General Questions and Information Thread

Brenda Cook shared some concept art for the STI logo

check out some of these designs

 

The wiki is playing games again, so here's a post about "what I was going to do".


I find that sometimes YouTube decides to obsess over a specific subject, and feeds you videos about it on the front page. In the last few days I've had classic American cars thrown at me. I didn't know I cared. I'm still not sure I do.

But then I started watching Ed's Auto Reviews and I've learnt things. Things such as "our wiki is wrong"... and that I'm apparently drawn to Dutch people talking about history (like this lad).


Turns out "Chevrolet" isn't a subsidiary of General Motors, it's a "division". Apparently having your own R&D, branding and production lines isn't enough for you to be considered a separate legal entity (unless I'm wrong - it's really hard to tell), so the wiki wasn't accurate. I did secretly suspect this - it means when 4x4 Evolution claimed to be "licensed by Chevrolet", strictly speaking it shoiuld have been "licensed by General Motors".

To be fair this is mentioned in the credits:

But I was lazy. And yes doing this properly might mean we'd have a page for "games that feature Michelin tyres".

It may also mean we have to make a note of the short-lived DaimlerChrysler, one of the worst corporate mergers in history. I'm still amazed by how much tangential "stuff" ends up getting a mention on Sega Retro by virtue of it appearing in old video games.

 

I ran these through GoodGen, and most of the ones from the Eagle's Nest BBS were known roms. Just three were unknown. Gunstar Heroes just seems to be a region hack of the JP release. Aladdin is the 1993-08-07 build with the scene group "Fairlight" replacing "Presents" on the first intro screen. Sonic Spinball is the 1993-08 build, but with the original "Premiere" scene group intro (the later discovered version is patched to skip this) and without the partial (interleaved) Sub-Terrania data at the end (I guess this was erroneously copied from a floppy with more than one game on it). This must be from the original "lost" release, so I guess it's at least somewhat historically interesting, even if there's not really anything new.

For the Scarlet disc 54 were known roms, with 17 being unknown. Most of these seem to be minor region hacks or fixes with only a few bytes at most code differences, which might just be dumping errors;

Top Gear 2
Troy Aikman NFL Football
ESPN National Hockey Night
Lethal Enforcers II
Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures
Richard Scary's Busytown
Aero the Acrobat 2
The Death and Return of Superman
ESPN Speedworld
ESPN Sunday Night NFL
Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
WWF Raw

As previously mentioned, The Great Circus Mystery has been hacked to say "Fixed by James Tsang" on the intro screen, with some different bytes in the code. The SNES version of this game has copy protection by checking the disk copier's SRAM, so I wonder if the Genesis version does similar and this is what was fixed (the "fixed" version is still region locked).

Boogerman, Earthworm Jim, NFL Quarterback Club, and Pitfall all have quite a few byte differences, but no immediately noticeable differences. Earthworm Jim is the 1994-08-05 build.

 

The last of the Brenda Cook contributions.



Game proposal for Fat, Daddy

Game proposal for Spinny & Spike

 

Chunithm is one of Sega's Japanese rhythm arcade games. It gets updated twice a year to make our lives difficult, and while it would be nice not to care, it's been a pretty successful endeavour for the company.

And that means lots of albums:
https://vgmdb.net/product/8276

I've been filling in some blanks, becuase it turns out Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (of Daytona USA fame) keeps turning up in these (and indeed most other things). But still, why are there so many albums?



Because Chunithm invented an anime girl band called "Irodorimidori", and because we live in wacky land, this fictional band also released albums. And had its own television series.


Also development of this series seems to be fronted by "Lettuce Shichijou" and "Cabbage Saito" and can you not just make Virtua Fighter sequels I understand that one

 

Maimai and Chunithm (and Ongeki, now that they've decided to update it again) deserve to exist to keep Mitsuyoshi on Sega's payroll and enable him doing things like this on company time:




(yes that last one is him imitating the Crazy Frog dance kids)

Maimai is even supposed to be getting a proper US release soon. Which is surprising for a whole bunch of reasons but maybe it opens the doors for others?

 

i'm gonna be 80 years old
grandkids looking up to me saying we love you grandpa
i try to remember their names and all my remaining brain cells say is

DEKO~ BOKO~ TAISOU~

EDIT: Wiki history fact! This music video was the sole reason we added Tsukutte Hashirou! Dekoboko Motors and Dekoboko Crane Company pages in September 2023.

