Here's a question nobody asks: Sega Retro is massive, and always needs help from the public (aka you), but what exactly does Sega Retro need help with? What is missing from the wiki, that could be specifically targeted in a "community drive" like the days of old? What does the wiki actually want? Well.. EVERYTHING, but I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few key areas to see, if this time next year, they had been addressed. "Wiki Bingo", except not bingo. Can you, or the internet as a whole, fill in these gaps before next Christmas? Will there be a prize if you win? (probably not) Below is a 2023 magazine "wish list" for Sega Retro. Obviously there are many, many more gaps to fill (like the many missing issues of Harmony), including gaps we don't know exist yet, but holidays, bit of fun, etc.. These are also magazines which I think might actually be feasible to scan over the next twelve months, aren't stupidly rare, and are (hopefully) affordable. Magazines are a primary source of information for Sega Retro - it's why we make a big fuss when interesting ones show up. #5: Dreamzone We currently have scans of about half(??) of every Dreamcast-specific magazine ever published. I've singled out this one because, as an unofficial (French) Dreamcast mag, it is almost certainly going to be covering topics that others aren't. We've got a few independent Dreamcast magazines already, and the trends suggest that, as the official magazines usually get the scoop on the big projects you've heard of, the unofficial mags have to go further afield, reporting on lower-budget projects - the sort that often don't materialise as finished products. Many French developers only spoke to the French press, and the big multi-platform publications were far too interested in the PlayStation 2 to give Dreamcast projects air time. I think there's potential for a lot of unfinished (and possibly unknown) Dreamcast games to be documented in these pages. Or the same tat as all the other mags - who knows! #4: Sega Mega Drive Advanced Gaming This is (I think) pretty much the only Mega Drive-specific magazine from the UK that we don't have a full set of scans for. We have some, but barely anything from 1993/1994/1995. I have no idea if there's much value here - Maverick Magazines were infamous for running their publications into the ground, and Mega Drive Advanced Gaming was the butt of many jokes for the quality of their games coverage, but it would be nice to see this, rather than just take Digitiser's word for it. #3: Game Informer Game Informer is still running, so we won't get a full set, but it's historically been one of the biggest US gaming publications, yet scans are thin on the ground. There are licensing issues at play - GI might still be selling older copies, in which case, fair enough, but it's still a big omission, and it would be good to at least know there was an archived set of original scans somewhere. The first batch of issues have little more than novelty value, but once it matures into a recognisable video game magazine, it's going to have scoops not seen elsewhere. #2: Beep! Beep! MegaDrive is an invaluable resource - Beep! is the publication that pre-dated it. Admittedly this might end up being more useful for NEC Retro than Sega Retro, but we know this is where news of the Sega Mega Drive was first printed, along with keyboards and floppy disk drives and whatever else. It's less focused on Nintendo than the likes of Famitsu/Famicom Tsuushin - I think it could prove useful. #1: GamesMaster (magazine) This is a big omission in terms of UK multi-format gaming mags, and while probably not the best publication out there, again, it's a gap to fill. Sega Retro also cares because we have 200+ ratings to verify, which we can't do without scans. But as with all of these, it's another source for pricing and release dates, and another opportunity to get a glimpse of unfinished (or unreleased) games. Also worth noting: scanning is one half of the process, reading is the second half, and will become increasingly more important as time goes on. That is to say, information from these scans need copy-editing onto the wiki, especially for non-English publications. That's just magazines that come to mind - again there will be hundreds of others from all over the world that don't have wiki representation, and yes we want those too. As for other wiki tasks, we've got loads - here's a start, but visiting Special:Random works too. You're bound to find something that could be better.
#4; I have a few of these, but not the full run. Any reviews from non-scanned issues were probably added by me. I've decided to use my limited time and funds to obtain and scan super rare non retail user-group fanzines and trade only papers, which I'm starting to get quite a big backlog of for scanning in the new year. Having said that, I'm willing to scan the non-scanned issues that I have if someone wants to edit the raw scans (this generally takes longer than the scanning process). #2; Agreed! These really need scanning, they have tons of SG-1000/Mark III stuff. I would do it myself, but all of my spare funds are currently going into the projects mentioned above. #1; These are already scanned, but they're behind a paywall on one of the game mag scanning sites. One of the conditions of joining is that the magazines aren't shared outside of that site. I added the reviews from there, so consider them confirmed, but unfortunately it will require someone else scanning them again in order to add them to the wiki. This is super low priority for me (and I only have a few issues anyway).
