Today on "accidental finds" https://web.archive.org/web/20010202075300/http://www.sega.co.jp:80/sega/puzzle/game.html ChuChu Rocket was ported to Shockwave, and I think it may have been archived. However, no web browser in 2024 supports Shockwave, and I'd have to jump through hoops to get this running.
Don't worry, PACHUKA comes to save the day. (No, seriously.) First, download this. Archived Shockwave installer. https://mega.nz/file/B1ITjaDK#7Lq6wICa0Ra7z5GyC0QEEm_jp2FGsgJyOAzbVorjjhY Go to Control panel Click Clock and Region Click Change date,time,or number formats Go to Administrative. Click Change systemlocale... Change language to Japanese (Japan). Reboot yourcomputer Your computer will now support Shift-JIS Chuchu Rocket needs this for the text. Then go and make a shortcut on your PC with the following mshta.exe javascript:open();close() Title it Internet Explorer Click on Internet Explorer shortcut Go to this url www.sonic-cult.org/flh/chuchu/ You can now play the game. The reason you have to do it this way is because instead of just going to archive.org and playing Chu-Chu Rocket you have to use the Sonic CulT mirror of the game For whatever reason literally half of the game is missing on archive.org The intro and title screen are saved but the actual game itself was not mirrored Since Shockwave loves to use multiple files This causes issues where you can't actually click to go to the game on Sega's website
Watch the video and add it all to the wiki. Then take it's secrets and apply to other games~ Cult had both this and the NiGHTS Shockwave game on the site. Ask Saz, I guess.
Wayne Gretzky and the NHLPA All-Stars is crediting Time Warner Interactive as both developer and publisher, and right now has no credits listed. "Better check that". Now Retro, what do we do when the credits are presented like a hockey team (View/Edit Stats -> Credits, for those who want to see it themselves)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AirForce/comments/1arnqae/now_thats_a_patch/ Someone posted this patch on reddit ... it looks like it's from the 49th Test and Evaluation Squadron... but I can't confirm it... can anyone here confirm it? This would look good on our References to Sonic in militaries page (I'm thinking of you, @cartridgeculture)
<3 tbh at this point you're definitely the expert in this field. id go ahead and add it. we can always correct it later, and you're probably right anyway
Via transcribing the production credits for Sonic Dash Extreme and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 - Arcade Edition, I recently ended up staring back into the black hole that is arcade racers released by Sega in the recent past and adding a couple obscure ones that (perhaps understandably) didn't have any wiki pages yet. Most of us know the deal here - R-Tuned: Ultimate Street Racing and Sega Race TV were essentially the last "proper" examples as we knew them from the arcade teams to receive a release outside of Japan, with the Initial D series being thrown to the 'grey import' dogs after its fourth version didn't do too well out West and the shortlived Sega World Drivers Championship never getting a chance at all. But Sega Amusements still needed new games to sell in the West, so they took matters into their own hands. This all goes back a bit further to Ford Racing Full Blown, an otherwise slightly boring title that has the distinction of being their first work. They started as they meant to go on though as almost every other subsequent attempt by them was also a console to arcade conversion, from the half-decent Sega Rally 3 to the less interesting GRID after Sega Racing Studio imploded and went to Codemasters instead. The latter title sold fairly well though, which is partly why we then got... Showdown, an arcade version of DiRT Showdown without the DiRT. The spinoff that got such mixed reviews that Codemasters never returned to it and just made more straightforward sequels for that series. Yes, it is kind of less remarkable than even GRID. Some games in certain modes can barely last two minutes, and the sheer amount of licenced tracks in place of original music ended up making me divide the production credits up properly. The one thing of more note to come out of it is a pretty nice four player "Special Attraction" SDLX cabinet that actual Sega engineers from Japan made with Sega Amusements: And there's a surprising amount of detail out there on this. Thanks to lead designer Hiroki Nunokawa and a couple of early appearances at trade shows, we know it was originally planned to use curved projection screens and also be sold in single and twin combinations, plus use the dropped DiRT brand. Some launch PR using early conceptual artwork brings up how the