General Questions and Information Thread

If they are based on the real cards, this Chinese magazine has saved us some work and catalogued bloody tons in its pages.

 

Sometimes Sega classes each expansion as its own separate "game", other times... not so much:

https://www.sega.jp/arcade/find/?q=恐竜キング

There's only one Dinosaur King. Which is odd because

https://web.archive.org/web/20130315181040/http://kyoryu-king.com/am/card.html

there are 24 sets of cards, and some are a clearly grouped. They seem to have transitioned to "Dinosaurs vs. Aliens" at some stage, so I'm going to guess the wiki will need more than one page. Don't know if something similar happened to Mushiking, though I'm going to guess it'll find many ways to annoy us.

 

wonder if anyone is up to cover the NFT version of Sangokushi Taisen

https://lp.battle-of-three-kingdoms.games/

 

That version does look pretty bleak. It comes to something when it's less interesting than the endless arcade games, and isn't even operated by Sega themselves. I do get the impression the series was first up for the NFT treatment in large part because that side of the business happens to be driven by Yasuhiro Nishiyama.

But then they've been doing quasi-NFT moves in card games with completely digital content and no physically dispensed things long before this anyway - there's Code of Joker, for one. But also shortlived failure Chrono Regalia, which bombed about as hard as the previous year's AM2 effort Soul Reverse, and alongside that + COVID is probably about as responsible for much of the arcade stuff being scaled back a bit around 2020.

 

Here's some incredibly vague future plans:

Category:Cards

Because so many games have them, I've made the Omni templates automatically recognise any xxx/Cards subpages, and one day they'll all live in this category.

Problem is, listing cards is annoying, which is why most of these pages are just info dumps. But it'll have to be done properly eventually, and so:

Template:CardTable

Virtually all cards are going to have a name and number, scans and comments, but the detail will vary between games. And I don't know how to cleanly convey all the detail, such that we can recycle as much of these templates as possible.

The challenge is to mirror all of the information on a card on the wiki.


But that's a lot of data. In WCCF there are six sets of stats applicable to the game, but also personal details and a heat-mapped grid of where the player performs best on the pitch.


Can't cut corners either - the stats change every season. Some players even change size.


christ I'm going to have to draw a footaball pitch in wiki code

 

Yooooooo. I'm not submitting guff (probably), but I appreciate the blokey blokes can get their due guff.

 

How I spent my Sunday: Template:WCCFCardRow

Code (Text):

1. {{WCCFCardRow|MVP1
2. |front=WCCF0102 MVP1 JP Card Front.jpg
3. |back=WCCF0102 MVP1 JP Card Back.jpg
4. |name=David Trezeguet
5. |name2=デヴィド・トレゼゲ
6. |team=Juventus
7. |position=fw
8. |offence=20
9. |defence=8
10. |technique=16
11. |power=17
12. |speed=16
13. |stamina=14
14. |skill=Hitman
15. |score=91
16. |no=17
17. |dob=1977-10-15
18. |height=1m 90cm
19. |weight=80kg
20. |nationality=fr
21. |heatmap=002200002210014300022320002100000000000000000000000000
22. |fw=57
23. |mf=40
24. |df=4
25. }}

Yeah uh... yeah.

 

So here's something terrifying: World Club Champion Football: Serie A 2001-2002/Cards. I'm not going to fill in all the details - that would be insane, but I figured I could at least get one or two cards in a good place for others to hopefully follow. Yes the wiki needs the loop limit set higher.

As part of this effort, I went logo hunting and managed to get a pretty decent set of Serie A football club logos from the 2001/02 season. We might be best resource in the world now... for this specific season of top-tier Italian football.

I was going to leave it at that, but since Retro had a period of downtime this afternoon, I thought I might as well hunt for the 2002/03 clubs - it's only an extra four, and while this stuff isn't documented online as well as it perhaps should be (I had to edit this one off a physical shirt), I managed to find them all.

Guess what


they didn't get the rights.


For this specific entry in the series, Sega didn't use the official team branding - they made stuff up. It's very close, but it's not the same.


There's also an official Italian translation, just in case finding hundreds of cards in one language wasn't enough work for us.


WCCF should be the easy one - it's pretty much the only trading card game Sega has produced that's not painfully Japanese... but it's still a struggle. The good(?) news is they stopped making these after the 2021 edition - it's not a never ending battle anymore.

 

I have little to no interest in football and WCCF, besides the place that the latter occupies in Sega's history. But I do like that its catalogue of cards went on long enough to take in many older famous players. For example:


The man who was responsible for the #31 UK charts smash "Geordie Boys", there.

 

oh yes there's definitely some interesting ones in later "seasons"

Bet the value of this went up over the weekend.

 

i only did this because I like vectors

Solving some WCCF mysteries, because our documentation is lacking. I had some preconceptions coming in - that the series would start small with the Italian Series A before growing to absorb Europe and the world. I wasn't expecting every football team on the planet to be represented, but I figured the words "WORLD" and "CLUB" would give some obvious clues as to what the game contained.

Apparently not.


The first two seasons are sensible. The Serie A is a defined league, and there are logical boundaries, even if it's unusual to start with Italy over England or Germany (or even Japan). But whatever.

