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kitsunebi's talking to himself again


kitsunebi

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8 minutes ago, lytron said:

 

First part: Imagine I'm a gamer who owns whether DDP nor SMB USA and I read that review in the Famitsu. My conclusion would be: I can pick up DDP which should be a bit cheaper by the time now and get the same game sans plumber for a cheaper price.

On these sports games, I would consider it fair to the customer if reviewers would handle it the same way. These games get dirt-cheap for a reason after a year. And every now and then, there is a (graphical) overhaul and maybe a tweaking of the game mechanics which may give a good reason to bump the score a bit up again, but generally, I think there is nothing bad in pointing out one gets sold the same game over and over again.

But I think these sports licence games (Madden, NBA, FIFA etc.) are a bad example to win me over. I think they are an evil that needs to be purged from mankind.

Right, as I said, pointing out those sort of things in the review is fair and responsible.  But since they aren't about the quality of the game itself, I don't think  it should affect the score. 

Btw, I don't like sports at all, but for some reason I enjoyed a lot of sports games when I was a kid.  Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Ice hockey etc.  But I understand your feelings.  Personally, I can't comprehend how anyone could find pleasure in driving a car and calling it a game.  Gran Turismo?  Urgghh...  But I can accept the fact that if you are the sort of person who finds cars more interesting than any other kind of tool or appliance (Screwdriver: The Game!  TOASTER OVEN: THE GAME!!!) then it would stand to reason that a game that simulates driving a car well should be scored accordingly.  To each his own.:) 

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1 hour ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Right, as I said, pointing out those sort of things in the review is fair and responsible.  But since they aren't about the quality of the game itself, I don't think  it should affect the score. 

Btw, I don't like sports at all, but for some reason I enjoyed a lot of sports games when I was a kid.  Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Ice hockey etc.  But I understand your feelings.  Personally, I can't comprehend how anyone could find pleasure in driving a car and calling it a game.  Gran Turismo?  Urgghh...  But I can accept the fact that if you are the sort of person who finds cars more interesting than any other kind of tool or appliance (Screwdriver: The Game!  TOASTER OVEN: THE GAME!!!) then it would stand to reason that a game that simulates driving a car well should be scored accordingly.  To each his own.:) 

Generally: Yes. But not for sports games. They have to be burned. All of them.

Serious time: I myself had a real fun time playing Fifa 98 with a classmate (in the early 2000s), so there is definitely a good reason for those games to exist. My problem is more of philosophical nature: It's actually shovelware. Not because of its quality, but because of the fact that its the same game sold over and over again with the least effort put into it. But its not actually shovelware because it still sells well.

But the points of criticism to that are obvious to me, too: It's a well-functioning game; if it gets bought by many, then there is actually a demand for this; and, of course: No one forces me to buy it, so what's the deal? I think my antipathy to... not sports-games, but their production schedule... is rooted in the way I want to see video games. I don't want to tap into this whole contrived discussion of "video games as art", so I phrase it a bit different: To me, video games are a perfect way to conserve feelings. Maybe that's why I say I love RPGs, even though I rarely play them anymore and can't stand their gameplay most of the time. Story-focussed games like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Evermore contain certain locations I always wished to experience, and I think this stuck with me.

Maybe my stance is understandable when considered from that point of view. Because these annual sports games are more planned as a consumable and easily disposable item. Like toilet paper.

But this over-emotional connection to video games as "time capsules of feelings" is what copulates me in the sphincter, because of mobile games that disappear easily, because of digital releases that easily disappear (i.e. P.T.), because of belated digital updates to physical releases which make the physical release playable in the first place (i. e. No Man's Sky), because of updates that break things you love about a game (i.e. the whole WoW Cataclysm story... I'm glad I was never into that game) and so on.

When you say you can't comprehend the merits of racing games, I hold myself back from breaking down what I think are their strength, since I expect you meant it like "I know what others like about it, it just never clicked with me." To me, I was always too bad at these games to have fun with them.

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4 hours ago, lytron said:

DOUBLE POST! <

I just went through the first 1.000 auctions of Famitsus and collected another bunch of Tables of Contents, plus maybe a lemmings special you haven't in the database yet...? Maybe you can use it.

I've actually been ignoring all of the Famitsu supplements (like that Lemmings issue) and focusing on regular mags that were on sale.  There are tons of those little free strategy guide supplements that came packaged together with the mag, but it's very difficult at this point to know which issue they came with.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Would you pay $50 for a magazine?  A new one, mind you, not the premier issue of EGM.