design was based on a helmet, and Patrick Michael has even posted this behind the scenes photo of a prototype using a Sega Rally 2 seat My general impression is that Showdown didn't do as well as GRID, and it became the last collaboration between the two on the Europa-R hardware as a result. If it wasn't for the goodwill from Codemasters doing all those fired developers a favour and GRID selling well in the casual arcade market I don't believe it would've ever been made in the first place. Even then though, those might not be the only reasons Showdown happened. It can always get worse - you could be a Sega of China developer working on a combat-based arcade racing game seen as so poor that it didn't even receive the benefit of a full release, and was effectively replaced soon after. K.O. Drive, one of several original arcade titles out of Sega Shanghai that coincided with them starting up a proper Chinese arcade sales arm. Even though they'd been knocking around for a good decade by 2012, their development capabilities were apparently not high enough yet that they could still turn out a game that never really made it to market, because nobody at Sega - even Makoto Uchida himself - knew how to make it better than whatever this is. And yet... K.O. Drive's various prototypes managed to appear at a surprising amount of trade shows, none of which have pages for now, and despite not properly releasing to the industry it somehow ended up being put out to pasture in a couple of cruise ship arcades (plus possibly one or two locations in Asia). Not too shabby for a budget RingWide title that feels like it's about to completely break sometimes whilst you're playing the ROM dump. Sega of China would of course get another chance to make an arcade racer with Sega Amusements... none other than Daytona Championship USA (which even reused Showdown's SDLX units). When you start from the bottom, the only way is up? (It's been suggested that DCUSA only really exists because Dave & Busters specifically wanted a refreshed version of the original Daytona - with the actual licence this time - to replace their old eight player setups of it, which were falling into disrepair as official parts support was about to end. That would explain a lot... but why invoke Sonic 4 syndrome by initially announcing it as a sequel?) And the odyssey kind of continues, as late last year we got: This is one of those examples where Sega Amusements has worked with an external company in Asia - they previously sold Storm Racer G by Wahlap out of China (which has the distinction of apparently running on the RingEdge 2), and one of the developers who helmed that went on to start up his own studio in Hong Kong, 3MindWave. They've since been responsible for the likes of ATV Slam and a few other newer Sega Amusements titles. Again it's not proper Sega as such, but they still work closely with them via people like Shinichi Ogasawara, and at the very least Apex Rebels seems to be a more original attempt to take on some of the conventions of those older Sega racers that everyone liked better - just for the current day and age of Western arcades. Which means boosting through an Unreal Engine-powered race track with a giant Akira structure in yet another Hornet homage.
Not-Akira Akira with "Tokio" branding. But at least one of the cars looks vaguely like a Stratos. GRID's pretty decent on 360, but it's one of the browniest and bloomiest racers out there. And it's crazy because you can customise the hell out of your team's vehicles and paint them all sorts of stupid colours... only to have it ruined by the brown and bloom filters. Not ideal for an arcade wanting to attract your attention. But Codemasters would make a wonderful arcade game in the form of Onrush... except they didn't release that one in arcades - they decided to put all their chips on online and gimp the experience for anyone not willing to pay up. And nobody paid up, and then loads of developers were laid off because their stupid plan didn't work. I don't understand why, as a species, we can't make arcade racing games anymore (as in, racing games released in arcades). Maybe it's because modern cars (and racing events) are so freaking boring that the people who set out to make these things lack the necessary taste. You used to have Monaco Grand Prixes where half the cars wouldn't finish because they'd break down. Sometimes in the tunnel where the cameras couldn't get to, so you'd have several seconds of mystery as they tried to work out where a driver went. In Group B rally, there'd be crashes and explosions and spectators were pretty much encouraged to stand in the middle of the road. Lots of people died. It's why Sega Rally 2 is full of (then) 10-15 year old cars.
