meppi

He! Someone else from Belgium! Welcome!

I'll just keep my mouth shut, me thinks. :laughing:

Well if everything goes right it shouldn't take long before it's released here as well.It's already on the Japanese list for release this month.

Hehe, surprised so many people actually fell for it. Funny fact is that we only have 1 Future magazine online, so that should have been a bit of a giveaway. The refunds thing got to me though. :laughing:

The same should without a doubt be said to you as well, as you're doing an amazing job. I'm sure I speak for everyone here when I want to thank you as well as the other persons who are making this project what it is. I would like to say, if you start getting tired or start feeling it's a drag to scan those GamePro's, try scanning something else for a change. Something from a different generation perhaps. For some reason, even though it's still magazines you're scanning, it somehow can make a huge difference in breaking the monotony of the job.

Welcome! :smile:

Ouch, forgot to reply to this topic when it was first posted as I'm actually the one who was asking for this one to be scanned. :blushing: Not sure if it sucked or not since I haven't read it yet. But what I do know is that it sure has a big following in certain parts of the web. I remember when I used to visit the TNL a lot, that people would keep bringing this up. It's supposed to be made with lost of love by people who hated what happened with Diehard Gamefan at the time. So yes, it was supposed to be by hardcore gamers, for hardcore gamers. But as we've seen with Maximum, such magazines don't seem to sell enough to be profitable. Doesn't matter how good the magazine actually is. A bit sad really.

Hi everyone, Just wanted to let everyone know why my releases seem to be slowing down a bit lately. I have just started working on the very first Mean Machines issue. And to be honest, it's the hardest magazine I have been working on up until now. It's coming along very nicely if I may say so myself, but it is going very slowly, even compared to some other problematic issues I have had in the past. For starters, the pages seem to have quite a lot of discolourisation and spots, so the editing takes up quite a bit more time to clean them up. But probably the biggest problem is that the issues are a bit too tall, as well as too wide for a regular A4 scanner. So every page needs to be scanned from the 2 sides (left and right), but also turned upside down and have the bottom strip rescanned. After which it all needs to be put together again of course, so that takes a while to do it in a way so no one could ever notice that it was done like that. :tongue: And finally there is the fact that for some reason this first issue seems to have been misprinted. Most of the pages are slanted to one side or the other and you can actually see the printing lines and colour blocks come through the spine. All this combines means that it takes a bit longer then an average mag scan. So I thought it might be interesting to show you how a page looks like when it has just been scanned, as well as how it ends up after doing all of the above. So I put together a small cbz file right here, which shows the raw page first and then right after the finished one. That way the difference really stands out. Oh and its a direct download link, so don't worry about waiting times.

So very true. I don't know what going on with reviewers these days, I really don't. Not just in reviewing Virtual console games, but reviews in general. Since I choose to only go for a Wii and a DS for this generation, it's only naturally that reviews for these systems are the first that pop into my mind. Lately I've simply stopped reading reviews since so many of them simply get it wrong. Talking about how certain Wii games are uncontrollable and such, while when I uy the game myself I can't seem to find what they were talking about. For instance, when a game like Excite Truck can score 6/10 on several sites you just know somethings amiss. Same goes for SSX Blur. Terrible controls etc. bah. It seems like many professional reviewers are unable to adapt to new ways of controlling these games. This makes me wonder what these same people were like when they picked up a controller for the first time to play Super Mario Bros. Would they have whined about the controls being crap as well, even though it was only a case of them simply having to take the time to learn how to actually control the game? it feels like when they pick up a game they somehow expect to e able to master it within minutes since they have been playing games longer than anyone else...or so they think. Perhaps it's partly arrogance or simply stupidity. Fanboyism or impatience, who shall say? What I noticed as well about reviewers and people who like to call themselves "hardcore gamers", is how they love to tear down classic games as being overrated. Somehow trying to put themselves above it to reach some new kind of "uber hardcoreness" or something. :tongue: Glad we didn't have all this kind of nonsense in the past. This is probably why I love these classic magazines so much. They weren't trying to be hip or cool. Most of the people writing them were simply gamers who loved to play games and not trying to preach their own philosophy about them to others. Oh well, they can't take away the past from us I guess. :happy:

