Yes the fact the title screen is fully animated (despite the subtle differences to the final game) is maybe the most interesting thing here. And of course if there's a flash of light before it appears... ...
EDIT: Now uses the new scans. Judging from the consistent screenshots, and these little additions, I think a fuller picture of how the Tokyo Toy Show demo can be illustrated. After the title screen, we have Sonic standing in this area. Then, Sonic starts moving. Sonic then stands still next to the first blue fella, who starts jumping at him. Sonic then moves out of the way. After he lands, he turns around and faces Sonic as he runs away. (Edit where the fella is placed inside the larger screenshot of the same area) Sonic then runs up a hill and jumps over the other blue fella that's ahead, who seems to be standing still. Sonic then lands and runs down the hill, and approaches the sign. And finally, Sonic runs off while the final message appears. Tada! What I find weird, though, is that the mountains in the background don't seem to be consistent in this part?? The latter's background is consistent with the previous screenshot's that came from the new set, but the same(?) area down the hill is from the new set as well?? Judging from the other screenshots, the background doesn't scroll very quickly, so this is very odd...
Seems pretty thorough - the only other thing you could add is that the cropped shot of the enemy facing right from the new scan seems to sit just after the three shots of the first enemy jumping, as it seems to show that after landing next to the bush it then turns to face Sonic as he continues to the right. Since it's heavily cropped, though, I can understand why you might have chosen not to include it, though details such as the background and tree having scrolled on even further seem to match up with their movements between the other full shots from that sequence.
@McAleeCh Honestly, I just forgot about it by accident. I added it in, alongside an edit where he is placed in the larger screenshot in the same area.
While we're on the subject of that particular shot, I'm now fairly certain the barely identifiable off-screen photo on the demo's TCRF page is taken a little before the cropped shot, but after the enemy has landed. If you look closely, on the upper right hand side you can see the large background mountain that area has, plus the small far foreground tree to the bottom right. Sonic is running behind the tree just slightly, having run slightly further than in the clearer shots we have, but not far enough to scroll the tree over to the enemy as in the cropped shot. Then on the bottom left side, you can clearly see the shape of the bush, and can just about make out the enemy standing overlapping its left-hand side, positioned the same as in the newly-discovered cropped shot. If I've interpreted that all correctly, then from that we can also infer that the far left hand side of the screen in the barely identifiable shot is obscured from view. From looking at how far the far foreground tree scrolls between other existing shots, in order for it to have room to scroll over to the enemy before it disappears off screen, I'd hazard that the enemy must be somewhere in the far-left area of the screen by the time the cropped shot was taken. If that's the case, we simply can't be seeing the full screen in the barely identifiable shot, as the bush and enemy are already to the far left of the area visible to us, even though the tree is still on the right hand side of the screen.
The page has been scanned. I'd upload an image of it here myself but I got the "too big" message so you'll all have to grab it from the tweet
Looks like the exposion effect is caused by the Sega logo. If you look at that second exploision image you can vaguely make out the Sega logo!
You can just about make out the SEGA logo in that second explosion shot! Also, I strongly believe we have bearly enough pixel details now to properly recreate that enemy design with precision
I tried making an animated gif of every picture we have of TTS now. I'm sure someone can do much better, I just was curious how it would look. I basically made a 640x480 canvas and pasted each shot while trying to align the details in the background so the size match in all shots and Sonic stays relatively center except for the beginning. I did it with the empty canvas around because some shots cut off more details than others. That's what happens with you get people just snapping pics off of a CRT I guess. Could use color correcting too. At the very least its an interesting look at how the different parallax layers moved.
"YOU ARE WELCOME NEVER OPEN" Now that's just rude (Wow, these scans are super clear. You could easily create pixel perfect art from these.) Oh man, when did we first learn of this demo again? The late 90s? Another 25+ year mystery resolved...
We still need a translation of this article, because it seems to go into detail about every single screenshot contained. Windii would probably do it, but uh...she asks a hefty price these days.
Ohshima said that the premise of Twin Stars was about two brothers defending "The Dream World" from Thirteen, that vampire-looking dude who was the leader of "The Nightmare World". As many aspects of Twin Stars were kept for the initial concept of Sonic 1, maybe Green Hill here is meant to be the first area of the Nightmare World, and that sign is supposed to be a goofy "Keep out!" sign that cartoon villains like to place around their territories. Even later pieces of Sonic media are guilty of this practice.
Windii (and SpeepsHighway) actually scanned this page! They're currently trying to get donations to scan more issues of obscure magazines: https://ko-fi.com/speepshighway/goal?g=12 No word on a possible translation of the contents, but hopefully it'll happen at some point
OCR and your Japanese-to-English translation tool of choice will get you most of the way. https://www.newocr.com/ is the one I use
Tried to put the title screen frames together, and added a SEGA logo at the beginning so it'd flow better. The flashing frames look like they may or may not be in the right order so I swapped them. I dunno. Was neat to try anyway. Edit: LOL if only I waited another hour for the translation.
Here's a crappy Google Lens translation. It says here that the explosion happens before the Sega logo shows up.
