The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

I don't know if it's been mentioned on here or not before, but I didn't realise until watching a Nostalgia Critic TV ads episode (of all places) that in AoStH: "Sonic Breakout" where cartoonist Sketch Lampoon is making fun of Robotnik in his comic book on the floor crying "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up", it was one of a string of adverts mocking an old lady who fell down.



I'm from the UK, so I probably didn't know about this :p

 

Yeah, it's a super old joke in America. It was also everywhere in the 90s.

 

What can be done to preserve the contents of Flash-based stuff from the old Sonic Channel?

Things like these puzzles and the entire Sonic Mega Collection Plus and Sonic Riders mini-sites.

 

Basically, you'd need to dig the SWF files out of the page and download them. From there, you could run them offline with a Flash projector, or potentially upload to Internet Archive's new thing. The trick there is Internet Archive is using Ruffle ( a Flash emulator), which isn't 100% complete yet. Depending on how complex any Actionscript in these is, there may be some bugs. I'd guess the puzzles at least are probably fine.

As for grabbing the SWFs themselves, I looked at the puzzles and it seems like they are stored in `images/puzzle.swf` within the location of the HTML page itself. So e.g. the Chaos puzzle, with this page, is located here.

 

Some of you might find this cool.

Sega World Sydney had some AOSTH themed mascot costumes, for years now, the only example of the Robotnik costume was a black and white newspaper scan which isn't that great in quality.

So I decided to run the image through some deep learning colour correction Ai software and... This was the result.

https://xcancel.com/DaveLuty/status/1330946667395371009

So It's not perfect, not by a long shot. But, it was able to accurately pick out the red and black of the suit, the yellowish bleeding is likely due to the contrast of the red and black either side of it along with the fact this is a newspaper print which has been scanned.

But interestingly are the colours of the face and moustache, again not perfect, but they're likely accurate and interestingly the colourisation effect has highlighted some of the texture of it which wasn't possible before.

Edit: Ah... Retro doesn't embed Tweets... Right... I'll try and fix that when I'm back on desktop.

 

SEGA of Japan sponsored the Blue Fox Honda team in 1993, racing at the All Japan Road Race 500cc championship. Pictured is the late Norick Abe, one of the most notable Japanese riders of his era, who went on to race in the World Championship against legends like Rossi, Doohan, Roberts Jr. I do believe the team wildcarded in the World Championship at the Suzuka round. Bike is the legendary Honda NSR500 that he won the championship with.




Pictured next is another rider from the team, Kenichiro Iwahashi. Different Sonic sticker this time.



Back to Abe, he's racing the same sticker here but with a white outline in the following picture.

 

Neat - make it better

I've run into a couple of Sega-sponsored motorbike events recently - it's a sport I know nothing about and it's a hard thing to track down.

 

https://xcancel.com/EgotisticalKarp/status/1332383507151278086

The Sonic Twitter posted traced art today. The tweet's been deleted but can screenshots can still be found quite easily.

 

Did anyone save the original file before it was deleted?

 

There's a screenshot of the tweet with the image in the plagarism twitter thread:


Sonic also seems to be either a trace or a reference to some of the older Sonic the Hedgehog artwork:

 

I feel like the Sonic trace is ok. It's official art it's there's to do what they want with it. Not cool tracing over that other guy's art though.

Also whoever was drawing this wasn't curious why AiAi wasn't using the modern style? That's like SMB 1 and 2 designed AiAi.

 

Well, they're using Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive) artwork as the basis of Sonic, so it's possibly intentional?

 

The pose is based on this.

 

Sonic Retro before Sonic Retro, episode #whatever:


From MegaTech #26 (1994-01-20)

This is the first issue published by Maverick Magazines rather than EMAP, and it's not great. But among the mistakes, someone spotted Hidden Palace and Wood Zone were cut from Sonic 2, and printed some scans showing the two levels.

A few years later, SWS2B would do the same thing:

https://info.sonicretro.org/File:Mag_compare13a.jpg
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:Mag_compare11a.jpg

Both from The Official Sega Solid Gold Guide: Sonic the Hedgehog 2... which we still don't have a full scan of, all these years later. Mind you we have the old build of Sonic 2 shown in that book so it's not quite as exciting as it once was.


Not sure what "a secret ice level in Sonic the Hedgehog" refers to, although this noise about "booster packs" pre-dates the announcement of Sonic & Knuckles, so that's a thing.

 

They used Classic Sonic for that game, likely as Modern wouldn't match the proportions of the other monkeys, so using Classic art as a base for Sonic still makes sense

 

https://www.sega60th.com/#60th The website unlocked the Sonic stuff, pretty much what we were expecting, three Mania avatars, a wallpaper and a header (both of which use the Sonic 30th render).

 

OH MAN! JUST LIKE THE LAST SEVEN WEEKS!

CRAZY!

 

huh, for all the complete damn lack of commitment to a Mania sequel, they sure have no problem using its aesthetic to market Sonic :/ annoying.

 

They haven't committed to anything. If this year was any indication Sonic doesn't exist. But seriously, they push Mania so much and we don't have a sequel? That's just shit business practice.

 

Sonic exists only as a comic book/movie franchise according to 2020. Meh what can you do, the franchise's anniversary is next year anyways so we'll just have to wait and see what we'll be getting video game wise.