kitsunebi

Ha ha...somehow, I think...that's not going to happen.

OGM was created in the first place due to a...difference of opinions with how things were done here.   And it certainly hasn't grown to the size it has despite its (by comparison) tiny membership due to a lack of dedication.  Besides, the world would be a boring place without alternatives.

Besides, the two sites really do cater to different crowds.  Is your favorite magazine Nintendo Power/GamePro/EGM? Is your interest primarily in consoles? Then Retromags is probably the place for you.  Is your favorite mag PC Gamer/Edge/GamesMaster? Are you interested in a broad range of systems from British microcomputers to the Amiga to PCs to consoles? Then OGM has you covered.  Do you like ALL games for ALL systems?  Well then, it's really not THAT inconvenient to be a member at two different sites, is it?

5 hours ago, StrykerOfEnyo said:

I've seen others post that those nearly 300-page EGMs were a slog to get through. I can see spending the time to scan 3-5 at a time, then editing as a group later. Its damn find work -- from everyone on the site. This is one of the best organized sites for mags I've seen, but then several ask for money to download content, so I usually don't stick around long since I just don't have the extra money at times.

There are less than a handful of sites producing scans - all of the others are just re-uploading other peoples' scans.  Retromags and Oldgamemags are the two main ones producing all-new content - Retromags currently has 4,226 files to download, and Oldgamemags has 11,592.  Bunches of new scans also pop up on the Internet Archive, but it's a bit of a disorganized wasteland over there, so there's no way to gauge how many scans they have, let alone which ones originated there and which were just copied from other places.

All sites require funds to operate - Retromags has 14,723 members, and gets by with donations, I believe (Phillyman can correct me if I'm wrong and he's paying out-of-pocket to keep the site running.)  OGM is a closed community of fewer than 300 members, so there is a one time membership fee to help allay the costs of hosting SO MANY FILES LOL.  But especially for anyone interested in mags from the UK or mags about computers/computer games, their library of mags puts all others to shame.  And of course the Internet Archive is an NPO that has over 24 million users and gets by on donations as well...MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF DONATIONS.  They pull in over $35 million per year.

None of these sites are profiting off of scans.  Again, Philly would know best about RM's finances, but I know that OGM barely scrapes by, and sometimes the membership donations don't even cover the yearly costs to keep the site going, despite it running on much simpler/cheaper software than Retromags.

But yeah, if you see any other site trying to charge money to access scans, for god's sake don't give it to them.  It's almost certain that the scans they offer were taken from somewhere else, anyway.

LOL.  I don't know how dablais does it, but I'm just uploading stuff I had already scanned during my 3 year hiatus from this site.  I do this in my free time, and once I get home from work, there's not enough of THAT in a day to do a single magazine, let alone two or three in a day.  Most of the work has to wait for the weekend.  Debinding and scanning a mag in a day is no problem.  But editing it, too?  Especially when most of the Japanese mags I scan are 200+ pages?  Forget about it!  I probably do about one new scan per week on average.

No worries, I know nothing negative was meant and took the post as it was intended.  It coincidentally came at just the time when discussion about hosting digital files/rips is taking place behind the scenes.  Strictly speaking, as per Retromags' current rules, digital files aren't actually allowed. However, there are in fact quite a few of them already in our downloads area, so the discussion at hand is how to deal with them going forward.  I also agree that it makes sense to use pre-existing digital files if they're of good enough quality, though I'm hopeful we can get some sort of official system in place for identifying those files for what they are, so that people with less experience identifying the difference between a scan and a digital rip won't confuse the two.  Because while uploading a digital rip isn't completely devoid of time and effort, it's miniscule in comparison to the work that goes into making a quality scan, so anything that confuses the two is a bit of a disservice to the scanners' efforts.

6 hours ago, StrykerOfEnyo said:

I appreciate the work it takes to put these files together, even when it seems like they might not get lots of downloads. I don't know if you scanned these from scratch or if they are converted from another digital source, but thanks for taking time around the holidays to post/submit them.

