VGBounceHouse

I have finished Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 180, July 2004. I've uploaded it here but it's still marked "Not Allowed" so I'm waiting for the go ahead before releasing it.

As always the issue is also available on my site in CBZ and text recognized PDF formats as well as viewable within the browser:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/2004/07/egm/pages/

I'll be jumping back over 20 years to do another issue of Video Games next.

So I'm here to vent 

I'm working on Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 180, July 2004. I did my normal hair dryer debinding and am having great results like this spread on Viewtiful Joe 2:

Full 300dpi here: 

Then I get to the feature on Driver 3/DRIV3R and they throw this at me:

Full 300dpi here: 

They overprinted making reconstruction impossible. That center frame of the flmstrip is only about half as wide as the others. But the other verticals line up in such as way that pushing the left side further left and the right side further right to have the proper gap space would cause the dude and car that backgrounds the entire spread to be misaligned (as well as pushing the text and header on the left to the edge of the page).

I understand doing layout mindful of gutter printing areas but the right page actually had a full vertical white slice (not enough to properly space a gap) meaning the actual design, or the printing of it, ignored the proper spacing. Arrrggghhh it's infuriating!

I know we've discussed this before but I can't seem to find what was agreed upon. When working with foldouts do I trim the width or create a blurred area to cover the portion of the regular page size that is missing? With the back cover of EGM 180 there is an inside flap to cover a 2-page spread and the back cover itself is narrower than the standard page size. These are unedited versions of the pages which include my standard page size template widths:

Was the rule to just ensure every image was the same height but to crop the widths properly? I don't remember.

Thanks!

(P.S. What are the limits on URL inserted images? I made both of these 480px tall and am pretty sure I'd seen wide images, but the second image here which is 725x480 just shows a broken thumbnail)

I have finished Video Games Issue 2, October 1982. I’m still working on another, much more recent mag, but I’m going to push forward with more issues of Video Games. While they don’t get a huge number of downloads I’m a fan of the long-form articles and industry insiders who contributed to it throughout its run. I am missing one issue so I won’t be able to mark the whole run complete on my own but I do think it’d be nice to have a nearly complete set available here. I may also take a detour and crank out another issue of Vidiot I have on hand.

This issue has a lot less border yellowing than the last few I released but more prominent bleed. Yes, I use black construction paper  They definitely alternated paper stock throughout the run so I don’t know if this was better preserved or a thinner kind was used for this issue that has aged more uniformly while also being thinner. The issue was also not as tall as surrounding issues...not a huge difference (50px at 600dpi) but might point to a different printer and thus paper.

As usual you can also browse the issue in your browser on my site and grab a PDF with text recognition if that’s your thing.

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1982/10/vg/pages/

I have finished Video Games Issue 16, January 1984, but am still waiting on the upload to be pushed. In the meantime you can view the issue on my site:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1984/01/vg/pages/

Like the last issue I did this one was tough because it appears they used a dirty drum creating unnatural bleed and stray ink. Again I did my edits at 100% rather than 200% to preserve sanity. The issue is very readable and replicates the in-hand look but it's always possible someone will turn up a cleaner copy than the one I had on hand.

I've got another issue of Video Games in the works (hopefully by the end of the weekend) but in the meantime I'm going to shill my Xbox Documentary if you don't mind 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/xbox-documentary#/

I would love to get the one issue of Video Games that I’m missing, plus a few missing Vidiots and Electronic Games, but I’m broke 

Hey notabi,

When it comes to perfect binding the only way to truly preserve a magazine is to debind it which means destroying it to a certain extent. While it is possible to press a still bound magazine down (or have a machine do it which I’m assuming the book scanner you mentioned is capable of) you will definitely lose some of the page depending on how much glue was used in creating the perfect binding, and you will get shadows and extra bleed that won’t be present in a debound copy.

It should be noted that many people working in preservation and generating scanned issues make compromises that the general public won’t be concerned with. Plenty use paper cutters to slice off the binding which is of no use to me as it compromises full bleed pages, but that’s a concern of few I suppose. Some readers only care about that, reading the text, while some of us are concerned with the original graphic designers’ intent, which includes multiple people, the magazine’s layout artists plus the work of the artists who created the advertising. For me the art is as important as the words which is why I use the hair dryer method to debind, which “destroys” the magazine in a sense, though all the pages could still be placed in single sheet plastic and put in a three-ring binder lol

The best advice I can give is to read up about your scanner and see what it says about placing a full, bound magazine in it. If it seems like it won’t destroy what you don’t want destroyed then give it a try, post some example pages, and then go from there.

1 hour ago, kitsunebi77 said:

EDIT: It occurs to me that who we REALLY need on approval duty/PM answering service is one of the fine folks at a certain site out there that mirrors all of our releases.  We upload something new, and those guys upload it to their site mere hours later!  For peoples' convenience, you know - in case they want our releases but can't be bothered to visit our site, I guess.  Like if Amazon Prime decided to upload all of Netflix's content so that people wouldn't need subscriptions to both.  Doin' it for the people, you see.    Dunno how helpful they'd be, but you can bet they'd be around to receive it if you send them a PM, especially if it was about a new release.