I think I know the one. It won't last though - there are literally hundreds of GamesMasters on ebay right now. It's not a rare publication. I'd do it myself if I had the equipment. And the time. And I didn't do a bazillion other things.
I have a fairly good document scanner for things up to A4 in width (here's a non-gaming magazine I scanned), as well as an A3 flatbed scanner. Unfortunately most of the magazines in my collection have already been scanned. I do have the final issue of GamesMaster, which I'll get around to scanning soon. It's not as exciting as something earlier and possibly not even relevant to Sega Retro.
Advanced Mega Drive gaming was great IMO. One of the few mags to give the Mega CD a chance and cover it well. I have most of the Sega Pro and Mega issues too in mum's garage. Here are some of them
Hey Black Squirrel and all, I have recently completed my run of the French magazine Dreamzone. As such, I have a full set and am willing to donate them to someone who has the time, skills and equipment to scan them. Unfortunately I lack all of these prerequisites myself, although I may be able to at least scan the covers at my local library and get these uploaded. I also have some other Dreamcast magazines that are yet to be preserved including a near complete run of the Italian mag "Dreamcast Arena", and single copies of the US "DCM" and Hong Kong mags "Dreamwave" and "Dreamcast Express". The latter is yet to have a page created on Sega Retro - I should be able to fix that shortly and get some basic info posted. If anyone is willing to take up some scanning duties (or knows someone who is) then do drop me a line. Cheers, Lozz
Ooh ooh ooh "no" ... I guess the world sucks? Well not quite - we did get plenty of scans, but of different magazines. Some of the highlights (and no these pages might not load straight away - tell the admins): https://retrocdn.net/Category:Power_Unlimited_scans A complete-ish(?) acrhive of Power Unlimited, gaming magazine from the Netherlands that I didn't expect to turn up. I've heard it's not a good read, but that's not why we archive this stuff - it's to help build up a picture of video game history as a whole. We potentially have physical proof of poor journalism, rather than just anecdotal evidence, and by extension you might know now that the Dutch had to look elsewhere for their 90s gaming news. https://retrocdn.net/Category:Play_Meter_scans Lots of Play Meter scans came through, trade magazine for the US arcade industry. I only did a quick run-through earlier in the year, and even that highlighted tons of new Sega-related stories we had no idea about. Thanks to this I was able to trade most of the big industry trade events of the 1980s. https://retrocdn.net/Category:CTW_scans Your resident Pirate who's also a Dragon uploaded a bunch of Computer Trade Weekly scans. Learn about the UK's computing industry that the country has collectively forgotten about, and why, contrary to popular belief, nobody much cared here for Nintendo during the 1980s. https://retrocdn.net/Category:Teletext_screenshots I'm also a big fan of the ever-growing "teletext that isn't Digitiser" collection. These were obscure back in the 1990s and often had a shelf life measured in hours - for any of the data to be salvagable is a modern miracle. And of course plenty of gaps were filled elsewhere. Not the gaps I hoped for this time last year, but I'll take it, it all helps. Those French Mega Force and Playmag scans never returned to Abandonware Magazines, so I guess we're the custodians of those publications now. Neat. Most of the advances on Sega Retro this year have been on pages themselves - far fewer "THIS GAME EXISTS" pages and more "this game has x, y and z in it" ones. I suspect the trend will continue into 2024.
Whilst they haven't been uploaded to the wiki yet, quite a few Beeps got uploaded to the Internet Archive this year, there's still 2 days of 2023 left ...
Thanks to the Ceefax ones being weekly, and the BBC being the most popular network we nearly have the complete set of Dreamcast reviews (52 so far, but not all of these show up due to either having punctuation in the title that the wiki doesn't like or because the score got cut off the end), just missing 2 weeks during DC's lifetime, one of which was it's launch week, so probably a few more reviews to add from that week at least. But yeah, it's amazing that these can be read again, well done to the guys working on recovering these.
I think the only thing I might be able to contribute is a couple Consoles+ magazines. I've never scanned magazines before, though.
And the DC launch week has been done, so that may well be all of the BBC's Ceefax DC reviews uploaded now, unless the 2001-03-30 edition reviewed a DC title.
