General Questions and Information Thread

I added Plus e cause I've kinda been meaning to. It's the touch-screen multimedia terminal that JCM installed in a load of restaurants, and that SEGA/Hitmaker/OVERWORKS created plenty of games for across the 5-ish years it existed.

Seeing as it's a new hardware page, I also made a release icon template and added it to ReleaseArcade. I haven't done something quite like this before, so there's probably a page I didn't think of that also needs changed to make it work. I'm not even 100% sure it fits under "Arcade", but it was the closest I could think of.

I also made a page for one of the games to see the results.

 

I hate that name because now I'm unsure if it's pronounced "plus eh" or "plus eee". Probably the latter but still even for Sega that is such a kludgy title

 

To be fair, plame JCM. SEGA's just making games for the thing.

Apparently SEGA didn't know know the actual name of the thing, most of the time their developers miswrote it as "PLUS-e".

https://web.archive.org/web/2023033...hitmaker/site/comphistory.html#Anchor17732000


https://web.archive.org/web/20030415190524/http://www.o-works.co.jp/owshp/index2.html

 

According to the Japanese Wikipedia, which is conveniently linked on the Sega Retro page, it should be pronounced プラスイー (pu ra su ii), with イー (ii) roughly corresponding to your English "ee" sound, yes. But I know that you know Japanese as well, so I'll just leave.

edit: actually, I just noticed the best part of that page: after the initial paragraph, it starts listing words starting with エ, such as "entertainment", which is probably the actual intended meaning, but still...

 

Just a quick interesting observation I made today about the possible inspiration for Twinkle Park.

https://bsky.app/profile/suddendesu.bsky.social/post/3lbhkqd5ijs2v

 

Game of the Year.

(Although I'm a little worried that it doesn't always seem obvious when an enemy is in the background for visual spectacle vs in the foreground to be dodged)

 

Sega turns up fairly often in Wizard magazine. While the publication mainly covered comics, there's overlap with comic-themed video games, and Sega of America had their advertising fingers in all sorts of pies. While looking for something else, I fell down a hole and spotted something I had missed:


Our cover scan for the US version of Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin, has an offer for "50% off Marvel Comics". My spider sense in tingling - does this mean there are variants without this deal? Better have a look on ebay!

answer: no

https://picclick.com/Spider-man-1991-Sega-Genesis-Authentic-Tested-Working-100-116278683828.html
but we don't have scans of all the extra gubbins. Turns out there's a SECRET CHALLENGE CONTEST that wasn't documented:


Finish the game on nightmare difficulty and you're given a special code. And hey:


they're not wrong. Nightmare players are presented with an eight-digit number - if you didn't have this piece of paper and weren't living in 1991, you'd never know what the point of it was. Turns out it was to win reprints of the first ten issues of (The Amazing) Spider-Man.


Spider-Man is not an uncommon game, but very few copies on ebay are actually "complete", which seems a bit odd to me. This isn't like Nintendo who packaged games in flimsy cardboard boxes - you have to make a conscious decision to keep the manual, but throw out the extra bits of paper - they all fit in the box, and while yes, they're redundant, I'm surprised people cared enough - it's more effort to get rid than leave alone.

 

@Black Squirrel: does the PAL version have anything that needs documenting? I have the cart and probably the box (we’ve kept p much all of the MD boxes we had) somewhere in storage

 

Probably - check the page, there's always something

 

A weird thing I ran into on my travels - there was an announcement at E3 2003 that Tiger Hill Entertainment had got into bed with Sega with the view of releasing a bunch of games. None of them came to fruition, probably because it was being run by film producers, not qualified video game people.

The press releases are a bit vague, and gaming journalists made assumptions, but supposedly Sega had at least 25 employees work with Tiger Hill on something in 2003/2004. Tiger Hill announced a bunch of games during that time, but only one ever made it to market:



Stranglehold in 2007, not published by Sega. Sega aren't credited at all in this release, although with development stretching back to 2003, I can't help wonder if they should have been. There were two other games, "Sinner" and "Burglar" that back to this period, but both were axed around 2005 (alongside some others).

A bit of a strange black hole though - pouring two dozen developers into some currently unknown project. Anyone know what it was?

 

Some credits shenanigans for a couple of titles on the delist chopping block - turns out the 2012 PC version of NiGHTS (which we'd previously assumed only used the PS2 credits) and iOS/Android version of Crazy Taxi (which simply otherwise uses the original's) have their own dedicated staff rolls in their menus, away from the traditional sequences that play after 'completing' them. Mostly consisting of localisation people at overseas branches and a few people from Sega of China or Sega Networks, but still:


Unfortunately this opens up the possibility that other versions of these ports from around the same time (NiGHTS' XBLA/PSN, Crazy Taxi's second PC port from 2011) also have their own credits - or at the very least duplicate the ones above, instead of those we had down on the wiki already. I can't find any clips and don't have the opportunity to nab them on any platform before they delist though.

