General Questions and Information Thread

That card fails at naming him (on the little row at the very top, I mean), in multiple ways.

For one, it uses the western order instead of reversing name and surname; furthermore, it uses katakana for a native Japanese name. Even if they didn't want to write 木村 和司 because they couldn't do kanji, きむら かずし in hiragana would have been a proper alternative.

 

I wouldn't think so -- FIFA's management sim aspects are nowhere near as detailed or refined as the FM series. You can delegate tasks in FM to try to simplify the load but I'd argue that the audience overlaps even less than that of Daytona USA and American Truck Simulator.

With the majority of the time being spent navigating menus I wouldn't think that the FM series would be suited to a prominent soundtrack in the first place. I don't think it has one at all, and would probably be pretty distracting especially if we're talking someone with the energy of Mitsuyoshi.

 

WCCF is menu based alot of the time so of course it has tracks for that too:


If somebody knows the orchestral opener tracks of the Mario & Sonic Olympic games, Sega arcade games that are about managing football teams and horse racing are full of that stuff, and I love it

But the highlight of WCCF OST is the main theme:

 

Dear internet archive: I am using your wayback machine legitimately, stop blocking me for hours for the crime of viewing multiple pages at once.

Today is Sports Pad Soccer's 35th birthday. It's the first thing listed on the wiki's front page, but apparently we don't know when the Sports Pad was released.



According to Sega, Sports Pad Soccer was bundled with the Sports Pad, and as it the only game to use the peripheral, they should both be celebrating an anniversary today. Except we know that isn't the case, because Great Ice Hockey came out in 1987. What gives?

Mistakes have been made. There are two different versions of the Sports Pad, but it was widely assumed this was a region thing - America got the big bulky unit for their big bulky hands, while Japan got a smaller version (see: Saturn and Xbox controllers between regions). But that's not strictly accurate (and to be fair we should have known this, this is a trackball controller - you don't hold it in your hands) - Japan actually received both units.


To celebrate the launch of Phantasy Star in Japan (1987-12-20), Beep magazine ran a contest, and one of the prizes up for grabs was Great Ice Hockey and a Sports Pad. There were only 1,000 copies of this bundle, and it was never made available in stores. That issue of the magazine hasn't been scanned so the details are a little unclear, but I think the idea was to send in a Phantasy Star barcode on the back of a postcard, and then you'd get your prize. The deadline was 31st March 1988 - I don't know if that means you'd have to wait until this date passed until prizes were awarded, or you'd get them straight away, but whatever, it was around the late 1987/early 1988 period.

And look it's an "American-style" Sports Pad. I think they were clearing out unsold stock.

You'll note that there are two prizes here, one for the Mark III, and the other for the Master System. They're pretty much the same console though - does that mean Mark III owners get a choice? Apparently no - the older Sports Pad doesn't work properly on Mark III systems for some reason (which might explain why they weren't keen to sell it).


Flash forward to October 1988 and you'll see Sports Pad Soccer claims Mark III support. That's because it was bundled with the smaller Sports Pad, a hardware revision that works on both consoles. I have no idea what the compatibility's like with the other Sports Pad games, and it's missing the switches so god knows what happens if you try and play non-Sports Pad titles.

Also despite the Sports Pad never being sold separately in Japan, and Sports Pad Soccer being a Japanese exclusive, the box claims to support 2 players. Can it handle two Sports Pads?


tl;dr little Sports Pad's birthday today, big Sports Pad was also released in Japan, need more scans.

 

That offer was also published in Famitsu, so I think it was just a general promotion from Sega at the time rather than a Beep exclusive competition. Also, Sega's Japanese SMS dates are all messed up. Sports Pad Soccer was listed as due out 88-09-02, and made Beep's SMS sales chart for September 1988, so unfortunately we're a bit late for the birthday.

Edit: They also show a US Great Ice Hockey box, when the prize just came in a plain card box, so I don't think we can determine which Sports Pad was given away as a prize from the promotion picture. Your theory that they were getting rid of unsold stock does sound plausible though.

 

Famitsu #43 Published 88.02.05

 

I've just had a thought as I'm making some pages for a couple web designers, Yukinobu Ushio and Noriko Sanda. It would make sense to link, on their pages, the websites they're credited for designing, right?

So, Sanda would have links to
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://osharemajo.com/
https://archives.sega.jp/3d/
http://archives.sega.jp/segaages/

Bit less sure what to do with Ushio since his only explicit web design credit, the Mega Drive Mini, has several other designers, whereas Sanda's Production credits only list her for web design.

Not sure whether to file these under External links or a separate section for Web designs.

 

I'd go with the latter.

 

For what it's worth, if you look up "グレートアイスホッケー" on Google images, you get a few photos that look like this:

As in, auction sites pairing the US-style Sports Pad with the Japanese cart of Great Ice Hockey. Not exactly "scientific" but given there aren't any pairings with the smaller pad, I'd say it's quite likely what was advertised was what they got (well except for the fact the cartridge shipped in a plain white cardboard box).

