kitsunebi

1 minute ago, 2nasty said:

oops it a accident i cant figure out how to take it off haha sorry about ur rep

It's a stupid button that I would remove if I could.  I think it's meant to be used for punishing trolls for making hurtful/racist comments and the like...which should really be the jobs of moderators.  But it sometimes gets used as a "dislike" button, which in other forums is often used by someone AGREEING with you about disliking something. Here, though, it permanently subtracts one point of rep from the original poster, so it's kind of more like a "I dislike YOU" button.

This year is a tragedy no matter where you look.

Only this time, you're gonna have to look RRREAAALLLY close if you want to make out that 1.15 inch screen.

So who thinks it's worth paying $200 to play 16 Game Gear "classics" on a screen the size of a postage stamp?

Anyone?

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/segas-tiny-game-gear-micro-is-92-smaller-than-the-original/

I...did not know this was a game.

3 hours ago, JonnyCGood said:

https://archive.org/details/wizardry-gaiden-2-imaginations-guide-book/mode/2up

I uploaded Wizardry Gaiden 2 guidebook. Now did you have this book and were planning on uploading it or maybe uploaded it before and I missed? Asking because I don't want duplications.

Not sure if I had it or not (I never looked at any of those guides until I uploaded them, at which point I deleted them), but I'm positive I never uploaded it -  I can't stand scans where facing pages are saved as a single jpg.

20 minutes ago, ml0045 said:

This has been brought before but the amount of ads and sparse content like actual guides which covered very little for games in USA magazines was its biggest con.

Yeah, the USA magazine (RIP) was a casualty of the USA's geography.  The logistics of shipping magazines across an area that wide makes if astronomically more expensive than in a country the size of Japan.

If over 1/3 of the population of the USA lived in California, that's Japan in a nutshell.  Sure California is still big (as states go), but if it had 126 million people living there, that's a very densely populated location.  Mags wouldn't have to be shipped nearly so far, nor to anywhere near the number of different locations as if they were serving the entire continental USA.  So the publishers can afford to publish their mags without as much dependence on ad revenue.

Also, unlike American mags, Japanese magazine publishers are the same publishers making all the strategy guides, and most times, the games as well.  So a mag like Famitsu, published by ASCII, and later Kadokawa (which publishes almost all Japanese game mags still in print today, and has its own games division as well), is full of all kinds of cross promotion.  They can write about the games that their own company publishes, and also print multi-part strategy guides in their issues for those games, which they can then collect in book form and publish as separate strategy guides as well.  So you've got games, magazines, and guides all made by the same publisher - it makes keeping your mag in print way more feasible, even without the previously mentioned advantage of Japan's geographical advantage.

I agree, most western mags are trash as well (well, the video game ones, anyway.)  Hence the extremely small selection of mags I listed which I don't mind reading, all of which were made by the same group of writers and editors, and none of which cover video games.

I'm not sure I'd fault mags for trying to sell me stuff and then praise developer interviews all in the same argument, though. What is any sane developer gonna do but hype their own games?

Retrospective reviews/interviews can be interesting, since at that point the game has been released and its merits laid bare to the world.  But I'm not very interested in anything written or spoken about games still in development since most of it is either speculation or hype.  I understand that some people like to pore over that stuff years later looking for clues to things that might have been in development but changed before the game was released, but "what might have been" has never held much fascination for me, unless there's a chance that it will some day come to light.  (Hello, Snyder cut!)

I feel the same way about film documentaries.  Something documenting the production of a film, created during the filming, will bore me to tears - I see no value in listening to yet another storyboard artist/set designer/cg artist/composer/director/whoever tell me how they do their job while discussing a film that none of them have even seen yet.  But a new documentary made about a film from decades ago can be fascinating, since they focus much less on the nuts and bolts of how the film was made and spend more time on talking about what made that film so special that people are still interested in it decades later.

EDITed to add: That reminds me, anyone who has any fondness for DS9 has GOT to watch "What We Left Behind." Great doc.

3 hours ago, Habanero said:

You should check this mag out. I've been reading a bit of it every now and then, pretty interesting so far. I'm considering buying more issues to scan (if it's not a pain in the ass to find them).

I realize I scan Japanese mags since that's what I have easy access to, but for the record, I have no interest in Japanese games, or Japanese gaming mags.  Also not much interest in video games/video game mags in general.