This comment breaks my heart a little.   Not because no one is downloading these beer mags.  That's to be expected.  This is a gaming mag website, so how many of those people have an interest in beer?  OK, and out of those people, how many of them have an interest in Japanese beer?  OK, and out of those, how many of them live in Japan, because honestly, you're gonna be REAAAALY hard-pressed to find any Japanese craft beer outside of Japan.  Hell, I may be the ONLY person that has any legitimate reason to be interested in this mag, and that's fine.  I scanned them for myself, so that I could toss out the physical mags and clear some space.  If anyone else wants to read them, fine.  If not, fine.

But ...LOL. I know you didn't mean anything by it, but as someone who works hard scanning everything I release, it makes me sad to think that someone out there might think I'm just making easy-peasy digital rips (something that generally takes all of 5 minutes...if you spent 4 of those minutes making yourself a coffee.)  Trust that anything with my name on it is a scan of a physical magazine.  And while there's some discussion currently on how digital files should be handled, identified, or even allowed, for now, the safest way to identify them (on Retromags) is if there is no scanner listed in the credits (since nothing was actually scanned.)

2 hours ago, matrixman said:

Thanks for scanning! Love the cover on this one.  The colors pop, wow on joker on page 13 and all the DC characters colors are great.  How do you adjust after scans?  Is it global or page by page?

This isn't a scan, it's a rip of a digital PDF sold by the publisher.

7 hours ago, Areala said:

I, for one, am utterly shocked that a guy starring as himself in a video game called "Tashiro Masashi: Too Many Princesses" (I think I got that right, not 100% though, please advise) would turn out to be a real-life convicted pervert. I mean, what are the odds?

You're 100% right about that cover artwork being bland. Why isn't Dragon Quest IV artwork plastered all over the exterior of this thing? It's like they didn't even want it to stand out on the racks.

*huggles*
Areala

Close enough.  Closer to "Full of Princesses" or even just "Lots of Princesses," but I think it's fair to say that either of those situations qualifies as "too many princesses".

Looking carefully at the cover, I GUESS it's some sort of abstract representation of volleyball, since they covered U.S. Championship V'Ball.  But man, Famimaga ALWAYS had ugly covers.  And yet it seems to be held even dearer to the hearts of Japanese old school gamers than Famitsu, despite the latter ultimately outlasting it.  It's one of the few Japanese gaming mags printed R-L, so maybe that makes it more endearing despite the fugly covers?

19 minutes ago, StrykerOfEnyo said:

Thanks for these kitsunebi. I don't understand other languages, but it always great looking at the artwork they put in these magazines. Plus it preserves the interviews so others can go back and translate them. Great work, I understand you were gone awhile so it's nice to see you back.

I used to figure that just about everyone who downloaded these would have no choice but to be stuck looking at the pictures, but nowadays that isn't really true.  Google Lens can do a decent enough job of translating to understand most of what's being said, so even people with no Japanese abilities can read something if they really want to.  You can upload images, of course, but it's faster to just point your camera at it.  If you have a tablet, I imagine it would be pretty easy.  Using a phone is harder due to the small screen size, but can be done if you really want to.  Here's a screenshot I just took from this magazine using my phone.  Just opened the CBR, pointed my camera at the screen, and google translate did the rest.

7 hours ago, Areala said:

Finally, a guide to finding and drinking beer in the modern-day Yokohama of 2012!

*huggles*
Areala

Hey now, what do you expect?  We've got cut-off dates after all.  Anyone who wants a more modern-day experience of drinking in Japan is welcome to come here and look me up.  Then we can read about it 10 years later when the cut-off date on the police report expires.

Don't worry about it.  I didn't come back just to stir up trouble.  And I'm sure it won't happen again.

Jesus, is this scan still here?  For the love of god, someone needs to replace this with Hubz' scan of the actual, non-reprint version of issue #1.

Although I'd like to think that Bond is too cool to use an adjustable-strap hook-on bowtie.  Surely he uses a real bowtie tied from scratch every time.