 

RE: Takenobu Mitsuyoshi sings football themes:


I should have spotted this sooner, but bleh. Sega Worldwide Soccer 97's menu theme is a Sega Saturn classic, which I knew was shamelessly lifted from Victory Goal 96. What I didn't realise was that it had lyrics:



Composed by Jun Senoue, back when his music used to improve games.

All this time, SWWS has been playing "vic-tory gooaaaal" in the background. They also played this live at concerts.

 

What I think is funny about Takenobu Mitsuyoshi and WCCF is that it's really his longest-running series, unless you extend his Virtua Fighter precense through voice acting Kage-Maru past Virtua Fighter 3. Daytona's what he's known for and his entries stretch over 34 years, but it's very occasional stuff and usually it's just archive vocals and remixed compositions. Meanwhile, as far as I know he's worked on every WCCF entry from 2001, with specific references to 2001-2002, 2002-2003, 2006-2007, 2011-2012, 2017-2018 and FOOTISTA 2019.

Here's a song I thought of, this was the 10th anniversary opening theme, for 2011-2012. Except, they released it on WORLD CLUB Champion Football 10th ANNIVERSARY BEST Vol.1 in July 2012, and 2011-2012 didn't come out until November 2012. Sneak preview at the new game.




2011-2012 also started adding different genre arrangements of the main theme as goal jingles you could download from WCCF.NET, then arrangements of classical music, then jingles from other R&D 1 games like maimai, Answer x Answer Live!, CODE OF JOKER and Sengoku Taisen, then spreading out to shoot button sound effects and voices. Checking so many spread out jingles across SEGA's YouTube channel can be a pain, so a while back I compiled them all in a playlist, in their upload order (how did this devolve into a plug?)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5ZqsL0gi2E0r0F_DFrvxiZMPSkJiLDiB

 

Beatiful intro. Shows how beatiful football can be. Thank you Mitsuyoshi san

 

Excellent news - Sega's official records through the Wayback Machine only go up to 2015-2016 Ver. 2.0. Most of Ver. 3.0 is missing, then after that, the site breaks.

No really:
http://www.wccf.jp/card/
While Sega still hosts the WCCF website (for the 2017-2018 season - the last one before Footista) none of the pages actually show lists of cards. I thought this was just poor maintenance since the game is old now, but no, turns out this was broken as far back as the 2016-2017 season, and the Wayback Machine has stored the breakages (did nobody at Sega notice? Or is it some quirk with not being in Japan?).

Anyway that's over 1000 cards unaccounted for.

It's still possible to build a list, just that we'll need scans of books or magazines or whatever to do so (or search for each card individually - fun fun fun). Basically, when people assume everything ever written is being saved by someone somewhere, here's some proof that it isn't.


What about Footista then? Well this uses a different system and is a little more complicated - every player has their own upgrade card and for some inconceivable reason, its website doesn't list card numbers, making it a needless faff to mirror useful data. They did, however, put out lists as PDF files - I think the internet is missing one from 2019, but at least there's some idea of what to look for.

 

bored now

World Club Champion Football: Serie A 2001-2002/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Serie A 2002-2003/Cards
World Club Champion Football: European Clubs 2004-2005/Cards
World Club Champion Football: European Clubs 2005-2006/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2006-2007/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2007-2008/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2008-2009/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2009-2010/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2010-2011/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2010-2011/Cards/Ver. 2.0
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2011-2012/Cards
World Club Champion Football: Intercontinental Clubs 2011-2012/Cards/Ver. 2.0
World Club Champion Football 2012-2013/Cards
World Club Champion Football 2012-2013/Cards/Ver. 2.0
World Club Champion Football 2013-2014/Cards
World Club Champion Football 2013-2014/Cards/Ver. 2.0
World Club Champion Football 2013-2014/Cards/Ver. 3.0
World Club Champion Football 2015-2016/Cards
World Club Champion Football 2015-2016/Cards/Ver. 2.0
World Club Champion Football 2015-2016/Cards/Ver. 3.0

I have upgraded Retro's WCCF coverage from "basically nothing" to "a tiny bit". This included sourcing 153 football logos... even though it turns out some technically aren't used by WCCF this was perhaps unnecessary. But whatever, you've got them now.


Things I heave learnt:

- The Wayback Machine will temporarily block you if you use it "too much". I had to resort to using proxy servers. That is terrible.

- Football is not well documented. Well okay, the games are, but the clubs, not so much. When I'm trying to find period-accurate logos, there's conflicting documentation, forcing me to work out a timeline on my own. This means we're probably now better than sites that specialise in this stuff.

- There's a policy on Wikipedia to resize non-free logos because of some fair use clause I don't understand. People have resized vector logos to comply. Vector logos.

- It is surprisingly difficult to find an accurate England logo. Wikipedia can't always be trusted because people like to trace raster images, but... shouldn't it be really easy to find an England logo? Also Argentina just won a world cup - why is it a struggle to find their logo?

- In addition to WCCF featuring national teams as well as clubs, some players don't have teams assigned at all.

- WCCF refers to England as "The Three Lions". I'm not sure anyone actually calls it that. Also they're leopards.

- These games, and indeed most of the internet, are horrendously inconsistent when it comes to naming clubs. So you'll probably find Sega's official lists don't match the cards, which don't match the real club names. Because nobody has eyes.

