I'm not sure ... but : "...this system was installed in a restaurant called フィッシュオンチップス (Fish On Chips) which opened on 17 July 1999 in Kawashima, in the Gifu Prefecture. The system is, however, different to the attraction in the Kyōto Joypolis Park. The 15-inch touch screens are actually integrated into the tables, so that each customer can play with the virtual fish in the aquarium. Another machine, most likely not interactive, displayed scenes from underwater life on three 200-inch screens. According to Kenya Yamashita, Fish Life developer and member of Sega R&D AM5, the idea to commercialise the Fish Life came into being after a client had asked if it was possible to have such a system at home..." you can read the rest of the article here ...
Saw this pop up in a facebook arcade group and the price was right. I don't expect to find any differences between this an the manual we have scanned, but "Preliminary Version" was too tempting for the price so I couldn't pass it up.
Calling anyone who speaks Russian: can you please look at pages 46 and 47 of https://segaretro.org/images/f/fb/Sega&3DOCatalogRU.pdf and tell me who's listed as the publisher of this catalog?
From the recent haul: https://archive.org/details/sega-zone-13/page/n9/mode/2up Suggestions of a Mega Drive port of "Snapperazzi", an IBM PC and Amiga game from 1993 that's barely documented online. It's a curious timepiece. You are an alien from the planet "dirt", come to take photos for the UK's leading tabloid newspaper, The Sun. Level 1: Planet of the Page 3 Girls. Level 2... we've run out of ideas. Also sponsored by Dominos Pizza. Also sponsored by Fizzy Chewits (which might not exist anymore(?)). I hope this would have been blocked by Sega's quality control. Alternative Software were the top shovelware publishers of their day - be glad if you've never heard of them.
Time Traveler manual arrived today. Don't have the energy to scan, but I feel this Marquee assembly manual and info from here should be added to the Retro wiki page. I'd love to know where they got this image so we can get a better quality scan:
Game Over on .TV, a few of these on Youtube with some Dreamcast/Naomi stuff. Edit: Sega at ATEI 2000.
I usually buy every dreamcast release for scanning, but my enthusiasm is waning. I need to sort out all of the scans I've done for other previous indie releases, and the thought of adding more to the pile isn't appealing. I'll probably get over it and pick them up next year, but if anyone else wants to do it, feel free and let me know. Note that you don't need to buy both the US and Jap versions from Pixel Heart, they are the same with a manual that can be flipped for either region, depending on your design preference.
If anyone wants to be Scooby-Doo: https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=Special:UnusedFiles&limit=500&offset=2200 I've uploaded the vast majority of Sega's press releases from 2005-2013. That's on top of the Sega Entertainment ones Asagoth uploaded last month. I've found homes for a lot of them, but there's hundreds left. Most of these topics are not understood and so don't have coverage on Sega Retro. Probably want to change that. p.s. yes we do have 2600+ unused files (although quite a few are false positives)
Nikkan Sports Pro Yakyuu VAN cost ¥180 for every 3 minutes of use, that's on top of telephone charges. Average Japanese baseball match lasts 193 minutes. Therefore to follow an average match on your Mega Drive would cost ¥11,580 ($84.52 at the time) + telephone charges. They were expecting to make ¥2B ($14.6M) / year ...
ruh-roh raggy "Columns for Clié", probably among the most obscure versions of the game. It's designed to work with some of Sony's Clié PDAs from around 2002. https://web.archive.org/web/20070626012933/http://sega.jp/corp/release/2002/0828/ https://web.archive.org/web/20021029032758/http://sega.jp/pda/columns/ Although, There's also a "Columns for Zaurus" (and a "Pengo for Zaurus") https://web.archive.org/web/20030720030121/http://www.sega.jp/pda/zaurus/columns/ That one also has officially licensed Nintendo games (or at least Balloon Fight and Clu Clu Land). Guess the Sharp-Nintendo relationship went on for a little longer than I thought. Also dinosaurs.
