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Sega Pico/Beena Thread.

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Kiddo Cabbusses, May 9, 2010.

  1. Scarred Sun

    Scarred Sun

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    Welp, this.
    Realistically, only a handful—right now we're probably 6 or less off from the Team Europe releases in terms of articles, so anything left in red here (give or take a half-dozen or so) is remaining. Note that this doesn't include language variants and the like, though.
     
  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I don't know if Team Europe has tracked down all of the South Korean exclusives... although in fairness they might struggle to do that on account that nobody knows how many South Korean exclusives are out there.
     
  3. I would also like to note that ROM dumps may not necessarily mean all the data required to play these is obtained. A few of these may be lacking storyware scans or scans of the tablet surface that they were packed with. (Also, much of the fact that these are so little documented in regards to gameplay even on the respective Wiki articles is because of crappy emulation leading things to be more difficult to do than intended, or not working.)

    There's also the rather ambiguous other "Asia" region Pico game that was discussed earlier. And while maybe getting all that would account for the original Pico hardware, there's ALSO the spinoff stuff (PasoPico, I think especially, should be better documented. We only have a demo of one game? Yeah.. and these are PC releases, too, so anyone could probably do this if willing to take the effort), and Samsung's Thinko and the Beena, which aren't even touched yet.
    And who knows? We may find more unreleased game prototypes. I take it there wouldn't be the same kind of clamour for "Sonic Jr." as there is for a... more Xtreme game, but it'd be interesting to see what surfaces.
     
  4. Scarred Sun

    Scarred Sun

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    Welp, this.
    Oh lord, speaking of Storyware--does anyone know of an accurate automatic whitespace cropper? The lack of uniform cropping on Storyware scans is 99% of why they aren't listed on the wiki as the "cart."
     
  5. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I didn't even know this was a thing until right now. But is it in the scope of Sega Retro?

    The other issue with the cartridges/storyware is something I brought up a few years ago - cartridge colours. I still don't know if they're meant to indicate something or (in North America particularly) they were manufactured at random. Last time I looked I couldn't find a pattern (note: the colours in the table are wrong as purple does exist).
     
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_oTtBWB1_Q
    It's hard to say, since while it isn't (as far as anyone knows) a Sega product, it was definitely something Samsung marketed as a Pico successor/followup, using their own Pico mascot and everything. It's a pretty unusual case as far the history of video games in general goes...
     
  7. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    The only other example I can think of is in France, where the distributor of the SC-3000 was also selling the Cassette Vision and Super Cassette Vision, which were both Epoch inventions (and rivals to Sega in Japan), all under the same brand. So we can't really go on marketing alone.

    So yes it's out of Sega Retro's scope, but anyone wanting to document that sort of thing should be encouraged all the same.
     
  8. Have a Pico Christmas, I guess. :P
     
  9. On a random revelation:
    https://twitter.com/HelloMrKearns/status/552601645679271937?cn=cmVwbHk%3D

    It seems the Pico was originally patented with a design making use of a joystick.
     
  10. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Also...
    The final design doesn't have any of these, does it? I wonder if there's any hidden inputs inside the circuitry that can actually be used, and that some of the earliest games may still react to.
     
  11. I would assume the "control buttons" basically became the colored direction buttons and big red button... I got nothing on the slider, though.
     
  12. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    I was assuming that those would be replacing the joystick... but who knows.
     
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  14. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    Might as well try and make another push...

    Sega Retro recently hit a milestone, in that every officially licensed game released for a Sega console now has a page on the wiki... or rather, every console apart from the Pico and Beena. But we're still talking thousands over the course of five years, even if some of the later ones exist as little more than "x is a game".

    I have a list of Pico/Beena games that need pages but the translations are dodgy and the facts sometimes wrong, so we're really looking for someone who might have even a fleeting interest in this subject to come forward and finish the job. Or at least double or triple check these translations so we can make stubs. There has to be something wrong because I can't currently prove some of these things exist!


    What's the polite way of saying this - it's getting to a stage where the only games left are pink ones aimed at little girls, and I want to preserve my brain cells. Your brains are expendable :eng101:/>
     
  15. JaxTH

    JaxTH

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    Jack shit.
    I CAN tell you that when I was doing Digital Albums that I found out that Love & Berry was a media empire for SEGA at the time. :argh:

    Toys, games, CDs, an anime (I can't confirm if it was a movie or a series).
     
  16. Ah, thanks for bumping this, I nearly neglected to do an update;
    EDIT: Oh, also some Brazil ROMs:
    https://www.sendspace.com/file/u3h3we
     
  17. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    The worst offender will always be Sakura Taisen. It shows promise by having giant robots fight demons, but in practise it's 15+ years of singing and dancing (including live stage shows), topped with the occasional love triangle and mounds of exposition. It's the quintessential Japanese media franchise for someone like me to hate.

    The good thing is there's no Sakura Taisen Pico games. The bad thing is that once these games are done, the focus for page creation will probably shift into areas like books and videos.


    The Shining series of games has gone fluffy too. I'm sure there's meant to be more killing with swords.
     
  18. I have nothing against Sakura Taisen considering the mix of dating sim and tactical RPG was a unique take on the genre, so the gameplay justified the more otaku-centric elements. Not to mention dating sims in general are an under-represented genre outside the eroge circles. And of course, the otaku in me would appreciate a game like this anyway.

    But opinions about anime antics aside, Sega turning Shining into something that essentially amounted to otaku-pandering (I mean seriously, we went from marketing that played up the Tolkien-esque high fantasy and the actual gameplay elements to scenes of Tony Taka-designed girls dancing around for no real good reason that doesn't even tell me a damn thing about how the games play) that didn't resemble past games at all in the post-Camelot era is one thing I consider a grave error on their part, but it wouldn't have been AS bad if they didn't top it off by spitting in the face of any western audience they had left through the YouTube drama they pulled.

    That being said, the Sega Retro section is barren on the cross-media stuff, isn't it? I remember when I was discussing this before and it ended up with a bit of a debate on whether the "Sands of Destruction" anime (the most recent Sega-sponsored one at the time of the debate) deserved an article. There's probably a buncha other Sega-sponsored TV programs that may have flown under the radar, and we'd probably have to dig into 80's and 90's anime to carefully check for that sort of thing in the cases where it isn't really obvious.
     
  19. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    There's also Kouchuu Ouja Mushiking and Dinosaur King which are both big franchises with anime series' which have virtually no representation on Sega Retro. It's all about encouraging someone to step up to the plate and tackle these things. That being said there are some very strange things that I honestly don't know what to do with - there's a small handful of TV shows and films which Sega sold on VHS, like this one, which dates back to the 1940s, I.e. before "Sega" even existed.

    I think the very first anime Sega was involved in was Zillion... but it doesn't look as if Sega is mentioned at all in any recent DVD release of this show, so I'm not sure how integral they were aside from producing merchandise and having Opa-Opa in there.
     
  20. ICEknight

    ICEknight

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    Didn't the anime change the Zillion gun design halfway through, so it didn't resemble SEGA's light gun anymore? Things might have gone wrong, somewhere in the production.



    + - I loved the Zillion toy gun when I was a kid. Ah, the memories...