The 2004-2005 edition spreads to Europe and takes its teams from the UEFA Champions League, which makes more commercial sense... but they only chose the teams from England, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. In fact they never managed to include the full lineup throughout the series' run, though did include teams which didn't qualify, because why not.

In 2006-2007 they start calling it "Intercontinental Clubs", but... it's only two continents; Europe and South America. In subsequent seasons they began removing the South American teams in favour of European ones, to the point where it literally stops having "intercontinental clubs". It took until the 2012-2013 season to drop this pretense, and it would be entirely European clubs until the end of time.

Well except not quite because the 2017-2018 season added the top flight of the Japanese J.League (or at least some of it?). This means you get a mishmash of UEFA Champions League teams, J.League teams and... national teams, because spoilers: they started adding in those at some point too.

Basically "World Club Champion Football":
- does not feature the whole world
- is not exclusively clubs
- is not limited to champions
- but it does have football

it also
- never fully represented Europe
- was never really intercontinental. No North America, no Africa, no Australasia.

there were also special cards with players dragged from all over space and time.


I would also like to take the time to pay homage to Argentinian team Boca Juniors, who change their logo when they win, and win a lot. It's tricky enough to get one official vector logo.

 

New scans up: a Sega Corporate Guide from 1986.

https://x.com/suddendesu/status/1716859435065454686?s=20

 

Interesting. If I had to hazard a guess it's Konami shifting the Pro Evolution Soccer (now eFootball) series to be this but with virtual trading cards a la EA FUT and getting specific exclusivity deals with many of the teams represented in the series. No particular justification for this other than the timing and the specific teams that seemed to be represented here; this would probably not be easy to verify anyway, and may well be complete BS.

 

Another scan for you: a Sega employee recruitment booklet likely from 1992 or 1993.

https://x.com/suddendesu/status/1717153303673679889?s=20


edit:

I have this, btw, so no one waste any money on it. I'll get it scanned eventually.

 

you're a wonderful human

and we got us some SegaSonic arcade.

 

Some of the contents of that booklet had done the rounds before somehow, though that doesn't make it not wonderful to have it all in properly scanned quality now. I particularly like the pages devoted to the render of the archetypal Sega amusement center from around that time, with conceptual art of a machine from virtually every range they were making then integrated into it - God's work etc.

This may have been mentioned in the Sega tweets thread or elsewhere on here already, but it's a great tidbit so sod it: that SegaSonic dev photo is of Noriko Omizo, who didn't actually work on the game. Living legend Shinichi Ogasawara, once again, actually went and @'ed her when one of the initial pics was posted by @RyogaMasaki... and she confirmed it was simply staged for that page.

 

There are 18 WCCF games - x years ago I mirrored card listings from a Japanese site for 7 of them, as newer games had yet to be documented. I kinda want to do the rest for completion's sake.

But I don't think there's a single online resource that lists every WCCF card ever produced. Sega listed cards for whatever WCCF game was current at the time, but there might be a gap on the Wayback machine around 2008-ish (and when there's backwards compatibility, they could be listing cards from the previous season).

They also liked doing this:

Release a "Ver. 2.0" a few months after launch which can add more cards. This is worse with with the Footista games which would release "upgraded" cards - same person, but with improved stats to reflect players getting better at the game in real life (I think it's a different card number, but Sega grouped them all together).

I also don't know which teams are in each version. Most cards are listed by teams, but the super special rare ones might be one-offs, or in a lot of cases, involve players representing the national team. There are England players in some iterations of WCCF - is it fhe full England team, or just highlights? Are these players that aren't represented at the club level, or are there both club and national variants of certain players?


One last thing because I know not many care:



J.League logos are far more modern and and clean than I'm used to. Many European club logos look like arse because they're sitting on 100+ years of heritage, but when you start in the 1990s, you can do tasteful rebrands without causing riots in the street. Our nearest big team's logo is shocking in vector form, but I guess that's heraldry and seahorses that actually look like horses for you. It's meant to look old.

 

Something else you don't get in European football:

Digging through the archives I managed to put together a list of cards for the 2009-2010 WCCF season. It was annoying, but it can be done.

It also solves a mystery on the Japanese wikipedia, which claims Japanese teams were represented... but didn't explain how. Later entries seem to have the entire top tier of the J.League, but here it's just some of the better Japanese players...

...throughout history.


"Japanese All Time Legends". I've seen similar cards and just assumed it was the national team, because... the photo looks like the national team. But photos apparently don't mean anything because they're still classed by club:



That club doesn't exist anymore.

I mean okay it does, but this pre-dates the J.League, when big corporate sponsors would run football teams and stick their names on everything. In this case, Kazushi Kimura played for Nissan FC (the same Nissan that makes cars), which became the "Yokohama (F.) Marinos". European clubs have changed their names, but it's shockingly rare and many have remained unchanged since the 1880s and 1890s.

 

The best thing about WCCF is the music by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi. Great stuff. Why not include it in a Football Manager game, Sega? More people need to hear it.

Or is the audience for FM, allergic to cheesy videogame music? Someone know the audience?

 

They're going for the FIFA crowd (or EA FC as we must apparently call it now) no cheese for them! :-p