I recently said the same thing over at Oldgamemags, but literally the only gaming mags that are of any interest to me are the first 90 issues or so of PC Gamer USA (when it was published by Imagine, before they were bought by Future and the quality dropped) as well as its predecessors run by the same staff/writers - Game Player's PC Entertainment, Game Player's Strategy Guide to PC Games, and Game Player's MS-DOS Strategy Guide.

Find me issues of any of those and I'll get excited.  Otherwise it's just one more mag I have no interest in other than adding to the DB.

Looks like they didn't debind the mag and then just cropped the hell out of it to hide the page curvature at the center...as if that was somehow preferable.

Either that or they DID debind it using a cutter and misjudged the location of the spine by a couple of inches.

Considering all the times I've seen people selling loose debound pages on Yahoo auctions, it's obvious that SOMEBODY is scanning stuff.

You'd think there was some sort of Japanese Copyright Gestapo busting down doors and locking people away judging by the way people are terrified of publicly sharing the stuff.  I think they see the stories of people distributing manga scans being arrested and think the same thing will happen if they release 30 year old magazine scans.  But it's completely different - the manga is continuously in print, so pirating it, no matter how old, is eating into potential profits for the publishers and creators.  But no one's making money of of old periodicals, so no one's going to bother prosecuting anyone for sharing copies.

Btw, when you're uploading these, you should probably include the full date.  Family Computer Magazine was published biweekly, so, for example, this is the March 20th issue.  But there was another issue published in March as well (probably March 6th).  So to keep things organized, best to include the full date, not just the month.

4 hours ago, E-Day said:

I don't think asking for the shipping to be covered is trying to make a profit.

I think you misunderstood me somewhere.

In my opinion, donating 49 issues that have already been donated to you for scanning is a total waste of resources.  So I suggested that he should follow through on the decision to sell them, which he mentioned he was considering, since he can absolutely sell 50 Nintendo Powers on eBay with no problem.

However, this gives him two options.  If he wants to make a profit, he can keep the money and call it a day.  If he wants to help out the site, he can use that money to obtain mags we don't already have in line to be scanned and donate those instead.  I hope that's more clear.

If all that's wrong is some dirty covers, we should be asking if he owns a flatbed and can scan the covers for you before selling them.  Or putting a call out to all of our members for cover scans.  Or  @TheRedEye (can't remember the name of his museum) who surely has those issues on hand?  A cover scan is non-destructive, so it's much easier to find volunteers to help out.

Worst-case scenario, just leave the cover dirty.  It might not be the Retromags way, but I think it should be painfully clear by now that no one really cares whether or not a mag is edited well, judging by the fact that almost all of the Retromags members who scan magazines don't actually release them here to avoid our rules, yet I'd bet they've never received a single criticism over the quality of their releases.

Well, if he was really looking to help out and wasn't interested in making a profit from his collection, he'd be better off selling what he's got and using that money to win an auction or two of issues we don't already have standing by to be scanned, then donate those.  I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to donate 49 mags we've already got just so editing the cover page for each one goes a little quicker.

15 minutes ago, E-Day said:

So among the other donations I got, I have Nintendo Power Issues 89-111, 113-165, 168-192.

A lot of the covers have "wear" on them. I am not sure what else to call it. White parts look dirty, as though it was sitting against a dark back cover of another issue and some of the ink rubbed off on it.

I also have the first four issues of Nintendo Power Advance.

So that means the only issue being offered that's needed is #167, unless someone else has it.

Good lord.  I recently made fun of a Famicom mag for putting Dragon Quest on its cover 19 issues in a row.  But as I add Famitsu Xbox to our database, I just noticed that it has Dead or Alive somewhere on its cover a total of 43 out of its 44 issues.  God knows why that one solitary issue didn't mention DoA on the cover.  Probably a mistake, I suppose.  I bet someone lost their job for that oversight...

6 minutes ago, MigJmz said:

Are you donating these? Not sure what you mean by cataloging.

Most of those have already been scanned and its very likely that the rest are already owned by either E-Day or Phillyman (though I'm not sure if that last one is relevant anymore).  Maybe he means indexing the contents?  If he DOES mean donating for scanning, we'll need @E-Day at least to chime in with what (if any) issues are needed.

41 minutes ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Wow, this is my first issue from 1989 I just noticed.

I've got a few more from 1989, then on to the 90s.

The highlight of this issue is the 1988 game of the year awards (which I partially covered previously in a post here).

2 minutes ago, JonnyCGood said:

Famimaga seems to be one of those right to left magazines. I can't seem to find any coherent way to determine if a Japanese mag is right to left or left to right. Only by checking 2 page spreads.