- These pages take so long to load, and the loop limit is set so low, that this whole exercise might have been a gigantic waste of time.

 

Doing some rounds on places I haven't been to for a while:

https://www.smspower.org/forums/19795-SEGAMasterSystemDutchLanguageSheets

Something we were missing - extra Dutch "manuals" for Master System games. Nothing particularly unusual, but something to make note of.

In some cases though we've already documented "Benelux" versions of games, the Netherlands being the "NE" in "BeNElux". According to us, they came with little orange stickers, but a quick check of the Dutch ebay and there isn't an orange sticker in sight.

https://www.ebay.nl/itm/38624063056...DdR5oSjjfHcMB4H/4vxeee3Q==|tkp:Bk9SR5aghuTyYg
...and yet some of these are clearly Dutch versions.

Looks like we've got some undocumented variants.

 

Yeah those manuals were added by the Benelux distributor before Sega added Dutch to the PAL manuals in 1991 (worth noting that the majority of Belgians also speak Dutch as a first language). There should be Dutch variants for all of the games listed here unless they didn't get released in Benelux for some reason. The same thing happened in Sweden, but as Sega added Swedish in 1989 there are less of those. I've also seen Finnish ones (also added by Sega in 1991), but I don't think anyone has made a list., they're pretty rare.

Ebay doesn't seem to be popular in Netherlands, it just seems to be mostly professional resellers who don't necessarily get their stock from just the Netherlands. I always had better luck looking for Dutch variants on marktplaats.nl. Looking on there now most don't have the orange sticker, so I guess they only put those on for a brief period. Of the few that did have the sticker one also has a retailer sticker helpfully showing that it was sold in Volendam, at least confirming that they were sold in Netherlands

 

Triple post ... site playing up

Edit: Might as well use this post for something, Finnish Super Tennis manual;





Edit 2: Looking for more I came across what looks like a Finnish rental version;

 

I was getting sick of not being able to find things, so I cooked up Category:Sports games by subgenre. I have no intention of splitting other types of game into "sub-genres" - I just figured since golf =/= tennis =/= basketball, it might be nice for Sega Retro to make a distinction.

Also known as, "I've uploaded all these football logos for WCCF, where else on the wiki can I use them?" Turns out... nowhere!

It's different for NFL/NHL/NBA or your American sport of choice - the publisher just acquires once license from the sport's governing body, and seemingly all the official branding becomes available. In (proper) football you're negotiating with national associations and FIFA, and in the 1990s, very few publishers went all the way (thought to be fair, maybe if you're planning to support 100+ teams, there's not enough physical space for all the logos). So you might have a team dressed in red and white calling itself "Manchester United", but it might not be the Manchester United.


Anyway in my quest to confirm whether games had the correct licensing, I came across a weird one.



SWWS 2000 has loads of club teams, but just lists them as text. Most of the shirts lack sponsors, but it's hard to see if they're otherwise accurate as it's a 23-year-old Dreamcast game. It would lead me to believe that the game isn't officially licensed by the bodies in charge, though even if Sega were playing fast and loose with the rules, I'm not sure anyone was likely to care.

This demo version (from Dream On Volume 5) is a bit different though. It only has three teams, and they built a special menu to select between them:



You can select between Arsenal (England), Saint-Étienne (France) and Sampdoria (Italy) - three teams Sega were sponsoring in real life at the time. Their logos appear in this demo - they don't in the full game.



Nothing else seems to be much different - the demo itself claims the full version is "out now", but the use of these logos could mean could mean the demo is licensed but the full game isn't. Or the full game was only licensed by three clubs. Or something else.


Another weird thing in the demo which I couldn't be bothered to search for in the final game - there are signs saying "ENGLAND 2006". This refers to England's bid to host the 2006 World Cup (which went to Germany). Developers Silicon Dreams was a British company, but you're selling this thing across borders, and it feels like the thing the governing bodies would have picked up on. Or nobody cared.

 

Something vaguely interesting for those who might be keeping track:

I built a system on Sega Retro that renders period-correct country flags if you provide a date. There haven't been too many radical flag changes (at least, for countries likely to be represented in 90s video games), but hey, it's kind-of neat.

I got caught out by FIFA International Soccer: Championship Edition though.



This iteration of FIFA has South Africa. I had been lazy with the dates and just put "1994", but that put up the apartheid-era flag, which clearly this game doesn't use. South Africa adopted their current flag on 27 April 1994, this iteration of FIFA was released in June 1994.

Bearing in mind the game would have gone gold some weeks prior to launch, that's not a big window to update the flag. I'd put money on this maybe being the first video game to feature South Africa's new flag (and given, you know, apartheid, maybe the first video game to feature South Africa full stop (though don't quote me on that)).

I mean sure the flag is technically wrong because there should be some white in there but shut up

 

Riddle me this

We're claiming the Game Gear versions of NBA Jam and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition feature 2-player modes compatible with the Gear-to-Gear cable. The boxes say they're single-player games, I can't see an obvious 2-player option, but some magazine reviews seem to think 2-player is supported.

Who is wrong?