As I work on the database for Dengeki G's Festival, it becomes exceedingly clear that Japanese gaming mags can succeed in ways that Western mags never could.  The magazine itself was perhaps secondary to the swag that came packaged with it, and the issue prices ranged from $20-$50 depending on what stuff was packed in.  Included goods could be anything from sticker sets to playing cards, jigsaw puzzles, mouse pads, tapestries, bed sheets, towels, body pillow covers, or plastic figurines, and everything including the actual mag was contained in a box.  That's right, magazines sold in boxes.  It wasn't just special issues, either.  It was every single issue. 

Madness.

Image result for 電撃G's Festival! 付録
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Did that magazine come out every month? I wouldn't pay that ever month since that would get unaffordable real fast. And with Japan being a small country with less cost and logistics needed for shipping, that $20-$50 would easy turn into $40-$80 in North America just to deal with the vast area the magazine would need to be shipped to. Plus the cost of importing all those good from China is probably more costly than it is for Japan to import from there.

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8 hours ago, E-Day said:

Did that magazine come out every month? I wouldn't pay that ever month since that would get unaffordable real fast. And with Japan being a small country with less cost and logistics needed for shipping, that $20-$50 would easy turn into $40-$80 in North America just to deal with the vast area the magazine would need to be shipped to. Plus the cost of importing all those good from China is probably more costly than it is for Japan to import from there.

It was irregular but usually came out every other month.  This particular mag focused on one or two games per issue, and all of the extra stuff pertained to those games, so I imagine you only bought the issues featuring games/characters you really cared about.  And of course these are games made for adults, so presumably the target audience is a bunch of grown-ass super-nerds with plenty of disposable income.

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By the way, since this is my thread (mwahahamaniacal.png), I figure this is as good a place as any to mention that I've been adding TOC scans to a lot of mags in the DB recently.  They're probably going to go forever unseen, since I'm not uploading them as gallery pics, so they won't show up anywhere as a new image.  All of my (currently) 8,332 image uploads are actual covers (or advertisements) -- no filler pictures of random stuff padding that number -- and I'd like to keep it that way.  So since a table of contents isn't a cover, I'm just pasting them directly into the item description rather than upload them to a gallery.  Unless you actually click on the database page for that issue, you'll never even know they're there. 

But at any rate, I've added contents to a bunch of the aforementioned Dengeki G's Festival mags, as well as Dengeki G's Festival Comic, and I'm currently adding them to Dengeki G's Magazine.  Not that I expect anyone to really read them or care, but since I have access to them, I figure why not add them?

7sv2bmyz.jpg

 

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2 hours ago, E-Day said:

I never quite figured out pasting an image into a post or into a description field, which is pretty lame since I am supposed to be one of the people helping to run the site. What did you do to get it to work the way it does?

No tricks.  Just drag and drop from wherever you have the file saved, and RM will upload a copy locally.  The file has to be less than .5MB though, which is kind of lame (no restriction like that in the galleries).  Luckily, these TOC pics don't need to be 600dpi to serve their purpose.

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Kitsunebi77 - Do you own most of these Dengeki Festival magazines? I am wondering if I have the opportunity to get any of these if I should buy and hold them until they are allowed on the site.

I recently bought two Tech Gian issues that will be allowed next year that I will probably use as my inaugural uploads.

 

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4 hours ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Kitsunebi77 - Do you own most of these Dengeki Festival magazines? I am wondering if I have the opportunity to get any of these if I should buy and hold them until they are allowed on the site.

I recently bought two Tech Gian issues that will be allowed next year that I will probably use as my inaugural uploads.

 

I don't own a single one, actually.  I've still got about 30 Dengeki G's Engine/G's Magazine issues and about 40 Tech Gian issues left to scan, but no G's Festivals.  All of the issues I own of those mags are allowed now, so if you have newer stuff, it won't overlap with mine.

Keep in mind, unlike Dengeki G's Magazine or Dengeki G's Festival! Comic, Dengeki G's Festival! was mainly sold to collectors interested in the character goods included in the box.  The mag itself (as you can see from the TOCs I posted) is quite short.   Unless you really want an anime girl pillowcase or set of trading cards or whatever, it isn't worth it in my opinion.

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  • 2 months later...

I don't normally waste everyone's time telling you what I'll be scanning next, but in this case I just wanted to make it clear that although I'll be working on Whiskcat's donated mags for the foreseeable future, the issue of Play Online I just posted had been sitting there half-edited since before the winter break and I wanted to finish it up so I could get get rid of the pile of pages on my desk.

