Mega Drive Fan Issue #18 - July 1991 | CGQ
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- Episode 64 - Mega Drive Fan issue #18 from July of 1991. Mega Drive Fan was a Japanese gaming magazine published by Tokuma Shoten between 1989 and 1994, after which time it became Saturn fan, and finally Dreamcast fan. This issue was donated to the show by Jordan in Yardley, PA, who goes by BusterD online. Thanks, Jordan!!!
Show Notes:
- This issue of Nintendo Power was donated to the show by "Buster D".
- The glass head thing in the intro happened because the footage originally shot for the intro was unusable and I needed a quick solution.
- This is the first episode of Let's Read to use the permanent "Let's Read" setup in the basement. There is some camera shake on the overhead camera, which I need to take care of, but otherwise I think it turned out great!
- All gameplay footage used in this episode was recorded using FPGA-based consoles; either a Mega SG or a MiSTer.
- Almost all of the box art used in this episode comes from segaretro.org, which is an amazing website.
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All video game footage featured on Classic Gaming Quarterly is recorded from either actual game hardware or FPGA-based consoles, unless otherwise noted. As of episode 35, it is recorded in RGB, upscaled using either an XRGB Mini Framemeister or an Open-Source Scan Converter (OSSC), and captured on either an Elgato Game Capture HD or a Startech USB 3.0 capture device. Prior to that, it was recorded in s-video using am RGB to s-video encoder and a DVD recorder. All videos are edited on a Mac using Final Cut Pro X.
Most box art featured in CGQ videos comes from The Cover Project (www.thecoverproject.net). Check them out for all of your video game insert needs. Other box art and magazine scans come from Matt Henzel Video Game Obsession (www.videogameobsession.com). Many, many other photos appear thanks to Wikimedia Commons and Evan Amos.
Theme music courtesy of Kevin MacLeod: (www.smartsound.com/royalty-free-music/incompetech)
#CGQ #LetsRead - Hry
Just an FYI for anyone not subscribed to the other channel - uploaded a slightly more casual Let's Read over there just the other day. PSM Issue #2 from October of 1997. czcams.com/video/qYtAghV_Udw/video.html
Say man, are you in Sac/Davis?
@@eagletrippin Yes.
2 in one day?! It's Super Bowl Sunday not Christmas, Chris!
Was just going to tweet you that it's the perfect time for a long read through! Keep up the great work!
Good heavens, I get so excited whenever get a notification about a new CGQ video upload. Hands down my favorite gaming channel on the Tube (sorry James Rollfe, Clint of LGR) However Joe & Dave of "Game Sack" are tied for that top spot.
I just came here from a sack video
I really appreciate your videos and the chance to see all the things I missed growing up.
Shout-out to Jeremy Parish!
I love these episodes so much. Keep up the good work, man!
Another great one, Chris! Thanks for the look overseas and I'm always looking forward to the next one!
Hi. Nice idea for a video. You can find most issues of Megadrive Fan (and its sister publications) on SegaRetro. Some additional comments.
1:59 Monthly magazines in Japan have the weird habit of dating their issues one month ahead, so the "July" issue was in fact released on June 8, a few weeks ahead of Sonic's US release. Sonic is on the cover because the magazine included (separately) a short comic of Sonic The Hedgehog to promote the game.
2:15 As mentioned in another comment, Sonic was the big summer game for the Mega Drive so the summer holiday connection makes sense. I think the palmtree motif also recalls Greenhill Zone.
3:55 That's exactly what it says. スクープ特報 means "scoop report".
4:31 The Sonic bonus screen is here to illustrate the column above, which explains the additional, faster CPU of the Mega-CD allows it to perform scaling and rotation, similarly to the recently released Super Famicom. The text below the screenshot says a few MD games like Sonic The Hedgehog already managed to pull off rotations but the Mega-CD's rotations would be much more impressive.
4:43 This part is about the support coming from third party publishers, saying 20 companies had already pledged support.
10:44 The main issue of the Super Famicom / SNES is that it struggled to reproduce the arcade experience of shooting games, especially as publishers cheapened out on cartridges rather than opting out for SA-1 accelerating chips. Kuuga / Vapor Trail here is a good example of an arcade shmup that a midrange developer could properly bring to the Mega Drive but would probably struggle to port on Super Famicom.
22:19 This is a series of articles about game development. This feature was a regular feature in which five different aspects of game development where handled by different professionals to teach the readers about game development. The first part is about game design and supervised by Naito Kan, the genius programmer behind Shining & the Darkness (and later famously Landstalker). Most of the core team behind Shining & the Darkness were ex-Enix and Chunsoft staff who had worked on Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest IV (hence the DQ screenshot). Naito then went on to create Climax and the Takahashi brothers went on to create Camelot.
22:55 This part of the feature is about game music specifically. It is supervised by "Master" a.k.a. Nakabayashi Tohru from Sega. This month's article talks specifically about the porting of arcade games and what challenges it brings. He mentions Ghouls'N Ghosts since Sega ported the game to the Mega Drive and he mentions that it is especially hard to port the music and sfx from arcade games made by other companies since their resources, trackers and methods are different.
26:08 Daisenryaku was a popular series at the time; the previous game got in a bit of a media controversy during the first Gulf War as a TV news report complained that the game was depicting an ongoing conflict. It is now believed the owner of Systemsoft had probably manufactured the outrage as a promotional stint. Nevertheless, this controversy made it one of the first hits of the Mega Drive in Japan. Advanced Daisenryaku was a big deal due to its improved AI and modem functionality which allowed "online" play (over the phone line) for the brief time period Sega promoted the Mega Modem. Regarding translated episodes, the US got "Iron Storm" on the SegaSaturn (via Working Designs) which was the Saturn sequel to Advanced Daisenryaku.
27:29 That's Aoki Naoki, head of business department for Sega's consumer division at the time. Not sure why his face would be familiar to you, frankly...
31:00 You got it mostly right. The top chart is the readers' most anticipated games among those that had been announced already. The bottom chart is about the games which readers hoped to see ported on the Mega Drive. Top right is the five best new releases according to readers' reviews. Bottom right are the 10 worst shmups of the Mega Drive according to readers' reviews.
32:51 The Tera Drive is shown because there was a special contest awarding a Tera Drive to the first ten players who would beat the special stage of Raiden Densetsu and send Micronet the secret message displayed at the end of the stage.
35:50 Keep in mind how big of a worldwide cultural event the fall of the Berlin Wall was for kids back then, just a few months before the game was released. The average Japanese kid probably all had heard of the Berlin Wall even if they had no idea what the fuss was all about, so I can see why Kaneko thought the title would be a good marketing shtick.
39:17 Magical Taluluto-kun and Eternal Legend are the other two games on the page.
39:52 The game above Halley Wars is Arliel a.k.a. Crystal Warriors.
42:41 Top one is Traysia. Next page's pinball game is Dino Land.
47:28 発売日未定 just means "release date TBD".
48:15 Not sure what the gals club is either (and probably would not admit it under torture if I did) but the reasons they are here is because they were present at Techno Soft's booth (booth 4403) during that summer's Tokyo Toy Show in Makuhari Messe.
Omg. Love the series "lets read". Thank you for 1 more show.
Cheers from Brazil
Great episode as always!
very nice stuff you do. hyper exciting!
Thanks, as usual!
Two Let's Reads in a row? You're spoiling us!
Great video 👍
New setup looks great - I honestly didn't even notice any camera shake. I really enjoy seeing these more atypical mags (both foreign and domestic) get some attention. Perfect niche for subscriber-exclusive content, in my opinion.
Funny to hear about the TeraDrive here as I just learned about its existence a week or so ago. I think I was looking into info on the X68000 and that led to other computers in Japan. I suppose a 286 wouldn't have been too bad at that time since the Mega Drive hardware would have your gaming needs covered. The 286 could definitely handle simple computer tasks at that time, and even some light gaming. We are both familiar with that, as we both had Apex machines running the old 8086/8088 chips. The 486 would have been brand new at the time with the 386 being very common at that point. I got my 486 in 1994, after the Pentiums were already available, but I didn't mind being a step behind that way. From what I have found, the TeraDrive was set up in a way that the computer output via RGB, but the Mega Drive output via composite, so that would be a messy setup. Also, while I mostly agree with you about Vapor Trail, I must say it has some good music, with the stage one(actually, it's the tune for every stage, it seems) tune being excellent.
Perfect, haha^^ keep 'em coming, I'm so excited for the next flashback. (Come on, there's gotta be at least a few still in there ...) ,P
This is a very good concept, that's how I used to "read" american magazines back in the day, looking at the pictures. What a busy visual on those japanese magazines.
Still in such great shape!
Thanks for this. I hope is well on your end.
I just came back from a week in Tokyo first time in my life, oh boy does everything there is hyper exciting... It's a tad over the top. The translate camera is a life saver
Watching from South Korea. Love this stuff.
Zach Couch sureee
Yeah one of the Advanced Daisenryaku games did arrive here in USA back then, the Sega Saturn version was released here as "Iron Storm" thanks to the publisher Working Designs. That said, great video, really love the let's read episodes!
I find it interesting that this magazine reads left to right. Most books/magazines in Japan read right to left.
Who knew we would read a Japanese magazine. I enjoyed it. Thanks
Another let's read! This guy is the real MVP in times of crisis.
This was really interesting! I was impressed with the level of detail in the info boxes for each game. I wish this was something that the U.S. magazines of the time had adopted...
Thanks
Beautiful book
Whoo hoo! Love me some let's reads! 🎉🥳
I had a 286 back then and i'm still sad to this day ^^
it was quite a leap from the c64 + nes, but as you mentioned it started to become slightly outdated.
Around 29:00-ish... Yes, Blue Almanac is Star Odyssey, although it was only recently localized by an unlicensed third-party. It also was a cartridge game, so the CD must have been a soundtrack.
This might have been mentioned in the comments already but I wanted to chime in on the whole who created Sonic thing. As a kid I held the belief that Yuji Naka was creator of Sonic but based on tales of the internet it became known to me that Naka did not create Sonic himself. He was however the lead programmer to make the game possible. But the character Sonic himself was not by Naka.
At 8:05 when he reads Namco, was I the only one that immediately thought of Bithead 1000 screaming it out as "NAM-COT"?
Was thinking how early (or late) this issue was for the streets of rage thing. I remember a few preview were Adam was named Wolf and it was the american name, not Bare Knuckle.
Master of Monsters is one of my all time favorite games!
We got Syd Valis here and that Blue Almanac came out on retrofighters as Star Odyssey
Yeah. It was a screwed up localization where they had no idea what to do with the SD part of the title. (segaretro.org/Syd_of_Valis)
@@arognlie broken link, it has a bracket added to it
I love that you remember SkyLab.
28:50 - The cards on the left are from Monster Maker, an RPG card game with illustrations by Kugatsuhime. There are some video game spin-offs, largely on Nintendo systems. But...
39:10 - The header image on the left is of Ariel, title character of the Game Gear strategy game by Sega that came out in the West as "Crystal Warriors". At 39:50 in the upper left corner there's a little segment on the game. Kugatsuhime drew these characters for Sega, and would do the same for the sort-of sequel Royal Stone a few years later.
We got a Daisenryaku game on PS2 and Xbox, I think that might be it though!
I really wish they would bring back physical magazines again. I'm sure there are some still out there, but they sure seem to have diminished in popularity. Reading on the internet isn't quite the same as a physical book
They're still very popular in the UK. I think the size of the US works against it, because distributing magazines nationwide is costly.
21:55 Indeed. Times were a little bit different back then (also it's Japan) and if you ask me, better. We had this anime & manga section in our local video game magazine back then and it also had pretty juicy stuff in it. They'd never print that into video game magazine these days. Oh god, I miss those days. Cool read through, well, flip through.
Listening at work! Gotta keep the phones running! Do you still have a landline? Remember payphones? Lol
um "Hyper UL-TECH" (ul-tech an abbreviation for "ultimate techniques") is the section of the magazine filled with secret "cheat" codes for various Megadrive , controller codes like up up down down "A,A,B,B,AA" etc for all kinds of cheats... basically the "Tips & Tricks" section like EGM had...