That what I mean. It went something like this: Mario 64: good at the time, especially since it was basically the only game worth playing. Mario Kart 64: Pretty good but the cool guys at college didn't want to play anything like it. Golden Eye: This did get playtime at college, pretty much all that's mentioned. Wave Race: not even mentioned. LOZ OOT: cool LOZ MM: Not even mentioned FFS. Some other "interesting" things that were said. Hey You Pickachu controlled just as well as most N64 games.... Rocket Robot On Wheels was one of the 2 good games on the N64 says one guy... Tertrisphere was weird, but had good techno music. So yeah, looking back at the podcast, this one sucked incredibly hard. I mean common, how can you not remember Waverace64? One of the best racing games even today. Majora's Mask, probably the most unique Zelda game ever. So very special. Goldeneye, till this day still my favourite FPS, along with Half-Life 1 deathmatch. 1080° Snowboarding, along with Saturn's Steep Slope Sliders, my favourite snowboard game. Blast Corps, Been playing my new Japanese copy this week, still love it to bits. Nothing else like it. Diddy Kong Racing, StarFox64, F-Zero X, Banjo Kazooie, Tetrisphere, Conker, Mario Golf and Tennis, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, Paper Mario, all triple A games in my book. Not to mention, Bangaio and Sin & Punishment as import games. I don't get how anyone can say they only released 1 good game every year. Sure, there were severe droughts, but there was always something very special on the horizon. And when looking back today, most of these games hold up extremely well or are even better than the sequels that followed.

I never actually got into the whole podcast thing until I started scanning magazines. As it turned out, these can be a lifesaver when having to sit through a couple of hours of scanning pages before you can edit them. First of is the Retronauts Podcast from the people over at 1Up. Even though I disagree with quite a few of their points it's a pretty good podcast. Although episode 2 was a bit embarrassing (N64 VS PS3 themed) when they seemed to have trouble naming more then 5 great N64 games.... :ermm: Overall they do seem to know their stuff very well. The second one is the RetroforceGO! podcast from the Destructoid site. I have only listened the shmup episode, which is nr.32 and they seem to have a not quite as much know how, especially about the very obscure Japanese only games. Which is something that interests me the most. Still, the people on the podcast have a great chemistry and their love for classic games easily puts this one at the top. If anyone knows other retrogaming podcasts which are as good or hopefully better than these, please share them.

Remind me again in summertime. I'm trying to stay as far away from ebay as possible in the next couple of months. It simply is getting much to expensive for me, and I don't want to get into any further trouble. I know I have a couple of expenses coming up which come to a couple of thousand Euro's so I'm gonna have to take it nice and easy for a bit.

Don't worry about the pixelated crap. You won't have time to notice it when you're playing the game. It happens when you've just countered a bunch of enemies firing about 80 bullets and rockets at your head and you explosion of counter rockets goes up to 200. So at that moment there are about a gazillion bullets and rockets on the screen at once, along with plenty of enemies as well. The game is simply crazy like that. I got the game yesterday and have been playing non-stop. (Between scanning the first Mean Machines magazine ) At first it's all a bit confusing since the game is so different from the originals, but slowly everything starts falling into place once I started getting my head around the new weapons and the new gameplay options. There are so many different ways you can tackle a level, it's all a bit overwhelming really. That being said, ever since the game clicked with me, I'm loving every second of it. Just had a quick look at the edit mode and it seems to be put together with lots of care and attention to detail. Very easy to use and yet has lots of options to create just about any level you'd like. I can see myself losing many months on this game already. The games only been out for a week in Japan and there are already 5 official downloadable Treasure levels on their site (which you save on your pc as sound files): http://www.esp-web.co.jp/products/bangai-o...l_download.html A very nice addition is the bat and sword close range weapons, especially the bat. When you hit an enemy with the bat he goes flying across the screen and whatever he touches received damage and if it's a non static object, it is hurled alongside it. I'm loving the way you can catapult enemies and objects and thus slingshot them into each other, using them as projectiles. Didn't understand from the movies how the bombs worked, but now I do. Very smart to keep the regular circle pattern when simply letting go of the bomb button, but when you want to specifically target certain enemies, you can press towards them, release the bomb and you missiles will move that way in a much denser pattern. Lots of depth in this game, I love it! If you've never played a previous Bangaioh, it might take a while longer to get the game to click, but it's so worth it. Pure arcade style action with so much diversity in the stages. There's even a Super Mario Bros Stage in there. :laughing: And I've heard there's also a Tetris and pacman stage, but I haven't played those yet. There are 160 stages in total, along with 24 free spots for self created or downloaded stages. But like I said before, you can save extra stages on your PC or even an iPod as MP3 files and load them into the DS by using the microphone. I'm having a blast trying to beat my own score and times on certain stages. And I've was up till 2AM last night working on my own stage, which is far from done, but I want to get everything just right so that it's as good as a regular professional stage, and that takes a lot of play testing. :wink: This is my game of the year so far.

Just installed the program. It seems very good indeed. A bit more complicated at first than CDisplay, but you get much more options in return. It takes a bit of getting used to, but every program does. I wish there was a version for OS X as well, because I'm switching over in a bit. They only seem to have ffView: http://www.feedface.com/software/ffview.html If I don't like FFView, I can always try Crossover Mac to see if it supports either CDisplay or ComicRack in OS X.

