There was a "Dreamcast movie creator" that was based on leaked components of the official SDK very early on (2002? 2003?). It used the proprietary CRI sofdec video and ADX audio encoding to get near DVD quality playback out of the Dreamcast, although at the maximum bitrate you'd only get about 40min per CD. So it could be that as well, which would mean they would only work on Dreamcasts, which might be why they are labelled as such. https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2015/06/bonus-feature-corpse-bride-deleted.html https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=41878
Yesterday I was told that Last Bronx had turned up as a question on the most recent episode of The Chase. Even knowing they'd got previous for retro stuff, likely on the whims of just one researcher, I thought this was a joke. Apparently not And Dermot O'Leary gets it right as well! Though this is admittedly an easy guess to make:
Always wondered about the other SEGA R&Ds at the time when R&D 8 was around, especially as R&D 4 is credited in Sukeban Deka II, yet it was still listed with R&D 2 on Sega Retro. Noriyoshi Ohba said in SEGA CONSUMER HISTORY he was part of R&D 6, which developed action games like Strider and the Mickey & Donald series. Rieko Kodama mentioned Michael Jackson's Moonwalker and GOLDEN AXE, which aren't games listed for her in her Meisaku Album interview, so maybe those are also R&D 6's games? Unless she wasn't a member of R&D 6 and she that a different department she worked at handled those. They definitely fit R&D 6's focus as games targeted at American audiences. R&D 6 is also one of the name in the preset high scores for Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf. I wanted to see what other games are probably by R&D 6 and if it matches both Ohba and Kodama together, so looked at all the above games to compile a list of consistent developers (bold for the R&D6 certain games, not bold for Moonwalker/GOLDEN AXE) Phantasy Star II - Rieko Kodama, Gen Adachi, Hiroto Saeki Space Harrier II - Naohiro Warama, Yamaichi Super League - Matsuhide Mizoguchi, Yamaichi Pro Yakyuu Super League '91 - Matsuhide Mizoguchi, ORE, Atsushi Seimiya, WANTA, MT. MAYA Super Daisenryaku - Hitoaki Minami, Hiroto Saeki, Takosuke Advanced Daisenryaku: Deutsch Dengeki Sakusen - Rieko Kodama, Hitoaki Minami ESWAT: City Under Siege - Matsuhide Mizoguchi, Yamaichi, ORE, SAT MAN, Naohiro Warama, Atsushi Seimiya, Hiroshi Momota, Takashi Yuda, Mikarin The Revenge of Shinobi - Noriyoshi Ohba, Matsuhide Mizoguchi, Yamaichi, Emiko Yamamoto, SAT MAN, Naohiro Warama, Atsushi Seimiya, Takashi Yuda, Kottu Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi - Rieko Kodama Streets of Rage - Noriyoshi Ohba, Yamaichi, ORE, Atsushi Seimiya, Hiroshi Momota, Kottu, WANTA Putter Golf - ORE, Kottu Hokuto no Ken: Shin Seikimatsu Kyuuseishu Densetsu - Hiroshi Momota Altered Beast - Rieko Kodama, Hiroshi Momota Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle - Rieko Kodama Mystic Defender - Rieko Kodama Sorcerian - Rieko Kodama, Chie Yoshida, Captain Elf Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom - Rieko Kodama, Yasushi Watanabe, Hiroto Saeki, Bros 400 Super Monaco GP - Hiroto Saeki, Takahiro Hamano, Masahiro Wakayama Battle OutRun - Gen Adachi Poseidon Wars 3D - Noriyoshi Ohba, Rieko Kodama, Gen Adachi Alex Kidd in Shinobi World - Gen Adachi, Captain Elf American Pro Football - Noriyoshi Ohba Golden Axe Warrior - Gen Adachi, Captain Elf Didn't quite confirm it either way for me if Kodama was in R&D 6, but clearly ESWAT, Streets of Rage, the Shinobi series and the Super League series were that department's work. It probably exclusively worked on console games, so no Game Gear exclusives. Golden Axe Warrior is the exception 'cause of Gen Adachi, but it is 2 years removed from Tournament Golf.
The unreleased SG-1000 port of Koronis Rift was mentioned a couple times here back in 2021, but I stumbled into it mentioned within a Mycom BASIC Magazine article on Space Harrier and checked all the adjacent issues for mentions. Hope that's enough info for a page. Koronis Rift - Sega Retro
Yeah it should definitely have a page as it was on lots of release schedules back then, but you should include the magazine page number in the reference as it's very time consuming to scan hundreds of pages of Japanese text to find the article. Edit: Ignore that, as you did, will probably need to edit some stuff somewhere else to make it link direct to the articles. Edit 2: fixed (no need for "page=")
Ah thanks. That was technically an artifact as I'd entered them as fileref first, it's been a while since I've added an magrefs.
