General Questions and Information Thread

RE: RE: What's a GameJam?

To be fair, they get smaller and therefore harder to find:


GameJam Storm (2003)


Sega GameJam 2005 Asobinasai! (2005)

The first two were alternatives to TGS, but these two were more about tournaments. National arcade tournaments were nothing new for Sega, but now they could host three game finals in one venue. And some other things.

Forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm over the best Japanese WCCF player of 2003 though. I'm interested in wacky prototypes of unfinished games, not wacky people playing finished ones.

 

The Mega Drive port of Samurai Shodown, running on real hardware. There's barely any footage on YouTube - this was the best I could find. Spot the rogue pixels.


"What rogue pixels?", says Kega Fusion... and Gens... and a bazillion other emulators. "It's just television noise, surely".



That's not what the super accurate Exodus says. Unless it's not as super accurate in this area as it could be.


These are CRAM dots, created when there are mid-frame palette changes. Because most games are built better than this, it's not something you generally see, and it's not something most emulators bother with, but uh yeah, Samurai Shodown is an exception.

Is this a common mistake across Sega Retro? ...maybe? None of our Mega Drive screenshots are truly representitive of the real experience at launch - no two televisions are the same, and there's variation in the console hardware too. There are 8,763 Mega Drive screenshots on the wiki right now - it is unreasonable to replace them all because some ugly dots aren't in the right place.

(that and Exodus doesn't have a screenshot feature)

Still, interesting from an academic point of view. I'm not sure if this counts as a bug.

 

Does ARES have an overscan feature?

 

CRAM dots are basically the unicorn of Genesis bugs. I once read a blogpost by fredbronze detailing Sonic 3's method of disguising them, and how they're a nightmare to actually show on emulators. Afaik only Exodus and BlastEm show them. I wouldn't worry too much about them, though.

 

Indeed BlastEm is considered the gold standard these days, at least as far as visuals and timing goes. It's the only emulator I was aware of that showed the dots (Exodus as well, but I learned that from this thread!) Although for general use, I still prefer the "all rounder" Genesis Plus GX (via BizHawk so I get a menu bar and TAS features).

I don't recall ever seeing the dots back in the day, but I was always playing on small CRT TVs with pretty shoddy picture quality, so it's unlikely they would have stood out to me. All in all, I don't think documentation quality is harmed by not including them in screenshots. Gotta draw the line somewhere, right?

 

Okay I'll bite. We've got a bunch of undocumented DVDs and some are related to old tournaments - maybe I can shift something. Maybe.

One of the finals of GameJam 2005 was "Kakutou Shinseki III" (格闘新世紀III), a nationwide Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned tournament.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050311030253/http://www.am.sega.jp/utop/news/vf4ft_kaku3/

This might be your winner, going by the name of "Itabashi Zangief". Best Japanese player of the game in early 2005. Hurray.

How did he get here? Well first you need to go to your local arcade on a specific date*:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050308163102/http://am.sega.jp/utop/news/vf4ft_kaku3/first_list.html

Once you beat whoever's there, you're pitted against other winners in your region:
https://web.archive.org/web/20050311013757/http://am.sega.jp/utop/news/vf4ft_kaku3/area_list.html

And then finally, you get to compete in the finals. I think it's fair to say it's quite an elaborate thing to put together, and as the name suggests, this is the third time a Virtua Fighter game was given this treatment. There were at least six, and probably other officially-licensed tournaments in-between.


I don't know what's on the DVD but if I were to hazard a guess, people playing Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned.


Obviously all flavours of Virtua Fighter were designed so anyone can have a go, but the later ones were almost certainly built with these events in mind too. It may be the main source of feedback for balance changes - here are the professionals, on camera, pushing the game to its limits. It's maybe the most important post-launch story in the product's life, so we ought to care, even if the content is a bit dry.


How many Japanese nationwide video game tournaments were there in total? Lots. I think they've been running WCCF ones every years since 2003, but you've also got Initial D, Sangokushi Taisen, rhythm games like Maimai, and of course Puyo Puyo, which was no stranger to massive tournaments even before Sega got their hands on it.


*this is also a useful tool for working out if Sega venues existed

 

i am thinking those new Super Games will have also this eSports aspect?

I am imagining competetive Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio lol

 

I've had coverage of these in mind for a while, but didn't exactly want to be the one to open Pandora's box with them, as countless other games like Border Break, Wonderland Wars, and even Mushiking (which actually held a world record for gaming tournaments for a while) come into the equation too. Obviously a lot of this will just be fairly impenetrable Japanese eSports nonsense, even with the laws preventing it from going more big bucks and corporate over there, but at least the more recent ones have been streamed online instead of getting bunged on DVDs.

Those that were held before anyone had really considered gaming as a sport seem much more interesting though. One of Sega's biggest in history has to have been Live UFO 94 - this came up before over in the Harmony findings thread, and alongside everything else had tournaments for both Virtua Racing and Fighter (possibly the first ever for the latter).