That sounds great! :smile: I've heard a lot of good things about Diehard Gamefan, and I actually got 3 issues from a friend a while back. But I've only quickly scanned through them once. I'm anticipating reading the very first issue. :wink: Oh and Philly, you can add Mean Machines issue 1 to the list as of today. The posty just delivered it, and it's in absolutely mint condition as well. :grin:

Ah, good tip! Never heard about that program before.

The small misalignments of some pages doesn't bother me since that's the way magazines are put together. Same thing with pages that are actually printed a bit slanted. It's just the way real magazines turn out sometimes. There are 2 solutions to the CDisplay dilemma. The first is to open a cbz/r and go to the 2nd page before selecting "show 2 pages at once". But you'll have to do this for every magazine you open, so it's a bit clumsy. The second way is to include a blank page (or the thank you paged) called something like 0000 or 0000a or something similar. That way when the program is set to open 2 pages at once, the first you'll get is the thank you page, along with the cover. And after that you'll get the correct pages side by side. That way everyone should be happy. The only thing you need to do is open up mags you download with winrar or something and include such a page. That way 95% of people who prefer the regular way will still get their normal releases.

What I don't understand though is, why force people to have them look at the pages that way, when programs like CDisplay give you the same option without having the pages stuck together forever? That way people always have the option to read the pages like they are used to, or if they prefer to choose the "display 2 pages at once" option provided by the program. Posters are an obvious exception of course. The only thing this does, is make the scan useless to certain people who don't have a 20" or larger screen to be able to comfortably read the smaller text. And it also reduces the quality of the scans in a way, as you end up with double pages which are as big as one regular page normally is. (500-900kB) Just take a look at the example cbz I uploaded: http://rapidshare.com/files/102723394/NP3_example.cbz Note that I did no extra editing on any page, being it one of yours or one of the raw release. Besides cropping the page back to a single page and saving it at 90%. So you see a 2 page 862kB file was cropped to a one page 439kB file, which is about half, just like it should be without changing anything to the picture itself. I think the difference is rather huge. I had the same reasoning when I first started scanning, as I had read a tutorial on here saying you should resize the 300DPI images down to 150DPI. The thing is that I always knew that there was something wrong with my scans, and no matter what I tried to do, that feeling remained. I even redid several magazines a couple times over and still wasn't happy. Until I compared my 300DPI scans to the same ones in 150DPI. Is there a big difference? Yes and no. The size difference (in kB) for the pages themselves is neglegable, so that shouldn't be a problem. But when you have coloured pages with an even background and text on top, you will see a big difference in artifacting between the two. You do of course have to save the pages at a decent jpg quality as well. Normally 90% in most programs, which turns out to be pages of 600-900kb for images that are resized in width to 1280. This might be the described grainy look people talk about. The artifacts that are being created by scaling down the images to far. You can see the artifact problem very clearly in the cbz pages above, around the text, compared to the raw version. So since these pages were kept at 300DPI in this case, here it must be caused by saving the pages at a much lower quality, which results in substantial quality loss. For instance the raw cover is 498kB and yours is 283kB, so you can imagine how much data was lost in the transition. I would have to strongly disagree with that. I regularly get PM's from new members thanking me for putting the scans up on a small UK board which is completely dead btw. Saying that they found out about Retromags, thanks to the links provided in the posts. So besides the small group of people of which "everybody already knows about this site", there are plenty of others out there who stumble upon the site day after day, due to various links, and more often than not due to finding a copy of a magazine here or there, and following the link on the "thank you" page. You do have to understand that if everyone just walks in with the attitude of "I do whatever I want", this place isn't going to last long. Surprised you haven't learned from the past, as I seem to remember very similar things happening here before, that tore this small community to shreds. I'm pretty sure Philly only started banning people because he didn't see any other solution, and tried to keep the pieces from falling apart. No matter where you go and what you try to accomplish, you will always come across ground rules, which have been set up for a good reason most of the time. So walking in and telling everyone: I'm doing whatever I want and if you don't like it you can blow me, is anything but productive. As well as being offensive to the other members working their butts off, within the rules and guidelines, because they understand that's the way to build this site up to something we all can enjoy.

