General Questions and Information Thread

Went out of my way to buy Worms Forts: Under Siege to improve coverage on Sega Retro. The game appeared at E3 2004, but was brought to the show by Acclaim - the same Acclaim that would go bankrupt later in the year, causing Sega to take over US publishing duties. So the reason we didn't have press assets until this afternoon was because I was looking in the wrong place.

Anyway it's more fascinating than most:




https://segaretro.org/File:Acclaim2004_WormsForts_Weapons_&_Ammo_-1.jpg
https://segaretro.org/File:Acclaim2004_WormsForts_Weapons_&_Ammo_-2.jpg

Nearly half of these weapons were scrapped during development . Tanks and planes didn't make it, and some of the animals and people are missing, but... Worm Village People, giant robots, waffles and a Fiat 500...



The old woman is very much GameCube-free in the final build (spoilers: Worms Forts never came to the GameCube. Also yes I did notice the Sphinx Mickey Mouse)


Not sure this Devil Worm made it into the final game either, despite being modelled.

Some of the other concept art suggests there was going to be a resource management system too. All gone in the final game.

 

A very lovely human has scanned Sega Hi-Tech Zukan Vol. 1:

https://archive.org/details/sega-hi-tech-zukan-vol.1

My favourite bit is the attempts at mapping out the routes of OutRun:



You spend a good chunk of the game driving around in circles, but you always end the stage travelling in the same direction as you start, meaning you are technically making progress (unless there's some creative license going on with these maps).

 

Today on "old Sega games nobody cares about"...



World Cup '98 France: Road to Win was the eighth and final Sega Saturn football game developed by (we assume) Sega's Team Aquila. I'm not super au fait with football games of the era, but from what I understand, EA's FIFA games had all the money, but Sega Worldwide Soccer 97 and Sega Worldwide Soccer 98 had all the respect (at least in Saturn circles). World Cup '98 France was a Japanese exclusive and shock horror, it ties in with the 1998 World Cup... that took place in France.

Is it better than the others? idk maybe - it has far fewer teams, but you'd hope it could justify its existence somehow. The notable thing is that this is a licensed product, whereas previous Victory Goals and Worldwide Soccers weren't.


But who licensed it? Contrary to what both Sega Retro and Wikipedia have been saying for years... not FIFA. It appears to be a bizarre situation where the game has the license from the event, but not the sports governing body that overseas the event, so it can use all the France 98 logos (and the mascot, Footix) it wants, but none of the uniforms, players or stadia (except maybe Japanese ones - there's a license from the Japanese Football Association too).

So real event, fictional players. Or semi-fictional - it's the "England goalkeeper David Seaman is known as 'Seeman'" type of fiction.



Official France 98 products were licensed by "ISL". I have no idea what ISL stands for - FIFA seems to take all the credit these days.

 

"ISL" was the company that was linked to much of the massive corruption at FIFA a few years back, there was a fair few TV exposés of them in the UK at the time.

 

TodoSega, SuperJuegos and Hobby Consolas were instrumental in my documentation of pre-release versions of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers games on Megadrive, showing builds with scenes, characters, stages, huds that didn't appear in the final in the case of the first game, and different cutscenes and story progression in the case of the second ("The Movie") game. These predate the earliest of the drx prototypes which in themselves show a process of refinement with art, music and engine differences in both cases.

That's without getting into the similar dev process for the Game Gear games (Which are hands down the tightest fighting games on the Game Gear, which uses the Gear-to-Gear link cable for 2P competitive fun. A hack exists to turn it into a Master System game with 2P controller support.)

Anyway, tangent aside, all I'm saying is that TodoSega in particular has been especially useful to me.

 

Fair enough - I'll prioritise Todo Sega

https://retrocdn.net/File:TodoSega_ES_04.pdf

RE: Tools - I did start making one



I timed it - 124 pages in an hour, so I've got my processes down to roughly 30 seconds a page, just cropping and rotating losslessly, encapsulating programs and scripts already have on Retro CDN.

Don't expect quick results - this is still a faff. Just less of one.

 

That's pretty quick in my book.

 

Okay Todo Sega is sometimes interesting:



https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:TodoSega_ES_15.pdf&page=26

THANKS! I WAS JUST ABOUT TO BE KILLED BY THEM!

Light Crusader, back when it was still called "Relayer", and its logo took design cues from Galaxian. I don't know much about the game, but I'm pretty sure the final doesn't look like that.

 

I take back what I said


https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:TodoSega_ES_16.pdf&page=13

 

It can all be traced back to Yes in this case and not Galaxian, somehow.

 

To commemorate the 26th anniversary of Nights into Dreams' announcement, today Yuji Naka shared a photo of Sonic Team at the presentation (where two other pieces of Saturn software Bomberman and Enemy Zero were also announced).

