General Questions and Information Thread

Good spot!

They UK dub of Urusei Yatsura is great, it really fits the show, although non-British viewers may not agree!

 

It's a definite tangent, but the BBC's trajectory in broadcasting anime is quite something. Today you've got CBBC carrying the newer Pokemon series (which is weird for anyone who grew up with it always being on ITV, in terms of UK terrestrial) and Dragon Ball Super like they're nothing, as numerous European television channels naturally did with other anime for decades.

But to get to that point over here, we (or at least those who received BBC Choice in 2000) got to see that Urusei Yatsura dub with British celebrities like Lucas and Lauren Laverne, and before even that, Jonathan Ross presenting the first UK airing of Akira on BBC2 following this 30 minute documentary partially shot in... Sega Park & Casino Colindale, when it was still known as SegaDome (because everything comes full circle):

One for the Sega World thread really, but from the clips in it it's interesting to see things like the rare Mega Play version of SOR2 on a Megalo 50:

 

I recorded that first airing of Akira, even though I already had it on VHS. Good that someone has uploaded it as my old tapes are long gone. Back then there was very little anime shown on UK TV, I can only really think of Ulysses 31, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold, the latter of which was joint French-Japanese production. There was a lot more on European TV via satellite, but obviously dubbed into Italian etc which I would watch to get my fix, even if I couldn't understand it. I still have a box of anime magazines and fanzines from the early to mid 90s which I should scan at some point, especially the fanzines which must have had a really low print run.

 

Someone scanned the full run of Anime UK magazine last year, so that's one less on my "toscan" list. To get back on topic, they have a games page from issue 12, but it's mainly Super Famicom reviews, although they do have occasional mentions of Sega games and a few show reports such as ECTS. The very final issue does review Gunbird for Playstation/Saturn, but he probably only played the Playstation version.

 

Something terrifying - until a few minutes ago Sega Retro was missing a commercially released Saturn game:


Denpa Shounen Teki Game 2. That's just shy of $7000 USD btw.

It's incredibly rare and incredibly expensive, and doesn't feature on any of Sega's official lists.


First glance and yes, it looks like Japanese game show tat that nobody will ever care about, however this is actually based on Susunu! Denpa Shounen, the one that would later force a man to live off magazine sweepstakes. There was a film about it last year. It's the type of gameshow that probably inspired that one episode of The Simpsons.


No idea if the game is any good because I don't think it's been dumped(?)

 

That's one hell of a Wikipedia article, Jesus H. Christ

 

On the 15th anniversary of Michael Jackson's passing, Shueisha published a new interview with Roppyaku Tsurumi about the development of the arcade version of Moonwalker.

Area 51 Zeku also shared some coverage from different publications like Game Machine, Coin Journal and Amusement Sangyo/Amusement Industry of Jackson's trips to Sega:

https://x.com/Area51_zek/status/1805536005744902589

https://x.com/Area51_zek/status/1805561372853551374

 

Yeah I caught those earlier. Before I read it I hoped there'd be some new insight in the Tsurumi interview on the cancelled Mega CD game that was mentioned on here a while back via one of his posts, but that didn't come up (nor much else especially new, unfortunately) - I suppose some things are still kept under NDAs.

The scans of articles from Coin Journal and the other two are nice as unlike Game Machine's I don't think those have been seen by us before, though in an ideal world we'd of course already have the entire issues these pieces are from.

 

A video about "Japan's last Sega arcade":


Is it any useful? There you go!

 

I've already said this elsewhere but that video's thumbnail is clearly on a whole other level of YouTube clickbait shithousery - imagine actually bothering to edit an image of what is actually Sega Akihabara 3-Goukan to have a Joypolis logo, even when plenty of actual photos of Tokyo Joypolis exist out there.

Also... there is (technically) a special secret remnant still open outside of Tokyo:


"Hi-Tech Land Kyuden". Likely once a Sega Hi-Tech Land that was upon a time one of those confusing examples where an existing local operator had a machine rental or joint management agreement with Sega. But they evidently didn't have much of an idea on what to rebrand it to when that ended. Unless it's covered in a Game Machine by some chance I don't expect further details to be forthcoming.

 

https://segaretro.org/Boy's_Active

https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/f1138790866?conversionType=YahooAuction_DirectSearch

Stumbled on this interesting curio. Is this part of the Wonder Boy franchise?

 

Not sure if this was already spotted but I've just noticed a bunch of the old US SegaSoft games are now on Zoom Platform. Most popped up in 2023 it seems. None of these were retail released in Europe so none are in my physical collection sadly.
ZOOM Platform (zoom-platform.com)

Some are on Gog and Steam as well although it seems that Zoom are the driving force behind publishing them (they are listed as one of the publishers on steam)

Not sure what's going on with retro's SegaSoft page, I see a bunch of release years but no actual game names.
https://segaretro.org/SegaSoft

 

"Purge Cache" (paste this after the url ?action=purge and click Enter to see them)...

 

I've never heard of this store prior to today. I'm impressed by the selection of old PC games they have. They even have old Arthur games!

 

Remember the ladies in Super Monaco GP? They digitized some nude Playboy models and drew swimsuits (?) over them. Well, thanks to an episode of Game Sack, I noticed this exact same artwork in another game.




Stadium Cross wasn't too popular and remains fairly obscure to this day. Hence the mixed quality of the above examples, sorry about that. My question is: would uh... anyone happen to know where these are sourced from?

 

Recently stumbled upon this video on Twitter.

This is from a TV report covering the launch of Galaxy Force in April 1988. This appears to be the same event where this video from the Sega Ages 2500 PS2 release was archived.

For those unaware about the Galaxy Force 1 & 2 situation, here's this quote from around the time of the 3DS Classic release:

Virtually no footage of the original release has been documented on the internet up until this point, but with this video you can see a bit of gameplay footage up close, as well as a slightly different start animation before Scene D.

There's also an interview with Hisashi Suzuki in the middle of the footage.

 

Noticed this in Blackpool the other day. A claw machine labelled "Magic Claw".



Note the music? It's the second stage music from the Mega Drive version of The Flintstones!

 

Okay, this is super rad, and fascinates me to no end. Nice find.

I wonder.... is this just some .mp3 pulled off the internet for a single machine? Or did Taito actually license out their old compositions to the amusement market? Was this machine originally some Taito UFO Catcher?

In all likelihood its probably the former. But who knows. Video games are a weird place.