badinsults

I just threw down $100, good luck with all the scanning!

Someone gave Contra Spirits a 6/10. Blasphemy! Plenty of Dragon Quest V and Link to the Past coverage in this issue, I like it.

Sounds like Retro is being taken over by triverse, who makes Retro Gaming Magazine (confusing much?). Sounds like the end of the road, but it is probably for the best, since Mike Kennedy apparently has no one left to finish the remaining two issues. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/247145-coleco-chameleon-hardware-speculations/page-299#entry3468575

There's a pretty neat section on American game releases in this issue. It is interesting to see the perspective on "imports" from the other side of the ocean.

Considering that there are tons of broken image links on Game Gavel, and has been for months, I don't know if I would be so confident.

Heh, I guess I should have made the disclaimer that I pick apart problems in every country I have lived in, including my native Canada (the problems there were so bad that I decided to leave). It is just my nature. But I love Japan, it is a fabulous place to live, full of wonder and friendly people. There are not many places where I can walk up to a hill and see two active volcanoes spewing out steam (I'm a geologist). I'm moving to Germany in just over a month, I'm sure I will find problems there too, but I imagine it will also be a really nice place to live.

Oh, I just gave that as an example. In businesses today, they hire on the basis of conformity to specific standards within the company, rather that giving employees the space to think for themselves and come up with new ideas. Nintendo is probably an exception in this matter, because they allowed their engineers to produce products like the DS and Wii. That is probably a credit to the innovative thinking of Iwata. Just remember how Nintendo was stagnating during the later reign of Yamauchi, where they clung onto cartridges one generation too long, and failed to take advantage of DVD support for the Gamecube. That is a more common occurrence in Japanese business. Also compare the recent innovations of Nintendo to Sony, who's latest consoles are just iterations of their previous hardware, and are ultimately stagnating. The traditional Japanese game industry is almost at an end here. Most of the big name Japanese titles drop off the sales charts pretty quickly (aside from Nintendo's first and second party titles), and the PS4 charts are dominated by foreign titles like Minecraft and Fallout 4. Japanese industry is currently being overtaken in a big way by Chinese, South Korean and Taiwanese industries (and probably soon by Vietnam and Indonesia as well) that produce better products at a lower price. A big part of that is an inability to change in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Nobody will take charge, a problem that goes all the way to the top of the high levels of government.

There are a lot of problems in Japan, and strict adherence to conformity is one of them. It is no wonder they don't put out innovative products that people outside of Japan want anymore. No one is allowed to have independent thought. It reminds me of an interview I read by Shigeru Miyamoto, where he said that under Nintendo's current hiring rules, he would never have been considered to work there.

Mike Kennedy has rightfully retreated, I would be shocked if they managed to finish the remaining issues (it is probable that he used the kickstarter money for Retro to fund his Retro VGS venture). Having a timely fix for the download problems that you are having is unlikely.

I've been sporting a beard for the past four months, never heard anything negative about it (generally, the women always say how かっこいい I am). I keep it pretty well groomed, though. Could be a regional thing, I live in southern Japan.

Thank you, these are an amazing resource for me!

This issue really shows the difference between American and Japanese culture. There is comic in there that literally shows a naked girl. Imagine if that happened in an issue of EGM!

I've heard the explanation that they miscounted when they started numbering issues, and just never bothered to fix the mistake. EGM claimed that it was because of them counting special issues, but I don't know if there was actually 10 special issues to account for that.

As I have mentioned in another thread, I have the issue from 1991, I am happy to reupload it if it is not available.

http://www.jvlemag.com/ I was wondering if anyone has checked out JV Magazine, a video game magazine made in France. They just released a SNES themed special issue that had an article about my website, and it looks like it is really well produced. I don't really read much French, but it is worth a picking up if you can.

Looking at the top 30 list, it really shows the dominance that Nintendo had in the early 90s. The first Megadrive title comes in at #12, and first PC Engine game comes in at #18!

It isn't surprising that the review system is similar to EGM - EGM basically used Famitsu as the template for their magazine! I love the fact that Famitsu is getting scanned. It is amazing they were able to pump out 200+ page issues, brimming with content, every week. Also, I think that Famitsu is a great tool if you want to learn Japanese, since a lot of the text has furigana over it. The scans are really great quality, and it is easy to read them.

There should be a scan of the October 26, 1990 issue somewhere on the site. If you don't have a copy, I can upload it (if someone tells me how to do it): https://community.retromags.com/topic/6134-famicom-tsushin-scanned/?hl=famitsu#.VsyNUV7RJyR

I used to have the issue with the Apocalypse cover. Maybe ask Jake if it was amongst the lot of magazines I sent him many years ago (if he still has them).

First off, as a pure end user, I am very excited that someone is scanning Famitsu issues. Just as a note, I know that tongueman did a high quality scan of one issue from the launch of the Super Famicom, if it is not up on the site, I will try uploading it somewhere. I don't know what other people think, but I would rather have a substandard quality scan (or scan of a reproduction) than have no scan at all. It is always possible to replace it later if you get a better copy of it. I think including both the fixed and unfixed version of the cover is fine, and maybe someone with a lot of time on their hands can do a better fix later. As for your second point, I agree it would be nice to have a "sort by whether or not it has a scan" option, and have it on by default. I am unsure of how hard that would be to implement.

Just a question, has the fixed versions of these EGM magazines been uploaded to the site? I noticed one was added today (which I actually hadn't downloaded previously). I don't want to kill your dropbox.

I'm not so sure that Sony can afford to bring out a successor to the PS4. Yes, the system is selling alright globally, but I would say that the console gaming market in Japan is pretty much dead. The investors here are going to be wondering what exactly Sony can do to reinvigorate that. Meanwhile, the big game makers in Japan are migrating to mobile phone games, or getting out of the games business altogether to get to the lucrative pachinko market. The Playstation propped up Sony during the early 2000s as the other components of the consumer electronics market dropped out (they eventually dumped their computer division to Lenovo). I think it is pretty telling that pretty much all the PS4 games in the top selling charts during the New Years holiday (probably the biggest shopping week of the year) are western developed games.

I have actually been musing about a video game magazine bibliography database recently, nice to see you have plans for one. I actually drew up some notes about my thoughts on it last week, but I will copy them here. I think when it comes to a bibliography, it would be good to ask around the video game research community to see what they think, so that it is in a format that is most useful to them (since they are likely to be the primary users). I really think that making the database game/system oriented rather than publication oriented would be the wisest approach. When I do research, it is usually focused on that.

Have you guys ever approached the Internet Archive to host the magazines? They already host a ton of them, I'm sure they would be all over archiving these magazines. The person to ask is Jason Scott. He is actually actively canvasing for magazine scans right now.

I think this is a reasonable measure. Honestly, I have tried downloading more than 3 in one day, and reached the bandwidth limit. There aren't a whole lot of magazines that I haven't already downloaded, though (since I got a ton from a torrent years ago on Underground Gamer). I doubt the people who are abusing the system are actually reading these magazines, and really, they should be going after a torrent instead.