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Happy Birthday! Here's a guide to 1985's Xanadu (Dragon Slayer II) from Nihon Falcom, which to this day is still the best-selling computer RPG of all time in Japan. https://archive.org/details/XanaduDatabookVol.1

THANK YOU!!! My name is Brian Lesyk (a.k.a. CIVICMINDED) and I wanted to sincerely thank each and every one of you who contributed to reimbursing me for the shipping costs incurred when I recently donated my video game collection to Retromags. It was a much-appreciated and heartwarming surprise to see so many of you pitch in to help support this initiative. Quick story... My wife and I bought our first home together three and a half years ago. During that time, I've been steadily converting my basement into a gaming room. My nearly four-decade collection of video game paraphernalia has been stored there since. About two years ago, the home's original hot water heater sprang a small leak and damaged a relatively small portion of my video game magazine collection. Nonetheless, I was heartbroken. That's when I stumbled across Retromags online video game magazine repository. I was delighted to see how comprehensive their library was and how well the site was run. I was able to recuperate some of my collection in digital form and have been a fervent supporter of theirs ever since. In the time since I discovered Retromags, I began to wonder about the status of my remaining physical collection. Despite being in practically mint condition, I was finally faced with some realities. My collection took up far too much space and I wasn't really reading through them much anymore. Basically, the collection became so big that I couldn't find anything I wanted despite being well organized. I was essentially hording. So, three things crept into my head: 1) Getting rid of all of these boxes could free-up some necessary space in my gaming room, 2) digitizing this massive collection would be a benefit to the gaming community (and myself), and 3) I felt that Retromags is THE trusted source and curator for this sort of thing. Though it was bittersweet watching the freight company haul away my life's collection on a pallet jack down my driveway and into a truck, it gave me great solace in knowing that the gaming community would maybe benefit from it just as I did. As I mentioned, my collection began decades ago. It started when I was about eight years old and followed me through college...through multiple cities and apartments...it eventually followed me home...and soon, it will be in your hands. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. Personally, I very much look forward to re-discovering much it in its digital format. It's exciting to know that my collection will join the many collections that all of you have contributed over the years, too. If you receive a fraction of the enjoyment in my collection as I have received from yours, I know my decision was the right one to make. Again, thank you all for your tremendous support! I am genuinely humbled and your generosity will not be forgotten. Sincerely, Brian

From June 1986, here's another guide to the PC-98 edition of the original Wizardry. https://archive.org/details/WizardryPlayingManual

Here's the game without which there might never have been a Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy. The most influential game the West has ever foisted upon Japan? Indeed. Originally released in 1981 in the USA, this guide covers the 1985 release for the PC-98 in Japan. https://archive.org/details/WizardryHandbook

As someone who has always edited my own scans, this doesn't really affect me, but it DOES bother me to see scans being released where the scanner and editor are different people, yet only the editor gets any credit when a "like" or "thanks" button is pressed. This seems to me an injustice. Sure, the editor typically puts in more effort, but that doesn't mean they could have done it without the work of the scanner. For that matter, if the magazine was a donation, the donator should be thanked, as well. I doubt it's possible with the software as is, but it sure would be nice if pressing the "thanks" or "like" button on a file's download page simultaneously gave reputation points to the scanner, editor, and donator (if there is one.) Could this possibly be implemented (perhaps with a mod)?

Here's a second guide to Nihon Falcom's megahit RPG Xanadu. This one's from 1986 and is nice and colorful with lots of artwork and a cool bonus at the end of the guide - a cut-out board game. https://archive.org/details/XanaduFile_201904/page/n11