For what it's worth one of the developers of that new game said OnRush was an inspiration in a recent interview I assisted with. And you can kind of see how... kind of. (^ Did also get to play it at the same event this video comes from, and though still not fully complete the game didn't look too bad - but I have only heard of one or two locations with cabinets in the country so far)
So the 360 store is "dead". I spent two days after it "shut down" going through things and ended up on the Dead or Alive 5 Last Round page as my final stop. The wiki is listing Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate as a physical only game, but by the time the page was made that was the only way an outsider could view it as such. Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate (2013) updated itself to Dead or Alive 5 Last Round (2015) technically. I say technically because the game was announced to be coming to 360/PS3/One/PS4 even though (on 360 at least) DOA5LR effectively absorbed all DLC for Ultimate into itself upon launch (and evern updated and changed achievement icons and descriptions to fit Last Round), but not quite. Going through various DLC you will notice that DLC has different names upon clicking on them and says that the game it is from is DOA5U while others do in fact say that they come from DOA5LR. The problem is now that I have catalogued 635 pieces of DLC for DOA5LR (along with a lot that is missing over the years because of the "shut down" because of cross-brand deals) I have been kicked off of Xbox Live and can no longer access the DLC page. Except others can which is why i keep putting things in quotes. While you can't download anything and they removed the search feature, all of the pages are still there IF you have the game. You could look at anything everything, just not download it. DOA5LR is digital only on 360 and PS3 but Ultimate is a physical product and would let you look at the DLC listings if you so chose. The point is, I have no idea what DLC there is for Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate specifically because DOA5 Last Round absorbed it and there have been various DLC delistings over the years. But here's the kicker; the Xbox Marketplace pages for both of these games aren't completely archived with Last Round (https://web.archive.org/web/2015100...st-Round/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8024b5607e8) only have 15 pages worth of DLC archived and Ultimate (https://web.archive.org/web/2013091...Ultimate/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d8024b5607e8) basically being a shitshow of only being archived the day it came out only which means you aren't getting anything besides the first page archived multiple times and it seems there were 400 odd something DLCs to that alone. The officials sites don't help either as while they list DLC dates and prices the Ultimate site can't be archived properly (which means it doesn't show anything at all) and the Last Round site will have to be checked countless times as it CAN be archived but any cross-promo stuff is eventually removed as more DLC cycles in. This is a mess and there is no way to verify what is actually there at this point and on top of that only someone with a physical copy of Ultimate or someone that has already download Last Round can see its DLC now. I did make this though: https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=Dead_or_Alive_5_Last_Round/Downloadable_content&action=history
An addendum to my previous post: When looking at Last Round on the Xbox webstore for the Xbox One version, none of the 360 DLC that is labeled as such things "DOA5" or DOA5U" come up on the store. Not sure if that means that stuff just isn't available on Xbox One or if it's because of some fuckery simply because you could transfer costumes and DLC from DOA5 to DOA5U to DOA5LR. So as far as the website is concerned, all that stuff is only on Xbox 360 and thus unobtainable. All I'm really missing is descriptions for DLC as I was at least able to get the names of things for the wiki. Though, with DOA5U DLC having different names after they are clicked on in the 360 store (because, once again, a lot of things got a name change once Last Round came out) we do need those as well since we don't have a DLC page for Ultimate yet, which i believe is the last 360 thing we need. But are you willing to make screenshots/video of all this stuff? It is over 600 pieces of DLC, but it would also be the only way to catalogue that stuff for the wiki now. It's easy to distinguish the Ultimate stuff from the Last Round stuff anyway because Ultimate's DLC will show the box art for it when you click on it.
I don't need to do it all at once, right? The tricky thing for me will be being able to make screenshots/video, as the Xbox 360 doesn't have such a feature built-in. Would I need to acquire a capture card, or is there some other way?
The fun doesn't stop because the servers go down: https://picclick.com.au/1994-SEGA-Retail-Store-Order-Forms-Brochures-326060109393.html I think these are Australian catalogues for retailers, and while I can't make out all the details in the photographs, the fact they make a fuss about Barkley Shut Up and Jam! is interesting, given that was one of those weird US imports that made it to Australia but not Europe. And yeah stuff like the cancelled Mega Drive version of Speed Racer, and a seemingly planned Australian release of Jammit, complete with placeholder art.
Good spot! I scanned the high quality (heavy glossy paper) Australian trade catalogues for 1994-09/10, 1994-11, and 1995-04/05. I suspect these (1994-04/05 and 1994-05) are earlier editions, but may be an alternative cheaper condensed brochure distributed alongside the bigger catalogues. Not willing to spend $100 + shipping from Australia for these though.
And Portugal... a friend of mine in the neighborhood had it... and I often played this game at his house (with the rest of the gang)...
And now, a real challenge: (courtesy of Game Informer #28) SAP is second audio program and I have no clue if it was even a thing on this side of the pond. VCRs might have picked it up though.
For the Olympics, Team GB selected Andy Macdonald, who at 51 turned professional 20 years before most of his competition were born. "where have I seen that name before?" MTV Sports: Skateboarding Featuring Andy Macdonald This was one of several Tony Hawk's Pro Skater clones that was critically panned at release. The internet's coverage is little more than "it exists" so I thought, in the Olympic spirit, I'd beef up Sega Retro's coverage. Though not by much, because he only came 18th in the heats. Still, could be worse: according to the manual, two of the "pro skaters" were "THQ2Supplydata" years old.
Did you know Sega(.com) were involved in a massively multiplayer online RTS? No I don't think they remember either. Legacy Online was apparently a repackaging of the 2000 RTS game "StarPeace", except you downloaded it and paid a monthly fee. https://web.archive.org/web/20030717015643/http://www.legacyonline.net/ It was dead within six months.
