If a magazine (or TV show) features 2 reviewers reviewing the same game and giving different scores, how does that work with Retro's review aggregator? Do I make 2 separate entries for each reviewer, or take the average and just have one entry for the magazine (or TV show)?
Average. Or you could write {{#expr: (SCORE1 + SCORE2)/2}} to get the wiki to do the maths for you - then there's a record (for editors at least) that there were two scores.
Speaking of reviews... I don't suppose there is a spreadsheet with all of the Genesis games on one axis and magazine title on the other axis, with review scores populating the spreadsheet... is there? I'm interested in the idea of balancing out review scores to create a kind of review aggregator. The problem with review scores as they are is that many magazines did not rate anywhere near all of the released games, and each magazine varies WIDELY in the range of scores it gives. For example, Famitsu rarely gave MD games a score over 30/40, but certain other magazines seemed to rarely give them under 80%. One way to possibly resolve this is to calculate percentile scores for each magazine. In other words, rank each review score for a particular magazine in relation to the other scores from that magazine. There would have to be some cut-off for magazines that only reviewed a small number of games, of course. But doing it that way will give you a list of how highly a game was rated, on average, across all magazines. I know this goes beyond the purpose of the Wiki in documenting scores, but if I could only get said spreadsheet, it should be quick work.
Graphs are tricky to plot on Mediawiki, but we do have tables. We've not been tracking individual reviews, but that's mostly because when we started adding ratings to Sega Retro, we couldn't. Perhaps we should be doing this. ...though I suspect the real solution is to more intelligently track all magazine pages. So it's not just a case of which games were reviewed, but which games were previewed, and which ones got walkthroughs, and which ones had cheats. Because while it seems a bit mundane, if we're able to determine which games saw the most magazine coverage, we can gage "popularity". Or at the very least, work out which ones were marketed the best. You'd be able to work out if statistically, some publications were biased towards certain publishers or genres. So you could say, yes 9/10 magazines gave Sonic the Hedgehog 2 a good score. But 5/9ths of those spent most of 1992 talking about it, so it was inconceivable they'd give it anything less (i.e. their views might not be reliable!). It also means I could say, "this is Sega Saturn Magazine. And here's a list of every feature they ever published so you don't have to go searching". The possibilites!
That aggregate review score page is kind of what I want to fix... I think we'd get a very different picture if we took into account the relative rating scales used by magazines. That would be amazing, but certainly too daunting to ever document, right? Tens of thousands of pages (if not more), and each one has to be connected to a game (or games). But your point is spot on - I've gone through Sega Visions before to get a sense of how Sega of America was marketing games in their own magazine. Landstalker had perhaps the biggest build up and release of any MD game in Japan, and guess how much coverage it got in Sega Visions? A single page overview, months after the game came out. No ads. No guides. A single page! SoA-produced games like Eternal Champions had tons of coverage, in contrast. Of course, this isn't surprising at all - SoA profited more from the games they produced, and they wanted to take care of their own devs. But the point is that magazine coverage is a great way to tell where the marketing funds were going.
You know when Sega Retro opened to the public in 2010, I thought for sure we would never get good scans of most of the Japanese games. Then we did. So yeah, things do happen. We do have hundreds of magazine scans (including a full set of Sega Visions) so there's enough to get the job started... although how the information is stored would require a bit more thought to make sure we cover as much as possible. We can set up database tables so the columns might be code | issue | page (pdf) | page (printed) | type (e.g. preview/review/tips etc.) | game | other details ...then we could auto-populate magazine articles pages too, and ensure they're always listed in date order. And it could simplify our ratings templates. Maybe we'd want to declare this on the file pages as a list of contents. Although perhaps best to wait until Retro CDN can access this database so we can cover non-Sega mags too. Lots to think about. But there's nothing stopping people from writing things down in preparation for this, should it come about.
They kept this quiet クラッシュ・バンディクー ブッとび3段もり！ Crash Bandicoot Buttobi 3-dan Mori!, or N-Sane Trilogy for those following at home. Sega are publishing the Switch version in Japan. Crash Bandicoot, whose invention was, in part, to destroy Sega's console ambitions in the mid-1990s, is now relying on the firm. Nintendo fans of Japan can now endulge on slightly weird fur shaders and rounded collision volumes. Activision published the PS4 version so I'm not sure what went wrong, but this is a thing.
Shenmue's development history is weird. https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3AEdge_UK_073.pdf&page=132 Here's something nobody wrote down - "Shenmue Forest" (or maybe "Shenmue no Mori" (シェンムー の森) idk). Looks like they had the clay models of the characters' heads on display. And plastic trees. Completely undocumented, and now really hard to find because Shenmue III exists (and it has forests in it).
