General Questions and Information Thread

Rethought:

Template:DevelopmentBob

I figured a development-specific bob would be a better approach, since there might be other things we want to note at a later date.

So yes unless someone has a better plan:

Code (Text):

1. {{DevelopmentBob
2. ...
3. |missedreleases=
4. {{MissedRelease|MD|1991-02-03{{ref|http://www.google.com}}}}
5. {{MissedRelease|MD|1992-03-04{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
6. {{MissedRelease|SMS|1993-04-05{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
7. {{MissedRelease|SMS|1994-05-06{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
8. ...
9. }}

for released games with development sub-pages (e.g. Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master/Development)

Code (Text):

1. {{UnreleasedBob
2. ...
3. |date=
4. {{MissedRelease|MD|1991-02-03{{ref|http://www.google.com}}}}
5. {{MissedRelease|MD|1992-03-04{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
6. {{MissedRelease|SMS|1993-04-05{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
7. {{MissedRelease|SMS|1994-05-06{{magref|egm|1|1}}}}
8. ...
9.  

for unreleased games (e.g. Waterworld)

 

Sega had a Dreamcast release schedule on their website - how modern:

Alexander: The Road to Percia‎ ( =/ )
Chi Q no Tomodachi‎
Ganzo! Doubutsu Uranai + Renai Uranai Puzzle‎
Hamster Monogatari DC‎
LiltherB‎
Monster o Tsukurou!‎
If it Happens‎
SD Hiryuu no Ken Densetsu EX‎


Shout out to Japanese developer Culture Brain, who failed to release SIX Dreamcast games over the course of two years. What a business.

 

Ding ding ding - scroll down to Dee Dee Planet.

I'm not totally convinced these VTimeline templates I made are a great solution - ideally we'd want one of the many off-the-shelf graphing... things, because I'm reinventing the wheel here, and when annotations are bunched up together (which they will be) it's a faff to sort out.

Unfortunately we need admins for that.

 

Did you know there's a lost Shining game called "Shining Rogue" (シャイニング・ローグ)? Some people did. Now more of you do.

It's another one of those "maybe didn't really exist" projects that may have been misinterpreted from interviews. Essentially Sega owns the "Shining" IP, and worked with Climax Entertainment to produce Shining in the Darkness and Shining Force. Shining Rogue probably would have been the third game, but Sega and Climax parted ways, and the project was left in limbo for a bit.

Climax went onto produce Landstalker (still published by Sega).

Sega's Sonic! Software Planning studio that is credited in Shining Force, went on to make Shining Force II.

A third studio, Gau Entertainment was brought in to make a game, before being bought by Nextech and releasing their project as Crusader of Centy (or Ragnacenty or Soliel or your "clearly not Shining" name of choice).


So what happened to Shining Rogue? Well Beep MegaDrive says it became Ragnacenty, but the internet is pretty adamant it became Landstalker. Are they both right?


While I don't know much about any of these games, Shining Force was released in March 1992, and Landstalker in October 1992 (having been announced in June). 7 months seems very tight to make a game, especially when dealing with untested isometric technology, which suggests to me that work on Landstalker began before Shining Force was finished. Was the project called Shining Rogue for the first half of 1992? Maybe - I haven't seen any documentation that says so, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But to abandon the the Shining Rogue name twice in the space of two years seems a bit odd. Just a placeholder title for some vague RPG Sega wanted to make at some point? I'd look it up further but not speaking Japanese, it takes ten times as long.

 

Things I learnt today:


That unreleased version of Frogger for the Game Gear isn't a just port of the arcade, it's an entirely new game, where you can reenact the events in Tiananmen Square. Before getting run over.

 

You should subscribe to my Youtube channel, I made a video of that game like a year and a half ago.

 

If you'd asked me a week ago which "games" on this list weren't likely to be real, I'd have put HOUSING and HOUSING CATALOG near the top. But nope, genuine things.