 

Portuguese advertisement for Danone's (yogurts) promotion "O Verão de Sonic" (The Summer of Sonic) broadcast on RTP1 on July 2, 1993, where you collected stickers and could win several of these pins.

 

The steam grid art for VF5 Revo changed slightly between beta and release:



Release left, beta right

The globe in the background shifted to the right, in the beta it was over to the left and it caused the background to become blue at the edges, which is reflected in Akira's hair and hightlights on his skin. Additionally, Pai and Jacky have different facial expressions - the beta used their art from the character select screen like everyone else but Akira. The actual VF5 Revo logo has shifted up a few pixels.

 

I've been watching Dark Winds, which is a TV series about native american tribal police. I noticed it's a production where Robert Redford is an executive producer (he had a cameo with George R.R. Martin in the opening episode of Season 3).

It reminded me that Robert Redford was credited as the director and co-producer of the cancelled Laseractive game Legacy. This was an adventure game where native americans would teach you skills for survival.

I wonder whether there is an opportunity here for someone with some clout to reach out to Robert Redford's people about Legacy. There could be a way to spin a story about preserving any lost footage or development material about Legacy into good publicity about Robert Redford championing native american film-making over the last 30 years (and to also act as an advertisement to get more eyeballs watching Dark Winds).

 

Maybe our resident interviewer @cartridgeculture will be able to (I can't speak for him, of course... but he's been good at it...)

 

thanks man, seeing this made my day. wanna know some fun wiki trivia: i actually HAVE reached out to sundance before. and i totally got no response lol. but my email was bad. this was back in late 2021, shortly after i created the Legacy article. i was SO inexperienced. so cocky. seeing doc's post got me thinking about trying again. im juggling about half a dozen pending interviews rn so admittedly its not gonna be top priority, but its on my list for sure

on that note, doing the research to assemble a good set of interview questions can take a long time
DO YOU have a topic that you're crazy familiar with and would LOVE to reach out to the developers about?
build me some questions and private message me, lets get something started!

 

Here's some old stuff about that 32X demo from one of the dudes who worked on it.

It's wiki updatin' time.

 

https://archive.org/details/sega-cdg-test-disc-2.0

The most exciting thing added from 1.0 is a title screen:


Reply with this in the context where these were first discussed https://bsky.app/profile/hcs64.bsky.social/post/3lle5xbyqrs2u

 

Anyone want some weird Sega arcade distributor murder mystery release event?
https://archive.org/details/play-me...e 14, Number 7 - August 1988/page/28/mode/2up

 

I've been thinking for a while that we should really separate the major updates for the big 2010's arcade games like Border Break, Sengoku Taisen, Code of Joker, Wonderland Wars. We're not consistent with it, maimai, CHUNITHM, ONGEKI, Shining Force CROSS, Sega Card-Gen MLB, even older examples like Virtua Fighter 5, Quest of D and SEGA GOLF CLUB those would all fall in the same style of updating and have their own pages. These major milestones all have their own slots on Sega.jp's game search and have their own pages on their SEGA ARCADE GAME HISTORY page, since there are notable additions in all of them to keep track of.

I'd have done it already if I didn't chicken out of a discussion every time.

Mobile games like Chain Chronicle, Ryu ga Gotoku Online and SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI Liberation Dx2 do also get big changes with a "Version Up" update like going to 2.0 and 3.0, but I'm a lot more unsure about those getting their own pages. There aren't any extra pages added on Sega.jp to track those updates, just the news articles, and they don't usually change names (exceptions exist like Derby Owners Club (2012) turning into Derby Owners Club: Next Furlong).

 

If the pages are worth splitting, go for it - they'll only have been combined because we didn't understand what they were.

 

I think it was sussed out previously on here that this would be hard to define with some titles - there was talk of Sangokushi Taisen having at least a few versions retroactively added to Sega.jp's release archives in recent years. And looking at them right now there's still odd cases like Initial D The Arcade only having its Season 4 update reflected, with 2 and 3 nowhere to be found.

The site could just not be taken as word of god for all of them to get dedicated pages anyway... but still.

 

Pac-Man Fever is that novelty song from 1981 that sometimes turns up in things:


Today I learnt there was an album, and track 2 is based on Frogger:



Because Sega held all the licensing rights in the US, this makes it the first Sega-related piece of music to be sold commercially (that we know of)...(?)


Well okay if you want to be awkward, "Sega" is a genre of music in its own right, developed in the former French colonies on the east coast of Africa. I thought about making an elaborate April Fools joke about this once.

 

I love searching for obscure Sega stuff when the only results are Mauritian dancing lessons.