It's actually very simple.  Just like all Japanese magazines or books, if the text is printed vertically, it will be read right to left.  If the text is horizontal, it will be read left to right.

2 minutes ago, JonnyCGood said:

I did check, and then added it to my "To Do list". But I checked around Jan 2019 and these were uploaded around March 2019. Just shows how behind the times I am. Didn't think someone would do me the favor of uploading them.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the instant you upload something to the internet, someone is waiting on hand to take it and upload it somewhere else.

Whether you consider that a favor or not is subjective.

Ah, nevermind.  These are already all available at archive.  I thought you'd already checked that.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Великий Дракон

We used to have one member from Russia who might have been interested in helping, but I haven't seen them around in a while.  There's probably not going to be much of an interest in doing this from anyone else here for obvious reasons, but perhaps someone on a Russian site about games or magazines will be inclined to do so.  Unfortunately, I'm just as unfamiliar with those sites as most Russian gaming mag enthusiasts are unfamiliar with Retromags, so I couldn't begin to say where this request might best be posted.

2 hours ago, E-Day said:

I prefer reading everything offline. Books, magazines, strategy guides. But I do like how much less room digital copies of stuff take. And like you said, digital is better than nothing

I agree with you about books and mags.  But you didn't mention comics, and as that is something I personally enjoy on a level of magnitude millions of times more than games or magazines, I will point out that I definitely prefer my comics to be digital.  Keeping my enormous collection organized and easily accessible is FAR easier once I switched to digital, and I've gotten so used to reading comics on my monitor that now when I hold a real comic in my hands, I can't get over how SMALL they are and how tiny the text in the word balloons is to the point that it detracts from my enjoyment level.  And since all comics have been created and released digitally for years now, you don't ever have to worry about bad scans, since they AREN'T scans.

It's sad that even when put into collections, archive is still a disorganized mess.  It's a shame that a site with a multi-million dollar annual budget can't keep things looking nice, but I guess chaos is unavoidable on a site of their scope where uploads aren't moderated at all.

On the plus side to archive's disaster-area level of organization is the fact that it makes it much harder for copyright-holders to issue comprehensive takedown orders.  In that sense, putting mags into collections has the potential to be negative, as it makes them into bigger, clearer targets, like when Nintendo forced archive to remove the collection of Nintendo Power one of their employees created, all of which had been taken from our site without our permission.

35 minutes ago, JonnyCGood said:

https://archive.org/details/RetroGameArtbooksAndIllustrations

https://archive.org/details/randomartbookcollect

These two have a lot of nice books but it's all dumped in a big collection.

It defeats the whole point of archive if you have to download the files to look at them.  The only positive thing that trashfire of a website has going for it is the ability to view files in-browser (unless the uploader gets lazy, like in these two links).

Hey everybody - rather than waste time downloading random artbooks you'll flip through in 30 seconds and forget, why not catch up on any episodes of Game Center CX you haven't seen?  You don't even have to download them.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A"gamecentercx"

1 hour ago, E-Day said:

I don't deny this. I like magazines that are 100 pages or less since they are quicker to process. I can't imagine how big either of those guides would be as a CBZ file, or how many days it would take to edit one of them!

When a book is over 1000 pages, who in their right mind would want to read a digital copy, anyway?  Flipping through that many pages quickly to find something specific is far easier done with a book than with a digital copy.  There's probably an index in the back to make it even easier.

Personally, I think strategy guides, even thin ones, are FAR better to own in print form.  If I have a question about what to do in a game and I'm on my computer, I can get better information from a FAQ or youtube walkthrough faster than finding it in a strategy guide, whether real or digital.   But if I was AWAY from my computer, playing the game on my couch or whatever, then I could have a print guide open in my lap if need be.  So that's where a strategy guide's value is, in my opinion.  Magazines are for reading, so that can be done anywhere, making digital just as good as print.  But strategy guides are just better on paper.

Imagine needing to find a definition of a word.  Connected to the internet?  A super-fast search finds the answer.  Offline?  A real dictionary will be infinitely faster than a digital dictionary on CBR or even searchable PDF.  Things meant to be read in order are fine as digital copies.  Reference works meant to be flipped through out of order are best in physical format.

EDIT for clarification: I don't mean to sound like I'm criticizing anyone for scanning strategy guides.  Digital is better than nothing if the print guide is no longer available to purchase.