I doubt this deserves it's own thread, but I thought it was interesting. Sega is working on using arcades as streaming data centers. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020...e-japanese-arcades-as-streaming-data-centers/
Grandstand SG-1000 .... apparently made in New Zealand. I had always assumed that Sega had just made a variant for Grandstand, but it seems more like the situation with Tsukuda Original (Othello Multivision), Pioneer (SD-G5), and Aaronix (SG-1000 II), with them just licensing it out. Apparently until the mid-80s New Zealand had strict import controls requiring a hard to come by import license which resulted in many early games systems getting at least partially manufactured in New Zealand. Via Google Books; Now I know why I have yet to see one with a Sega serial/model number sticker. Incidentally, NZ SC-3000 was made in Japan. Maybe it was easier to import computers, that would be logical at least. The Master System released in Australia in 1986, but took several years to reach NZ. Now I wonder if it was a case of waiting for the import controls to be relaxed.
Thumbnails have returned (on Sega Retro at least) https://segaretro.org/Ecco_the_Dolphin/Magazine_articles Now I can actually demonstrate the new rating scheme. In addition to printing numbers, magazines liked to give out awards, usually signifying that a game was getting more than 85% or 90% in their tests. I've tried to automate this as much as possible - there will be mistakes and missing ones - when editing, pretend everything works fine and let me know of bugs so I can fix them. Everything is defined here. There was a brief period where games liked to show of their awards. Turrican actually has more but boxes were localised. This is what games did before Metacritic... although it was unusual for games to be universally praised and be released after review. (spoilers: they used this box for the Atari ST version, where half the awards didn't apply) This is still something you see today, but given the demise of print media and percentage review scores, not nearly as often (and almost nobody cares).
An interesting history lesson: Computer & Video Games/Ratings This is maybe 70-80% of Sega reviews published by CVG between 1981 and 2004 - the then longest-running video game magazine (and often most popular) in the world. I can't imagine even publishers EMAP kept track. It tells a few stories about how game reviewing changed over the two decades. All games were great until 1991/1992, when they discovered percentage scales went below 50. And everyone was coping CVG's ideas at the time, except maybe the Newsfield publications which were happy to point out when things sucked. It was one of the first to adopt a percentage rating system, and also one of the first to drop it. Reviews of the early 2000s are much more stark, with publishers across the industry favouring 0-5 or 0-10 scales. Now it's more fashionable not to have numbers because people get upset online - it's a long way from the late 1980s where if you wrote in an complained, the editors would point out how wrong you were to the 50,000+ readership. I need more numbers to confirm things but there's some interesting examples of games being viewed completely differently 30 years ago as to how they are now. "AVGN games" you might call them - a lot of love for FMV games and licensed titles.
After to work out how a bazillion magazines review games, I'm left with a small handful whose systems I don't understand. Time to delegate: - Guida Video Giochi (Italy) reviews games with both numbers and stars. Which is more important? What does "16" mean? (/20?) - User (Greece) has numbers, but also percentages, and I don't know how much of this we need to care about. - Freak (Israel) has percentages, but everything's in Hebrew which I can't read. - Micro News (France) seems to make things up as it goes along. I don't know what's going on here. We also have a bunch of Russian and eastern European magazines which may have had opinions. A near-full list of understood rating systems exists here. Another issue I don't know how to deal with yet is reprints and translations - where there are two or more magazines printing what is essentially the same review. There are three versions of Mega Force doing this, and also tons of European magazines borrowing content from the UK. Also GamePro en Español where there's at least nine minor variations to cover all of Latin America.
Guida Video Giochi... Tipo/Genere (Type, genre... action, sports, puzzle, etc)... Animazione (animation), Grafica (graphics), Suono (sound), Prezentaz. (presentation), Acessib. (accessibility), Potenzial. (potential) : 1 star minimum, 6 stars maximum... Interesse (Interest): 1 minimum, 20 maximum... not sure which is more important... but I guess that "Interesse" is the one that counts...
Going through the hoard: https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SegaMagazine_UK_05.pdf&page=52 A Streets of Rage 3 prototype. Skate and Blaze have had their pointless palette changes, but Axel is still in-tact. This is detailed coverage of the whole game, although other than Axel, it's looking more Streets of Ragey than Bare Knuckley from what I can see.
Yep. That's the March 9 1994 proto. https://hiddenpalace.org/Streets_of_Rage_3_(Mar_9,_1994_prototype) On the surface, it's similar to the final (colour and name changes, bad ending on Stage 5 Easy Mode, no Ash) HOWEVER the absolutely horrible difficulty tweaks hadn't been implemented yet, so the game plays more like Bare Knuckle 3. As seen in the scan, SEGA Magazine UK indeed reviewed this build, and then had to answer letters in a later issue (Issue 10) from people complaining about Axel's colour change and how the game really wasn't as good as they described it.
It woud be interesting to do a history/overview of how Sega-related video game magazines were operating at the time, now that we have a bazillion examples. Which mags were good, which were bad, the target demographics and whatever. My gut feeling is that EMAP were producing the best all-round coverage (CVG goes up and down, but the Mean Machines -> Mean Machines Sega -> Sega Magazine -> Sega Saturn Magazine route seems solid), while Future thought they were producing the best coverage. It looks like Sega Power gets dumber over time. That's about as far as I've got.
The EMAP mags had a famous feud with Digitiser. It's all written up here: http://www.superpage58.com/digitiser-mean-machines-sega-magazine-feud.htm I remember Sega Power did try to go down a more humour-based road after Sega Mag UK launched, IIRC jokes about chimps were common for a while! Issue 44 of Sega Power is interesting: The main review is the unreleased version of Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition.
Oh man, I remember the Digitiser feud. As a regular MMS reader and someone who didn't have a TV with Teletext you can probably guess which side I came down on - I very much enjoyed Mean Yob slagging them off every month in his mailbag =P
Pete Sampras Tennis PAL needs a lot of scans, it seems. https://twitter.com/glennedwards1/status/1275048590986162176
That magazine published 1993-05-27, so it has to be for the July-December (H2) 1992 period. I haven't been able to find any articles for that period yet, but it was only up against MegaTech and Mega. MegaTech was selling around 40k in H1 1992 and H1 1993, so it's plausible that Advanced Gaming was in the lead if Mega had a slowish start. Incidentally, later in the mag they have a slightly different figure of 42,683. Maverick we're pretty awful for buying up magazines and gradually transitioning them to tiny pamphlets with nothing but recycled content. They could continue like this for up to a year. Presumably this meant that they didn't have to refund subscribers. A good example of this is MegaTech #36. 32 pages of reprinted old reviews, with one "new" review of Star Wars Arcade, which was in fact just lifted from Mega almost word for word with the same screenshots, just a bit cropped. Looking at the "Game Index" of previous reviews it stopped being a proper magazine reviewing new games after issue 32. It continued on like this until at least issue #43, possibly #44. This had also happened to their own Mega Drive Advanced Gaming in late 1994, so by 1995 they only really had Mega as an actual real Mega Drive magazine. However, by the final known issue even that had became a "special" issue, just featuring old platform games. They also did the same to Sega Zone; Paragon used to be similar, reducing page count down to 32 pages for later issues of Sega Pro, Saturn+, and Games World. At least they still squeezed in new content instead of recycling old crap. These later "pamphlet" issues are ultra-rare, probably only sent out to the last few subscribers that they had left.
I can confirm Dreamcast Magazine by Paragon did this too, although it seemed forgivable at the time as the magazine limped on waiting for Shenmue II and the other last PAL releases.