Anyway the list is smaller now. Japanese magazines are very good at printing release schedules, to the point where unless a game is explicitly cancelled, it'll hang around at the bottom of the list for years (as opposed to Western mags that just drop vague hints and have you guess). I've checked about a dozen magazines between 1991 and 2002 without seeing most of what's left, which suggests they were only briefly in the schedules (spoilers: I'm not checking every issue), or didn't exist (this list is from a branch of Wikipedia after all).


Case in point, Shin Waku Waku 7 was a proposed sequel to Waku Waku 7 which I don't think made it past the concept stage. I think there's an assumption here that it might have been Saturn-bound, but I'm not even sure they started coding on it. Some are also placeholder titles that were probably renamed - "Schwarzschild" for example is probably Mega Schwarzschild as opposed to the original Schwarzschild, but who knows.

And yes there was a "Virtua Tennis" on the Sega Saturn. Is it related to the game all know and love (despite it being called Power Smash in Japan)? No idea!

I might post some fun findings.

 

Random thought for the day. Was the J-Cart possible on other platforms? For example, if there was a Master System port of Micro Machines, could it have supported 4 players using ports on the cartridge? What about the SNES?

 

Fun findings:

Mega Drive

Road Riot 4WD
We got a prototype of this back in January, but given this was in the schedules for years, was taken to shows, and Tengen invented the thing (because Tengen = Atari Games), I'm honestly surprised it took that long. I'm not sure I'd call it a "high profile" cancellation, but it keeps turning up.

Ushiwakamaru Saburouta Monogatari: 24-jikan Tatakaemasu ka?
An RPG that takes place in an office block, which might be related to energy drinks. Because modern life is role playing, or something. Think: that part you meet the Game Freak staff in the original Pokémon games, but as a full fat release.

Alien 3
The Mega Drive version was released in the West, but not in Japan. Acclaim Japan were no stranger to cancelling projects (though they did ship the Game Gear version), but Alien 3 is unique... in that it never left the schedules. By 1995, more than three years after its debut, the company was seemingly still planning to release it. What was the problem? Nobody knows!


Saturn

Edward Randy Arcade Gears
This is the only re-release of an old game I came across, and it's Data East's take on Indiana Jones. Apparently there's been three attempts over the years to port this to home systems and they've all failed, so 32 years after launch, you can still only play this in the arcades.

Guh Edward hungry! Edward sleepy! Edward randy!

Guilty Gear
I'm surprised I hadn't heard the original Guilty Gear was Saturn-bound. Because it was.

Then again I didn't know it was on the PlayStation either (although do you blame me? It took until May 2000 to reach PAL regions). Still, it's a series with fans, and as the Saturn is more capable in 2D, this could have potentially been the definitive version of the game.

Kaiun! Nandemo Kanteidan
I think this is game based on a Japanese antiques show (or at least, "what is the value of this thing"). I... don't understand how you could ever make a video game out of this, but I'd have loved to see them try.

Polygon BASIC for Sega Saturn Pasokon Setsuzoku Type
Polygon BASIC for Sega Saturn Sega Saturn Taiou Type
Not to be confused with Game BASIC for Sega Saturn, though the idea is similar. I think this might be a 3D modelling package for the Sega Saturn, which is... different.

Rock Climbing Mitou Hou e no Chousen Himaraya Hen
There was a similar game released on the PlayStation, but this is a "Himaraya" version. But you've translated that wrong - it's the Himalayas, surely? Yeah I don't know.


Dreamcast

Alex: Virus Composer
I'd love to know what this was. How does one "compose" a "virus", and who is Alex? Is it the same game as Alexander: The Road to Percia which Media Factory also cancelled?

If it Happens
It didn't.



In total we've logged over 650 unreleased games for Sega systems and/or published by Sega.

 

Now think about all the unreleased stuff that WEREN'T on scheduals!

