JonnyCGood

Thanks for the Soul Blade GameFan book scan, as the series is pretty high quality and hard to find. They're pretty slick looking and have nice art. Especially hoping the RE: Director's Cut book is scanned one day (though most of the most interesting parts have been scanned already). Their Re2 book has the same cgi promo-art that you've seen a thousand times already, so it's not that interesting.

Is this the mag that only had 2 issues?

Thank you, I was actually looking for a 22 year old picture of Katayama, as I could only find modern ones. He does look like Reiko with the same haircut and similar face. I think it's very plausible that he used a picture of himself as a reference when designing Reiko. So I figure that it has to be a Japanese source, since if it was in English we would know about it.

https://ridgeracer.fandom.com/wiki/Reiko_Nagase And here is the page in question: This is very, curious. It seems to be very specific information, but they don't explain where they got it. It would presumably be some Japanese magazine or guidebook for Ridge Racer R4 since that seems to be the CGI render of Reiko they're talking. She does in fact look fairy androgynous. A lot of people question this though saying that Incite is not a good source and they could have just made it up. It's also unclear if they are translating properly. It's entirely possible that "scanned" doesn't refer to any sophisticated scanning rig, but instead a simple photograph. And using a photo as a reference when designing a cgi rener is pretty standard practice. So anyone has any idea where this might have come from, or any Japanese source which backs up, please post it. It could be anywhere. The PlayStation, Dengeki PlayStation, Famitsu PS, Weekly Famitsu, etc.

https://www.endlessfight.org/discuz/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=544&extra=page%3D1 They are known as Blazblue on that forum, and that post announces their death. https://archive.org/details/@gamebookscaner And troublingly, most of their uploads have been taken down. That includes a complete scan of Saturn Fan, and up to 1988 for Famimaga, 4Koma and several Valkyrie Profile books. Right now we should organize who has what and then pool what can be saved. I backed up all the strategy guides, but nothing else. Not the manga or the magazines.

Are you aware of the similar Brazillian Retro Scans project? https://retroscans.org/

https://www.silenthillmemories.net/publications/guides_en.htm This fansite hosts a bunch of your Sh scans, and erroneously credits me as having scanned several SH books. To clarify, I never did and these were scanned by an unknown scangroup and released on manga sites which I then uploaded to archive. I've only uploaded a few, when I have even more downloaded. I've just procrastinated on that front. I'll upload the rest of their SH scans today.

1. At 187 pages and 97MB, it could easily afford a higher file size. 2. It doesn't include the separate fold-out maps, which are admittedly hard to scan. The older scan for the book does in fact include them. https://imgur.com/a/ZlcuLkl

Got any SNK guides?

Wait, what? This game just came out. I swear. How can it be a "retro mags" ?

Keep in mind that the archive mag project creates "Readable" scans, but they're not great. They're nice for reference, but I'd prefer better scans for posterity. Also when it comes to french mags, I'd love to see more issues of Gameplay RPG, which (Despite its name) covered adventure games and Role playing games. https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=235

This is one of the major french sites and it lists several dreamcast magazines: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/ There's also several German projects that don't do complete scans, but they do catalog german video game reviews and are quite complete. Here is one example: https://ninretro.de/ And funny enough, Maniac magazine is still up and running, and they've been transferring their reviews from their 0's print magazine to their website over the years. https://www.maniac.de/systeme/dc/

These scans seem to be taken from a Chinese piracy site which directly sells files, and rehosted on another piracy site that hosts files on file hosting sites. This is also where the issues of Pocket Gamer came from, which have been re-hosted on archive: https://archive.org/details/pocketgamer/掌机迷vol001/ The Japanese language book/magazine piracy sites are also suspected to be located outside of Japan due to strict piracy laws, either in Korea or Taiwan. There's also Chinese scanning forums who frequently post scans, often using Baidu. Such sites post a lot of Chinese and Japanese language scans, so it pays to keep an eye on them.

That's good to hear. The magazine itself seems a bit derivative and likely has no exclusive content. But it's nice that someone went ahead and scanned the entire thing. I am curious if they had permission to use Famitsu covers or if they just copied them. I like seeing all these quirky local magazines scanned. It's especially interesting to see how various countries reviewed various games. There's several chinese scanning forums and I fear some of this material could be post. These are based in Taiwan or mainland china, and they're in a prime spot to scan both Chinese language material and Japanese material. There's also Japanese manga sites which periodically post retro game book scans, that I can't find elsewhere, which I think are sourced to underground chinese scanners. They have another thread linking to another file sharing site with a host of old Chinese video game magazine scans. I don't think I can use it though. https://www.endlessfight.org/discuz/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=513&extra=page%3D1