Late response.... Years ago back at the Sega Forums, there was an Automation topic concerning Sonic 4 where at one point, someone dug up and posted some old reviews for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (in particular, Hyper's S3 review and Megazone's S&K review) and people were drawing similar conclusions--reviewers getting tired of the franchise by that point, despite the series being only three years old. I think the problem there was that S&K was being pushed as a traditional new Sonic game; despite the game itself essentially being little beyond a Sonic 3 level expansion pack. Obviously we know the real answer in that they were one game split into two halves, but you wouldn't conclusively know from either the marketing or the game's presentation. Sonic 3's ending is conclusive enough that you wouldn't know that the story doesn't actually end there if you didn't have Sonic & Knuckles, and Sonic & Knuckles (in-game) likewise doesn't bill itself as a direct continuation of Sonic 3's story beyond the title screen. And while the lock-on technology was heavily promoted in S&K's advertising, it was presented as more of a bonus element (Play as Knuckles in Sonic 2 and in Sonic 3!) instead of being the essential way to play both games (Play Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles together as one interconnected story/as one big adventure!). This especially hurts S&K's standing given that Sonic 3 was only released six months prior, so you could easily see how "fresh" Sonic & Knuckles actually was in comparison. I feel the reception for both games (since even Sonic 3 in some reviews had some of these 'more of the same' responses S&K was hit with, no doubt to it being rushed) would had gone over better if Sega was more willing to admit and market them as two episodes of one project, or at least pushed S&K further back and refined it to make it more standalone/more evolved as a game from Sonic 3. (Or somehow, against the odds of the McDonalds' Happy Meal deadline/cartridge production costs/otherwise hectic production cycle, was able to release everything as one singular "Sonic 3," and avoid this whole mess.). But that's veering into "what could have been" territory.
I've seen a few people Tweeting about this and I think it would have been much better if it made more sense. It's just so random, would have made more sense for Mania to have the Saturn banner. I get it's for Sega's 60th anniversary but meh.
The selection is insane. None of the games map to systems at all - Sonic 4 E1 has been put down as a Master System game...
Somebody go fetch high resolution versions for the wikis. This amuses me greatly. (also because there's a lot of Go Sega stuff and I kinda want to put it together but I don't know how and I'm conscious that it might all disappear by next year) They probably had an intern write a script to generate these. "Sonic Mania should have a Saturn box"... I mean, NiGHTS actually was on the Saturn - it's clearly a bit of fun. Although as has been pointed out, they might have to rethink the Sonic 4 Episode II art... because the GO SEGA stamp covers the "Episode II" bit. The problem is they're not using the real assets so the North American Saturn boxes look like liquid arse.
Someone over on r/Sonicthehedgehog ripped the borders but not the actual box art. I'd figure someone would be interested in these here. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Sus1zuBTEXkAYv1LO0u5q1KayffV9Yh9?usp=sharing
Is it supposed to be Go Sega? I thought that was a poor man's attempt at a 6 in the logo's font -- notice the bottom corner is round rather than squared. Either way it's an eyesore IMO.
Yes I don't really understand it either - my first thought when I saw this earlier in the year was that it was some clever pun on the board game Go, but now I think it's just some weird localisation thing. Maybe 6s look like Gs if you squint.
they have to be messing with people. Nights on the Game Gear is so far out there that I can easily take it as a joke.
It's both. Celebrating SEGA's 60th anniversary, while also have this campaign and logo called GO SEGA, with the GO looking like 60 deliberately.
There's another point - Sega fans get very picky about region-approrpiate art. That's why so many aftermarket games ship with three different covers. That orange Dreamcast swirl is foreign muck in PAL territories. And having Genesis on a box creates a land of confusion. Unless it's Japanese, in which case it's rare and cool. If I woke up and found my Saturn collection in double-sized jewel cases I'd be livid for all of five seconds!
I was going through old Sonic Adventure stuff on here and TCRF because I can't work up the energy to want to actually do anything right now, and Wait, the animals used to be flickies?
Well spotted! Could there be leftovers of this in any of the demos or prototypes? This might be overthinking it, but Sonic Jam's Sonic World had five colours of Flickies: blue, red, purple, green and orange. In Sonic Adventure there are five categories of animals: Blue (normal) Red (power) Purple (fly) Green (run) Yellow (swim) Since blue is the standard Flicky colour, it would make sense for blue to be "normal". Maybe this is what they originally had in place? ---- On a related note, Sonic Advance has the exact same 15 animal species as Sonic Adventure. Some look about the same (gorilla, mole, deer, skunk) but others have different colours (kangaroo, elephant) and some have radically different designs (rabbit, peacock). Having the exact same species can't be a coincidence, so were Dimps working from outdated designs, like how an outdated Egg Carrier design was used in Sonic Pinball Party? The true ending does use the correct (Sonic Adventure accurate) green for the kangaroo, and pink for the rabbit, but the latter's design (muzzle etc.) looks more like Pocky from the classic games. (In Sonic Rush's ending, they straight up do use a pink Pocky.) The ending also has two additional animals, one that appears to be Picky, the pig from the classic games, and a brown animal on the left whose design doesn't quite match Ricky or any of the SA1/SA2 animals.
You know, Cybershell recently tweeted some early Sonic Adventure screenshots that show more advanced lighting compared to what's in the final: https://twitter.com/Cybershell/status/1315039698385944576
I've noticed that, too. IMO just more evidence the Advance 1 REALLY wanted to be "Sonic Adventure in 2D".
the lighting on this reminds me of the baked vertex-lighting the original Spyro titles had. Lantern has several vars for lighting, but do we know if it would've supported this, or would've this been done through the aforementioned vertex lighting?
Nice. It's appreciated. When I was browsing I noticed that, we really don't have that many review scores for Sonic Adventure 2 at all, which is a shame. I find it interesting that after a dip for Sonic 3D and Sonic R magazine reviews for SA1 and SA2 are high again - but the low number of reviews for SA2 (dreamcast version) makes making that statement a little unbsubstantiated. Our scanner has arrived (perk of my wife's work - now we're working from home they've decided she needs one) so I will try to get my magazine collection shipped up from Birmingham as soon as local lockdown conditions permit that kind of travel.
They have to be added - we need people to volunteer their time to read magazines in our archive and add them to Sonic Adventure 2/Magazine articles. But there are thousands of files, and I try to prioritise the less popular games which aren't as likely to attract volunteers.