(The connection between both of these, by the by, is the new developer page add Shintaro Kai - who, after contributing to the game design of Black Knight and Colours, moved to Sega of China, where he did the above ports, Transformers Human Alliance, and even Sonic Athletics, among other unspecified projects until 2014. The more you know?)

 

Yes my worry is the Sega Vintage Collection re-releases all have their own credits, but it can be difficult to tell, since putting these things on YouTube isn't something normal people do.

There's clues to what we're missing in this category - these are people who still have "manual" lists of credits (as opposed to whatever is picked up by the CompanyHistoryAll template). If you take Mike Hayes, someone claims he's credited in the Xbox 360 version of Sonic 2, but there's presumably no footage online to back it up. It's a similar story for pretty much everything left in that category (although I can't rule out some of it just being flat-out wrong).

 

Along the same lines, my collection of PAL Sega PC games often have an extra localisation section in their credits compared to the mostly US versions that are currently on the wiki. I do have all the Steam Dreamcast Collection and Genesis Classics so can look at those. Unfortunately, that 2011 non steam version of the Dreamcast stuff has Starforce DRM so will be going nowhere near my PC!

 

The US has an advantage because most game manuals have been scanned (or at least, the pages with credits have). I know Sega Europe liked to print its own credits but I guess people aren't as keen on scanning big multi-lingual manuals (we have a whole bunch with just the French sections... it was all short-term low internet bandwidth thinking).

But even with manual scans, there's gaps on the wiki:
https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:Superpuzzlefighter_sat_us_manual.pdf&page=2
I learnt yesterday that Capcom credited people in tiny letters at the front of their manuals. Most publishers put credits at the back.

 

There's probably a lot of interesting information here, but I don't speak Japanese. Takenobu Mitsuyoshi is currently streaming as I type, but I don't know what he's saying.

https://www.youtube.com/@SEGASOUNDCHANNEL/streams

 

So here's something stupid: it looks like Sega of America managed to invent both a "Sega Online" and a "Sega On-Line".

The latter (with the hyphen... except for when they didn't use it) seems to be a internal group that dealt with Netlink matters - I made a page, they turn up in some late Saturn and early Dreamcast credits, hurray.

The former is Sega of America's website. So when you go looking for one, you tend to find the other as well.



https://archive.org/details/maximum...06/mode/2up?q="sega+of+america"+"sega+online"

And when looking, I found this 29th May 1996 screenshot of "Sega Online". One of the news items is "It's official: Sega reclaims "sega.com""... which suggests someone else had the company's preferred domain and they had to fight for at least 18 months to get it (or maybe they had it once and lost it? - either way it's a vaguely interesting early internet story we might want to make note of).

"What about the Wayback Machine". Yeah, their oldest snapshot of is the 19th December 1996... which is a full two years after launch in November 1994. I forget if there are older mirrors, but we're still talking months of ~mystery~ - the type only solved by screenshots in magazines, much like our efforts to cover Sega Forum for rival platform, CompuServe (though granted, CompuServe is totally dead and there isn't an archive of anything). Perhaps it's worth having a dig and making a page.

It also wouldn't involve documenting the entire history of Sega of America's website - the "Sega Online" phase came to a close around the time of the Dreamcast's launch (or rather, the months leading up to launch, so mid-1999). The transition from early internet "wow isn't this cool" to "oh right we're a business, buy things" seems like a natural cut-off, though we've probably extracted most from the website circa 1997/1998 already.

For the record, the Sega On-Line group seems to have lasted slightly longer than the Sega Online website, though only by a few months. And we don't know when the group formed.

So
Online 1 - 0 On-Line

 

I have screenshots of SoA's homepage for every month from launch through 1996. I'll make a thread as it would help if anyone else come across any others. They launched Sega.com at E3 1996, Segaoa.com mirrored it until September 1996, an error page was still up in October, and the earliest Sega.com archive is from November, where it was mirrored at Slagoon.com (Sega Online carried the Slagoon comic). From CD-ROMs I've found archived homepages from April 1995 and January 1996 (I mirrored that one here).

 

This is the first I'm hearing of this Slagoon stuff, it's fascinating.

 

https://archive.org/download/alfred-chicken-sega-genesis-unreleased-july-14-1994-prototype

 

I was going through this book "Arcade TV Game List Kokunai•Kaigai-hen (1971-2005)" (or Arcade Video Game List Domestic/Overseas Edition (1971-2005)) and spotted a game I hadn't heard of, and we're definitely not covering yet.

Get Bass Blast (ゲットバス・ブラスト), released for Sega Model 3 in March 1998.


Clearly this is some kind of update to Get Bass (Sega Bass Fishing). I thought at first it would be tough to find because looking that up shows results for Get Bass and the Blast City cabinet, but it turns out, that's actually super relevant.



This comes from the July 1998 issue of Game Machine, on page 18.
https://onitama.tv/gamemachine/pdf/19980715p.pdf

Translation

Interestingly our Blast City article does mention Sega Bass Fishing specifically for the US.