Soundsheets were generally known as Flexidiscs in the UK. Think the only Japanese one I have is this Masami Tsuchiya release: https://www.discogs.com/release/2165390-Masami-Tsuchiya-Alone
Those Darius ones look great.
3 Likes
I mentioned it in the post but it sounds fine! Maybe a little audible hiss, but my speakers already have a little default tone to them.
Despite appearances to the contrary I am not an audiophile (nor videophile!). I use whatever works. I do have vintage amps and speakers but that’s not because I meticulously chose them, it’s because I had something newer and it didn’t cooperate with my record player. So I just go to thrift stores and keep what works. As soon as something is functional and good enough I stick with it. I don’t like to tinker with things! But yeah, it sounds perfectly fine.
@QuestJun hmm flexidisc sounds so familiar that I bet we used that in the US too.
Apparently decibel magazine is still releasing a flexi disc with every issue, and has since 2010. Pretty neat. January 2025 [#243] – The Decibel Store
4 Likes
Here’s another fun one. A Sakura Taisen photo cd called Sakura Taisen teigeki secret file. When I ordered this I expected it to just be in a jewel case, but it came in a big magazine styled book with shots of ST’s ugly (sorry) robots and a bit of info on the visual designers.
I haven’t yet checked out the disc itself but it claims to have 106 photos on it. The best part to me is that they tell you you can run it on your Saturn of course, but also various types of 3DO, PCs, or your PCFX. will update when I actually have time to see what’s on there!
13 Likes
aaaaaaand now it’s stuck in my head :/
1 Like
I love how specific they have to be! All those 3DOs and Saturns.
3 Likes
cool games only
These all have little goodies too which I love!
MvC comes with a little comic book, it’s very adorably mini
Paradise Killer comes with an art card, stickers, and an excellent styled soundtrack download. Love that it looks like the Blood Crystal interstitial!
Slitterhead is a whole Day One edition from XSEED that is very cool and high quality which is what I’d expect from them. CD is in an actual case and not just a cardboard sleeve! I have a feeling this game got a super low print run so if you’re interested I’d try to snag a copy before they disappear.
10 Likes
Here today are the Laserdiscs I got. All straight to video except Gazer which I think was on TV first. All seem to be pretty sparsely documented in the west.
Let’s start with these two scifi films.
Mikadroid is about a wwii robot coming back in modern (early 90s) times. Space Hunter Mika is about what you’d expect. Carefully hiding a still of Mika punching a topless lady in the boob.
Next up there’s cosplay warrior cutie knight 1 and 2. They’re sentai highschool girls I think. Splendid and super-sexy, we waited them! Bwahoooommmm. It looks like they changed the knights with each episode?? No reviews on imdb for either one!
Lastly, gazer and kyonyuu hunter. Gazer seems to be a school occult thing like Eko Eko azerak maybe? I can’t find much on it even though it’s from 1998. Kyonyuu hunter doesn’t appear to be on imdb though the sequel is. I think it’s based on a comic series? There’s a high school girl who likes a guy who likes girls with large breasts so she goes and hunts them down. Or something!! Artfully covering a lot stills of the same lady’s breasts in this one too.
Well that’s what I got! Hopefully I can capture these somehow at some point and make them available. Hard to search for LDs on Surugaya, but they’re there!
Something I (finally!) learned through this process is why normal people always seemed to look at me funny when I asked for/about v-cinema in Japan. In the west we think of that as describing cool yakuza movies, horror, and sci-fi that went straight to video. Well, browsing suruga-ya I finally put together that yes, 80% of v-cinema was porn. Vhs tapes would have v-cinema on the side of the box even and while 1 in 5 was a gangster film the rest were porn. Porn porn porn. So I’d be in a café essentially asking if folks knew where I could find some pornography, but on vhs please. Lol. Whoops.
17 Likes
huge fan of the graphic design on the back of cosplay warrior cutie knight 1
2 Likes
Also, you probably already know this, but Domesday Duplicator seems to be The Way to capture LaserDisc (and other stuff too).
