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.
Topic: Daigirin (Read 274 times)
