ATTENTION! THIS IS IMPORTANT! At the end of this month imode will go down. Their is one brave souls out in Japan who is helping us archive saga imode games. These games are not availed outside of Japan. Please help this person. This is our chance to help the games from being lost. Don’t let what happened to Rockman, FFVII and other games happen to Sega and any imode games. For the sonic fans I know you will be happy with what is being preserved. If you can help donate that be great, if not then please spread the word as much as possible. https://twitter.com/gamepresintl/status/1463121743003144192?s=21 https://t.co/G1iVpSF3QQ
3D Real Billiards (3Dリアルビリヤード) https://web.archive.org/web/20071113215319/http://sega.jp:80/kt/kddi/petsega/ This game has ruined my system. Thanks game. Sega lists it specifically for the W41CA, a 2006 phone by Casio. This means I'll have to look it up one day, which is something I could do without. Still, at least it comes in "Fiesta Orange": complete with added penguin. In other news: Nope. There are a very small handful of BREW 4.0 games, but not on the subscription services. More in a bit.
It's always like this. You go looking for one Sega thing and you fall into an entirely different Sega subject you didn't know existed.
Puyo Puyo! Sega was the last important "portal" for Japanese feature phones. In fact, it still exists, though for how much longer, nobody knows. It took over from all the Sonic Cafes and Sega Ages-es and became almost a unified service. Sega Retro has had the Android content documented for years. We're missing decent screenshots of most of the games, and we're not listing specific versions of Android that might run the software, but it's something. But Sega only started supporting Android in 2011 - the portal started in 2007, so that's four years of feature phone games that still need documenting (well okay five - the last release was September 2012). Enough time for more generations of phone hardware which Sega supported. And I'm going to say right from the outset - I'm going to get this wrong. On the i-mode side, we've got 90x (top tier) and 70x (mid tier) series phones coming out every year, and at some point the new mid-tiers exceed the old top-tiers and a 705i ends up being equivalent to a 903i or something - I just don't know. Sega's tactic is just to list all the numbers, or not list anything - deciphering minimum specs is a task I'm going to pass on, for the same reason I've passed on versions of Android. How good did i-mode phones get? Enough to run Virtua Racing. In fact... this is based on the 32X version of Virtua Racing Deluxe. You know, that system the internet says they can't emulate, or something. The description says this is from a SH-01C from 2010: Don't currently know what this means... other than more confusion on our wiki and more preservation awkwardness.
Not to come across as a jerk or something, but I truly believe that some things are better left undone. Like a testimony of what could have been, rather than what it actually was. Gotta love these guys for what they're doing, but if you're ever about to hit a dead end, then trust me, it's not the end of the world. That said, I never was a huge fan of mobile games. They are a nice-to-have though. @NaoyaShinota Praying for your success!
Nope! Kaitou Reinya in Columns 2010. And then I found a port of Virtual-On. Japanese mobile phones: a laugh a minute.
A (mostly) completel list of all the mobile games that will need finding. Note of course there are multiple versions. This doesn't yet include stand-alone games, the medal stuff, and Sakura Taisen. Eek.
I did a thing summarising some of this stuff and promoting the preservation efforts - I mode, You mode, We all mode for i-mode The previous article by Tom is also pretty interesting - Watch the Sega shareholder meeting that ended the Dreamcast
ALRIGHT SO A LITTLE PREMATURE THERE, BUT I THINK WE FOUND THE PENGUIN. I don't know about being able to use it as a racer, but it seems to appear within the objects of the letters that make up the "POWER SLED" logo Specifically between the "W" and the "E" in "POWER"
Something else this doesn't include - pre-Java games. I initially couldn't work out how many were actually "games" as opposed to "services for games". There's some noise about Sega attempting to link its arcade games to i-mode devices (it really was a massive market) and the terminology was vague in the early days, but I've found half a dozen, mostly for J-Phones: Golf Tengoku (ゴルフ天国) Love Tennis (ラブ☆テニス) Metcha Snobo (めっちゃスノボ) Minna de Fishing (みんなでフィッシング) Socccer Saikou! International (サッカー最高！インターナショナル) Super Play Yakyuu (スーパープレイ野球) https://web.archive.org/web/2002060...w-ent.co.jp:80/jpn/products/jphone/index.html There was only a period of about six months where you could buy phones with colour screens that didn't support Java in some way, and I don't know if there was some fallback system for monochrome devices. Equivalent technology might be games like Snake (II) for the Nokia 3210/3310? It came and went so quickly that the internet doesn't have good records.
I dipped my toe into this stuff a while back, and as far as I could tell Quest of D had the most advanced of these (i.e. was actually some sort of mini RPG with unlockables for the main game) - the rest all seemed to be for score keeping/information linked to ALL.Net profiles, but I may have missed one or two slightly more significant examples. Of course the wider problem with these besides preserving them in the first place is that a good chunk of them were linked to arcade games that themselves are already inaccessible today due to their complex network setup/Japan-only release. So both together make for even bigger impenetrable messes... which they're still making to this day.
WOW Ja Park WOW Sports Medal Desu. Sakura Taisen Keitai Club As far as "games" go, I'd say at least 95% of them are represented on Sega Retro (pre-Java, Touch de Uno and a few one-off games left by my count). Obviously there's a lot of non-game stuff that still needs covering, and most of what's here is just "THIS THING EXISTS", but we're still the best in the world at documenting them all.
Nice work! Is it possible to confirm some of the release dates for Sonic Golf 3D and Sonic no Jirai Sagashi Game? I've been able to mostly update the Sonic Cafe articles on Sonic Retro with information from their Sega Retro counterparts, but those two games have dates that don't quite match up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041205201407/http://sega.jp:80/kt/docomo/sakamoba/ Saka/Soccer Puyo DX (サカぷよＤＸ) This could be the worst one yet. A J.League Pro Soccer Club o Tsukurou!-themed version of Puyo Puyo that was only made available for three days in November 2004. This image is all that survives. Supposedly there's a 2006 version too, but archive.org has no captures from that time period so it's been lost to time.
There's gaps in the sega.jp archive, and if the dates on Sonic Retro are correct, these two fall in those gaps. It's a recurring issue - there just aren't easy-to-find records anymore
I am a mascochist. Sakura Taisen Kayou Show Teikoku Uta Gekidan Hanagumi Tokubetsu Kouen: Ai Yueni Sakura Taisen Kayou Show Teikoku Uta Gekidan Dai 2-kai Hanagumi Tokubetsu Kouen: Tsubasa Sakura Taisen Kayou Show Teikoku Uta Gekidan Dai 3-kai Hanagumi Tokubetsu Kouen: Beni Tokage Went after some LaserDiscs, ended up documenting the first three Sakura Taisen "Kayou Shows" - the stage performances only a subset of a subset of people care about. Real bottom of the barrel stuff for someone like me - I can't comprehend how a series involving demons and steam-powered giant robots can make its money on singing and dancing. One thing I didn't realise is that the performers of these shows... are the voice actors from the games. It was a pre-condition of the job - you had to look like the character and be prepared to stand up on stage. And of course there's the TV show and films and radio dramas and all sorts of other things you were expected to be a part of to ensure continuity. With that third show, the VHS, LaserDisc and DVD copies were all released simultaneously at the same price.
Tunneling below the barrel. Sakura Taisen Furitsuke Video Gekitei (Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan) Gekitei Ondo (I have no faith in the translations) This is a VHS teaching dance routines to a television show based on a video game. This YouTube clip is also mirrored for some reason - I'm sure we're depriving Sega of millions by sharing this. You must feel my pain.