I guess the unauthorized guide couldn't get Bond's actual bowtie and had to settle for a picture of junior agent Poindexter's bowtie and bottom-shelf gin martini.

GREAT SCOTT!!!

It's an unauthorized guide with cover art that actually evokes the game it covers!!

Blame Future.  The USA version of PC Gamer as published by Imagine and its predecessors (Game Player's PC Strategy Guide, Game Player's PC Entertainment) were all excellent.  Then, in 2002, Future bought out Imagine (Future being the company that published PC Gamer in the UK.)  The UK mag was never as good, so this didn't promise good things to come, but for a while at least, the USA version retained it's own separate identity.  Eventually, though, the UK side of Future took more and more control until the mag became what it is today -  a 1:1 copy of the UK mag.

So if you want good issues of PC Gamer, just make sure they were published by Imagine.  And don't forget about its precursor mags, either.

3 hours ago, GamesAreGood said:

Is it me, or is there something wrong with the file? I tried opening it in Comical, and the file doesn't seem to register.

Looks like it's just you.  Or maybe your reader.  I have CDisplay and Mcomix and it opens fine in both.

So there are two "official" strategy guides for this game?  I thought that was...impossible?

1 hour ago, MigJmz said:

Also its very pixly-blocky around the text on yours but if thats what we want to do then fine.

LOL what are you talking about?  Do you mean if you zoom in 1000% to look at the individual pixels?   It's not "my version," and it wasn't sabotaged in any way, it's simply the file you uploaded dropped down to around 300ppi, which is as large as any magazine file needs to be (and, I might add, still larger than 95% of the files currently available at Retromags).

Anything at any size will look pixelly if you zoom in far enough...because the image is literally composed entirely of square pixels.  But we don't have any reason to care about that.  What we're concerned with is the quality of the file as pertains to reading.  At any zoom level where pixels can be seen, the mag is unreadable, so it doesn't matter what it looks like.

Here's part of a page from this file at 5000px:

Here's that same part of the page at 3200px:

Both are of identical quality at any kind of reading-level zoom. Feel free to open them in new windows to see them slightly larger than our forums will display. (And to be honest, both are probably easier to read than the actual printed page, since Japanese mags use very small fonts.)

No matter how high the resolution of someone's display is, there will never be a need to zoom in further than a normal reading distance.  So we do not edit our files under the assumption that anyone will EVER read the magazine with just a few words on screen at a time like this:

It matters because the rule is in place to prevent unnecessarily large files from being uploaded, regardless of their individual size.  Just like our gallery.

One gallery image at 600ppi might only be 10 MB.  Not so big.  But still unnecessarily huge, and those things add up. 

Our official rules still state "2200 px high" but as you know, I've been pushing to allow for 300 ppi uploads.  But a 300ppi A4 magazine will only be around 3000-3200 px high.

It has been discussed and Phillyman has explicitly stated that 600ppi scans are not allowed to be uploaded here.  And he's the one who has to pay for the storage and servers.  If he posts something indicating that 5000px uploads are allowed, then of course that would be fine, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

As I said, 5000 px is not allowed here.  You can upload it to the Internet Archive if you like.

Don't or I'll have to replace it again.

Sorry, not corrected, per se, but resized.  It's been discussed with Phillyman.  A height of 5000 px isn't allowed here.  I resized it to 3200 which is about 300 ppi.

Also, it was saved at quality level 12, which actually increases filesize without adding to quality.  Never save above 9.

These are Phillyman's directives.  Just making sure they're followed.

The corrected file is currently uploaded.

If you have the 210 MB file, you may want to download the new copy, which is only 37.4 MB and looks the same.

From 250 MB to 25 MB.   And it looks the same.  Thanks for taking care of this one.

1 hour ago, E-Day said:

Is that small screenshot on the cover not good enough? 

No, you're right.  One small screenshot is all you really need to make a totally relevant cover.

Here's another Sonic guide I might scan some day.

Apparently they felt there was no need to have the cover artwork even tangentially related to the game.  I get that it's an unauthorized guide, but...