I figure there's not much overlap between "people who like documenting video games" and "people who like football", so we don't have much information on the Virtua Striker series. That's despite it having the best teams: Nobody knows if Virtua Striker 4 has hidden teams, but every other game has F.C. Sega, a team made up of the developers. They play in the colours of JEF United, which Sega used to sponsor, and I think goalkeeper Satoshi Mifune can be turned into Bean the Dynamite... or something - it's a bit vague as to which versions have that feature. Fun fact: F.C. Sega actually exists: https://www.facebook.com/fcsegastaffolo/ I don't know what the story behind this is - it looks like a very small Italian team with very little internet presence outside of their Facebook account... but it has Sega as a sponsor. And somehow I don't think the kit colours are a coincidence.
A heads up: We have over 700 Japanese books documented on Sega Retro. Most of them are little more than "THIS BOOK EXISTS" (feel free to fix that). I've been using the Japanese Amazon for getting some of the basics down - release dates, ISBN numbers, publishers etc.. Now that we've had a bunch of scans come through... turns out Amazon, and by extension, much of the internet which mirrored the same lies, is wrong. The Japanese like to date the exact release date of a book inside the book itself. So for Landstalker: Koutei no Zaihou Hisshou Kouryaku Hou, the release date is 1992-12-12. Amazon, meanwhile, lists it as 1992-12-01. In the past I might have noticed the 01 was suspicious and rounded down to the nearest month, but I'm finding that the listed month can be wrong too. And the publisher. And the name of the book. It's likely a real world case of being forced to add a "day" field to a database, even if the day wasn't known. Clearly they just used the first valid value, and as a result, the world's biggest book retailer is spreading false information. Luckily nobody gives a damn about 25 year old Japanese strategy guides so there's not much damage, but it it's something to look out for. I'll probably fix the dates on the wiki in the next few days.
Speaking of such things, Game Gag 1P Comic: Sega-hen can be downloaded here, from Jammin' Scans. Just to confirm, is this an officially licensed book? From what I understand, Japanese copyright law doesn't have caveats for parody, so I guess so? But the description says that the strips originally ran in Gamest magazine. If this is accurate, did they have the official license for the individual strips as they were published in Gamest?
As a follow-up on Japanese publications: oddly, the most accurate information I've found on original list prices and dates are from Surugaya and Book Off. Neither one is perfect: you'll definitely find the month-only issue on these two sites occasionally for pre-1999 releases, the two companies can have dates that differ by several days, and the list prices can differ if tax is included or not. However, they're far more trustworthy than Amazon JP for this sort of thing.
Someone on the Dreamcast-talk forum dumped the files from a Katana dev kit that seems to have been used by the developer Red Lemon: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13763&sid=c5367619f3903754bb09fbdfe85a1194 The thing that's got the most attention so far is this cel-shaded Simpsons/insect prototype called Bugsnax Bug Squad! It begins with the text "Demo V1.0 toon render engine prepared for Fox Interactive - October 2000". So presumably it was intended to pitch the cel-shaded engine to try and get the licence to make a Simpsons game, rather than the other way round (a Simpsons environment used to prototype an insect-themed game)? https://kotaku.com/someone-found-a-weird-unreleased-simpsons-game-on-an-ol-1845919560 But the bit that really interests me is that apparently the dumped files also include a playable build (labelled v5 according to forum posts) of the cancelled FPS Take the Bullet. I was really looking forward to that game at the time, as it seemed to be the best hope of getting a spy-themed FPS like GoldenEye onto the Dreamcast. The Official UK DC magazine once mentioned that the game was going to use the DC's light gun - I wonder if there's a way to test that in this build? This all reminded of a short article about Take the Bullet I have from a couple of years later, that isn't mentioned on the game's wiki page. Issue #126 of Edge (August 2003) had a feature on promising-looking cancelled games, which included this sidebar on what happened to the game:
