Sega Bass Fishing

A Spicy Take on "Physical Scans" vs "Digital Manuals"

As you can tell per the edits I've made on this page, the line between something being a physical scan and a digital manual is blurry. We have the PageMaker/InDesign PDF exports of many things that were also printed ephemera for both arcade and video games, and having something like a Steam manual separate from every other game manual just because it didn't hit a scanner is a bit silly. However, that also means we should probably (and I brace here just because of the sheer ReplaceText levels needed) rename "Physical scans" to something more neutral ("Game ephemera"?) Just thinking aloud. - Scarred Sun (talk) 09:59, 22 April 2018 (CDT)

Ephemera are things you're meant to throw away, so that wouldn't include carts. What about this:

==Game paraphernalia==
===Digital===
===PlayStation 3 or whatever version===

I prefer to keep purely digital things separate from the scanboxes. - Hivebrain (talk) 12:08, 22 April 2018 (CDT)

I also think the digital should be kept away from the physical - at least with games meant for the home. I agree it's not the prettiest setup, but I can't think of a cleaner way of doing it right now. I don't think "ephemera" and "paraphernalia" are going to make the article read better, particularly to non-native speakers.

Our coverage of arcade games is just... bad. It's true that there's an overlap between the physical and the digital there, but I think I've had like, three attempts at making a good scan template and I'm still not satisfied. I am genuinely wondering if the true answer is just to have a big fat table of part numbers. e.g.:

No.	Name	Scan
4389204932	Manual	blahblahblah.pdf
4364562	Marquee	Nobodycares.jpg

Because I just can't see how we can cater for all the different types of arcade machine in just one template (and then we could automate this and fulfil my dream of having photographs of official Sega-approved screws).

The other factor to consider is the Japanese. There are hoards of PDFs spread across the Japanese Sega website, a lot of them for arcade games we don't understand. There might be a dozen different manuals for Sega Bass Fishing, but you know roughly what the product actually is - I have no idea how to even quantify the maimai games. -Black Squirrel (talk) 14:26, 22 April 2018 (CDT)

Yeah, the coverage and quality on the arcade games is really lacking—it was only after I went to do some unrelated cleanup of random PDFs that were broken (spoilers: just open them up in an editor and delete everything after EOF, usually just a space) that I realized how much we mere missing. I see that at some point at least Sega Europe's arcade division was scraped for data, and I've been trying to go back and do likewise for Sega Amusements. Japan is a whole other kettle of fish and trying to find anything resembling operation manuals is difficult. What would we even do otherwise? Note what cabinets were in which Sega-owned arcades?

As far as physical vs. digital, I get it, but at the same time I also feel like the distinction makes no sense to a casual reader. Boring example but one that makes my point here: sonic:File:SonicRush_DS_UK_manual.pdf is made with a PDF rip of the in-house file Sega Europe used for making the EU Sonic Rush manual. It's literally the source file, just not printed to a document and scanned. There's... many more files like this out there and ~*theoretically*~ we'll have them online at some point. For all intents and purposes, it is the manual. I don't think distinguishing the content by its source makes the most sense. - Scarred Sun (talk) 16:44, 22 April 2018 (CDT)

I really think we want both the digital source file, and the scanned manual. They need to be kept somewhat separate to avoid confusion, and so we know what's missing. Most people won't care about the distinction, but the same could be said of Master System games with slightly different barcodes. I'm in favour of combining things a bit though. Another suggestion:

==Scans and documents==
===Steam version===
<gallery>
manual.pdf|Digital manual
</gallery>
===PC version===
<gallery>
manual.pdf|Digital manual from site x
</gallery>
{{scanbox etc

- Hivebrain (talk) 11:43, 23 April 2018 (CDT)

I went through the Sega Amusements website a few years ago, but... eeehh it started to feel "unreliable" when it came to older games. Many of the manuals look like late-90s black and white photocopies and there is often no indication of region (which is important, because the US and "European" divisons shared the same basic website).

When you do an ebay search for the real things you also find some were printed on coloured paper, which led me to believe that while the content might be exactly the same, it's not a true representation of what the user received. And I couldn't check to see if there were other issues.

There's also this genuinely scary "ENGLISH" region that seems to have been catered for. You see it in the flyers - do we actually know where this is from? US? UK?

However, looking back I think the true answer is to document and preserve everything. If it's a crappy recreation from some weird Sega sub-division, it's still within scope. It might be redundant to have multiple copies of what is effectively the same thing, but for the person who wants that extra layer of pointless detail, we've got him/her covered by having both physical and digital copies. We can prove they're exactly the same, even if secretly we don't feel we need to. -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:14, 23 April 2018 (CDT)