General Questions and Information Thread

So Modern Vintage Gamer got hold of a real early prototype of Bio-Hazard Battle/Crying, supposedly 1991 via Irwin, the Canadian distributor at the time. What's super interesting about this is that it has a modem option! It's greyed out, so not clear if this option is coded in, or just planned for the future. Regardless, there's very few known Mega Modem games, and I don't think this one was previously documented as having it planned.

 

So what's the most popular cheat code on the Mega Drive?

ABACAB

The most famous example is Mortal Kombat's blood code, but it's in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Vectorman and Wolfchild... and probably some other places (I haven't tested much on the Mega-CD).

Abacab is the 11th studio album by Genesis (and a song). It's almost as if it was designed for cheat codes... 7 years before the Mega Drive launched in Japan.

 

Another fun one for the collectors:





I wouldn't have thought Jordan vs Bird was a good enough game to re-release, but apparently it was. EA replaced their "EASN" branding with "EA Sports" in 1993 after a legal challenge by ESPN. I've yet to check, but I'm guessing there will be others.

For the games themselves... well there is a revision 01 but it still says ESPN. Only the Japanese version says EA Sports.

 

^Cool find.

Conicidentally this magazine got uploaded to the Internet Archive the following day. It was issue 11, published 86.10.31. The following issue published 86.11.14 also has a release schedule;

86.12 (Early): Great Tennis
86.12 (Early): Golf
86.12 (Mid): Ninja (Tentative Title)
86.12 (Mid): High School! Kimengumi
86.12 (Late): Space Harrier
Next Year: Koronis Rift
Next Year: The Black Onyx

Which shows that there is another error in Sega's release history. It gives 85.12.22 for Astro Flash, F-16 Fighter, and Great Tennis. However, F-16 Fighter and Great Tennis both have 1986 copyright box and title screens. We already have a source for F-16 Fighter releasing March 1986, and now we have one for Great Tennis releasing December 1986 (this makes more sense with the product code too). Unfortunately we don't have the exact day for either of them.

So whilst Sega would have you believe that they released nine games for Mark III in 1985, they only actually released seven.

 

In 2012 Retro City Rampage, also known as "References: The Game™" was released, and the internet got giddy when they learned it had filters:



One of which was this green screen filter which was cute and novel for a few seconds. But this style of "de-making" video games is a new concept right? This wouldn't be a selling point in the 1990s - it would be like releasing a brand new PS5 game today with a 4:3 480p mode.




Not quite. Toughman Contest from 1995 has (an admittedly quite broken) green screen mode turned on by using the password "SALADBAR". And I think (outside of what I think is shadow/highlight effects on the left screen) it's only three-colour green screen, which as far as I'm aware has never been a thing on any home system ever (the closest I can think of are pinball dot-matrix displays).


I'm not sure anyone would give two damns about Toughman Contest in 2021 but it does have a lazy 32X port. How lazy?



Well it supports the same cheat passwords, and with the green screen one, only the Mega Drive graphics turn green. That means the new 32X art is obvious, and demonstrates the add-on is only used to render some new backgrounds.

 

Player One seems to have ran a Sega-centric magazine for three issues - can't find any mention or page on Retro, currently only a few auction listings of them for terrible prices, and I can't locate scans anywhere, but their contents make them sound interesting at the very least -

The one above in particular apparently has, among more, a Japan report with photos of Joypolis and the "secret premises of Sega" (whatever that means), a 7 page feature about Formula 1 racers who are fans of Sega, and interviews with Fumio Kurokawa about Virtua Fighter 2 + several western developers, including Dave Perry and Fergus McGovern

 

I knew that one existed but yeah, there's a lot of gaps in our knowledge when it comes to French magazines. Anything marked "hors-serie" is a special one-off issue, and these things have a habit of turning up out of the blue.

 

There were at least two other "Les Jeux Sega Par Player One" issues; the third and likely final seems to be from late 1994, with the preceding couple from around that time as well





I've read little of Player One, but I am aware that writers for the original magazine were accused of having a bias for Nintendo during the early 90s era - I imagine these were made to appease the contingent of their readership who thought that

 

Here's another one for the "Sega of America didn't know how to promote Japanese games" list.

