Daigirin

[dshadoff]

Back in the late '90's in Japan, there used to be a quarterly book published, called "Daigirin", which listed all of the games in catalog format, and included some additional hint/trick information for most of the games.

When I say it "listed all of the games", I mean "for (basically) all of the systems available" at that time.  In 1997, the book was basically a telephone book (remember those?) format, listing over 11,000 games across 13 systems.

Soon afterward, I didn't see these books anymore - I think the last one in this series was sometime in 1999.


So the other day, I was doing a search on Yahoo auctions to find the latest version that I could, and found that they released one in autumn 2011 as a sort of "anniversary" or "revival" of sorts.  This monster covers over 23,600 games across 26 different consoles - over double the previous one, published 12 years earlier (as advertised on the cover).

Better yet, it added coverage for a few more games than the 1997 issue, in other words after "end of life" for the PC Engine system:  from 656 games covered in 1997, up to 668.  And from 1799 hints & tricks in 1997, up to 1863.

...And it comes with a CDROM.

Sadly, nothing is perfect:
- the selling price on the book is over 8000yen on average (compared with 1000 yen for 1997/98 versions)
- The CDROM application does not have a separately-accessible database (it is all compiled into a 80MB monolithic executable file), and doesn't support cut-and-paste of the return data.  That must have been done deliberately, because I think it takes effort to prevent that.   


...While I'm not going to do a game-for-game comparison of the lists of games, I'll mention here if there are any interesting/notable games (or cheats!) in the new version.

Also, it would be interesting to see if the data could be extracted from inside the process' execution space, since it's good information.

[esteban]

Since the data is not easily extracted, you will be looking for the  new content manually, correct?

Damn, that will take some time

Call me an idiot, but would taking screenshots of the data (since copy-n-paste is disabled), and then subsequently batch processing the screenshots in OCR software provide anything useful (especially since I OCR would introduce errors)?



Back to the content...

Better yet, it added coverage for a few more games than the 1997 issue, in other words after "end of life" for the PC Engine system:  from 656 games covered in 1997, up to 668.  And from 1799 hints & tricks in 1997, up to 1863.

I'm not just curious about the new additions...I am also curious about how many discrepancies there are between the 1997 and 2011 datasets. Surely, there must be errors/typographic mistakes in both sets...too bad we can't compare the text files from each.

[dshadoff]

Since the data is not easily extracted, you will be looking for the  new content manually, correct?

Yes, but I'm not planning to expend a lot of effort on it.  That would take some time, as you said.

Call me an idiot, but would taking screenshots of the data (since copy-n-paste is disabled), and then subsequently batch processing the screenshots in OCR software provide anything useful (especially since I OCR would introduce errors)?

I think that OCR of screenshots would likely have better results that scanning the book, since rotational inaccuracy would be eliminated.  But there's only one game possible on a screenshot, so this would be too much work as well.

I'm not just curious about the new additions...I am also curious about how many discrepancies there are between the 1997 and 2011 datasets. Surely, there must be errors/typographic mistakes in both sets...too bad we can't compare the text files from each.

I doubt that they amended much of the internal content; rather, I expect that they just added information.

"Dead of the Brain" now has an entry, although it's just release information and a description (no tips/tricks).

However, many games now have additional entries of their (Japanese) Virtual Console release dates, and their release into a service called "Game Archives" (not sure what this is - is it the Sony equivalent of Virtual Console ?)

Also, I didn't notice this in the previous version (although it may also exist there), but the Tengai Makyo games have quite a lot of entries under tips&tricks...

[NecroPhile]

You find all the neat stuff, man.  Any chance you can snap a few teaser pics of the book and cd screenshots?  I'd love to know if it has anything good for Gotzendiener. 

[esteban]

You find all the neat stuff, man.  Any chance you can snap a few teaser pics of the book and cd screenshots?  I'd love to know if it has anything good for Gotzendiener. 

I love your love for Götzendiener

[spenoza]

I have the 1999 print edition of this. Picked it up in Japan when I was studying there from '98 to '99. It includes game release info, codes/cheats/tricks, and even review scores for the Neo Geo, Gameboy, N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, and Playstation. Was 980 yen new.