lytron

Thank you for your extensive, detailed answer. I held back to reply because I had the hope that someone of the persons who could answer the guide line stuff would say a word. :/ Anyways, maybe someone will join the discussion in the next few days to help me out there.

So, I work on my debut here, and I just want to check a bit on the quality standards here. I scan at 600dpi which is, I think, pretty good (you can actually see how the colors of screenshots consist of RGB dots), but I am not removing the pages from the binding (it would break my heart ;___;) and I am no photoshop wizard to remove some unpretty marks. I uploaded a preview file below. This was scaled by 50%. You see the curving of the paper due to the binding on the left edge, and to the right, you see how stuff from the other side is shining through the paper. Is this an endeavor I should strive to persue, or is this nothing that would help this project? Furthermore, can someone link me a tutorial for uploading here once I'm finished (which will unfortunately will take a long while)?

DOUBLE POST! <3 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.

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.

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.

Yeah, so, uhm... there you go. ^_^; Back in the day, the famitsu guys had quite tough standards for their game ratings (it was nearly impossible to get a full score of 40 points back then, right?). So, I think, this is also a reason why the score plummeted so heavily.

Maybe the reviewers say something about it? I think there might be several other ways of explaining it: Maybe the reviewers were different persons Maybe the taste of the persons have shifted. Depending on the years of these reviews, maybe some other platforming game-changer appeared meanwhile (like SMW), so their standards changed Maybe they thought "This is not what I expect from a game from the Mario franchise" and the critic had a harsher tone Maybe they thought "This is Doki Doki Panic with Mario graphics, so why should I give the same credit a game that does literally the same as another one?"

Well, that's a in-depth discussion I started here, as it seems. First of all: Thanks to snatcher123 for the link, I didn't recognize your post when I wrote the last answer. @kitsunebi77: How is the Japanese copyright law on this stuff, do you know that? On "If these German mags on that page are out of print": I'm pretty sure it's a mixed bag. Mags like "Dos-Trend", "ASM" and all the Amiga mags are surely long dead, while things like the PC-Games and PC-Action will still be around (but they are published at least since the 90s, so these scans there might be no current issues). But it might even get a bit more complicated, I remembered that when I asked in a kiosk for the "Total!" magazine, the owner told me that the "Man!ac" is the follow-up to it. I highly doubt that this is true, but one has to do some bigger research if any of these old mags are just rebranded and now property of a rebranded publisher or another publisher who bought up the original one... big headaches promised for that. Besides that, just a random thought: Have you ever thought about a tag system where you can tag magazines in your magazine database with games from your game database, which makes it easier to find magazines easier which cover these games?

Just wanted to say that I found another Japanese one, the "Super Soft Magazine". Don't know if this might be a spin-off of the Basic Magazine. Did you have that one on your list?

That's a good point. And with that argument ("PC is for hardcore gamers") we can re-unite the threads with the StarCraft boom of Korea! They had recently a short report about Gaming in South Korea on television. The players moved on to League of Legends and such, they play about two years professionally and make their fortune in that span. But, well, for that time, they have to do nothing in their lifes but play. Which defies my personal definition of the value of games, but hey, who am I to judge, and besides that, its business, not entertainment. I heard of that StarCraft TV channel, too. I think I read on wikipedia that it closed down now (of course, Blizzard officially stopped the support of the original StarCraft around the turn of this decade), or it moved on. But there was a twitch channel that had re-runs of those matches all day! xD If I could make a wish, please look for Japanese mags around mid-1993 and mid-1995. That would be very helpful for my "research" in Beta screens. Mid-1993, as I mentioned, because of Secret of Mana, and the mid-1995 because Sep/Oct 1995 was the release time of a big load of most-important-SNES-RPGs-ever: Tenchi Souzou, Tactics Ogre, Bounty Sword, Seiken Densetsu 3. But actually everything from Japan would be great; I surely will find something of interest in almost every mag!

Yeah, that adult visual novel PC audience exists since the MSX/FM Towns/FM Marty era. I think mostly because Sony and Nintendo both censor the few adult games they allow on their consoles. Besides that: Maybe it was a kind of downward spiral - no Japanese game developer cared for the PC, because there is no big PC audience in the first place, because not many games for the Japanese audience are produced for the PC and so on. My first thought was: "PCs are big, and they take up a lot of space, and Japanese homes don't have a lot of space", but there are enough photos on the internet that prove: Many Japanese are inventive enough to get whole gamesets into their flats. Yeah, maybe the Koreans simply put everything StarCraft-related into its own magazine. Unbelievable that this game got THAT big. Even though it is excellent. Can you provide the names on that list, or would that too much work (work time that you rather want to spend on actually scanning those ;D)? I guess I'll stay back from uploading those covers/TOCs then. It's no use when nobody uses it.

Thanks alot! I just found out that besides the aforementioned "Gameboy" magazine, there is -of course- the "Gameboy Tsushin" (which translates to... Gameboy magazine), which adds to the confusion. I add a pic of the "Gameboy" magazine I meant (from a Japanese auction), where exactly that issue is of particular interest for me (because it definitely contains development screenshots of Secret of Mana). Some of these Korean mags seem to be scanned here, but I don't know if I should link this. If not, remove this line. BTW had Korea a quite big mobile gaming market around the second half of the 2000s (which is pre-smartphone-era), so I guess there were quite a number of magazines focussed on that which cover games that mostly are lost (Like the very Legend-of-Mana-lookalike "Dragon Lord EX"... seems like my game preferences are obvious by now). Besides that - is it of help to post auction pictures of magazine covers and their TOC, or do you get in trouble because they are done by someone who is not asked if we use his picture?

Dunno if you have this here, just a list of everything I can think of. Germany TOTAL! - Different from the British version, ran from June 1993 to December 2000 Club Nintendo - German Nintendo power, chief of staff were Nintendo employees who also worked on the German translations of the games. Ran from 1989 to 2002. MAN!AC - Started in November 1993, changed name in 2008 to M! Games N-Zone - Started in June 1997. Retro Gamer - started in August 2012 South Korea Game Power PC Champ Net Power Meca Power Zine Japan Satellaview Tsushin - Famitsu Spin-off Gameboy - Too bad it actually was called that way. Hard to find Family Computer Magazine - AKA Famimaga Hippon Super! And some MSX/PC stuff, like Login, Basic Magazine and so on...