Did have a chuckle at Sega Magazine UK telling people not to import Bare Knuckle 3 because the "official" Streets of Rage 3 would have improvements. Funny how that turned out!
This is my favourite Sega quote right now - Electronic Arts vs. Sega, circa early 2001: https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:DreamcastMagazine_UK_20.pdf&page=20 Too bad it's a dissertation's worth of research finding all the hard numbers.
(Quite literally) an issue: So for some reason, officially licensed magazines tend to have awkward names. I think I've solved this for PlayStation, but I'm stuck with these two Australian magazines. What are they called? What are their official names? You will notice that in the early days, both were using different names. Note: it needs to be precise, because there is already a Official Australian Xbox Magazine, which was published separately at the same time (covering the original Xbox). If you want to see how this can be a problem, see the UK's Official Xbox Magazine and Xbox: The Official Magazine (UK). They all call themselves "OXM".
I'd go with "Xbox: The Official Magazine (Australia & New Zealand)" and "Nintendo: The Official Magazine (Australia & New Zealand)", but that's just me. It also says "The Official Nintendo Magazine" inside the magazine itself, and the website is officialnintendomag.com.au. It also looks like they changed the name to "Nintendo: The Official Australian Magazine" at some point.
REMINDER THAT SRGA HEROES IS SHUTTING DOWN. HAVE IT'S PRESS RELEASE: https://www.sega.com/segaheroes BUT WAIT! CRAZY TAXI GAZILLIONARE/TYCOON/IDLE TYCOON IS DOING THE SAME! PRESS RELEASE!: https://www.sega.com/crazytaxitycoon
I am deprecating the Ratings template - the one people have been using to add review scores to game pages. As the "magazine articles" sub-pages also exist, you can end up defining a magazine twice. Now you only have to define them once! Disney's Aladdin/Magazine articles Streets of Rage 3/Magazine articles Put your ratings here (it'll be just "| rating=something" most of the time). No need to think anymore - the system will convert all the different rating systems automatically (although you can override it if a magazine is doing something strange). For example, I have told CVG to default to percentage values. EGM will expect four numbers between 0 and 10 (e.g. 1,2,3,4). Even GamePro's wacky system is represented as a statement of intent. Broken magazines should be piling up in Category:No rating system - I'm hoping to reduce that list when the wiki wakes up (working magazines are listed at Sega Retro:Ratings, but to future proof it, assume everything works). Also some magazines don't have pages on Sega Retro (yet) - it's early days. Scores will still be shown on the main game page, but it'll be a fully automated thing you don't have to worry about. We'll also be able to produce more interesting results this way - whether the PAL version of a game is better than an NTSC-U or NTSC-J version. Or list every review ever printed by a specific mag. It also opens the door for further discussions about how to weight magazine ratings. 1/5 could be the lowest possible score from a magazine, but in percentage terms, this is 20%, not 0%, meaning results may be positively skewed. I don't know the details of every publication on the planet. What's annoying about this is there are thousands of game pages and no means of automating the conversion.
Maybe we should break up Magazine articles to individual pages for each platform? Then we could have sections by article type (News/Previews/Reviews/Tips/Features etc) on each format's Magazine articles page. This would be a lot tidier, and would make it a bit simpler for importing reviews. That would also allow ordering different article types by different values. For example, it might make sense to order reviews alphabetically but news chronologically.
I'm not against sub-pages for individual platforms - the only reason it hasn't happened is because I'm lazy. We used to try and organise by type but while the British mags are very good at saying "this is a preview section", that's not the case with every publication - it tends to blend together. But I'm all for making this stuff easier to navigate, be that by sorting or splitting or whatever.
Line of Fire Line of Fire/Magazine articles Let me know what breaks. Category:Update ratings template it'll only take weeks and months
Books such as Essential Sega Guide aren't currently included (I guess that this is also the case for other media). I'd fix it myself, but I'm not sure how to.
Yeah it'll only be working correctly for magazines, because there is information in the MagazineBob template that isn't in BookBob or WhateverBob. I will look into this at some point. But pretend it works when filling in magazine articles subpages for the time being. I haven't got a plan for TV videos yet, so when you run into GameMaster reviews put them... somewhere until somebody comes up with one.
damn by the way, do we want to make the move from "Czech Republic" to "Czechia"? Czechia's been its legally adopted it as its "short name" in 2016, but I'm not sure how well it's been recognised. It feels like it's a more future-proof name, but for all I know there could be a Czech government in waiting desperate to revert the change because it's widely unpopular or something.
Wikipedia still uses Czech Republic for the page, but the EU is now using Czechia as the common form: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en-5000500.htm It's like saying "do we call this country the "Federal Republic of Germany" or "Germany"; or "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" or "United Kingdom"". If we're using Germany and United Kingdom, we should probably be using Czechia.
The power of the new ratings system in action: Megazin/Ratings We can break review scores down by magazine. So if you were desperate to know what Slovenian magazine Magazin thought of some Sega games in the 90s.... now you know. And of course we can go all Metacritic and use numbers to determine how good things are: Mega Drive game ratings This is open for more fancy maths than before, because we now have easy access to more review data. For example, as I said somewhere a few days ago, Gunstar Heroes is typically rated higher today than it was in 1993, and that skews the average score. So it should be possible to plot reviews against time and determine how things are perceived to have aged. Or indeed get reviews by region. Also because several magazines had their readers write in with their own reviews, we could perhaps determine what the general public thought vs. the paid journalists of the day.
Just to expand on this a bit, my thought at some point (and a lot of it just boils down to "when we have the time/excess funds to make this feasible") is to actually do magazine OCR that bakes all of that in. Archive.org has made some in-roads on this, but if you look at their output on a magazine, it's not ideal. It still needs human review, wiki markup, etc. that we'd have to do via ProofreadPage.
Thank you for working on this. I've brought up this point before, but the ability to see all scores for a particular magazine is incredibly useful. It allows percentile scores to be calculated (percentile basically refers to a ranking of scores from lowest to highest). Some publications are known to be more or less strict in their scores than others, and this can be linked to region. For example, Japan-only games tend to have lower average review scores since Famitsu and Beep! MD scores tend to be in the 20-30 out of 40 range (50% - 75%). Meanwhile, certain publications tend to give everything 85%+ unless it's bad, and then the score is drastically lower, like 30%. Essentially, the use of percentile scores would balance the different rating scales that each publication uses. Of course, a publication would need a certain minimum number of reviews for percentiles to be accurate. For that last reason, I don't think they can replace existing absolute ratings, but they are a very useful supplement.
I bet everyone already heard about it, but anyway, here's a random as heck tidbit about the term "blast processing".
I'm mainly analyzing Sonic the Fighters, but I decided to check something in Virtua Fighter 2 regarding Ranking Mode, BUT... Ranking Mode input is P+K+G+START (If enabled in the game's settings)... but if just START is pressed and held at the Sega splash screen we get an easter egg: Without holding the buttons at the Splash: Holding the buttons at the Splash: Is this documented anywhere or widely known? it seems just too easy not to be out there in the wild. EDIT: This trick also works for Fighting Vipers, but just holding either START button at the SEGA splash screen or during the intro will show the credits. EDIT2: It is just hold START, not P+START for VF2.
Model 2 emulation hasn't been great over the years (see: every screenshot on our wikis probably needing to be replaced), so I'm guessing no. Good find!