The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

He might not be 'leaving' but... the way this is worded makes me think he might not be returning to be 'the face' of the social medias.

I dunno... Maybe I've been looking at too man cryptic Sega messages lately?

 

You know, if they're implying that Sonic must first go through bad games to get a good game... then I'm not buying this marketing hype cycle. We've been though this song and dance, Sega/Sonic Team!

 

Yeah, I wish Sega would drop all this teasing/hype marketing. It just adds to the bitterness and disappointment when the next game ends up being worse than the last one (and even more so if the game is delayed, which has happened with the last two titles). Good games generate their own buzz. See Rush, Colours, Generations, Mania.

Also, implying that Sonic needs bad games to get to good games is just a turn off. Because, really, the mistakes made in some of the more recent bad titles were so obvious that they shouldn't have been made in the first place. This spin just underlines how clueless Sonic Team is.

 

The last crop of hints dragged on for ages, were cryptic to the point that they made no sense, and it turned out that most of them didn't mean anything whatsoever. A couple of them were explained to point towards the 2016 birthday party but the rest were unexplained.

Nobody should give any attention to these campaigns of vague, meaningless, drip-feed hints anymore. This shit is beyond done. The marketing team should just shut up until they actually have a game to show.

Remember that whole corporate spin of apologizing for betraying fans' trust after Boom bombed so badly?

Meet the new "Amazing Sega," same as the old """Amazing Sega."""

 

I'll have to admit I'm a bit tired at these cryptic hints we're getting. They're pretty harmless on their own, but they make me worried that the next Sonic game we get is gonna have yet another abysmal marketing campaign ala Force or TSR. Friendly reminder that they didn't deem necessary to give these two games a goddamn NAME when they revealed them.

This isn't some kind of grand open world game, it's a 3D platformer... that's more than likely going to be 3 to 4 hours long. Just show us a cool trailer and release the game in the next few months following it, please. I wish more companies took notes from Capcom when it comes to marketing their games...

 

So this may be a coincidence but two achievements in Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair might be Sonic references. One is called "Super Tonic" and the other is "Tonic Mania."

I know they've never had anything to do with Sonic though so I'm going to chalk this up as a maybe lol

 

Pretty sure it's not a coincidence; the first Yooka game had a clear Sonic reference. One of the unlockable moves was called Spin Dash IIRC, and it worked the same as in Sonic: you held a button to charge by spinning in place, then released it to send yourself rolling at high speed. The character you purchased it from even described it as a move that "makes you spin like a certain gaming icon" (paraphrased; don't remember the actual words).

 

To quickly detour from Webber and company's latest game of hints, here's something interesting I just noticed this by sheer accident lol.

Mat Piscatella, videogame industry analyst for the NPD group, was asked back in November what were/are the best selling third-party games on each Nintendo platform. He was able to go back as far as the N64 for his findings (which he clarified were/are measured in U.S. dollar sale rankings).

The best-selling third-party game on the Gamecube was Sonic Adventure 2 [Battle].

So there you go.

 

So I was looking for something unrelated and came across this Japanese article on Michael Jackson and Sega. It mainly talks about the Moonwalker arcade game - it all needs mirroring and translating on Sega Retro but I can't do everything.

https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/interview/190625a


It turns out that Michael Jackson quite liked going to Tokyo Disneyland. And while he was in the area, he'd pop into Sega's offices and have a look around. This apprently happened on more than one occasion.


Here's Michael Jackson looking at some gubbins.


...and then he goes to meet Mickey.



Check it:





it wasn't a one-off - the dude genuinely got on well with Sega.



There is a couple of references to this book:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/マイケル・ジャクソンの思い出-坂崎ニーナ-眞由美/dp/459111810X

"マイケル・ジャクソンの思い出"

Apparently there's a chapter on Sega. Maybe a passing reference to Sonic 3. Don't quote me on that.



Also seems to confirm that Taku Makino, the man who created that 3D Sonic reference for Sonic the Hedgehog, also drew Bubbles the monkey. So there's a thing you can tell your kids.



For the record I'm trying to track down exactly when Sega AM2 became a thing. I found this noise yesterday.

 

yeah his mouth doesn't look terrible for once

 

https://twitter.com/smb_jp/status/1194212753608626176?s=12

Just found this old tweet for Super monkey ball banana blitz hd, thought it was funny how it recreated that scene from sonic movie

While we are at it, this music from the game is really close to jun senoue style that i thought it was from him, but i can't find a source that confirms this

 

Not sure if this deserves it's own topic or not, but recently some interesting things surfaced regarding Sonic Jam. No, not the Saturn version, the other one. Released on the failed "Game.com" Tiger handheld.

This game was a compilation of sorts, featuring a zone from each of the Genesis Sonic titles. As such, Sega supplied the developers with many assets from the Genesis Sonic games. Some of the assets that they were given also happened to be from earlier in development:

Seen above are Tails swinging sprites from Sonic Jam compared with the equivalent sprites from Sonic 3C 0408. These sprites were left unused and were overwritten by Tails's super transformation in later prototypes, as well as the final game.

These laughing sprites for Knuckles are also different, styled much more like Sonic Triple Trouble.