I moved from "bootlegs" to "mistaken for bootlegs because they're odd" to "odd". There's some strange situations which we weren't documenting correctly. This is the Taiwanese PC release of of Enemy Zero, crediting a company known as Worldwise Enterprise. But it also says "licensed by SKC". What's an SKC? Answer: awkward. SKC held the rights to distribute Sega's PC games in South Korea, and then seemingly sub-licensed this to Worldwise for Taiwan. So "Sega -> SKC -> Worldwise" - all above board, but we were reporting that SKC were doing things in Taiwan, and they weren't, directly. So with all that noise worked out, I changed the Enemy Zero page and added Worldwise Enterprise as the Taiwanese PC distributor in the game bob, and did the same to other, similar games. But there's a problem with this method - there are at least 35 versions of Sonic 3D on PC, and in the interests of fairness, we really ought to be listing the other 34 companies too. Oh and some of those are publishing labels rather than companies. And some are re-releases with slightly different details. In fact... there's quite a lot in this area we're not handling fully. There is a lot of information that's pertinent to a specific release of a game, and while we list some of it, there's a lot missing, mostly because getting templates to work nicely and look decent requires skills and time, and much was written before technologies became available to us. I've made a list: https://segaretro.org/Template:ReleaseTest aka we ought to do something similar to how MobyGames does it. Except, you know, better. If we take a game like OutRun, there's tons of publishers and developers, and that's even after separating the UK home computer ports. We're missing most of the distributors - Tec Toy should be listed in hundreds of pages for the Brazilian release, for example. We're not making the distinction between "Sega of America" and "Sega Europe" (which we probably should be for a Sega wiki), mostly because it makes the bob look complicated and ugly. But releases are complicated and ugly. Price drops are also a thing I've been conscious of for a while. And if a game was re-rated by the ESRB Because they found a hidden sex scene, we're not able to cope with that either. I'm not sure I have an answer to this yet, partly because you'd also expect a 1:1 relationship with ROM dumps and sales figures and peripheral compatibility and whatever. Maybe you do.
Up until March 1994 that should be fairly straight forward for Sega Europe (or technically Virgin before the buyout) as nearly all third party games were distributed by them, even for publishers which manufactured their own cartridges such as EA (barring a couple of MD launch period releases) and Codemasters. The only exceptions being Acclaim who went their own way a bit earlier, and obviously Accolade, at least whilst they were unlicensed. That's for the UK at least, some publishers would have different arrangements in other SoE countries, and then we get into tiers of distribution with sub-distributors in countries where SoE didn't directly operate.
Oh, and Konami went a bit earlier too. Sorry about the image quality (just about readable if you squint), but I got outbid on these;
I'm not sure it's practical to have that amount of information in the bob. Maybe moving it to a section in the article itself would be better, and possibly combining it with physical scans as a single table. That's a lot of pages to reorganise though.
Worked on it a bit: Code (Text): {{ReleaseTest2|name=Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)|PS3|US| | name2=ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ | distributor=Sega of America | upc=1-2345-6789-0 | comments=Only sold in Toys 'R' Us. Cursed by the gods. }} ("name" can be inferred by the page name) This goes querying in the current releases table (set by the bobs), and then you can add more stuff. I'm thinking about dedicated sub-pages - the main pages give quick overviews, but all the stuff you're less likely to care about can be handled here. if we didn't have tens of thousands of games, it would make more sense to do it the other way (i.e. populate the bobs automatically), but yeah. This still might not be the best way.
Template:ReleaseTest2 witness my power Code (Text): {{ReleaseTest2|name=Virtua Tennis 3|PS3|JP}} I've got it auto-generating a whole heap of guff from three template arguments, most notably, cover scans! I can hack more out of the content ratings. It's making "educated guesses" right now - you'd have to provide more info for special editions. Likewise while I can code in some "expected" dimensions for covers, there'll be plenty of odd ones. My vague aim right now is to use this as a replacement for the current "distributor" field in game bobs, on the grounds that there are tons, and it's messy, and not many people actually care (at least, not enough to clog up the main page). But as said it'll lend itself well to other "less important" information, like pricing changes and barcodes and more detailed content ratings. We've only been waiting 13 years for a use for these. Sega voluntarily added violence warnings on their games, and made a big thing of being the responsible video game publisher™ protecting the yoof. That being said, there's always the chance technical limitations will get in the way - we know of 39 separate physical releases of Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island (yes really). It'll be interesting to see if the wiki can cope.
