Got three more to go. I mentioned previously about the Alisia Dragoon error, which did hold up this a bit longer than I wanted. After a lot of proofreading, I believe I have it corrected properly. Also, there are notes added to the May 1995 chart's entry for Alisia Dragoon as well as the June 1995 chart's entry to explain the discrepancy between the two issues.

There was also another issue I had with this, though it is minor. See, normally, I use Microsoft Excel to do my data entry and editing, and then once I have finished, I then upload it to Google Sheets to make it available for reading. Unfortunately, I must've brain farted this time around because this time I decided to do all the work in Google Sheets proper, which actually took me longer to work on this than usual because the tools and how things work in Sheets is different than how they work in Excel. Long story short, I was fighting Sheets half the time while making this update. Consequently, when I went and tried to add the June 1995 chart data to my Excel copy as a back-up, Excel did not copy over the notes that I had made in Sheets, so I had to go back and fix those notes. So that was fun.

EDIT: I also just noticed that the embedded instance of Sheets doesn't include notes. I thought I made a mistake and forgot to include them. :/



I took a long break from working on this project because all these numbers and transcribing sort of small and somewhat blurry Japanese text into English to the best of my ability was a real strain on my eyes and brain, but I figured I should dive back into it. I am currently working on the June 1995 chart.

And as I'm working on the chart and get into the 70s, I noticed that something was slightly off. Several games in the "Previous Month" column (the second column from the left) were one number off from what they should be. As I looked at later ranked entries I noticed that, indeed, several numbers were off by one. Namely, I looked at "Alisia Dragoon" which in the June 1995 chart says was placed at 73rd place the previous month. According to my transcribed chart of May 1995, and double checking the actual May 1995 charts, 73rd place was "Star Cruiser." In fact, Alisia Dragoon was ranked at 242 in May 1995.

When I first transcribed the May 1995 charts, I did find it a bit odd that Alisia Dragoon had a drastic drop in ranking for that month. Very few games in these charts change positions in such a large degree, especially titles that, by this point, were already a couple years old. Usually, they maintain their average score, with a few updated numbers pushing it slightly one way or the other, as new games enter the charts causing the majority of ranking displacement.

All of a sudden, in June 1995, it is back up to roughly the area it was previously, with a different previous month listed, and pretty much every ranking below it adjusted.

Up to this point, there were very few typos or errors of this sort in the magazine's run. At most, it'll be a typo with the average score but the ranking placement was correct otherwise, or maybe they forget to include a number on the chart somewhere. This is probably the biggest error on the charts that I have seen so far. My only assumption is that somebody made an error with the May 1995 Alicia Dragoon ranking (either calculating the average score for it wrong or did a copy-paste error and accidentally gave Alicia Dragoon some other game's average score, although it doesn't look like any other game got this error) and this was silently corrected in the June 1995 chart. Looking through the side bar text and notes accompanied by the chart, they don't seem to draw any attention to the error at all, so this is all just my theory on the situation.

I guess this is a good time to reiterate something I've always said about these sorts of publications. I find old magazines like this to be a good primary source for researching video game history, culturally or otherwise. But also, these are popular publications and not professional, and should always be approached not as absolute facts on pages, but rather a sort of general idea of what things were probably like in the gaming landscape of the time, to be taken with whatever amount of salt and critical thinking you want to approach it with. My fascination with this gigantic monthly "reader ranking" system is that this is about the closest thing to hard statistics you can get that paint an idea of what was probably popular (or reviled) during this time period. The hard numbers being thrown around and the actual rankings don't really matter THAT much; it's more the gist of the rankings and scores. They shouldn't be interpreted as "Lunar: Eternal Blue (1st place in June 1995 with an avg. score of 9.3867) is definitely more popular or better than Langrisser II (5th place in June 1995 with an average score of 9.0688)" but rather, both Lunar: Eternal Blue and Langrisser II were among the most popular games of this era.

EDIT: It turns out that only the games that were in the 73 - 242 "previous month" rankings were affected by this issue and were adjusted one number up. The rest are numbered properly. So that makes my theory that they made a weird error with Alisia Dragoon make sense. I might have to double check some other numbers and see if maybe it was a situation where they swapped Alisia Dragoon and some other game by mistake.



MercuryCDX
@MercuryCDX

I dunno I thought it'd be fun to have a visual reference for at least the number one games ranked on those charts, and it kind of puts into perspective how many of Beep!'s readers really liked one-off number ones breaking up streaks. Shout out specifically to Virtua Racing, which just kind of interrupts Phantasy Star IV's really long streak. Also shout out to Wrestleball and Langrisser, which both got released in the US at least as Powerball and Warsong respectively. I think the only games on the list that didn't get a western release at all were Tenka Fubu and Yumimi Mix, both being CD games.


MercuryCDX
@MercuryCDX

Also, out of curiosity, I wanted to see what that chart looked like if I excluded CD and 32X titles. In some cases, certain streaks are extended rather than broken up by one-off titles. In the case of the last year, Lunar: Eternal Blue gets basically replaced by Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyou Toitsusen, with Alien Soldier breaking it up for a moment.



I dunno I thought it'd be fun to have a visual reference for at least the number one games ranked on those charts, and it kind of puts into perspective how many of Beep!'s readers really liked one-off number ones breaking up streaks. Shout out specifically to Virtua Racing, which just kind of interrupts Phantasy Star IV's really long streak. Also shout out to Wrestleball and Langrisser, which both got released in the US at least as Powerball and Warsong respectively. I think the only games on the list that didn't get a western release at all were Tenka Fubu and Yumimi Mix, both being CD games.