General Questions and Information Thread

There's been some issues of RePlay magazine added to the internet acrhive recently, let's see what an operator has to say about Virtua Fighter
https://archive.org/details/re-play...8-may-1994-compressed/page/10/mode/2up?q=sega



hmm

 

When Mercari Japan sellers do the (ehhh) scanning work for you...

Here's a Sega News letter and price guide from the Amusement Machine Show 1991

 

R-360 cost 18 million yen in 1991. Wow.

 

Interestingly, that event appears to be where the lesser-seen Rad Mobile version of the R360 made one of its few documented appearances (which up until now I had confused on the wiki with AOU Show 1991, whoops):

And sure enough, one side of that flyer specifically notes this to be the case. The other with its price says the R360 is "on sale now", and neglects to mention Rad Mobile. But G-LOC isn't specifically cited either, which has got me thinking...

As linked before, the one other sighting of Rad Mobile running in an R360 is in this video at Hi-Tech Land Sega Shibuya. With how that location was also used to test out the G-LOC original, and near-total lack of documentation besides it, my line of thought has always been that it was placed on trial there too and promptly failed - but perhaps there's more to this?

 

In the latest chapter of "weird crap Retro needs to document", a 2019 post from myself:

There's an obvious reason to be distracted but what even is this thing - packaging? a plastic board?? Why was it manufactured??? ????

Apparently this is a "shitajiki" (下敷き), something you put behind a piece of paper when you're writing, so it doesn't slide around on the desk or whatever. Japan apparently has a name for it, and you get video game themed collectable versions. Because of course you do.

And sure, merchandise, here's an OutRun one, whatever - just make a list on the wiki like all the other noise. But I have to post this one:


https://aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/n1063461711/
It's the back but... hey kids, here's a list of Mega Drive accessories, complete with barcodes. It's only 2,000 yen for a replacement RF adapter, why not memorise the number? 49743...



how best to advertise Sonic the Hedgehog as a brand? How about the Sonic 3 data select screen. Big part of life for the Suvival Kids of the 90s.

 

Loving the 'everything all at once' graphic design on that, right down to the additional gratuitous screenshot of the pre-rendered 3D Sonic model that just keeps popping up again in random things (They Call Me Sonic, SegaWorld London ads, etc) from this period.

 

Partly due to the above, this morning I documented some pencils. And you wonder why I'm single.

Merchandise/Tombow

It's a fool's game without a proper catalogue - while I knew there were a lot of Sonic branded products by this company, I hadn't anticipated half a dozen reskins. It could genuinely be a case where every year or two between about 1995 and 2002-ish, the whole Sonic-themed product range was updated and re-released.


(they also sold sets)

I was drawn in by the wacky artwork, but realistically we'd need a volunteer army to handle all this noise.


Unfortunately it's not Sonic, and also this is a pencil company, which means



You get different gradings of pencils. Imagine the shame, only owning a set of Virtua Fighter HB pencils when there were also B and 2B on the market.



Fun fact: this is still a thing.



What possible use case is there for a pack of 12 Mario-themed 6B pencils.

 

The doremon game was a part of a giant pencil box set. The wiki covers it already

 

I keep finding weird "collectable" cards.


This is a "TCard", designed for Tokyo's bus network back in the day. But only certain types of buses, because reasons.

I've been using a site called Mandarake, who claim to be the RULERS OF TIME. When it comes to flat, scannable things, they seem to have more useful photos and scans than most online Japanese shops auction sites, and yes, 1925 results for "Sega card". Granted, a lot of it not actually related to Sega (or cards), but the vast majority of those which are, aren't documented on Sega Retro. In our defense, most come from card-based arcade games that never left Japan - it's unreasonable to expect many English speakers to give a damn about Fate/Grand Order Arcade. I know I don't care.

But Sega has been using "IC cards" for 20+ years in the arcade games, not so much for the gameplay itself, but as a means of storing save data. Even if Sega released one IC card for every game, the list should be "manageable" - we know roughly what games were released during that time and not all games need to save, so I'd say we're looking at less than 100, tops, depending on whether customers were given a choice of designs (but even then, why would you manufacture more than a few for one game?).


So for something that isn't completely alien, World Club Champion Football is a long-running series of card-based games, some of which made it to Europe. It's a nightmare to cover - here's everyting from the first release in 2002 (a page that hasn't been touched since 2014), but when it comes to saving your game, surely there's only going to be a single type of card, right? It means at most, that's 18 IC cards to find, and that's very doable.



This was a mistake.


Yeah they uh... released cards for every team in the game. Every year.

Can we put a rough number on how many IC cards were released per season?

Well there's 25 listed here for 2004-2005, and this was one of the earlier entries.



I swear they do this on purpose.

 

I couldn't care less about F/GO Arcade as a game, but I do know that one of its cards referenced Virtua Fighter, for some reason:

In fact, zoom and enhance... he's everywhere.

Somehow I don't think any of the gacha card whales that got this in Japan even recognised these small-scale cross-brand assertions.


For games like WCCF, I have it on good authority that there are also variations in the card sets issued at location tests as well. They do legitimately want to ward off everyone from documenting them.

 

The original sales flyer for the R360 has G-LOC featured all over it and has a date of 10.1990 on the back.

In addition, this Amusement Machine Guide with the date of 9.1991 seems to provide some clues.

The prices for the machines were listed on here this whole time! And it was published a month before the October AM Show (where that news letter and price sheet add up).

