General Questions and Information Thread

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So anyway I found an undocumented Virtua Fighter game.


https://picclick.ca/Vintage-Pog-Milk-Cap-Virtual-Fighter-354630922896.html
Nana nana nana nana
Batomen (バトメン )

I'm not sure what the full story is here. It's a Tomy invention, and definitely not a series of Pogs, nope.


There's numbers, and because it's from Japan, extra ~technology~. That's a barcode, and with special readers, you can have the cast of Virtua Fighter fight each other. It's like a pseudo-successor to the Barcode Battler, but not quite; it's "C Code". Also ignore the 1994 - I think the whole thing comes from 1997).



This "Cyclone" system seems to be the most prominent (there's also a wireless "Cyclone 2", maybe other things?), and uh... where's the Virtua Fighter? Well here's the thing, there were several Batomen series, so the reader/player/whatever gets generic branding. What other series were released for this thing?



Oh you know, Pokémon.



Can they compete? Probably! The non-Pokémon discs are hard to find but there was a Bomberman series too. It's like Smash Bros. but not even remotely like Smash Bros..

 

Fungible fun tokens. Interesting!

 

Some weirdness that I don't think was fully clocked at the time:


In 2017 Sega released "Sega Catcher Online", and I'll be the first to say I didn't give even the slightest of damns, because I thought it was just a wonky simulation. Turns out... it's actually live video footage. As in, real machines existed somewhere and had cameras attached:



And yes, if you won the prize, it got delivered to you, which is only slightly insane. Also they brought it to America.


Anyway the sale to Genda caused this app to change. First it became "GOTON!" when the two were still partners, now it's "GiGO Online Crane" and yes, it still exists, just without the "Sega" bit. Then again, other manufacturers made similar services, so you always had options, which means multiple warehouses across Japan, filled with physical crane games being streamed to mobile phones.

But by selling part of its business, Sega gave up the dream... for a few weeks.


https://sega-ufo.com/
In 2022 they made another one, imaginatively titled Sega UFO Catcher Online. This means, in a roundabout way, Sega are competing against themselves.


Also that Sega font in the icon is familiar. Something tells me they weren't happy losing this one.

 

That situation is definitely a weird one, as even Genda already had their own online crane game app called Lift (yes, these things are everywhere now). I have no idea why Sega didn't just transfer ownership of the original app from Entertainment to the main part of the company immediately before the initial 2020 sale happened, besides corporate red tape and negotiations possibly making it more complicated than they desired?

Possibly motivated by this, Sega's even doubled down on apps for UFO Catcher stuff of late - there's the recent "Prize On" too, which appears to be some sort of loyalty awards points thing to win even more prizes for simply playing the cranes. Except there's apparently also additional hardware being sold to locations so that the machines can be linked up to this one (?) and it's another thing that I don't quite know how to cover yet.

 

A copy of the extremely, extremely rare Wonder MIDI has appeared on Yahoo auctions.

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/p1106351755

Anyone wanna go half on the price with me? :P

 

$7,000. Oof.

Save the pictures please.

 

We have some existing images of it already, but this is indeed the first time we've seen the back side, I think.

https://xcancel.com/ucchii16b/status/1043643254657310720

Also this auction is missing the disc. Bleh.

 

Yeah I'm not asking my dad to buy that... sorry
Too rich for my blood

 

Making it known that this Yakuza game bundle exists: https://www.play-asia.com/yakuza-like-a-dragon-like-a-dragon-gaiden-bundle-chinese/13/70ggxp

 

And now for a Sega game that almost certainly no longer exists:


Super Frog.

 

Masahiro Sakurai's latest video showcases a few rare items he has:


One of them is a Sega "Associate Planner Certificate" or "Jun Kaihatsuin Ninteishou" (準開発員認定証), a card/certificate thing given as some sort of "give us your game ideas" competition in 1988-ish. His is number 4 - obviously I had to looking for more:



https://xcancel.com/AlanMoriguchi/status/1320302751096553472

ding


There are clues about this campaign:
http://bto8.smspower.org/segapower/5062/index2.html

A bit of digging and I'm sure you could find more.

 

Not to be confused with the Team17 classic

This has made me remember how it's briefly shown running during that old short German documentary with Sonic and Virtua Racing concept art, in a scene shot at O2 Park Sega World:

I still wish we could get this in better quality one day - a lot of the narrated history is rubbish, but as gone over before there's good footage of things. Now add Super Frog to those!

(also I hadn't realised there were seemingly zero mentions of the thing by any Japanese sites at all until actually giving it a search for the first time today. Sega Retro - the best coverage of frog projectile launching games on the internet?)

EDIT: and it turns up in Kasou Genjitsu Yuugi Taizen too, at the same location but this time shot from the POV of a poor employee maintaining the thing. Isolated clips of the series like this one are still there on a few platforms, but you have me to thank for all four episodes still being available in full on Retro CDN - last time I checked, kukun kun had privated all of them.

