An answer to a question nobody asked: what's the most "unlucky" series of games on a Sega system? Wing Commander! Wing Commander was originally set for release on the Mega Drive before being moved to the Mega-CD. It shipped, but the PAL release never materialised. Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi was also going to be on the Mega Drive. It was cancelled. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was meant to be released for the Sega Saturn. It was advertised, but was cancelled. Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom was also Saturn-bound. It was cancelled. (StarLancer, which shares the same creators, got a proper release on the Dreamcast, but not many people actually bought it. Oops.)
Educate me: https://archive.org/details/famitsu-dc-march-1999/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/dengeki-dreamcast-vol.-3-1999-01-14/mode/2up Some Japanese Dreamcast magazines turned up overnight. I'm currently uploading them to Retro CDN (when the server stops playing games) but I have a question: Where are the publication dates? I'm conscious that for Weekly Famitsu, the date printed on the cover does not necessarily represent the date the magazine was published. It's "the week ahead" or perhaps "the week that's just passed" - Akane sorted it all out a few years ago, but it's a skill I ought to learn. p.s. I want a Dreamcast tank.
Back page gives next issue's date. So for Famitsu DC April 1999 issue was due out 99.02.26. For Dengeki Dreamcast Vol.4 was due out 99.01.14 (cover date is the date the next issue is due out).
What I usually do is, I compare the dates we have at hand (e.g. segaretro) and search the mag for kanji that look like a publication date. I can see a date on the spine of the mag that says it was published on March 1, 1991.
From the US magazine VideoGames, March 1994 "Gets nasty" https://segaretro.org/VideoGames_&_Computer_Entertainment/Ratings https://segaretro.org/VideoGames/Ratings Sorry lads, of all the reviews we've collected so far, you never gave less than 3/10, even though your scale goes down to 1. Not that GamePro were much better but glass houses etc. You also gave Superman: The Man of Steel a higher rating than anyone else on the planet. Probably because you signed a deal with Sunsoft so you could review it first.
Yeah, US magazines relied on advertising revenue more than subscriptions. It took some of them a while to even start giving scores for their reviews. I remember being really disappointed when I obtained my first issue of a US mag (GamePro) ... I was expecting US mags to be far superior to UK ones (they got most stuff first and it was a far bigger market), but it was just a massive advertisment, including the editorial stuff. It's rather bizarre how few US Sega mags there were, and how reading old usenet posts Americans used to have to import UK Sega mags!
They've been teasing this for a while, and now it's gone public - Digital Foundry covering PlayStation launch titles, complete with comparisons. And many end up being better on Saturn. The findings will need copy-editing for Sega Retro at some point.
And the award for best manual advertisement goes to... https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SpecOpsII_DC_US_Manual.pdf&page=24 Spec Ops II: Omega Squad that manages to promote three Dreamcast games that were cancelled before release: Legend of the Blade Masters, Gorkamorka and Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025. Ripcord Games belongs to a special group of Sega publishers that managed to cancel more games than they actually released. In fact I suspect all three of these were announced before Spec Ops II, missing their release deadlines multiple times before being scrapped. They just weren't very good at "publishing" video games.
My Sega Retro contributions are often tied to what turns up in my YouTube subscriptions. So here's something inspired by John Linneman: I didn't realise there was footage of Rayman for the 32X. Well, the first clip here is anyway - I think the rest are Jaguar prototypes(?), but either way it was enough to make me split a page and make Rayman (32X). This is apparently from E3 1995 and is clearly a very early prototype - of the "was this really good enough to make playable" variety. It's the sort of thing where if a ROM was ever found, it probably wouldn't reveal much more than what you see here. Some months earlier a small handful of screenshots that don't even indicate a playable product were released. I haven't worked out which magazine this is yet. Here's thing about Rayman: it's very well documented... in French. This was Ubisoft's crowning achievement and saviour of the Atari Jaguar, which spent most of 1995 being hyped up by the French gaming press, before being delayed time and time again. Were there more hours in the day and I spoke the language, I reckon I could get a pretty detailed narrative going for the thing. But there isn't, and I don't know Rayman 1 well enough to make observations. Though I do know it had backgrounds. Also some of the educational spin-offs are pretty bad.