The R360 is in it, but it's still showing the version with G-LOC. So yeah, it's possible that the Rad Mobile version got tested at some point in the middle of all this and then promptly failed.

EDIT: Here's the date for Rad Mobile: 01.1991. But now looking again at that video, it has a date of 911016 (or 10/16/1991) in the title, the same month as the AM show and where the Rad Mobile version was demoed. I think we're onto something...

 

Matthias Bleyer (BSV Bad Bleiberg, Austrian Second League, 2001/2002 Season)

 

RE: card game things

I have just wasted most of my lunch trying to grasp all of the version upgrades for Sangokushi Taisen. I have now realised that it was not wise and have retreated back into knowing barely anything about this stupidly massive franchise.



All of the above is a few examples from "Sangokushi Taisen 3.59 War Begins", alone. Updates made to the update of an update, because of course there were. One or two even received their own location tests, for some reason?

I dread to think how many pages the wiki may need of these and all of the new cards released for them.

 

I was in the area

Sega Retro:Todo/Trading card games

Even though there were revisions (and location tests for those revisions), Sega seems to class Sangokushi Taisen 1 and 2 as two separate games, so I guess we should too(?). Shoutout to the second game that manages to have "2.01", "2.10" and "2.11" versions, because that won't confuse future historians (also it copies the Windows 3.x naming scheme).

With Sangokushi Taisen 3 things get complicated*, and I think Sega may have even retroactively renamed some of its updates. Also alarming is the number of official tournaments, though luckily it's all written down and archived.





*well okay it's all relative

"Sangokushi Taisen 2 Zenkoku Taikai DVD 'Hagyou e no Michi: Wakashishi no Kakusei'" (三国志大戦2全国大会DVD「覇業への道~若獅子の覚醒~」) doesn't exactly roll off the tongue

 

To be honest I have no idea where we draw the line with this stuff, as Sega's own site still distinctly separates all the revisions for the Taisen series, as well as other things like Wonderland Wars, Border Break, and Code of Joker. But some do seem to be incredibly small updates (or indeed done retroactively).

 

I don't envy the person who ends up hunting for cards.

This morning I improved our coverage of Avalon no Kagi (The Key of Avalon). This is a game that was popular enough to see sequels (or updates, or whatever) but was retired in favour of (I guess) "better" games after a couple of years. There's 200-250 cards for this one (maybe more depending on how different the location test version(s) were), but Sega kept a list and I'd say it's fairly manageable. It's a number just shy of the full Pokédex in Pokémon generation 2.


Sangokushi Taisen is a level above that, which means you get super ultra special cards turning up in strange places:

This is the John Woo film "Red Cliff" which was such a big film it was split in two. For god-knows what reason, both halves' "collectors editions" contain a Sangokushi Taisen 3 card. They don't appear in the standard versions or the Blu-rays (or any subsequent re-release), just these specific DVDs.

It's all based on Three Kingdoms-era China so there is some sense here, but not pleasant if you were actually trying to collect all the cards.

 

Great news, I have identified 26 versions of Sangokushi Taisen prior to its 2016 reboot (although I say "reboot" - the logo has a 4 in the background, then the next one V, and the next one 6.... but apparently the version number went back to 2.0 so who knows). And there might be more.


The troubling thing about this is that Sega has redefined what it believes is a major release

https://web.archive.org/web/20150512023622/http://sega.jp/cgi-bin/amgame.cgi?ct=2
there were 6 in 2015

https://www.sega.jp/arcade/find/?q=三国志大戦
there are 8 today

These are all the versions referenced on their website.

Thing is, none of these are just minor bugfixes - they all affect game balance, though I would guess the only ones worth pages are:

1
1.100 (maybe)
2
2.10 (maybe)
3
3.1
3.5
3.59
3.594 (maybe)
3.595 (maybe)

or just 1, 2, 3.

I'd suggest it's borderline impossible without knowing how the games work, and for that you'd either need to travel in time or drastically improve emulation.

 

Key of Avalon actually seems like one of the more interesting ones to me - I quite like the distinct artstyle done for it, which you can kind of tell was the work of one Hiroyuki Taguchi. I was going to say "of greater fame for The Ocean Hunter", but that's pretty much just comparing one slightly less obscure arcade game to another at the end of the day.


In more 'they are actively making this more of a faff for us' news

At some point along the way, Sega stopped placing all the latest bits for the Taisen games (and probably other titles) together, instead branching them all off into separate webpages. It's certainly how the current game in the series, Eiketsu Taisen, is doing things.

They do at least allow you to sort by specific categories, however for updates and revisions, the actual day they were pushed to cabinets is only mentioned on the pages about them. So each individual example would need to be archived and referenced (sigh).

Some of these Eiketsu Taisen revisions are mainly just bugfixes, but a few aren't. I got up to the 1.5 update "Kaiten no Goubosei" (廻天の五芒星), which is presently its only one classed as a bigger deal, before starting to hit things that actually happened this year.


Should anyone desire to tackle the confusingly titled 2016 reboot next, it's the same story there, at least for more recent years (?). And as its own website currently is, everything since 2012 is separated month-by-month for Sengoku Taisen.

 

Yes some of these revisions were in operation for just a week.

 

Just in case anyone was thinking "stick with the console games, it's easier"


This version of Sangokushi Taisen Ten, a Nintendo DS spin-off... contained three cards for the arcade version. There is no escape.

I was worried these handheld versions might support the arcade cards through this thing but thankfully(?) not. In the DS games, the cards are completely digital (though I'm guessing are based on the real life ones).