 

I've been uploading cack over the years with the view of making sense of it one day. And you don't get much cackier than this.



"Youkoso Sega e" (ようこそセガへ) was a marketing campaign around 2007/2008. The lady is Satomi Ishihara, whose entire purpose seems to have been to say that line when prompted. She was in the role for about a year, acting as the company's "character image" until Sega got bored and replaced the campaign with something else.

I thought there might be more to it than that, but turns out it was just to get people through the door. Which is strange because...



...they really overdid it. For a period of a few months, she was all over the place, to the point where it starts looking like a strange cult.


How did Satomi Ishihara land this role? Sega held some form of contest, which they did regularly. She's the fourth(?) "image character" for Sega in the 2000s, and I'm not going down this road - I just wanted to see if the branding meant something, and it doesn't.

 

https://segaretro.org/Sponsorships/Football/JEF_United_Ichihara

JEF United (Japan)

https://segaretro.org/Sponsorships/Football

... and the less known Favoritner AC (Austria)




Do we know of any other clubs sponsored by Sega between 1992 and 1996? (Yes... it's a jersey made in Italy... of an Austrian football club that's little known outside Austria... sold in Japan).

 

(only those already on the wiki)



anyway today on "events lost to history"



See, I told you telephone cards reveal things. This is a special Sonic Team card released in conjunction with "Sega Cyber Club" (CyberClub?) (セガ サイバークラブ), which took place between 22nd September and 1st October 2000.

Sadly the wayback machine didn't get this one - the site was dead by December 2000, but from what little reporting exists online, it sounds like an online expo before online expos were meant to be a thing. Sega and ISAO (the short lived "all the internet things" bit of CSK) had their various teams showcase games and content over the course of about a week, and you could stream presentations online and all sorts.

Quite a lot of information was revealed at this event, including some release dates and supposedly Sonic Adventure 2 details.


For those not fortunate to have decent internet in 2000, they also ran a "Sega T&T Club" ("touch & try") at various venues across Japan, such as Tokyo Joypolis. Here they had Dreamcast kiosks among other things.

https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/22/news02.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0010/11/news10.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/22/news03.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/22/news04.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/28/news05.html

https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/30/news04.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/30/news05.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0009/30/news02.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0010/01/news01.html


https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0010/01/news02.html
https://nlab.itmedia.co.jp/games/gsnews/0010/01/news03.html

 

I was noticing a lot of Dreamcast Magazine/Dorimaga/Gemaga-branded telephone cards. Turns out that's because the magazine(s) released 10-20 new cards every three-to-six months between 1999 and 2004-ish.

Stunts like these mean we could be pushing over 1000 Sega-related telephone cards in total.


We should still upload as much as possible, but it probably means (at least partially) rethinking how we handle merchandise. These cards were released as a set... but they're also merchandise for individual games, and we don't want to manually list them twice.


Though generating the content is tricky too, as the scope is predictably massive - yes we want photographs of the "thing", but we also want box scans, and manuals, and promotional material, and stock images, and explations of what it is and why it exists. Some of this pushes the limits of Template:MerchTable2, yet we also can't make pages for everything - some items don't have official names, and others are far too simple to justify all that effort. See also: the reason there's so much variation in the merchandise pages.

I'm not sure I have a solution to this... but there is an idea that I can't get out of my head: can we make Sega Retro display every Sega t-shirt ever made? Because I kinda want to do that, if not just to gloat, because no other fan wiki on the internet does this... mostly on the grounds it's freaking insane.

 

Those events at Joypolis did host a whole bunch of pre-release appearances and reveals. I'm not familiar with the exact ones, but probably some important stuff. And it transpires that these photos I had mirrored ages ago off this Instagram page are from them:

Oh to be Yuji Naka circa 2000, keeping a watchful eye over your company's big game event


Looking back on it, there are definitely other things on that account which warrant more detail.

 

I like this idea. Ok so... We could house everything (release info, type, company, etc) in a template on the main "product image" file itself. Products with multiple files (physical scans, manuals, etc) would be uploaded as normal, just tagged only as "supporting material". When a new piece of supporting material is uploaded, we can go to the main file and add it to the template.

This would keep all the merch's info/scans "together" in a template we can pull from anywhere on the wiki. From here, it would be as simple as making a "T-shirts" page and a template pulling all "main" files tagged t-shirt. Because that in-file template would assumedly contain everything from MerchTable2, we could just as easily sort by merchandiser, game, even franchise(!), etc for automatic Merchandise pages.

This would require editors adding merch info on the filepage and not on a wiki page, but this also cuts down on manual copy/pasting, and isn't too far from uploading a file on RetroCDN anyway. In cases where someone uploads supporting material without a main product image for it to be associated with, we can hold those in Todo.

 

Yeah that was the conclusion I was starting to come to, although it still hinges on every piece of merchandise having some sort of unique identifier, which might be tricky in some cases. Food for thought.