Turns out that Xbox leak does matter to Sega Retro: https://www.eurogamer.net/leaked-mi...dragon-was-briefly-a-timed-next-gen-exclusive There are bits about Yakuza: Like a Dragon's timed exclusivity. I don't know how or where this stuff was leaked, but Sega stuff will need mirroring in some form somehow.
A couple of days ago I went on a renewed quest for telephone cards. Lots of Japanese companies, including Sega, gave away promotional telephone cards (or "teleca" (テレカ) because Japan) to commemorate various events or special offers or whatever. I get the impression very few people actually used them for their intended purpose (i.e. public telephone boxes) but whatever, it's a thing. As telephone cards are flat, they're easy to scan, and their collectability means there's plenty of material online, which is great, because they can give clues to games or events that happened. Sometimes telephone cards are the only (current) evidence that something existed. There's a lot. For Sonic it's manageable, and while a faff for Sega as a whole, I'm more inclined to care because... I like Sega. But I have to be realistic - I do not care enough about Sakura Taisen. For reasons unbeknownst to man, there are hundreds of Sakura Taisen telephone cards. Seemingly every single game or event (which includes the stage shows) had some sort of commemorative card, and while I tried listing all the variants I could find, I gave up at 147 because my brain hurts. And yes I did just resort to vaguely describing what the picture looks like than looking up the history. Shoot me. But of course, ideally we want scans. Here are lots of scans. Mirror that noise. Though you'll probably want to crop things first. Important warning: context is everything. While we've listed these as merchandise, in many cases telephone cards won't be something that you would have gone out and "bought"; they'll have been pre-order bonuses, or magazine freebies, or given away at events. So while the temptation is to go "this is for the Sakura Taisen 2 video game", it might not be. It maybe for something we know nothing about, or have documented incorrectly. The trick is doing some research and finding out. And of course some of these originally came in fancy packaging: What's a "Sakura Taisen Collection 2003"? I've no idea. It's alright to have this stuff lying around in wiki limbo until someone works out the answer. I can't stress enough how big and confusing this franchise is for English speakers. Incidentally that site lists all sorts of similar telephone cards, so if you're in the mood to tackle Hatsune Miku or the later Shining games, series I care about even less, go right ahead. Ditto for any type of related merchandise, really.
I'm tempted to download everything, but I have no knowledge of how they work I don't know how they differ from each other There are individual scans for each card, even though the motif is the same There are individual pages for each card, even though the scans are the same It's probably best if we just wait until they sell out and disappear from the store, and then focus on the ones that pop up on eBay for a lot of money in 50 years or so.
US Fanzine Game-Rave. It gives a good insight into SoAs issues in the Saturn era from a fans perspective, which is obviously highly critical. Also an article on GameWorks which I'm sure will interest the arcade side here, with opening dates etc which we don't have on the wiki.
I thought I'd give it a proper shot. Here's what I came up with: Page 1 sorted by article numbers. Different store -> different article number -> different scan. The ones numbered 1 and 2 are fronts + backs. Different file formats. Is the wiki able to cope with AVIF files? I'll upload everything in a zip file once I'm done. You decide which scans get the Retro seal of quality. Edit: I've spotted one mecha, the rest is all gurls. Two things I've only now become aware of: On this site, you can't search by article numbers. At least it didn't work for me. You can switch the site language to English. Anyway, the cards are in the link above. Maybe they'll be of some use.
Some very nice individual has uploaded (what looks like) the entirity of Power Unlimited, the Dutch gaming magazine: https://archive.org/details/@coexist-1980 I don't know if there's a catch to this.
The catch is that it's a terrible magazine. Lots of terrible, juvenile humor, and the reviewers have bad taste. To give you an example: they said that you should only buy Final Fantasy VI (PlayStation) for the Final Fantasy X demo. The FFVI disc's only good as a frisbee.
In fairness you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a gaming magazine that couldn't be viewed as this to some extent throughout much of the west, particularly of that era. They're also still great documentation of a certain cultural moment in the medium, and all that. People waited years for all of Mega Machines' complete run of five (count 'em) rare issues to be scanned in before. Alongside its weird landscape format, that was pretty much all it was at the end of the day, even if it went a bit bolder and further than others in being so. (although one of its writers - who probably committed a cardinal sin of some sort by dismissing Sonic CD's soundtrack as "tenth-rate techno" - now heads one of my favourite music podcasts, so I might not be the best one to talk about this anyway)
Really? Because most magazines I read back in the day were fine. I mostly read Consoles+, a French magazine, back in the day. The only magazine that was pushing it a bit was a French magazine focused on RPGs in the late 2000s.
https://archive.org/details/thunder...hundercats 024 (1988)/page/n7/mode/2up?q=sega I'm starting to see this more and more - magazines (and in this case, comics) with Sega adverts in them, but are otherwise completely out of scope for Sonic/Sega/NEC Retro. A bunch of Disney Adventures scans have been uploaded in the past few months, now we've got ThunderCats, and while the CBZ of this is issue is only about 40MB, others can be chunky things (of the "I don't care enough to deal with this today" variety). I'm regularly checking archive.org's text search - there's plenty of weird false positives, but you'll often find things that might matter. And while yes, we have other sources for this specific advert, the more sources (and more dates for those sources) means you can get a better idea of when certain games were released and how much attention they were getting.
And I thought you wanted to preserve the potential magic moments where many young children first came in contact with SEGA ads. But if it's just release dates ... (Just in case: I'm being cynical.)
Well... It was thanks to the discovery of these two that we discovered that this marketing campaign parodied the film Wayne's World ... I don't remember seeing these adverts in other magazines ...
Oh, cool! I owned quite a bunch of them until some nice person thought I got too old for it and decided to trash all of them. My favourite issue was the one where Micky had a cape and a sword. It ended on a cliffhanger. Anyway, were these adverts all over the place, though, or exclusive to one line of magazines? That could be an interesting differentiation. Marketing is a science of its own. If you're going to document it thoroughly, try not to mis- or overinterpret it.
I'm not sure if they were exclusive to one line of magazines ... but he have some German gaming magazines and these adverts don't appear in any of them... https://archive.org/details/micky-maus-1993-23/Micky Maus - 1993-15/page/n57/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/micky-maus-1993-23/Micky Maus - 1993-14/page/n49/mode/2up
N-Zone and PlayZone (Play 3, Play 4 ...) come out with anniversary DVDs every once in a while that feature every issue ever published as high quality PDFs. I can't bring myself to upload them, though. Long story short, some adverts matter, others don't. I guess the question is, do they tell a story or something? That's highly subjective, I'm afraid. Some are insightful, some are funny. I dunno It's a form of pop culture, really.
...and those are the ones we want... Wait!... Are you German?! ... I had no idea! ... do you remember seeing those "Games World" ads at the time?
I am! Hallo! Donausdampfschifffahrtskapitän. I've never heard of Games World, though. It apparantly seemed to be a TV Show similar to CyberMaster, though, but much less edgy.
If you know anything about Sega in Germany and German-speaking countries (especially from the 90s) that we don't, please let us know... I know a bit of German but not much (enough to identify interesting stuff for Sega Retro in texts...).
Right now, the Plaion press server seems to be your safest bet regarding all things Sega related. But I'll keep my eyes peeled, of course. Problem is I got an N64 back then, unfortunately. (Mega Drive -> N64)