This video had amazingly flown under my radar until a few weeks back: Basically the only clean-ish footage of Dennou Senki Net Merc that we have out there, forgetting the fat watermark in the bottom left corner and the lack of music (no sound board, apparently). According to someone in the comments, the game's just about playable in MAME with some technical jiggery-pokery, but it's very likely a setup with fully working VR doesn't exist now.
Back in 2016, The Dreamcast Junkyard highlighted something we should have known: Japanese Redline Racer underwent quite a substantial change when brought to the West as Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing, to the point where the wiki page should have been split. It's taken five years to catch up because... it's a mediocre bike racing game from 1999 and it's been 20+ years since I apparently played the demo (which I don't even remember). And when I say "substantial", I mean, they redid the graphics and music, tweaked half the audio, fixed a bunch of bugs and made it handle better. I guess the clue was that there were two separate PC versions too, even though the tracks are mostly the same(?). Kind-of curious if there are more games like this - vastly different games that we've grouped together by mistake. Sega Retro isn't as strong on the Dreamcast as it is say, the Mega Drive - you can't just download 32945023023 ROMs in seconds and become an expert in an hour or two. You have to commit.
So I purchased and disassembled a Sega "ferie". This particular unit was very lightly used with no battery leakage, despite having batteries from 1996 in it. It comes with all documentation which I will be scanning for the wiki. Plans are to document and photograph it best I can, then it will be sent to have it's ROM contents dumped, then will be donated to the Femicom Museum.
Photoshop people https://ia801502.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/21/items/sega-ekp-2006.7z/SEGA EKP 2006.7z EKP 2006/SEGA@GC06/Produkte/Virtua Fighter 5 - PS3/Logo/logo_gold_fix.psd Can someone check this isn't a duplicate of https://segaretro.org/File:VF5_logo.png I'm in the process of mirroring the contents of this press disc (from Gamescom 2006) on Sega Retro, but while Paint.NET can handle most of the PSD files I typically come across, this one's a bit too fancy. I'm not pirating buying a copy of Photoshop just to check this one file. if it's radically different (i.e. more than just extra padding), save any useful combinations of layers and upload as SegaGC2006EPK VF5 Art logo_gold_fix.png or words to that effect. All the other PSDs in this archive have come out fine.
I found something very interesting on ebay. It's a Virtual On Cyber Troopers ROM kit, but it comes with the communication board. Bizzarely within the ROM box itself it comes with a backplane connector and Fiber Optic Transmitters to make your existing Model2b I/O filter board compatible with with the communication board. Albeit it appears to be missing some other parts, like some capacitors and a resistor, but it's interesting to see a set which is basically a conversion kit!
Don't know if this is worth a thread of its own, but Tencent is buying Sumo Digital's parent company: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...n-and-sackboy-developer-sumo-in-usd1-3bn-deal
File this under "probably don't care... but" https://www.discogs.com/Various-The-Best-TV-Ads-Ever/release/1659956 I grew up with these sorts of things lying around the house but you might not have - such is the power of television advertising, you could buy CDs containing music used in said advertising. Disc 2, track 3 is Robbie Williams' She's The One, which was used to promote the Dreamcast, and says so on this box. That advert (as opposed to a more memorable one with a better song) The ASA had both of them pulled because "up to 6 billion players" was considered misleading, but we'll ignore that I guess. Tedious fun fact: She's The One was released as a double-A side with "It's Only Us", the main theme of FIFA 2000... and it only exists there after Williams got EA to put third-tier club Port Vale into the game.
Something we might care about: Lord of the Sword/Reception Rambo III (Master System)/Reception Master System games that only have reviews from UK publications. Now of course, this could be as simple as "not enough reviews have been added", but I've made a point of scavenging French and German magazines to get a bit of variation into the system, so seeing this is... unusual. Oh but yes, there were more British mags therefore higher chance of scans... and half the sysops are British, and I'm biased as hell, but Air Rescue (Master System)/Reception In this case, we have no British scores. Or indeed any UK coverage at all so far, which could suggest it was never released there. i.e. there are fewer pan-Euro releases than both Sega Retro and the rest of the internet are currently claiming. Or we need more reviews. Either way, something to look at.
