I'm woefully unfamiliar with these things, but I've been fixated on this Japanese coffee brand offering QR-accessed AR environments through your phone that feature Seaman. マウントレーニア 深い癒やし水景×水音AR| Mt.RAINIER (mtrainier.jp) The pages can be archived on things like archive dot org, but is there a way to actually save the AR environments? Seaman speaks some Japanese in them so it'd be good to have them accessible in the hopes that someone could translate them sometime. Even without that, it feels like the kind of weird thing that would be neat to look back on in a decade.
Okay I might be sort-of right. That document covers the hearings, this is the report: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false I hadn't realised so much had been copied to Sega Retro verbatim.
God dammit. I literally just bought some of this nasty coffee just so I could post a pic of the QR code and package so that people could give it a look if they want, and just when I was about to post it, I realized that you can access it using the site linked to in your post. Just scan that code and then line up the logo with the logo on the picture of the cup. Now I've got a s#*tty coffee (about 90% milk and sugar) to choke down or toss out and nothing useful to show for it... I've done the AR thing 3 times, Seaman only showed up once. I'd keep trying to see if he says something different, but I lost interest when I realized Seaman isn't interactive. You can talk to him all you like, but he's not listening, not even in Japanese. What is the point of this?
https://archive.org/details/@andrea_pastore Many more issues of Italian magazine Game Power have surfaced. There were scans of some of these issues before, but they had horrible watermarks - these ones look clean.
https://archive.org/details/@comfort_food_video_games Some of these are relevant to our interests, many of them aren't, and we have some already. The problem here is that every scan tops 1GB, which is Retro CDN's upload limit*. The most practical solution is to resize each page. I don't know if I posted how to do this before but it's shockingly simple if you have Imagemagick installed. I just made a batch file with Code (Text): magick mogrify -resize 50%% -quality 90 *jpg run it in the same folder as the images, fix the DPI, make a PDF https://retrocdn.net/File:GameInformer_US_080.pdf ...and here's one I made earlier. "Shouldn't we be mirroring high quality archives?" Yes. But we can't. "why -quality 90?" Because JPEG compression is odd, to the point where I've no doubt in some cases, "quality 100" won't actually take it below 1GB, even though the dimensions of each page are halved. Blame the algorithm. "why does Dengeki Oh have photos of young Japanese women on its covers when it's predominantly a video game magazine?" Because, erm. Uh. CVG did this once in the UK when they stuck Louise on one of their covers. There were many complaints and it never happened again. A fun read though. *also it takes an age to download things from archive.org and I can't be bothered to wait that long. Maybe you can.
The DPI fixing tool never worked for me. Surely there's something I'm doing wrong. But I will give ImageMagick a try. In 4 days. When the downloads have finished.
I'd resist using the term "mirror" when you're literally halving the quality of the files. Don't get me wrong - I also convert any 600dpi files I download into 300dpi files as well for my own personal collection, but I would never claim to be preserving them. I just can't see the difference between the two at any normal reading size (also why I size my own scans at around 300dpi). Maybe I'll have regrets if I ever get a 4K monitor, but for now... This is also a quick and easy way to steer kids away from picking up the mag on newsstands. Each issue has a section covering adult games with pornographic images, but the mag itself was probably sold alongside other gaming mags as opposed to adult magazines, so it was a handy way to make sure it didn't attract the wrong audience.
Sega vs Nintendo: The Multimedia Wars' Future Sega Who Can Take on Nintendo Two interesting JP books. The portions I've seen translated talk a lot about the obvious subject matter and prospects at the time, but also company and employee backgrounds - e.g. how Hayao Nakayama was convinced to join Sega by Takenori Ogata, his unconventional/expensive headhunting of executives from notable companies to better establish a layer of middle management in the late 80s/90s, etc.
It's been a few years since I've looked at these, but I got the impression they basically lift all of their information on Nakayama / Sega's early years from Eiji Ohshita's 'Game Wars' book, which was originally published in Feb 1993. That book is really the authoritative book on Sega's history, since it was written with approval and is based on interviews with many of the top people, including Nakayama, Ogata, Sato, Suzuki, etc. The updated 1996 edition is available on Amazon JP for next-to-nothing, and there's also a Kindle version.
I had wondered whether that was the case, as a lot of the material seemed to line up with what I had already heard was in Game Wars; thanks for the tip. Was not previously aware that it had actually came before them. This one from late 1995 sounds similar too - not sure if it lifts to the same extent, but it looks at the amusement side of the company in particular. There again appears to be focus on Ogata, Suzuki, and Sato, as well as Akira Nagai and some additional closing sections looking back on the development of Virtua Fighter + the prospects of multimedia.
https://retrocdn.net/File:Sega_Who_Can_Take_On_Nintendo_Book_JP_1993-08-25_(by_Hironao_Baba).pdf https://retrocdn.net/File:Sega_vs_N...ture_Book_JP_1993-10-20_(by_Teppei_Akagi).pdf ... Edit: due to my stupidity I confused one book with the other initially... but it's already fixed ...
The takedowns are beginning on Gaming Alexandria's Famitsu scans. Might be a good idea to back some up now even if it means heavily compressing them for CDN
I'm not saying that it's got anything to do with it, but if I were a litigious publisher looking to issue some takedowns, I would probably start with the ones being used to promote Patreon accounts. Gaming Alexandria pulls in $2400 per year, and funding scans of Famitsu are a big part of the appeal to supporting the Patreon, so that could have played a role in them being targeted.
So it doesn't get lost: Talk:Sonic Origins/Museum Also when I was doing side-by-side comparisons to see if Sega had "borrowed" scans from Sonic Retro, I discovered our set were surprisingly lacking: https://info.sonicretro.org/File:Sonic2_box_jap.jpg There must be a better Sonic 2 Japanese cover scan out there.
Getting torrented now. These early ones are important as they have a regular Mark III section (Mark III Tsūshin) before any dedicated Sega magazines existed. Famitsu (like most other Japanese companies) have always been pretty protective of their IPs, Neogaf had to stop people posting (individual page) scans of Famitsu quite a few years ago due to Famitsu's threats. Someone should probably back up the scans from this account too as they've also been posting scans of Famitsu right up to recent issues from this year, which is odd as I'm sure they're available digitally direct from Famitsu. So I'm pretty sure something will happen to that account too. The same is true for Future Publishing in the UK, someone uploads recent Edge scans to IA and then there's a big purge of Future titles, including long dead obscure titles such as New Computer Express which I'm sure the lawyers didn't even know existed when they demanded that all Future Publishing titles get removed. Collateral damage when people upload recent issues of the few magazines that are still in print.
ObscureGamers is set to shut down. The site was designed as a replacement haven to migrate after the shutdown of ASSEMbler Games forums shutdown. I can't link to their archive for rules reasons, but the discord has a link to their releases. It's hard to sift through it all so I'd let someone else more experienced than me to go through it.
Their discord or ours? Not finding anything searching for obscure on the sonicretro discord, but I'm not much of a discord user.