I swear to god... each time I want to view an enlarged page of a magazine, I click on it, and it downloads the entire magazine. Is there a way to view individual pages on the wiki at their highest resolutions without downloading the entire magazine? It's really, really, really annoying for those of us wanting to contextually read the linked blurb...
It's a quirk in the PDF Mediawiki extension - it's just not very good at rendering thumbnails (which is why we've got a lot of them turned off on Sega Retro). I too am waiting for a fix. If you put [[File:Edge UK 073.pdf|page=132|1000px]] on a page, then preview (don't save) it'll render it at a decent size. But it doesn't work with every magazine and I've yet to work out why. I think it ties itself to a dpi setting somewhere, which can vary depending on how the JPEGs/PDF was saved. Currently this system isn't so good for "reading", but fine for saying "the source is here... honest".
I've had six issues with the Mediawiki which just end up being a technical limitation. It's why I don't upload to it at all. EDIT: That being said, I recently saw something, I think it was when I was investigating Yu Suzuki's Tower of Babel being found playable, about Ryo walking around in this area. Are you sure all these shots isn't just some Dreamcast demo?
I am far too tired for this on a Tuesday evening. Went looking for one obscure Sega-related venture, came back with another: Curious packages from the 2018 Tokyo Game Show... Bath salts. Now you can bathe in Dreamcast. oh and don't get it confused with the Dreamcast rice - that would be embarassing! The Dreamcast turns 20 this year, while the Mega Drive just turned 30, so Sega are selling a lot of merchandise as of late. It might also be a concerted effort to make sure Sega Retro can never hope to document this company in full.
Exciting challenge: Which event is this? I'm guessing a CES from 1982/1983-ish, but that's about as far as I have time to get today. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock is an unreleased LaserDisc arcade game that Sega made. That might give you some clues.
(Winter CESes happened in Las Vagas in January, Summer CESes happened in Chicago in June.) Go go gadget eyesight: THE MOVIE Opening in over xx00 theaters xxx xxx June 198x THE ARCADE GAME xx xx xx xxx designed by SEGA Distributed by BALLY/MIDWAY Star Trek III (the film) was apparently greenlit on the day Star Trek II opened, which means this isn't Winter CES 1982 and is unlikely to be Summer CES 1982. The game was cancelled in 1984, so my guess is it's not Summer CES 1984. The film also opened on 1st June 1984 - before Summer CES 1984 took place. That means (because I'm pretty sure this is CES), either Winter CES 1983, Summer CES 1983 or Winter CES 1984. I think it's a Winter show - those yellow "aisle" banners seem to show up in Winter footage (but maybe they were installed in Chicago too?) If you look closely, there's a reference to the Atari 1200XL. That computer was announced at Winter CES 1983 and didn't go on sale until March. So it's probably not that event. Congo Bongo has a 1983 copyright, but it could have been delayed (or already released). That Wico Computer Command also has a 1983 copyright. I suppose there's a chance this is Summer CES 1983, but if you had Star Trek III in a playable form, you'd think it would have been made available by Christmas. It didn't take long to make video games back then - that's why there were so many. My current guess is this is Winter CES 1984.
Presenting one of the least effective "don't drink and drive" adverts ever made http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzjb_jrcHYY I think maybe the best thing about this is that, while the rules said Sega couldn't get any credit, the US were quite happy to show off the unlicensed Ferrari Testarosa. Also in OutRun you can crash as many times as you like without consequence. Nobody dies, you just probably won't have time to get to where you're going. There's supposed to be a longer one from 1987, but hey.
Useless Sega fact of the day: In 1968, Sega bought a computer. THE CENTURY 100 FROM NCR They were the first company in Japan to purchase one of these, back when buying a computer made the news. I've spent the day uploading issues of Cash Box, which should go some way to documenting what Sega were doing in the 1960s and 70s. These were all originally archived as PDF/A which makes them horrible to work with, but when information is scarce, you take what you can get. David Rosen turns up all the time (and even makes it on the cover of one issue) - I think our coverage needs updating. Other things I've learned: - Sega officially became an American company in the 1970s for a bit. Sega Enterprises, Inc. became the parent of Sega Enterprises, Ltd., but then at some point, Japan became the main base again. - Sega acquired some "Kingdom of Oz" shopping centres in California in 1976. I can't find photographic evidence that they ever existed though. - Michael Eisner, who was the main driving force behind Disney for much of the 80s and 90s... was once on the board of Sega. It's a small world (after all).
September 4th, 1976 issue of Billboard... some more info... Edit: these are results for the 70s... but you can filter your search as you wish... lots of ''old'' info...