How to deal with this event on the wiki is something I'm yet to figure out though; just how many pages are needed for each aspect and all the attendant sub-events, even with such little documentation to use?

Then by the time of Virtua Fighter 3, you've got Sega trying to make the most of their big new venues across the world - Tokyo Joypolis was used for the location test, and SegaWorld London + Sega City Mississauga were the first places outside of Japan to have the game. So unsurprisingly, at the official tournament back in Joypolis, one of the categories that year was the 'International Championship', covered in this video from an Indonesian perspective:

Something called Virtua Fighter 3 Japan Vs England also happened, where Sega seems to have planned to provide transport packages for a few Japanese players to jet off to London and visit the UK champions at SegaWorld (the infamous GamesMaster tetsujin feature may have even been inspired by this). Gamest covered it at the very least.

 

We've done it before, with things like Champion Train '93 in Germany, though granted, nothing quite on this scale. Throw things at a page and see what sticks.

 

Kakutou Shinseki III

aka I don't know what I'm doing

 

Virtua Fighter 2 The Eternal Battle and Virtua Fighter 3 Maximum Battle - both of these videos should be helpful for the earlier VF tourneys. Will need to investigate further on if 3tb ever got one too, and confusion reigns on the exact name for the LIVE UFO championships (have seen "Virtua Fighter GP '94", "LIVE UFO Virtua Fighter Tournament", and simply "Virtua Fighter Tournament" all cited).

Initial D's tournament in 2019 raises another good point:

This one was held as a part of Toushinsai, the arcade game championship events ran by Taito and NTT eSports. These began in 2015 based mainly around fighting games on the former's NESiCAxLive service, but grew to include championships for other titles, including both Initial D and its main competitor series, Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune.

Toushinsai itself is a replacement of sorts for the more famous Tougeki championships, which were an Enterbrain scheme and more focused on fighting games (at least, until they died in a perfect storm of poor planning in 2012). However even with Sega running separate tournaments, these had the official blessing too - do they matter?

And naturally a lot of the examples planned during the past few years have had to be put on hold or cancelled outright. The 2020 tournament for Initial D got as far as some of the qualifiers, but the final seems to have been postponed then called off altogether. I don't think there's been a proper national tournament for it since, but others have still had theirs - Eiketsu Taisen's first was late last year, and the finals for the fourth 'King of Performai' take place this Sunday.

 

I thought this might be easy to find, but turns out the internet doesn't know much about Virtua Fighter 3tb. Maybe it was too late to the emulation party.

There are apparently four different revisions of Virtua Fighter 3 (A, B, C and D)... with seemingly no documentation online explaining what the differences are. Then there's 3tb and... there's no documentation on that either. The story goes that while VF3 was big in Japan, it was overshadowed in the West by iterations of Tekken, but you'd think someone would care.

Sega Retro's coverage of the arcade version is little more than "it has team battle" - other sources claim there were "tweaks", but I don't know what that means in practical terms. The vast majority of online coverage concerns the Dreamcast version (or arcade VF3), and there's more going on in the home port.


For the record, (arcade) 3tb is built similarly to The King of Fighters - you pick three characters, and they fight another three characters. No tag team, no swapping the order between matches, and no second try if a character gets knocked out (although you can pick a character more than once, so have a team of three Akiras). If the cabinet is set to team mode, this is the only way to play... although it can also be set to "normal" mode which turns it back into vanilla Virtua Fighter 3... but with a 3tb title screen.

I don't know either game well enough to say whether 3tb is changing character costumes or backgrounds. I also don't know if team battle lends itself well to tournament play - I'm guessing SNK held official KoF tournaments without issue, but maybe it's a faff to police 3tb, or there's a way to exploit the systems or something. KoF does the team battle thing better by virtue of there being more characters - in 3tb you end up fighting the same people over and over.


Fun fact: there are DRINK and NAKED settings in VF3. The first decides whether Shun Di's head should turn red once he drinks, the latter puts more clothes on Taka Arashi.

 

RE: RE: RE: What's a GameJam?


Sega Game Impact 07 Asobinasai (2007)


Yappa Asobinasai 09 (2009)

Sega stopped calling their events "GameJam" after 2005, which makes them even more obscure.


"The finals of Kakutou Shinseki V occurred at Yappa Asobinasai 09".

You can see why we didn't pick this up as a Sega-related thing.

The 2009 event also seems to be the place where the first Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA game was announced. There were also versions of Sonic and the Black Knight and Sonic Unleashed available to play:



I don't know the games well enough to make comments.

 

Went in the opposite direction - what was the first Virtua Fighter tournament to be held? And instead of an answer, I found a new set of questions.



"Hasha Kakutougisen" (覇者格闘技戦). There is literally nothing online other than photos of these two flyers from two auctions. Looks like a Saturn Virtua Fighter tournament.