Then there are the skidding/stopping sprites, which seem to.... wait...what's up with that middle frame?
(Credit to Fred Bronze for restoring the sprite)

It appears that this frame is leftover from Knuckles's earlier design! Notice how the fist is even reused from the Sonic 3 prototype sprite. And to think that this was hidden away in such an obscure Sonic title all this time. I wonder if there's anything else in here?

Prototypes of this game show even more changes:

Mushroom Hill is using different graphics here; the final is almost identical to S&K. In the second image, Knuckles is using a very peculiar sprite, possibly as a placeholder?
There's plenty of other changes seen in other pre-release screenshots:

Spoiler

As terrible as this game is, it might be worth looking into it more simply for the possibility of any prototype content that the developers may have utilized.

 

I was about to post this (admittedly with even less info that you accumulated) in the Sonic 3 proto thread. This definitely either deserves its own thread or should be posted in there. It's relevant enough IMO and feels like it's going to be forgotten just sitting in this thread.

 

https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:Sega_Magazine_JP_Issue_07_19970506.pdf&page=46

Sonic Jam prototype.



Shadow/highlight mode causing problems?

 

This could be fake, but TSSZ just reported that demos related to a Sonic Adventure project (possibly a remake) were leaked: http://www.tssznews.com/2020/01/06/rumor-demos-surface-for-future-sonic-adventure-project/. Take this with a grain of salt.

 

I really hope it’s true. Wouldn’t come out of nowhere with the Adventure stuff we’ve been getting lately.

 

Yeah I'm seeing people freak out on twitter over SAME like it means a new Sonic Adventure like they haven't been doing this for years.....

 

What interests me most about this supposed leak is the alleged "new rendering of Sonic and his friends". If this is a legitimate leak, I'm curious as to what those renders look like, and if they actually are entirely new, or if they're repurposed old art/renders with alterations. (Would be far from the first time the latter has been done, up to recently with some character art for Sonic Mania.)

Also, TSSZ has since updated their article after receiving some additional details, which are located at the bottom of the article. Whatever the case is with this "leak", I'm interested to see what happens during this year's South by Southwest event.

Edit: Looks like this "leak" has been debunked.

 

Splats possibly was supposed to appear in Scrap Brain. There is a commented reference to "usa_act" within Scrap Brain's edit table per the official source code (you can find it in the second copy of edit6tbl within Sonic 2 Nick Arcade's source leftovers.)

...and "usa" is shorthand for "usagi," which means "rabbit" in English.

Code (Text):

1. edit6tbl:
2.     dc.w    29
3.     dcblw    ring_act,ringpat,$26bc,0,$00        ;1:
4.     dcblw    item_act,itempat,$0680,0,$00        ;2:
5.     dcblw    brobo_act,brobopat,$0400,0,$00        ;3:
6.     dcblw    uni_act,unipat,$0429,0,$00        ;4:
7.     dcblw    imo_act,imopat,$22b0,0,$00        ;5:
8.     dcblw    buranko_act,fetamapat,$4391,2,$07    ;6:
9.     dcblw    haguruma_act,hagurumapat,$c344,00,$e0    ;7:
10.     dcblw    dai_act,daipat,$22c0,2,$28        ;8:
11.     dcblw    switch2_act,switch2pat,$0513,0,$00    ;9:
12.     dcblw    pata_act,patapat,$4492,0,$03        ;10:
13.     dcblw    pata_act,yukafpat,$04df,0,$83        ;11:
14.     dcblw    noko_act,nokopat,$43b5,0,$02        ;12:
15.     dcblw    break2_act,break2pat,$43f5,0,$00    ;13:
16.     dcblw    dai_act,daipat,$4460,3,$39        ;14:
17.     dcblw    dai4_act,dai4pat,$22c0,0,$00        ;15:
18.     dcblw    door_act,doorpat,$42e8,0,$00        ;16:
19.     dcblw    dai4_act,dai4pat,$22c0,1,$13        ;17:
20.     dcblw    noko_act,nokopat,$43b5,0,$01        ;18:
21.     dcblw    dai4_act,dai4pat,$22c0,1,$24        ;19:
22.     dcblw    noko_act,nokopat,$43b5,2,$04        ;20:
23.     dcblw    dai4_act,dai4pat,$22c0,1,$34        ;21:
24.     dcblw    yukae_act,yukaepat,$44c3,0,$00        ;22:
25.     dcblw    fire6_act,fire6pat,$83d9,0,$64        ;23:
26.     dcblw    fire6_act,fire6pat,$83d9,11,$64        ;24:
27.     dcblw    ele_act,elepat,$047e,0,$04        ;25:
28.     dcblw    yukai_act,yukaipat,$42f0,0,$00        ;26:
29.     dcblw    scoli_act,scolipat,$8680,0,$11        ;27:
30.     dcblw    buta_act,butapat,$2302,0,$04        ;28:
31.     dcblw    save_act,savepat,$26bc,0,$01        ;29:
32.  
33. *    dcblw    ring_act,playpat,$0780,50,$00        ;28:
34. *    dcblw    usa_act,usapat,$0448,0,$00        ;5:
35. *    dcblw    mawaru_act,mawarupat,$4348,16,$00    ;7:

Note for those looking further into the leftovers: usa_act (questionably Splats) is not usagi_act (the "friend" rabbit object.)