JonnyCGood

Any more guide books in the pipeline?

I noticed that Saturn Power, a mag I wanted to read, are gone too. https://archive.org/details/saturnpowermagazine?tab=collection

Thank you for your very high quality scans especially of Japanese horror games. I'm shocked no one has done those Silent Hill guidebooks before.

We need an archive of the archive since Publishers have sniffed out that a bunch of their magazines are on there. A lot of the Japanese magazines and publishers are still around, so I can see them striking down thousands of uploads if they feel like it. The era of just putting everything on archive for free might be coming to an end.

Super Play and PC Engine Fan have my favorite covers out of all the gaming magazines. I am a sucker for 90's era anime designs and art.

Yes, there is effectively a "lost" issue of GR. If you were to scan the Italian version, you might be able to recover it. Alternatively, ask if anyone who worked on the issue is willing to digitally release the issue. A few cancelled magazine issues have been released in this format.

The Gamefan Resident Evil book has a lot of concept art. https://imgur.com/a/LZ3eyWx

Woah nostalgia. I had this issue!

Woah these Gamefan books are so cool! Any chance you have the Resident Evil or Persona ones?

Gamebook Scanner (blazblue) is back to uploading. Included in their new uploads are issues of PlayStation Magazine, and Gamest 95. I wonder if they're the ones responsible for the other issues of Gamest floating around? These scans have been shared on Chinese scanner forums and thankfully have been started to being uploaded to public sites. The good news is that there's much more out there, and the more people scanning the more likely we are to get these books scanned.

Out of nowhere someone popped up on archive posting 83 Japanese magazines or game guides in good scan quality. This includes 15 issues of Famitsu, a few Gamest Mooks, guides for Zelda, Ys, Sakura Wars, etc. Cool stuff. I was curious if they were attached to any groups or forums, and I found out they come from a Chinese forum called Endless Fight. The forum hides download links those who aren't registered and it won't accept new accounts. They've posted most of what they've scanned over the years on archive, but they got a ransomware attack in Dec. and lost a bunch of the new material they were scanning. Since then they've continued to post their scans of Dengeki PlayStation, Dengeki Saturn, and Chinese magazines "Game Times" and "Game天堂" to Endless fight but not archive.

The Super Famicom and Hippon Super are some of my most wanted mag scans. I have Vol.5 No.16 from an unknown scanner taken from Underground Gamer. Supposedly there were more? https://archive.org/details/the-super-famicom-september-16-1994 Is that why there's been so few Super Famicom magazines scanned? Entire runs of a few Mega Drive and Saturn mags have been scanned.

Cool! I don't think I've seen too many SotN guides scanned. The ones I know of in English are the was one by Prima, one by BradyGames, and then the Survival Guide. It was never a huge game so it didn't get many guides.

Oh man, these are nice. Did anyone happen to make any guides for TMNT: Tournament Fighters by any chance?

These I know have been scanned ages ago and were uploaded to places like Underground gamer and elsewhere. Some were scanned by 420 scans. The Eye has some of them. Some more here and here. If you want to scan them again and submit them to retromags then be my guest. RM won't accept random scans but only with permission from the scanner. This is the list of Nintendo Power suppliments scanned on the site: https://www.retromags.com/magazines/usa/nintendo-power/nintendo-power-supplements/ I don't think these are scanned. There is a prima pokemon guide scanned. Is this the same thing?

