are really freaking old, and they're still descriptive, but different uploaders have had different ideas:

- "registration card" (or "reg card")
- "QRC" ("quick registration card")
- "survey (card)"
- "post card"
- "card"

At some point a decision was made to use the term "registration card", and fine, okay, cool, whatever - we can deal with that. But thinking about the "what is Sega's name for things" comment above, I realised that a good chunk of these never actually use the term "REGISTRATION".


Look, an actually complete version of the Japanese Sonic 2 on ebay, as opposed to the many others that aren't. There's only three things in the box: a cartridge, a manual and a... "郵便はがき". "Yuubin Hagaki".


Google's translation is "postcard", which again is fine, but strictly speaking I think only the Japanese post office (Yuubin) will handle it, and idk, "Yuubin Hagaki" is a more accurate name for the same reason "Sakura Taisen" isn't "Sakura Wars".

What it isn't, is for "registration". It's a feedback form to help Sega understand its customers and make better games. This is subtly different to many Western "registration cards" where you are genuinely registered for something (like a mailing list). I was expecting to have to sub-divide by region at some point... but maybe we can sub-divide by "type".


I am undecided how much I care. I'm sure the Japanese don't call them "cover scans" either but I'm in no rush to edit the templates for that.

 

https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/21175/Eagles_Nest_Mac_Collection_Disc_6.TOAST/Console SNES/Columns3/427.Columns 3/Mega Drive

Found another one hiding away in the SNES section, Censor scene release of Columns III (JP version). This is new to GoodGen too, the header has been modified to include "CENSOR" (twice), there's just a couple of bytes different in the code. The file is dated 1993-10-09, a week before JP release.