Sometimes an image in a magazine stretches across two or more pages (with a fold-out poster, it could be up to 9 pages). Editing them back into a seamless image is something of a pain, but here are some tips. Debinding For this example, we're going to use a two-page spread from a glue-bound magazine, since that's more of a challenge than a stapled mag. First of all, this is what a glue-bound page looks like when removed using heat: All of those holes on the right side of the image are where the page is glued to the spine. The page has not been torn - those small pieces of the page simply aren't there to begin with (or rather, were removed during the binding process). This is as perfectly complete as you can possibly get when debinding a glue-bound mag. All of those holes are going to have to be filled in during editing. But this method of debinding is absolutely necessary if you want a seamless join. Suppose you had saved a few minutes and debound this magazine with a paper cutter, slicing away the spine and gutter. This would be the result: Looks fine, right? Yes, it looks perfectly good, and the small loss of image on the far right might be acceptable if this was a single-page image. But if you try to join two pages that have been similarly debound using a paper cutter, you can see that the image is not going to look seamless at all: Fixing the image at this point is pretty much impossible, since there is simply too much information missing (indeed, an actual paper slicer is almost definitely going to crop off even more than I did for this example picture). Because of course, this is actually what the two pages look like side by side after being debound with a slicer: ALL of that space in the center needs to be filled in order for the picture to look good. Suddenly those tiny holes from a heat-debound mag don't look so bad, eh? Editing: When joining images in Photoshop, you will be extremely reliant upon a handy feature called the "content-aware fill tool." First, you'll want to fill in all of those holes on the gutter side of each page. Sometimes this is very easy. If a page has nothing but solid color or very simple shapes with straight lines extending to the edge, you can usually just select the length of the gutter side with a rectangle tool, use the content-aware fill tool, and presto - you're done. This is what you will do with most pages which don't actually have images reaching all the way into the gutter. When joining images across multiple pages however, using the rectangle tool across the length of the page when selecting the area to be filled will make the image harder to match up with the facing page since it will alter all of the space between the holes as well. Look at the following pair of pictures carefully and you'll see that the image on the right isn't quite what it should be after having the selected rectangular area filled in: The answer, of course, is to use the lasso tool to select each hole individually, and using the content-aware fill on those holes only, leaving as much of the original image as possible intact. The next step is to line up the pictures as closely as possible. They will almost never align perfectly, so you will likely end up with some empty space at the top or bottom of one of the pages that will need to be filled, again, using the content-aware fill tool: Next comes detail work, using the fill tool (or sometimes the clone stamp) to more seamlessly blend areas that don't quite match up: Often times, the angle of one page will be slightly different that that of the other. Getting them both to align perfectly is almost impossible, so another trick worth experimenting with, particularly when it comes to straight lines that don't quite line up from one page to the next, is the warp tool: (After warping the image, you'll want to use the fill tool or possibly clone stamp to fix the warped pattern of the color dots in the background). Saving And finally, when you've got your image joined to your satisfaction, simply select one half of it (one page), cut and paste it into a separate window, apply any level adjustments, and save. Then with the remaining half, crop the area where the second page was by zooming way in to make sure you get the crop pixel perfect so that the pages will look seamless when viewed in two-page mode in a CBR reader: (select one page) (cut it away and paste it in a different window) (Zoom in to crop) Be sure to use the exact same level adjustments on both pages. You could do this before splitting the images apart, or course, but it's likely that you'll have already created an action set that will adjust levels, resize and save your image all with a single button press, in which case, you'll want to wait until the images have been split before performing the action. Voilà!! Now you see why editing can take so damn long if done well!

Retromags Presents! Tips & Tricks Issue 047 (January 1999) Database Record Download Directly! Scanned By: Phillyman    Edited By: E-Day    Uploaded By: E-Day Subscribe to our New Release Feedburner email!  

You should have linked to it! http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/forgotten_interview_with_miyamoto_sheds_light_on_a_classic_zelda_production

threw in my contribution

There are also a bunch of scans that are very old and can use an updated version. A lot of the early Nintendo Power issues fall into that category I think. The majority of my own stuff that I have to scan is GamePro and a small number of original run Game Player's. Phillyman has so much stuff and so many boxes, he doesn't even know what he has Once Game Stop ceases to exist and/or Game Informer goes down, we can probably revisit that publication.

Amazing collection! This needs front page attention.