Most coin-op coverage in World's Fair was relegated to its Coinslot supplement, which later broke off and became its own thing. Unfortunately, this means its archival status is incredibly poor; most people who actually received the magazine (i.e. showmen) apparently often threw Coinslot away or gave it to their sanddancers, meaning that many scholarly World's Fair archives - including Sheffield University's - include almost none of it. Much of Coinslot's own physical archive was also purportedly destroyed in an office fire some years ago, and I'm led to believe those held by BACTA have water damage as well. The elements were seriously against it or something. Against these odds, one personal digital archive of all editions from 1966 to 1999 does exist thanks to the great efforts of a few old UK amusement industry heads in 2000, but is not likely to be ever shared publicly. So TL;DR, this is probably a dead end, although I wouldn't rule out some more common 1990s issues from after it split off turning up one day.
Hey do you like obsessing over numbers?? Now you can obsess over little graphics too. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)/Reception "Awards" have been visible on magazine articles sub-pages for ages, but yesterday I got the wiki to keep a proper record of them. It's a pointless metric since praise was usually reflected in the review score, but once upon a time this mattered to certain breeds of game publisher. Also I've spent countless hours over the years cleaning up scans to make this possible (it might take some time for the wiki to update itself - you can speed up the process by re-saving magazine articles subpages). Sonic 2 might have the most awards so far at 13 (ruined by the fact there are two different Sega Pros sharing the same graphics). I think the peak for these silly awards is around the 1992-1994 mark, although they never fully went away. And obviously there are tons of magazines that have yet to be added to the tables.
Hey, I'm not sure how I'd go about changing this but I just wanted whoever can fix this to know that the article for Kabuki on the Sega Retro wiki is listed as an unreleased game by Taito, but after taking a look at the magazine article listed on the page it looks to be a game that did release (Which has a Wiki article as well) under the name "Maou Renjishi" in Japan and "Mystical Fighter" in the USA. Again, I'm not that savvy with the Wiki, but these articles should probably be merged or something.
Sega Japan is doing their Summer sale on PSN in case anyone is interested in picking up the Virtual On collection, the Shining fighting games, Fighting Climax Ignition, or the Border Break starter pack. Looking over what’s available, I must say Sega did a pretty good job with localizing their games last gen. Very few titles stayed in Japan. Not sure why Virtual On never made it over considering the translation work would be minimal though.
The December 1996 issue of Playboy Magazine has a "Virtual Vixens" blurb, which mentions Aoi from Virtua Fighter 3 and strangely uses Honey's name from Fighting Vipers instead of "Candy", which was the Western (and European?) name. It also features some terrible white-washing art of Grace in the upper left.
I mean, they do do videogame reviews at least sometimes. I remember hearing about a Tekken 7 review in one of them. Worth a shot. Maybe they've reviewed some Yakuza game's or something.
So I've been fighting this list again. I can't currently finish this job as there's too many missing scans of GamesMaster, but I've made some progress in the last couple of weeks and now there's only... 400+ left. Yeah I'll get bored at some point. Anyway the way I've been doing this is tracking down individual reviews, then making sure the whole magazine is represented. The side effect of this is that Sonic 2 now has 50 reviews documented - the most reviews for any game on the wiki (shared with Aladdin). The number isn't surprising - I've made very specific pushes on both of these games in the past to prove points on the internet, and of course Sonic Retro was founded on Sonic 2 documentation. But it got me wondering - are we now better at being Metacritic than Metacritic itself? In a way, yes we are. PS4 Sonic Forces, the version most of the press bothered to cover, has only a measly 46 reviews! This means, in the battle of "vague numerical representation of quality between two games released 25 years apart", we win, and you can tell your friends and family that Sonic 2 is 9 percentage points away from a perfect video game... whatever the hell that even means. I mean sure PS5 Elden Ring is sitting on 83 reviews at the time of writing, but I think it's pretty good showing for print publications circa 1992/1993. And there are still loads that won't have been scanned, so the number will only go up.
Accidentally came across this: "Axel's Magic Hammer", a 1989 game published by Gremlin Graphics for the Amiga and Atari ST. I think it's fair to say its developers had Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the mind... I mean "Axel" is even an anagram of "Alex".
Europe, you need to get your act together. If I want to find out what was airing on BBC 2 this day in 1993, it's super easy - it's all online. We have two video game programmes that are known to have shown game reviews; Télévisator 2 (France) and Play Time TV (Germany). Playing into stereotypes, finding air dates for the German show is relatively easy because the media was very well organised (although there are few unknown weeks). With France, you just have to guess. So I did. There are effectively no archives of either show online, just a few, undated clips on YouTube. I'm not expecting full episodes any time soon, but it would be nice to at least know how many there were.
Doing a bit of digging on Power Sled that I don't think we've documented anywhere. First up is what appears to be a prototype of Power Sled? Perhaps a smaller version made for testing? I guess almost all Power Sleds are technically "Prototypes" as there was no wide-scale release: Via worthpoint: Second, we have an auction from 2014 from Brad Ward's auctions. Three videos, first of the machine working in an arcade, then being featured in the auction listing at 5:33 were he discusses parting it out for the auction, meaning this set (if anything sold) is broken up, then the last video is of Brad moving the TV screens with a truck. They mention that pictures of the machine are on their blog, and hopefully these have not been lost to time and were archived, so I will see if I can find those next.
^ Both have been referenced on Power Sled's page for a while. At least one of the Brad Ward blog posts is archived, and states it came from the Playdium location at West Edmonton Mall, Alberta - not sure if there were others. Sega do seem to have installed it and a select number of other attraction outside of their own venues, albeit not many. The "prototype" distinction in that other listing appears to have been made because the bobsleds are notably of a different shape to the version seen at most other locations, e.g. Joypolis, Club Sega, Sega Arena, etc. One of these did make it out to an arcade area at museum-cum-theme park COSI, and has more recently been replaced by Hang-On.
Oh ho, interesting. I should have checked the wiki before posting. It was just a memory floating in the back of my head that I decided to put into writing before I forgot, thanks for pointing that out! EDIT: Via post So yes, it is in pieces now... unreal...
I've pretty much hit a dead end on this for now - we don't have the scans. Now of course, the general rule is we want EVERYTHING, so if you have material relevant to Sonic/Sega/NEC Retro, even if there is supposedly no representation on the wiki (i.e. we don't know it exists yet), scan scan scan. But if you want to unblock this list specifically: - GamesMaster (magazine). As far as multi-platform magazines go, I think this is the highest profile English one that still has significant gaps in the archive. - Sega Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, particularly the ealier issues. Maverick Magazines had a knack for running magazines into the ground so we're expecting the later issues to be kinda terrible (like they are for MegaTech and Mega) - There are gaps in French magazines Consoles +, Joypad (France), and Mega Force (France) - Power Unlimited, the Dutch magazine that we know almost nothing about - Game Informer, which has never been archived properly because its owners threw a wobbly some years back - Various issues of things between 2001 and 2010, i.e. post-Dreamcast, pre-"internet dominates everything" - And then it's those two TV shows, Télévisator 2 and Play Time TV There's also reviews from Digitiser, but you're better off talking to the professionals on that one. And a few old references to Hobby Consolas which we have scans for, but the scans need cropping and there are missing pages and it's a massive faff that takes me the best part of an hour per issue and i hate it. And if you just want a bit of data entry because your life hasn't turned out the way you planned, there are plenty of magazines that have been uploaded, but aren't represented on the wiki.