6 Likes
Yeah… Every time I look at this or the direct rf method for vhs or whatever it’s called I think:
- what does this actually do?
- this seems really complicated
So I pretty much need someone to do all the hard bits so I can just hit play and record and not worry about the rest. Not sure when or if such a thing might occur.
1 Like
Certainly seems like a bigger undertaking than just getting a usb dongle.
Quick one today and it’s GAMES. I bought two fm towns games because they were cheap. Shooting towns, with all its fun slogans, is a shooting game maker. I hope to eventually find a trove of games made for/with this. The other is part of the psychic detective series by data west. I don’t love adventure games frankly but I have a mild fixation on data west so when I saw it for like 9 bucks I figured WHY NOT and here we are.
Wait here’s one more thing - have you ever accidentally bought two copies of the official guide for Black Matrix II on the Ps2 because you forgot within about 15 minutes of adding it to your cart that you had already done so? Well I have.
11 Likes
Just got this one hand Super Famicom controller. I’ve wanted one of these since I saw it in EGM way back. I’m going to play through Earthbound on stream with it.
20 Likes
That thing is super cool, but I thought Earthbound was already optimised for one handed play by having the left shoulder button work as the action/confirm button?
That is true. I figured it would take a bit of getting used to, so playing a game that doesn’t need so many buttons will help me acclimate. I wonder how hard it would be to get moves off in Street Fighter.
3 Likes
Woah, never knew something like this existed!
This would be the coolest and also most difficult way to play Uniracers.
3 Likes
Oops I forgot to keep doing my thing with suruga-ya delivery content for sickos. Here’s another weird thing I got.
What is this, you may ask? This is three doujin CD animations called anime freak FXGA, vols 1-3.
For some background here, the PC-FX as you may know is the pc engine’s ill-fated successor, which was very focused on video, specifically anime, but they went a different direction than VCD and none of it really came to anything.
But since they were pushing the animation connection, NEC did a 6 volume series called anime freak, where they showed previews of new upcoming anime, as well as original anime made just for the PC-FX anime freak disc series, based on NEC properties like private eye doll. The mascot was Princess Rolfee.
Meanwhile, the PC-FXGA is a video card for your PC-98 or windows machine that allowed you to play PC games, but also had a 3D chip in it, and could do limited 3D games. There was a development suite for it that was largely aimed at hobbyists. It’s a pretty unusual/rare card and there’s not a whole lot you can do with one.
So, what are these discs then? They are three doujin anime freak fan discs made either with or for the FXGA (or both), whose content I’m completely unaware of, and who nobody I’ve talked to has ever heard of. they don’t play on a normal PC-FX, which was always going to be unlikely, but I had to check. The third one appears to have adult content but vol 1 seems maybe pretty clean and maybe just showing previews of sentimental graffiti or something? Two of the three of them have Princess Rolfee on the cover, but disc 2 has her face mosaiced out (uh oh).
I haven’t had time to actually look inside but I can say that these are discs with no labels (no writing even), with paper printed covers and no backing. The fact they were on suruga-ya at all is quite surprising. I don’t know if there are MORE than three, but there were three on the website so I got them all (quite cheap too, I think the priciest one was 8 bucks).
This is like a niche of a niche of a niche and I am excited to see what they are. I would be surprised if more than 100 people had ever looked upon one of these. I’ll rip ISOs eventually and put them on the internet archive.
15 Likes
Hell fucking yeah dudes are ROCKING out here
3 Likes
Here’s another quibi: a doujin VHS release of a combo vid for Party’s Breaker and Queen of Heart '99, two doujin fighting games. Has a 4-koma on the back.
QoH in particular was a big game during my college years and insert credit’s formative season. It’s a 4 player simultaneous fighting game before (and better than) guilty gear isuka (and being quite different from smash bros which came out the same year).
I can’t immediately find a 4 player video - it’s very good chaos and you’ll just have to trust me - but here’s a blurry combo preview from somebody else:
9 Likes