 

Lots of intriguing/rare old 90s Sega ephemera generously shared on this account - owner seems to have managed a Hi-Tech Sega location and worked within the company itself during that decade

Zunzunkyou no Yabou - despite apparently recording a daily intake of only ¥1500 on location test, it still made it to market, and multiple boards are alleged to have been forced to run at Sega's own venues (where it also did poorly)
CD-ROM of Waka Chikara (which, incidentally, was recently added to maimai)
Wing War R360 setup with Super Megalo screens as live monitors
1992 new years greetings postcard (art also used in other places)
Sega Harmony issue from December 1988
A Virtua Fighter tournament (or two)
Sega Game Card collection, wallet, stickers
Three Daytonas and a Desert Tank
Promotional booklet for Mega Anser
Creation is Life motto wall panel
Harmony cover art scans
and whatever this is

The scans of that 1988 Harmony issue also appear to confirm suspicions that it regularly had press clippings from notable sources about Sega. More of these to go around would be pretty great, although I understand that would be hard to achieve.

 

https://segaretro.org/Sega_Super_Circuit

 

You wouldn't think the cropping on the Harmony cover would make a difference, but that Roller badnik covered in snow.

Put one on the top of a hill in a winter themed zone, and as it chases after Sonic, the ball gets bigger. If that isn't "put this in a Sonic game" material I don't know what is.

 

An issue:

https://segaretro.org/Magical_Taruruto-kun_(Mega_Drive)

When I originally wrote Template:InfoTable I hadn't anticipated on it being used for levels with eight screenshots. We want lots of screenshots - it's a great idea, but we need a better way of representing this content.

There's been some talk, and what looked like a solution in my head was less of one in practise.

This isn't something wikis generally deal with, so there aren't any ready-made solutions out there. Sites like SMS Power and MobyGames have dedicated screenshot pages - maybe we want that, but I quite like the idea of associating screenshots with levels, which those sites don't really do. However, as my test shows, it's very easy to clutter a page - we're going to need something that gets information across, is relatively elegant, and won't look like total arse in mobile.


Sega games come in all shapes and sizes - you could argue really big levels deserve their own sub-pages (e.g. Doom, E1M1 - there's a map, there's secret doors, things change depending on difficulty settings, John Romero could probably tell you a story about its development), but levels in Fantasy Zone, which are little more than a nice "background" and "a boss"... that's going to be harder to justify (but will still need more than one screenshot).

 

What if you put some gif along the text that goes through all the screenshots and a link to its relevant gallery to see them separately? Or the most relevant screenshot, if the gif is a bad option.

 

Recently on "this is a stupid idea where are the admins"

https://segaretro.org/Template_talk:VTimelineDevelopment

Sonic 2's development timeline, auto-generated on Sega Retro. Amaze your friends with the annotations that draw on top of each other because sadjlfksdajgauw4efh

We don't have precise dates for the Simon Wai or CENSOR prototypes, although you can assume the Nick Arcade build was shortly before Summer CES 1992... because that was what it was probably built for.


This is a similar pattern for other games - an initial showing, radio silence, a bunch of prototypes all at once, and a sizable gap before release. In Sonic 2's case, the bulk of development occured within the space of about four months, but there was two months afterwards where it just... sat.

Not that this is unusual I guess, but nice to visualise.

 

Yeah, this has been a thing for awhile like when I did this: Shin Megami Tensei III Noctune HD Remaster/Downloadable content

 

18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker/Development

So I guess the idea is that every game would have a development sub-page, which in turn would have (at least one) automatically generated development "timeline", pulling details from across the wiki (trade events, prototypes, build dates, (missed) release dates etc.). Obviously the more we know about a game, the better the timeline will be.

And after many months I think I've built something that works... "okay" 90% of the time. I originally envisioned this as being docked on the right hand side of the page, much like the Bob templates, but it's a bit too wide for that... and yet not wide enough to not look tacky. When I started, I couldn't visualise what a month looked like in terms of screen real estate, so there's a lot more vertical scrolling than I had expected - a horizontal timeline might have been better, but then you'd need scrollbars and idk.


Hilariously this is probably one of the most complex things ever done within the confines of Mediawiki - pulling things from half a dozen SQL tables, then rendering the results with HTML <div> tags. And there's 15+ templates involved in getting there.


Top tip for aspiring wiki people: don't do this. Install a graph extension.