Lads, you've got to stop these elaborate, multi-decade jokes: Accidentally found on ebay - Virtua Fighter cards from Bandai. They were labeled as "Carddass" cards, and ha ha, stick them up your bum, funny. what are they really called? oh And in addition to this Virtua Fighter set, they made Sakura Taisen and Evangelion ones. Carddass (カードダス) has been a thing since 1988.
I briefly talked about Carddass somewhere in this topic after finding something that was neither this or Sakura Taisen that Sega was also involved in.
Also in today's weird ebay finds: https://picclick.co.uk/Samsung-Sega-Virtua-Fighter-2-PC-Retro-Game-385678769922.html https://picclick.co.uk/Samsung-Sega-Virtua-On-Cyber-Troopers-PC-Retro-385699043680.html South Korean PC versions of Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtual-On. We've known Korean versions of these games existed for years, but these variants are different, as they're published by Samsung. Obviously Samsung were the distributors of Sega consoles in South Korea, but finding PC games is unusual. I mean, not £270 unusual - you can pick up discs with the same contents for mere pence, but unusual all the same. Something more deserving of that money might be where these versions came from: Widescreen CRT? Built in status screen?? Anti-gravity laser keyboards??? One of many "Magic Station" (매직스테이션) computers, a line sold by Samsung throughout the 90s. It even has a jingle. Virtual-On (and probably VF2 - I haven't got that far yet) was sold as a pack-in. I don't know precisely where or when, but it may have pre-dated the stand alone release. They may also be the last Samsung-published Sega games out there, because supposedly they pulled out of the video game market in early 1997.
We've had a list of "game compilations that don't exclusively feature Sega games" for a while, but it's been little more than a dumping ground. In the last few days I've made it "official" - Miscellaneous game compilations. And now, the weirdest one so far: 3/10ths of this is Sega (6/10ths is Ultimate Play the Game, aka Rare) and it was published by Boots. Boots is a chain of chemists in the UK. (There was a design fad not too long ago where most beauty products either had their names printed in FULL UPPERCASE or full lowercase, but never Proper Case. I noticed it when having a bath a few years ago. I'm posting this on a worldwide internet forum.) In the 80s and early 90s they briefly sold electronics for some reason, but this is the first time I've seen software explicitly branded by Boots. Shampoo, paracetamol, ten ZX Spectrum games on cassette. also Here's Arthur from Ghosts'n Goblins being driven in a Ford Mustang(?) by some sort of creature, who is poking the lad from Paperboy. There's a dragon from Space Harrier in the back. Video games.
Yeah, Boots were into Computer/Video games for quite a while, I remember browsing Mega Drive games in there in the early 90s. The newsagents/stationary chain W.H. Smiths were similar. Boots is also somewhat international, you'll find them in higher end shopping malls in Thailand. I was meaning to add some "game compilations that don't exclusively feature Sega games" in the past, but wasn't sure how best to do that, so good job on adding a solution. Towards the end of the 8-bit computer era in the UK the market was dominated by budget and compilation titles, so there were lots of these with the odd Sega game included.
I actually have this compilation. There's also a Boots Action Pack which features Kung-Fu Master, Top Gun, Jack the Nipper, and Auf Wiedersehen Monty. Remember that this is the early 80s, there were no video game stores so it was the remit of newsagents and corner shops, especially if they also sold music cassettes. The more surprising thing to me is that they actually commissioned and published a book for the Spectrum too: (Ian Sinclair wrote lots of programming books in the era and is not related to Sir Clive Sinclair)
Pengo/Clones Zaxxon/Clones Another thing moved into the mainstream - clone software. As in, "let's clone a popular video game and sell it for less" - it was all the rage in the early 1980s. Given these are only tangentially related to Sega, I've been putting the scans on Retro CDN. I guess the idea is, if you grew up with "Pengi" and thought it might be a official Sega product, now we're explicitly telling you it isn't. We're probably missing tons. And this isn't "ooooh Hexen is a Doom clone", it's for really obvious contemporary commercial software where the objective was to mimick the real thing. There's no doubt what "Zaxxan" was meant to be.
I have made it in the world: https://picclick.com/Sega-Mega-Key-Mega-Drive-Tec-Toy-134617168998.html things I wrote for Sega Retro are making their way onto, weird, fake Tectoy products. For $200 USD you can put it on a shelf and admire my overuse of dashes.