Pretty good considering the language barrier.
SD Valis DID come to the US, as Syd of Valis. The GG Fan section, left page, Magical Taruruto, a game based off the anime of the same name, also has games for the Famicom,a SFC game, two Gameboy Games, and a Mega Drive game (made by Game Freak of Pokemon fame).
Street Smart is also an SNK made game, some consider it the prequel to the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury games due to one of the characters is supposed to be Takuma Sakazaki, and the other character, Jeff Bogard, father of Terry and Andy Bogard.
You should do more Japanese magazine flip throughs
Why does the sky in Green Hill Zone look so dark? I really think they should have swapped the sky and sea colours. My dad actually told me that he originally thought the zone was set at night.
No doubt the Japanese MegaDrive Fan magazine showed various articles so they show Masato Nakamura because the chip tunes in Sonic 1 were pretty amazing... so that was just focused on talking about the chip tunes.
must of this vide "I don't know" lol
SD stands for Super Deformed Valis.
I think it is Mega Drive issue 7. It says it right on the cover.
The 7 indicates that it is the seventh issue of that year, not the seventh issue overall.
@@CGQuarterly
That's an odd way to do it...
that translate app..wow. Scan and translate.. Ive never seen that
Sonic The Hedgehog 1 japanese version is the definite version of this game. The PAL release has one level missing. And the North American release has scrolling, paralax and FX effects missing. Anyway cool vid, love 90's japanese gaming mags.
There's a level missing in the PAL version?!?
the google translate app just blew my mind
286 started in 1982 but wasn't superseded until 1985 but really in those terms it is kind of night and day. Regardless, I'd be really interested in knowing what 286 chip it had used. Bet it used an S-Video cable though to the TV... rofl. yuck, but I guess at those resolutions, meh...
Any chance of a 'PC Gamer' magazine?
I don't currently have any, but I am bidding on one on eBay! I bought an early 90s Computer Gaming World a while back on eBay, but it got lost in the mail. :/
@@CGQuarterly Here's hopes you win it. A classic is the one with Duke Nukem Forever on the cover.
Regardless, good episode...as usual!
The art work is interesting compared to what we got here.
So this mag had the "online capability" mention of a game in 1991???
How's that possible? "Online" didn't even exist as a word in 1991...
Technically some variant of "online" has been used for about 100 years, usually in reference to telegrams or railroads. It started being applied to computers in the 50s and 60s, especially once ARPANet was created. By the 90s there were various commercial networks one could connect to and be said to be "online," though by 1991 the internet as we know it had been launched.
Also, in Japan they had something called Sega Meganet, one of the first online multiplayer services.
@@SonofSethoitae The internet in 1991 was not even close to how we know it. It was mostly blank spaces with few words and not even pictures that any browser could support.
@@FPietros Well sure, but it was the internet proper and not some other service, which is why I said "as we know it."
@@SonofSethoitae Correct.
If anyone hasn’t checked out hyper hardboiled gourmet report on netflix. YOU SHOULD CHECK IT OUT. The epitome of a Japanese “Cooking/food?” “Documentary”? Amazing.
Do it.
Moon language.
That iphone tho
DUUUDE, that is one THICC magazine, most of my favorite games are in there, covered in full or mentioned in passing.. early Mega Drive era (1989-1991) is the best.. * _ *
anyone else always find it weird how japanese mags and their fan art is always much better than american fan art? Not that anime looks aesthetically better, but in general the average japanese reader can seemingly draw in their style more competently than the crayola crayons submissions in the west.
Do their schools all have extensive art programs?
"Do their schools all have extensive art programs?" maybe!
Let's play classic games instead 🎮
Thanks today has been very boring
クリスさんは日本語を話さないか？
I live in Japan and have a Japanese wife. If you need real translation, let me know. If you want any games from Japan, let me know too!
Next time try getting a magazine that you can actually read. This is an exercise in futility.
Take a hike, fella.
David, sorry for the confusion, I'll translate for you. When CGQ said take a hike, fella, it translates loosely to "Get outa my cunt-re" hope that clears up any confusion.