And in case you're wondering "did Yuji Naka seriously scribble over Naoto Ohshima in MS Paint because of Balan Wonderworld", the answer is likely "yes"

 

Now that he's severed any long-term corporate ties, Naka's Twitter is quickly becoming another one of those where the relentless posts/revelations/public spats are essentially just daily entertainment value now.

I'd say it's possibly worth opening an entire thread about his constant postings on the platform by this point.

 

Well, after years of rumours of him being a dick it's nice of him to go onto social media and prove it.

 

We now have a full, (cropped) set of Todo Sega, the Spanish magazine that... had stuff in it. There is content here that you might not find in other sources... but the content is in Spanish.



Hey look it's the unreleased Clockwork Knight: Pengin War, being called "Clockwork Puzzle".


As with so many magazines, someone will need to sift through it at some point. The editorial might not be the best though - they're one of the video games are awesome publications where everything gets a high rating. 85% for Mega-CD Power Rangers. Eighty five.

 

It would be called "Clokwork Puzzle" ... "Pepperouchau" had to destroy "blocks" (which are in fact toys) with bombs (Bomberman-style bomb-dropping mechanics), it would include a "four-player battle mode" and they (Todo Sega) didn't have a release date yet at the time of publication... ...

 

You don't usually see magazines publishing screenshots of noticeably broken or unfinished builds of games (on purpose) - they'll show Hidden Palace Zone thinking it'll make it into the final Sonic 2, but not the empty void of Genocide City, or Casino Night before it had solid floors. It's usually a mixture of publisher instructions and common sense - nobody needs to see your glitchy tile maps.


https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:SuperJuegos_ES_040.pdf&page=13

Oh. Okay then.

Earthworm Jim 2 "beta version" was a cover story for this issue of Super Juegos. I guess it would have been hard to know exactly how unfinished the game was when this was printed... but... uh.


Probably shouldn't be showing that.


I think it's just an empty level guys.


Earthworm Jim 2 was a big deal, but it's very unusual to give a game this much coverage this early in development. They list out all the levels, not knowing most of the names would change, as would the order they were played in, and some would be scrapped entirely (like the Breakout mini game).


I guess the instinct is to always show a game in the best possible light, but I think being able to see a game progress is far more fascinating.

 

https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:TodoSega_ES_20.pdf&page=25

Taz in Escape From Mars (which I think he does by the second level... then goes back), was sold in Spain as a bundle, alongside this VHS cassette of old Warner Bros. cartoons. A special Sega version... which probably isn't very "special" at all, since it looks like this was repackaged later on.


Hey fun fact: technically this isn't "Looney Tunes". I mean it is - for all intents and purposes, there was only one brand in 1994, but originally Warner Bros. had two cartoon series, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.... and technically Bugs Bunny was a Merrie Melodies character (most of the time). The more recognisable theme song, "Merrily We Roll Along" is also from Merrie Melodies (Looney Tunes used "The Merry-go-round Broke Down"... until Merrie Melodies also used this). There's been no meaningful difference since 1945 but you were still seeing the divide 50 years later.

 

It's been maimai's 10th anniversary of release this month, and Sega have been doing a bunch to celebrate - commemorative new tracks, special livestreams, etc. This in particular caught my eye on one of the streams though (sadly privated at the moment):

Conceptual designs for all three Performai games from about 2/3 years before their debuts. Chunithm's doesn't look too different, but they clearly hadn't came anywhere close to figuring out the right proportions for maimai, and Ongeki seems to have had an entirely different name and control scheme at that point in time.

 

For the first time ever, the holy trinity:



Andretti Racing, Darklight Conflict (which doesn't render correctly in Mednafen) and Wipeout 2097 all have hidden wireframe modes. Just in case you were in denial about the Saturn using quads instead of triangles. It's one of the few benefits from using this style of 3D - it's really good at emulating the look of Tron.

In fact not only are all these modes unique to their respective Saturn versions, Darklight Conflict has its mode tied to the Saturn's clock!

 

NASCAR 98, also known as "yeah okay there's a few more Saturn games with wireframe modes".

There's a bit of a performance boost in Andretti Racing (which is essentially the forerunner to NASCAR 98) in its wireframe mode, but here the increase is massive. And while that might seem obvious since you're rendering "less stuff", take a more modern example: Sega Rally Revo draws a race in wireframes in its credits sequence, and the performance is beyond appalling. The regular game is a near-locked 30FPS, but the credits must be single digits, presumably because more modern GPUs are quicker at drawing filled triangles than lines to each vertex.


On the subject of Saturn rendering quirks:



The Saturn has rules about alpha transparency, and while more enterprising programmers could get around some of the limitations, it was common to see the checkerboard "mesh" pattern used instead. Pandemonium has semi-transparent circular weapon indicator things, but only when layered on top of VDP1. Layered on VDP2, they're opaque. I don't understand this well enough - whether you'd class it as a "bug" or an intentional design choice.