Not sure if I should upload this one in the download manager like this or if those 16 pages should be simply included into a new version of EGM 082, but until we figure that out I'll just post a rapidshare zip file here. Simply unpack and you've got the cbz of the Killer Instinct 2 Strategy Guide that came with EGM 82. rapidshare link

I was just about to post that I have this very issue, and I'm sure I had the small guide book that came with it as well, but that I had just turned my place upside down to find it and besides finding all sorts of inserts and other supplements, I simply couldn't find it.... That is until I was about to close the final box and took last look between a bunch of unrelated papers, where I found a handful of other tiny EGM guide books and the very last one was this one: :smile:

Not sure how many have played the original on N64 or the semi-remake on the Dreamcast, but there's finally a sequel released of this incredible game! Well in Japan anyway. Since I couldn't wait for a European release date and as I'm home right now for a whole week, I decided to order my copy from Play-Asia and pay a bit extra for express delivery. The best thing is, I just got a call from FedEX asking me if they can deliver it to me tomorrow around noon. For the people not knowing what this is all about, here's a couple of vids: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v7dCioi4&NR=1 http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOTZFRI2eE If there's anyone out there who is also ordering this game and wants to share self made maps (yeah, i know it's a long stretch. ;P ) let me know.

First post shamelessly stolen from another board. :fear: JPN Release Date: 03/19/2008 Price: 4,800 yen Players: 1-4 Genre: Exploding Missile Action USA Release Date: (1up) 05/15/2008 / (IGN) 06/24/2008 Price: $29.99 Official Site: (does not work in Safari) http://www.esp-web.co.jp/products/bangai-o/ Official Trailer: Screens: Characters: BANGAI-O Ruri (girl) - Masato (boy) - Hakase (meaning: Doctorate) (old man) Weapons: Homing Bound Napalm Break Sword Bat Barrier Edit Mode: Lets you create and share your own levels using the DS speaker and mic. Level Editor Screens: http://dol.dengeki.com/data/news/2008/2/29...5f61314e18.html http://dol.dengeki.com/data/news/2008/3/7/...4ced665197.html http://dol.dengeki.com/data/news/2008/3/14...75509032ce.html IGN Interview with D3 the US Publisher http://ds.ign.com/articles/855/855028p1.html

Not sure what the problem could be with the uploads as I never experienced any problems with it myself. There was some trouble with the download system on the former provider, but those have all been fixed with the new one. As for what Philly does with his magazines, that's his business. Same goes for everyone else. In gaming it's the exact same thing, you have gamers and you have collectors. Some people get enjoyment by playing the games or in this case reading the magazines, others do so by collecting them instead. I'm actually a bit of both, I enjoy to collect rare games and also magazines, but when I have the time I do love to play or read them, even though with the amount of games/magazines I buy or scan/download, I know that I have way to much stuff that I will never play or read anyway. That doesn't make the enjoyment of having them any less. If I want to I can still pick them up and read/play them anytime I want. Let's face it, no matter how much work goes into creating these releases, they will always be for a very niche group of people. Many of todays gamers aren't even interested in the former generation, let stand generations past that one, so you can only imagine what they would think if you asked them if they wanted to read videogame magazines from 10-20 years ago. You first of all have to have some love for classic games or systems, and like I stated above, within that group there are lots of collectors. I don't see anything wrong with that. As a matter of fact, Philly has kept this site going against better judgment for quite some time, even though he was the only one at that time still working on it. So the last thing that should be called into question is his dedication to this project. What he does with the scanned issues is up to him. As far as I'm concerned he can print the pages out, clip them all up and light them on fire in a pagan ritual of bestiality, drugs and self-mutilation, and I still wouldn't have a problem with it. What it comes down to is that we shouldn't scan these magazines for some ulterior motive such as getting some kind of recognition for what we do. If that's the case, you're bound to burn out sooner or later (probably sooner) simply because people only care about the mags and not who scans or edits them, and that's only natural. The only reason we should be doing this work is because we love the mags ourselves and we want other people to be able to enjoy them as well.

I think he was just so excited by the news that he missed a couple of keys. :grin:

My answer would definitely be "I am just plain lazy!", and yes; I'm being serious. :grin: I sometimes even wonder what keeps me going when I simply don't care about doing certain other things which should have priority. But in the end I simply love this hobby, and especially the retrogame aspect of it whichis more of a passion actually. And since retromags is quite a big part of the retrogaming experience, everything fits into place. The 2nd reason would be that I came across a scan of the official Sega Saturn magazine a year or 2 ago, and I was sad that I couldn't find the other issues, especially since it was a great underappreciated magazine as well as system. So I wanted to share the couple of issues I had with people just like me. Didn't took too long before I started looking on EBay (which I hated at the time and barely ever used), looking for the missing issues. Finding out who Rich Leadbetter actually was and how influential he was to the feel and content of the mag. (Just go through the mags and look how many columns and reviews are actually written by one man) The learning about Maximum, which was his baby, and a bit further down the line starting to figure out lots of great people worked at one and the same publisher, and on different mags (EMAP). So it's become a bit of an addiction in and of itself. :wink: