General Questions and Information Thread

GAN Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by SEGA SAMMY CREATION
Something about internet sports betting.

 

Well how about a game where you manga casinos Sega???

 

It was a secret to everybody

Once upon a time The Official Football Manager Magazine existed. They printed three issues before giving up - I assumed it was just a weird footnote in Football Manager history.

Turns out the issues came with demo discs:
https://archive.org/details/fmmag-06
https://archive.org/details/fmmag-07
https://archive.org/details/fmmag-08
Sega demo discs (well except for the inclusion of UEFA Euro 2004 in one issue which I think was by EA). So it's a weird footnote in Sega history too.

If you spotted the outlier, well done - Out of the Park Baseball was briefly owned(?) by Sports Interactive, and thus is sort-of an undocumented Sega game. It's a management game released annually, and so little coverage is given to the earlier versions, that I can't even say if they were released physically (which means the Sega connection is even more tenuous).



I think Sports Interactive were only involved in two or three versions between 2005 and 2007. They were very quick to hide all traces of this deal in the years which followed, and the internet doesn't care about the history of baseball management sims.

Either way though, another demo version of Sonic Adventure DX. Is it the same as the others? Who knows.

 

Today on "old video games making things difficult":

I've been adding country flags to national sports teams because... I like flags. Team USA Basketball has flags, so let's add som--oh



God dammit EA.

Team USA Basketball is sort-of based on the 1992 Summer Olympics, except it doesn't have official licensing from the IOC, and it changes a few things for whatever reason. The problem with this approach is that one of the big players in the tournament was the CIS - the commonwealth of independent states, built on the ashes of the Soviet Union. It existed because not all the breakaway countries could put together their own sports teams, and with all politically wibbly wobbly athletes, it competed under the olympic flag:



Problem is, this is an IOC trademark and they're brutal with its misuse, so EA had to invent something else. Their solution was to pick a white-red-blue horizontal tricolore which has never been used by any country in the world ever. It's pan-slavic colours so it kinda represents that general area of the world, but it's fictional.

Why would you bother programming flags and listing capital cities and official languages if you're planning to include a team that doesn't have any of these things.


I was curious if it was based on something at the event, but here lies another issue: this was basketball at the 1992 Summer Olympics, where the US put forward the best team in the history of the sport and dominated everything to the point where they made a video game of it. It's actually really difficult to find photos online that aren't the USA Dream Team.


look at this freaking noise


It's a weird product. Bottom left of the above image is the Lithuanian basketball team - their kits had tie-dye colours and a slam-dunking skeleton and it's kind-of wonderful. They play in flat yellow in this game.

 

Today's questionable use of my time: NBA All-Star Challenge#Roster

There was a table of teams here before, now it's semi-automated. And like with football, it'll have a go at adding logos (Template:BasketballLogo etc.). Yesterday I knew very little about the NBA, now I know more than I'd like.


But most of the logos are missing, and that's because the NBA is strange. I suspect most historic team logos (at least the ones we care about - 1989-2005-ish) have been vectorised - they seem to turn up on official outlets from time to time, and some teams like the Atlanta Hawks and New York Knicks are happy to include an extensive history of their evolution in their annual digital "media guides" (aka "here's the history of our team, our plans for the upcoming season, and why we're great").

I've spent a while looking for official sources, but fundamentally I don't really care much about American sports - I'm not super keen on repeating this process for the NFL and NHL and MLB and whatever college variants are out there. But it's still a nice thing to have - if we're going to document team sports games... we're going to need to talk about teams.

And of course it's notable if Sega games get the facts wrong.


So to actual sports fans - if you want to go hunting for official logos (i.e. not the fan re-creations), that'll be lovely.

 

What game is this screenshot of on Sega's homepage? It should be a first party title released around the date shown, but I can't work out which one.

 

RE: nobody cares about old sports games



There's some weirdness to the team selection on the two Mega Drive Triple Play games. "Ghetto USA" appears in Triple Play 96 and "TODDs Team" appears in Triple Play: Gold Edition. You can rename teams in both titles... but this was a fresh ROM.

There's a "Todd Wilson" credited as QA lead in Gold Edition - did one of his tests get shipped in the final game? Or is it a weird emulation quirk?


There's not much mention of this online, though there are a couple of forum posts that allude to it being a thing.

 

The manuals for both explicitly say that they're one-player games. Apparently this claim was added by...me? Since I can confirm that I have no idea what I'm talking about, we can close this case.

 

Oh shut up, Madden.

Madden NFL 97 (Mega Drive)

One of the additions between Madden 96 and Madden 97 was a bunch of classic American football teams. As in, 68 of them dating back to 1952 (though apparently later games would peak with over 300). The games just use current logos rather than historic ones, but idk, it would feel better if Sega Retro tried to be accurate. Also some teams don't exist anymore, so the laziness with in-game branding doesn't always work.

 

Few American teams give out vector logos because they believe it makes counterfeit merch harder to make if they don't. You'll be lucky to get a decent resolution PNG most of the time. And a lot of the PNG's for older logos are fan recreations, either because the team never released a digital version of the logo or because they never made one in the first place.

This site is going to be your best resource. In my own experience, it has its foibles (whenever a team moves or changes its name it's treated as a separate entity, and sometimes it treats illustrations from magazines/game programs as "logos" when they really aren't) but it should still be helpful.

Have fun sorting out the mess

 

I think any short-term dreams of having a full set of historical team logos is well and truly crushed by NCAA College Football 2K2, which has 118 licensed teams. Later games threaten more, but that's a task for another day.

Granted even the first Football Manager has hundreds more teams (since it's literally "stats: the game"), but WCCF's existence means we've got a head start on many of them. And the sport is worldwide. And the games are more modern.


Currently this is just turning pages from "this game exists" into "this game has things in it". Obviously to really document these games, all team and player statistics will be spread out in detail. That is to say, these logos may not always be 20x20 pixels in size.

 

So here's something fun - there's maybe a 50:50 split on Sega Retro between the MLB in America and the NPB in Japan. That site is no help at all for Japanese baseball... and honestly, neither is much else.



There have only ever 12 professional teams at any one point, but only 3/12(?) of these logos are covered? And there were a bunch of subtle changes over the years.




Through the power of... not being terrible with image editors, I can get decent results from some pretty poor sources, but it's a struggle. That second one's the 1990 logo of the "Orix Braves" - I think they had different ones in 1989 and 1991.


So yes, to new wiki users who think they can't contribute because "they don't know things" - why the Christing hell would I know about 30+ year old Japanese baseball? Because I looked it up and became an expert. You can too!... ...

 

Anyone have sources for the European release dates of 4x4 Jam, Flashback_(Dreamcast), Ganryu, the JoshProd version of Sturmwind, and Zia & the Goddesses of Magic?

These would be the ones dated 2017-11-15 for reference.

 

Here's a weird oddity, curtosy of NHL 2K:



These two special teams have copyrighted logos... which suggests they might have been used at some point for something other than this game. This match would be the obvious one but I don't see those logos anywhere - any clues?

 

I wasted a day looking for these, and I was able to find... 19 vectors. Because nobody cares about college football history, and these institutions are constantly rebranding to get people in the door.

And many like to cover up their chequered pasts by pretending they didn't exist in the 90s.


Anyway
https://retrocdn.net/Category:American_football_logos
https://retrocdn.net/Category:Baseball_logos
https://retrocdn.net/Category:Basketball_logos
https://retrocdn.net/Category:Ice_hockey_logos
https://retrocdn.net/Category:College_sports_logos

For the time being, this is probably the best I can offer. If you want a full set, you'll have to hunt them down.

 

There are SOME eBooks. Don't know which ones though.

We would want both physical and digital obviously.

 

There are some Prima ones sprinkled across this set. Much of this is watermarked drivel though.

 

Because I'm appently obsessed with adding little icons to things, how about Formula 1?

They use little icons in real life, why not on Sega Retro?

...because in the 1990s and racing logos looked like this:


...and they were rarely shown on screen, and they changed regularly, and even the fans will have forgotten who half the lower budget constructors were. They appear even less often in video games, so it's not worth the effort.


But I have found a new art form: the "we don't have an official F1 license" game.


Look at my "McRalen".


F1 Hero MD's rip-offs were so blatent that when it was localised as Ferarri Grand Prix Challenge, Acclaim had some of the labels changed. Out went "Tyrroll", in came "Tyger".

Full marks goes to this one though:

Williams became "Bally".

Well played.

 

So, when did the Sega RingEdge 2 release? The wiki says "2012-09", but StarHorse 3 Season I: A New Legend Begins says it's a RingEdge 2 game but was released almost a full year before on 2011-11-22 (no reference).

Now while you could chock it up to a mistake as StarHorse 3 Season II: Blaze of Glory all the way to StarHorse 3 Season VII: Great Journey used RingEdge 2 from 2013-2018, you also have maimai coming out on 2012-07-11 (no reference), two months before the RingEdge 2 supposedly came out.

Either way, something's wrong and I'm expecting it's the RingEdge date.