I didn’t know there was someone out there mirroring, but that’s always helpful to spread unique content. 

‘Thanks for pushing the release. Not sure when I’ll have another one since the next mag I’m working on is already a release here (you know me, gotta have those spreads which are impossible when mags are debound by cutting) but I’m gonna try to alternate between XBN and Video Games after I finish the one I’ve just started.

15 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Oh, no.  You're not gonna foist the responsibility on me.  I'll let E-Day approve it, then.

P.S.  you might want to PM E-Day and ask him to approve this, or else he may never notice.

And while you're at it, PM phillyman and maybe he can do something about lifting the need to have someone else approve your files now that you're a trusted uploader.

I waited until morning and followed your advice to PM while E-Day was listed as online but no response and no approval oh well. If it’s still not approved by the time you log on again please do the approval.

40 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Listen, approval is just a formality at this point.  You've uploaded quality scans in the past, so I don't even download them to check anymore, I just approve them.  So if you want me to wait or not is your call.  Awaiting your orders, kemosabe.

Since I saw both of you in that thread you created liking a delay I’ll leave it in your hands as I’ve already done my part. My really old mags never get hundreds of downloads so release it now, in 8 hours, whatever works. I have to get back to some new HTML/CSS/JS I’ve been putting off, just happy to have bookended this mag.

56 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Toldja. Gotta get on these things early to stop the E-Day juggernaut.

Man, I was all set up to go exactly 24 hours after the last release 

Should I wait? Since it'll have to be approved it could always be delayed that way...

I’ve finished the issue and uploaded it. I’m following the lead of kitsunbi77’s thread and waiting until later tonight to post it so the current new release stays at the top for a full day. In the meantime you can preview it on my site:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1984/fa/vg/pages/

This one was tougher than expected. At first glance the source seemed real good, but it had two damaged spots, the right side stain that persisted the 2 front and back pages, a what looks like water damage at the bottom causing creasing at the bottom margin of every page. But those were easy fixes, the real problem was drum smear throughout the issue. This was a problem with this type of cheap paper stock where the ink wasn’t applied evenly. Luckily the worst problem, smearing, isn’t there, but loads of ink castoff was. I did my best to clean it up but I’m sure some specks remain here and there. You’ll also notice they used cover stock on the outer two pages (8 total edited pages) and you’ll see the beautiful bright white there compared to the yellowed newspaper stock used for the rest of the paper.

21 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I'll tell you one feature of the Xbox I DID appreciate - the hard drive making it unnecessary to purchase memory cards.  I also remember using it to store some MP3s that I could play during certain games in lieu of whatever songs would normally be playing.

I'm definitely looking forward to checking out your doc when its finished.

Will you also be discussing the Xbox's (lack of) impact in Japan, or strictly focusing on the American market?

Other hardware innovations like Dolby Digital encoding (and the rest of the nForce design used) and broadband on board will definitely be covered. There will be fond remembrances of the original Xbox' custom soundtracks which were a software feature rather than an OS-level one as in subsequent generations. Creating your own mix and then having the game cut in the fake commercials and other bits was awesome in GTA San Andreas.

I have a friend in Japan I hope will be able to wrangle some translators to add to the European and American magazine coverage of other markets than the U.S. The main documentary will cover the success (or lack thereof) in other markets but I'll be sticking to what I can dig up from primary and secondary sources rather than the speculation I often hear from people when discussing the system. Depending on funding I'll gladly add non-U.S. magazines to the mix, and I already include all games released for the system with regional exclusives broken out:

http://vgpavilion.com/platforms/consoles/xbox/regions.html

As the EU had various mixes of country grouping depending on the title that list will need work as will my current box art.

In the meantime I'm gonna bookend Video Games after dropping the first issue with the last:

22 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

The most dangerous thing about debinding with heat is if any glue gets left to harden on the page, since it can scratch the glass of an ADF scanner.

I'm curious about this documentary.  First of all, what made you settle on the Xbox?  Don't get me wrong, I owned all the consoles of its generation (..the LAST generation of consoles I owned), and on multi-platform titles I typically preferred the Xbox for it's slight technological edge over the others.  But the system never really seemed to have much personality to me, or much in the way of memorable exclusives.

Second, this sounds like a huge project.  Is this a hobby or is there some amount of professional involvement?  Do you have other documentaries under your belt?

My ADF seems to work fine but it pulls the pages too close to the edges of the bed for me to trust so at least I'm safe if slow with my hand scanning 

I've been planning the documentary for a long time though I've only been working on it daily since the start of the year. I thought about doing one on the Intellivision as a test case given it's much smaller library but decided that my past work was always "go big" I'd go with my first choice, the original Xbox, for three primary reasons: it was the return of an American company to the console space after decades; it started a paradigm-shift in terms of development which was Microsoft's impetus along with the "battle" for the living room; and it was a well known brand creating a distinct new brand which had internal as well as external challenges. The book "Opening the Xbox" was published near launch and documented development of the console with a lots of insider access, and the more recent "Project X" series is also loaded with interviews with people that were there, but neither looks at the console's lifespan, or the games themselves, and almost all of the material comes from Microsoft past and present personnel.