 

https://xcancel.com/AppleSlipper/status/1627455541005156352?s=20

I must be out of the loop, when were these characters a thing?

 

http://athletic.segasammy.co.jp/
A few years ago (which might mean 10 or 15)

 

If my dates are correct on LIVE UFO, that was April 1994 - so unless there was a smaller region-specific tourney for VF1 at some point beforehand, the one there is most likely to have been the first ever official one.

After the additonal Virtua Racing and Daytona USA tournaments at LIVE UFO, Sega Rally seems to have had an event as well about a year later at Yokohama Joypolis; Sega Rally Time Attack Festival. Good luck on finding much else about it besides this image, with who I presume to be the winner receiving a machine's marquee as a prize:

However, it may well link to one of the mysteries of the game - the "Joypolis Mode" found in an unused test menu, which appears to have no function if selected. It's been assumed this was related to Sega Rally Special Stage by some, but 1. that was installed at Shinjuku Joypolis two years on from the arcade original's release, and 2. in the one known Time Attack Festival photo, there's clearly some different stuff going on in those screens.

Whilst it's somewhat relevant, the original Yokohama Joypolis location appears to have been the venue of choice for a couple of years whenever Sega wanted to run tournaments and other events. Parts of Virtua Fighter 2 The Eternal Battle happened there, and, of course, the Japanese qualifying wing of Rock the Rock did too (seen here at 37:25):

That same month as Eternal Battle though, the second 'Polygon Junkie' (ポリゴンジャンキー) event also happened elsewhere. What's a Polygon Junkie? A series of Virtua Fighter-inspired club nights organised by Sega and Dai Sato between 1994-96, mainly to debut test versions of their new 3D arcade games and have DJs play some tunes.

Specific details aren't forthcoming on what most of the said test versions are, but apparently a special edition of Fighting Vipers with Mahler enabled by default and "Big Head Mode" on (which would later resurface in the Saturn and Sega Ages 2500 versions) made its one public appearance at the third in December 1995:

These have flown under the radar of most people, mainly due to the lack of documentation they have - brief features in the press and some retrospective mentions aside. I only came back across these after immersing myself in the world of Virtua Fighter's popularity in Japan again, though I do remember vaguely hearing about them before.

 

Challenge accepted!





Oh wait no that's... another one... it never ends


I agree though, that "Joypolis" setting is unlikely to be Sega Rally Special Stage... because Shinjuku Joypolis didn't physically exist when Sega Rally was launched. But I see you came to the same conclusion I did - naming "Joypolis" without a specific location in that banner suggests it pre-dates the time when there was more than one, which would leave the original Yokohama Joypolis. And that's reasonable considering vanilla Sega Rally launched in February 1995.

Unless there's a super secret mode in the base game somewhere, I'd imagine the Time Attack Festival version was a different build. So the setting could just as likely be a leftover from location testing.



Coincidentally I ran across that "Polygon Junkie 2" news item just a few hours before you made that post. It just goes to show, yet again, how much is video game history is missing from the internet.

 

Gamest scans stop at May 1995.

https://archive.org/details/gamest0134/page/126/mode/2up (lots of prototype shots for those interested)
https://archive.org/details/gamest0135/page/188/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0136/page/114/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0137/page/214/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0138/page/186/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0139/page/183/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0140/page/183/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0141/page/191/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/gamest0142/page/110/mode/2up



And because it wasn't complicated enough, it appears there was an official tournament as early as March 1995.

 

At the very least, that 'Time Attack Competition' seems to have been less of a proper tournament. If I'm reading into this correctly, readers would simply record their best times on a course for a couple of months at Sega-affiliated venues, pass them onto their location's clerk on a application form, and then hope they were good enough to get printed in a 'best of' tally within a later issue of Gamest (and also the Sega Fax Club, apparently):

I'd say there's a fair gulf between just this and organising qualifier events to weed out good players at specific venues, who'd then compete in the big finals at either a flagship location, an event hall, or Sega's headquarters - although once those have been better documented, I guess these smaller competitions could be done as well (?).

'Time Attack Championship' might be a bigger deal, and from the looks of that flyer it was for the Saturn version.

As for Polygon Junkie, an interview with Dai Sato made as part of the 20th anniversary commemorations for VF does have some background info about it, and there is more detailed coverage on the first couple they held, as well as Eternal Battle, in issues of Game Charge. I understand Gaming Alexandria have both those and the earlier issues of Arcade Game Magazine though - just a matter of waiting for the scans to surface now.

This flyer tells us a bit about the second; Sega Rally, Virtua Cop, and VF2 were all there, as well as Sato's mates


Plus from the looks of this tweet, there's at least one old webpage about it backed up on Wayback. I haven't gone looking yet, but I suspect this is something from when AM2 had their regular online columns at sega.jp.