There's a quote attributed to Miyamoto which is used to claim that he didn't care for the DKC games which a lot of people treat the quote as a fact. So where does it come from? Turns out these scans aren't just pretty colors, but actually useful for determining these sorts of questions. An early web source is this 2006 featured article from 1-up.com (2006). It refers to the quote as coming from an Electronic Games magazine article from 1995. Unfortunately it is not scanned. The article is an interview of Miyamoto and Tim Stamper of Rare by Steve Kent. People on twitter claim that it doesn't contain the aforementioned quote. Who knows. In terms of print sources, the quote appears in Edge magazine issue 93, which is in turn a section from Steve Kent's book "The First Quarter". And it also appears in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games (page 518). These all date from around 2001, 6 years after the supposed statements were supposedly made. Here we see there is some attempt at a narrative showing that Miyamoto's Yoshi Island project and Rare's DKC were in some kind of rivalry: He also says the quote in an episode of G4's Icons. In 2010, Miyamoto himself addressed this. What to make of all this? Taken together, since the earliest version of the quote that can be confirmed is a good 6 years later, and not sourced directly to Miyamoto himself but a journalist, I'm a little suspicious of this. And, it seems unthinkable that a Nintendo employee would bash a game in an interview. It might be that he made an off-hand comment which was then misunderstood or mistranslated and then a journalist wanting to push a dramatic and contrarian narrative picked up on it. It's telling that 1up and G4 have people straight up bashing the game calling it "boring" or not very good.

Here's the old scan for comparison: https://archive.org/details/Superplay_Issue_27_1995-01_Future_Publishing_GB As you can see it's readable so better than nothing. But it's got washed out colors, crooked pages, and lower resolution. Hats off to Delphinus48 for the scan. Very cool to see Parodius, Kid Dracula, and Goemon, on a cover in a 90's English language magazine.

That's fine. I think Delphinus48 and Retromags are the only places that have high quality scans. Jason scott uploaded most of the series in 2013 and it's readable but not great. Super Play has my 2nd favorite covers ever in any gaming magazine. PC Engine Fan is #1 and of course it's hardly been scanned too.

Oh nice. Super Play has really nice covers and I'd love to see the entire magazine run scanned in very high quality. Last I checked most issues were scanned but a lot were kind of sloppy rushjob scans.

In principle I think the cbz format could be expanded upon to allow for OCR without anything major changed. Something like an additional text file that a CBZ reader knows what to do with. That way you can have a nice clean cbz with searchable text, which i think is the only advantage pdf has over cbz. Archive.org added OCR a while back and allows for text searching and that's what I've been using for text searching of cbz/cbr files. Originally it was for latin characters only but they've expanded it to Japanese characters too. For example, it's neat that you can search for "Faxanadu" in both English and Japanese. Whatever they do could probably be done on standalone cbz readers as well. PDFs are a bit of a chore to work with since they only can be edited by a few programs like photoshop. And it's frequent people will lazily extract images from pdfs via just exporting .jpgs which either means a quality decrease or file size bloat.

It's also on Archive: https://archive.org/details/Dengeki_Gs_Magazine_Issue_024_July_1999

Kitsunebi has gone back to uploading these Japanese books. I actually have all these books on my HDD but got lazy in uploading them myself. And they seem to be sourced to Chinese scanning forums such as Endless Fight. A user from that forum has started an archive account to post their scans to archive directly. There's probably some middle-man too. We have no idea whether these scans are being posted with permission by the way.

If the complaints are about other sites mirroring content, I don't get the problem. I want this content as freely available as possible, and it doesn't belong to any one person, it belongs to all of us. I want to build easily searchable databases that people can have access to so they can search about whatever they want to. I in fact want these in as many hands as possible simply to prevent any of this material ever being lost. My big complaint is that they are absolutely enamored with the pdf format, presumably because that's what their site software uses. They will take books I know were in cbz/cbr format and convert them to pdfs! Ugh! When you host something leave the files alone and change nothing!

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Famitsu Xbox 58 or so issues have been scanned and are on the archive already. For purchasing, I would say go to ebay or yahoo auction and someone in Japan is probably mass selling theirs.

That is Arial Tetsuo, who was kind of the face of the Wipeout series during the 2097 era. She is of british-japanese descent, but races for the North American Auricom team. She then made a run for politics and was later assassinated. All the pilots have elaborate backstories that are barely covered in the games. She is incorrectly shown with a Feisar team for the artwork on this cover. Her being Anglo-Japanese is likely an allusion to the game's design itself, which borrows heavily from anime and Japanese sci-fi series. Arial Tesuo also appears in the Fluke's "Atom Bomb" music video which cross promoted the game.