Hiroyuki Takahashi, co-founder of Climax Entertainment, speaking in 2017 at the Game Business Archive 3 talk about Shining in the Darkness:

“We were told that there was no chance Shining in the Darkness would sell in America, so they didn’t promote it at all there. At the time in America, if a game didn’t receive any promotion, it wouldn’t sell at all. However, Shining in the Darkness ended up selling 300,000 copies in America. That kind of record put it just behind Dragon Warrior. After that, we received a mountain of fan letters from America.”

 

I've spent the last few days in Dreamcast game ratings mode, converting from our old rating system to the new one.

Most of what's left is... awkward. I've been verifying each score as I've gone along, but we don't have scans of some of these magazines (mostly GamesMaster), and others don't have sources, which means I have to go hunting. Others are website reviews, which I'm not sure how to handle, if indeed we even want to handle them.

There's a few issues of Consoles + between #80 and #100 which I can get scans of, but they need cropping which is tedious and time consuming, and even with handy dandy tools, it can take the best part of an hour per issue.


However 99% of reviews we know about are accounted for under the "new" system. What we didn't have was many reviews to begin with (at least in comparison to other systems), which means Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren Gaiden: Onnakenshi Asuka Kenzan! is listed as the second best Dreamcast game of all time, which probably isn't correct. So if anyone wants an excuse to read some old gaming magazines from around 1998-2002, here you go.

Be incredibly wary of page numbers as many of the issues we have on Retro CDN are missing pages - something I didn't spot until it was too late (but am slowly fixing).

 

I'd love to do this, but am pressed for time at the moment.

But one thing that comes to mind is that Dreamcast magazine re-reviewed some games in their "second coming" section. Games that seemed really amazing at launch were re-assessed later with their scores reduced. I'm guessing we should be careful to use the second scores?

 

Something for NEC Retro, if anyone is updating it.

I'd love to see a SC-3000 version of this.

 

Came across this resume for Randy Fugaté;

"PreProduction R&D" for unreleased Tomcat Alley (32X), "High Stakes", "Baseball", and Wirehead (32X). Wirehead 32X was known about, but I think the other three are new. Not much to go on beyond them being FMV games. Probably not enough info to create pages for them. He's not credited on Surgical Strike or Wirehead, don't know if or how that should be added.

 

I'm guessing this is the closest we'll get to an official announcement that Hyper magazine is dead (if it wasn't already obvious to everyone).

https://medium.com/forgotten-worlds/what-happened-to-hyper-magazine-57e5ba994725

I'd like to think this means that scans of back issues are now slightly more free game.

 

I forgot to post this earlier in the week - this noise about a "European Super League" for football, that came and died in a matter of days:




The Dreamcast had one 20 years ago! It also came and died within a couple of days, though probably because it was only ever going to appeal to a subset of fans across Europe... and I'm told it's not actually that good of a game. It chose not to include music on its title screen and menus, so that probably tells you everything you need to know. There's also a PlayStation version if you're allergic to polygons.

But hey, forward thinking. As are these statements I've highlighted from the back of the box:



"Even bald patches"

 

Yep ... I remember this game... I played the Playstation version ... plans to create an European Super League date back to those times, but fortunately it never saw the light of the day ... it was just talk and not so polemic as the current one... it was just an idea on a paper... we Europeans, don't need one... we have a better thing called Champions League



SHIVERS UP MY SPINE!!! ...

 

I might start challenging some more reception-related gaming myths:


"Daytona USA was released on the Sega Saturn, but the port sucked so much they had to re-make it as Daytona USA: Champion Edition, which was received much better"

Daytona USA/Reception
Daytona USA: Championship Circuit Edition/Reception

Not quite! We haven't got much data, but what we do have suggests the opposite - that CCE is the one that under-performs.


Almost a shame we don't have a "PlayStation Retro" to see how the many variants of Ridge Racer got on.

 

sup people. 32X question here. can i get the Genesis Virtua Racing working on my 32Xthrough modding? connecting cart pins to cart connecter?