General Questions and Information Thread

Useless trivia of the day:

There are tiny evolutions in European Mega Drive II packaging. Ignore the differing pack-in stuff - we don't have that many images yet.


mid-1993 (white start buttons)


late 1993 (red start buttons and miscoloured Finnish subheading)


mid-1995


late-1996



Obviously the key giveaway is the list of advertised games, but now you can identify a console's year based on where the letters of "video game console" intersect with the grid. Because you'll want to do that - it's an important life skill.

 

We need more obsessive people.



Apparently there are 25 of these defaced Dreamcasts. Each one of these will be uniquely stupid - a very quick google search yeilds 5 of them, probably due to the fact that people are desperate to sell.


Ultra mega bonus points if Retro can find them all :specialed:

 

Question (since nobody answered it on the wiki):

is "achievements" platform-neutral enough? For describing the Xbox-style achievements/PlayStation trophy thing.


On Sega Retro I used the term "rewards" the other day (Jet Set Radio/Rewards) and would like to start pushing for better documentation of these things. When the achievement pages on Sonic Retro were made, trophies didn't exist, so I thought, given the current climate, it might be sensible not to skew things towards the Xbox side.

What I hadn't counted on was other platforms having similar systems. Has everything non-Sony converged on "acheivements" or is "rewards" a better fit. Or is there a better noun than all of these?

 

They're generally called "achievements" in common speech; "rewards" usually describes things like unlockable content.

 

I believe iPhone also uses "achievements".

 

Fair enough, achievements it is!

 

I can put up achievement pictures from Xbox from the games I've completed but I have no idea how to get pictures from PlayStation for the platinum trophy images.

It was Jim that did that when me and him were doing it on the Retro wiki.

 

I'm guessing the tools probably don't exist yet to extract raw textures from each game - placeholders from PS3/PS4 screengrabs are better than nothing.

 

You can get the trophy pictures from sites such as psnprofiles.com.

 

Thanks to recent extension triumphs, Sega Retro is now officially Metacritic:

SG-1000

Master System

Mega Drive

Mega-CD

32X

Game Gear

Saturn

Dreamcast

as long as you ignore the fact that right now the best Dreamcast games are controllers (and it's not parsing apostrophes properly), it could make for some interesting reading.


The more magazine scans on Retro CDN that are linked up to pages, the more accurate these lists will get. And then, just like Metacritic, you can completely ignore the numbers and judge games by your own personal experiences and tastes. Be your own men/women!

 

Another task to share:

Category:People known only by an alias

Here's a bunch of people credited in old Sega games. We don't know who they are - do you know who they are?


There are plenty of others to come, but our wiki software has yet to process everything. Sill, enough to get you started am i rite

 

In the latest in "questions nobody will answer":

What is the "SEEDY lounge"? Or the "SEEDY crew"?


This is something credited in a whole bunch of Sega manuals, but I don't know what it is.

 

What era?

There was a Pioneer SEED TV in the SG-1000 era

 

US-published Sega Saturn (and at least one Mega Drive) game(s) between 1995 to 1998-ish. I was thinking it might have something to do with compact discs as well, but it could also be an acronym for something.




(p.s. developers were worthless in 1983 - you don't see Japanese credits in SG-1000 games)

 

I vaguely remember this in the news but it's always fun to revisit:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/716237.stm


When we say the PlayStation 2 was hyped up beyond reasonable expectations, this is probably the peak.


This is genuinely how the fight was played back in 2000. Dreamcast games run at a 640x480 resolution. The PlayStation 2 is so powerful that it could kill people and start global conflicts.

Which would you buy?

 

Undocumented tat of the day



In Japan they have this concept of a "medal game". It's a bit like gambling, except rather than use real money, you use tokens (or "medals" because nuts to the English language I guess). Here's one inside something else. In Bolshevik red or something.


Remember when Sega made a Japanese-exclusive board game for the 1990 TV show Twin Peaks? Well it happened.

 

Man... You're a rarities "magnet" ... great find... Twin Peaks was a successful tv show, at the time... my mother never missed an episode (she even bought the spin-off novel "The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer"... the book has sold well ) ... i bet that, if they had released this board game in the west , it would sell well too, given the success of the tv show... and being a board game made by Sega... I think that, to get one of these, we'll have to pay a "small fortune"... and it will be difficult to find one... it's a good item for collectors...

 

RE:

The Seedy Crew

You can thank Congo the Movie: The Lost City of Zinj for this one.