The aspects of this project include:

• A standard "viewer ignorant" two hour documentary
• Extended cut version with more material geared towards gamers
• Additional video bonus features
• Video coverage of all 1,000 games
• Extended single game and genre grouped videos
• Interviews with people across all aspects of the console and games and hopefully external sources like members of the press and advertising agencies
• Every videogame magazine published during the Xbox' lifespan scanned (and possibly converted into my HTMLization format depending on time)
• Every media file, trailer, interview and feature produced about the console and game made available in one place
• Full details on all games including credits, articles both online and off, advertising, box art, manuals, discs available online
• Coverage of games announced but never released
• All of this material cross-indexed on my site for research so anyone has a definitive starting place for their own content production

As for the Xbox having a personality, I'd point to Live! which defined online gaming during the period unlike the PlayStation Network or already ubiquitous PC gaming. Halo in particular was a phenomenon and aided in the rise of collector's editions and midnight launches. And whether positive or negative, the introduction of download-only games, and the access to the console market by conventionally PC-only developers due to the toolchain helped define the Xbox.

The project has been a hobby, as has my Videogame Pavilion site. But I will be attempting to crowdfund to work on it full-time, otherwise it will have to be part-time. In the past I created award-winning Stars Suite educational system which helped millions of kids, including hundreds of thousands of at-risk students get "normalized". I was the sole developer and designer both front-end and back-end even if the company liked to tell people they had a "dev team"  and that is only one of the handful of large projects I've handled solo. Not that I hope this is a one-man job given my dislike of many videogame genres, I hope to bring others on board to help with the commentary and analysis aspects of things I'm less excited about.

Today is my 127th day in a row of tweeting updates (and posting many of them to the project's Facebook page):

https://twitter.com/VGBounceHouse

https://www.facebook.com/XboxDocumentary

I also have hundreds of videos taken from all of the Official Xbox Magazine demo discs, Microsoft's Exhibition disc series and LucasArts' Xbox Experience on my YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6qUFvxiiaZAoQ09ZZmHPg

Finally my site has a dedicated page to the documentary along with three of Microsoft's game catalogs scanned as a starting point:

http://vgpavilion.com/xbox-documentary/

From there you can scan the over 2,000 web pages that host information about every game released for the system.

I have never done a documentary before, but I've studied a few I really like, and a lot I don't, to get a sense of direction. In the realm of videogames I've yet to see anything like I'm planning, much less the larger "experience" I'm putting out there in terms of text, images, videos and links.

On 7/5/2019 at 3:59 PM, E-Day said:

Is there a way to clone you 10 times so that you can edit everything? I don't have the patience to make everything look immaculate the way you do. I could use 10 clones of you myself to edit the non-GamePro stuff I'm scanning .

Thanks, and yet all I can do is worry about the stuff that still eludes me like color matching facing pages or aligning plate offset errors. I gotta say getting a handle on using a hair dryer to separate perfect binding has been a revelation for the most part, except for the smudging on the inside covers. I use gloves but the glue there is so haphazard it can make reconstruction of ad spreads even more difficult than just the glue discoloration on its own.

i will be focused on my Xbox Documentary for the next two years (conventional length documentary at the end of next year, the full project complete to coincide with the Xbox’ 20th Anniversary) but will find time to get as many of the early 1980s mags done along the way, for a sanity break if nothing else  

It's still pending approval but I have archives Video Games, Issue 1, August 1982

Database Page: 

Download Page: 

As always the pages are archived on my site. along with my own identical CBZ plus a Text-Recognized PDF: http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1982/08/vg/pages/

The editor of this mag (which came from the National Lampoon/Heavy Metal publishing group) is still around and I'm trying to get in touch with him for an interview. He published a book, Video Invaders, which had an ad in this issue which I tweeted at him. No response yet.

I'm hoping to have a surprise for everyone before the end of the weekend but in the meantime I wanted to share a link to the HTMLized version of Xbox Nation  (XBN) Issue 3, Summer 2002.

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/2002/su/xbn/

I still have some final touches to make like internal links, but every article is available for reading, something that was often difficult with the printed magazine due to their use of white text, particularly when there were offset plates out of alignment or oddly small font sizes.

Some fun for a hot day from the surprise I'm working on:

I have finished issue 52, July 29, 1984:

My archive is viewable here: http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1984/07/29egh/pages/

You'll find my CBZ and PDF along with a ZIP with the TIFF scans and PSD edits.

That'll do it for the copies of Electronic Games Hotline I have on hand. Someday I may unearth my other copies but for now I'm back to regular magazines.

I have finished issue 40, February 12, 1984:

My archive is viewable here: http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1984/02/12egh/pages/

You'll find my CBZ and PDF along with a ZIP with the TIFF scans and PSD edits.