Now that it's out of the way, it's nothing but blissfully short English-language mags for a while.  Seriously, do these things ever crack 100 pages?:lol: (yes, I know there were exceptions)

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13 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I don't normally waste everyone's time telling you what I'll be scanning next, but in this case I just wanted to make it clear that although I'll be working on Whiskcat's donated mags for the foreseeable future, the issue of Play Online I just posted had been sitting there half-edited since before the winter break and I wanted to finish it up so I could get get rid of the pile of pages on my desk.

Now that it's out of the way, it's nothing but blissfully short English-language mags for a while.  Seriously, do these things ever crack 100 pages?:lol: (yes, I know there were exceptions)

What all did Whiskcat send you? I'm excited! :)

*huggles*
Areala

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I actually saw someone selling a bunch of Login magazines on Yahoo auctions that had been debound with a heat gun.  I can only assume whoever it was scanned them before selling the pages (I kind of doubt anyone actually bought them), but I've never seen those issues go up anywhere, so they must have done it just to have a personal copy (Japan is weird)

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For those that want the TLDR version: too bad there isn't one.  Man up or get out.:P

Anyone who's been here knows that my personal passion and greatest contribution to the site is in filling out our databases and image galleries.  I'm sure most people would prefer I spent that time contributing scans (at 9200 images uploaded thus far, that would be the equivalent of quite a few magazine scans, especially since the time it takes me to acquire/edit a single cover is significantly longer than the time it takes to scan/edit a single magazine page), but I personally get no satisfaction from scanning/editing.  It's extremely boring work, and at the end of it all, all I have to show for it is a digital duplicate of a magazine I just destroyed.  At best, that could be seen as trading one thing for an equivalent thing, but by most people's standards, it equates to doing a whole lot of work and ending up with less than you started with. 

Which is not to say I won't keep scanning.  At the very least, I'll be doing the donated issues in the pic a few posts up ASAP (how fast that will be remains to be seen, but I could never take on the impossibly huge donations that some people unload around here, since I'd feel too guilty if I couldn't get them scanned within a reasonable amount of time.)

But currently, my interests lie in fleshing out our Japanese database.  When I came here, the Japanese DB consisted of nothing but Neo Geo Freak and maybe 15 covers.  Now we have 31 Japanese magazine categories (not counting subcategories) comprised of 3915 issues and 2663 covers (and that number will probably increase in a few hours:P).

And I haven't even gotten started.  Seriously, in the past week I've added Colorful Apex, Puregirl, Colorful Puregirl, P-Mate, and PC Dolphin.  And I've got a list of 110 more magazines to add to the database (at least, that's what's on my constantly expanding to-do list).  I expect Japanese mags to easily surpass the total amount of USA mags in our database before the year is out, and eventually to surpass the total number UK mags as well.

This is exciting to me not because these mags are all going to be scanned (are you @#$%ing KIDDING me???)  It's because, as the guy spending countless hours tracking down all the information and covers necessary to do this from every obscure darkened corner of the internet, I can tell you that there's no other website in the world where you'll be able to find out so much about Japanese gaming mags - not in Japan, not anywhere.  I can imagine a time when someone in Japan is writing a book on the history of Japanese gaming mags, and Retromags will be a primary resource.  Of course, I've got another bajillion mags to add first...:blink:

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 The work you do on that section is a good example for others new and current members that you don't have to scan to contribute. What you do is just as much preservation as scanning an issue  of a magazine. We need the info on the magazines just as much as the scans of them.

 Personally I'd rather you fill the databases with this info than scanning the odd magazine. It's invaluable. :)

 But with that load you just got scan those before you slow down.;)

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On 11/8/2017 at 4:25 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

No tricks.  Just drag and drop from wherever you have the file saved, and RM will upload a copy locally.  The file has to be less than .5MB though, which is kind of lame (no restriction like that in the galleries).  Luckily, these TOC pics don't need to be 600dpi to serve their purpose.

Just increased it 4x to 2048kb, let me know if that is enough :)

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CapBon and Dengeki GB Advance galleries complete and added to the DB.  That's one title that was on my list and one that wasn't, so the list stands at 110 titles left to add (I'm positive it will be more, though.)

In related news, browsing Yahoo Auctions in search of additional titles to add to the list is treading dangerous waters.  Will not buy more mags [slaps face] NO MORE MAGS!

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