Espio in Chaotix always did look more like a Dinosaur than a chameleon to me. If it wasn't for the palette cycling and the label of "X the Animal" it wouldn't have even occurred to me that he was one. It makes total sense that they'd want to reuse the design. Maybe, given the existence of less refined Vector sprites with slightly less colours presumably from some point in Crackers' MD development, work had already started on Espio sprites prior to any implementation on the 32x. Maybe Espio was even considered for a solo game after S&K prior to rolling him into the Crackers experiment, and thus his starring role was still in mind prior to re-leading the game as a Knuckles venture. It would be curious to get in contact with the guy behind the Crackers engine experiment (Hiroshi Okamoto) to hear more about it's development. It's clear that they weren't building off of the Naka engine but trying their best to replicate it, so I wonder what led to that weird break and need to replicate an engine. We do know that Naka was later proprietary about his engines in X-Treme's development. Were SEGA trying to remove their reliance on Naka for company politic reasons? Was Crackers an offshoot of an attempt to replace Naka which failed and thus became a weird grab bag of Sonic-esque stuff? Okamoto's first project for the Sega CD "Panic!" did release in 1993, and his next work was Chief Programmer of Chaotix. He worked sporadically for them since then.
"Levelup" wrote an article where they check out if League of Legends fandom is really the most toxic among the gaming ones, said that's a misconception and included a list with the ones that are even more toxic. Guess what? Sonic fandom ranked 3rd. The analysis to these conclusions seems to be based on Facebook and Twitter on a worldwide scale, and the friend that shared this with me points out talks about the movies may have influenced this high rank. For reference, this is the article (in Spanish) and here is a transcription of the list from most toxic to LoL toxic, in case anyone's interested: 1) Call of Duty (what a surprise) 2) Mortal Kombat 3) Sonic the hedgehog 4) WWE 2K 5) Borderlands 6) Madden NFL 7) The Elder Scrolls 8) Grand Theft Auto 9) Halo 10) World of Warcraft 11) Animal crossing: New Worlds (wtf?) 12) Final fantasy 13) Need for Speed 14) League of Legends (not even in the top 10). Honestly, I'm happy I stay inside the walls of Sonic Retro, it must be a wild world out there.
In the past I've tried to check out various Sonic-related FB groups, and...yeah... People here argue from time to time, but those folks get downright hostile over the dumbest shit. One time Mike Pollock made a joke song called "Boom Shadow" (to the tune of Moon Shadow) because people were bugging the hell out of him about whether or not Shadow would be in Sonic Boom (a decision that has absolutely nothing to do with him), and after sharing it on FB, he got put on blast hard in some group I had recently joined. I tried to stick up for him a bit (he's just having a little fun, he also does music, etc.), and then suddenly I'm a "Mike Pollock Apologist" or some shit, as if I'd gotten wrapped up in some HUGE controversy. Yeah, I'll just stay here. Also I had no idea Mortal Kombat or Elder Scrolls had notably toxic fans. I mean, that arrow in the knee joke got old REAL fast, but that's just a dumb joke.
I'm surprised Fire Emblem didn't make the cut, I love this series to death but jesus christ the fanbase is the absolute worst hellhole I've ever had the misfortune of interacting with lol
Haha, zing! Choose Your Legends propaganda was a mistake and Edelgard is the herald of drama. Also surprised to see Pokémon didn't make the shortlist given how much of a cesspit that fandom was, especially around Gen 8.
It's a very american-centric list all things considered. Which is a shame given the website is spanish, oh well
Idk man, I've been around the Sonic fanbase for a long time, and while things get heated I've never encountered the same toxicity both in online LoL communities and while playing the actual game. (Which seems to be a key factor that's missing from this) All you have to do is see what steps Riot has taken to address this to see that this list might be off.
Yeah I do feel the Sonic fandom is largely exaggerated. Sure, it can be cringey as all hell, but fandomwide issues rarely get more heated than tantrums about the colour of Sonic’s arms, as opposed to a community like Smash Bros. which has had serious issues with stuff like sexual harassment being endemic for years on end. Not that there aren’t some hugely regrettable examples of bad actors in the community (not going to name anyone, though I’m sure everyone’s first guess is the same one), but I’d say such cases are generally anomalies and, compared to some other communities, the Sonic fandom is kind of just a kid eating crayons.
Origin point for the data was this thing which not only went after video games but pop star or movie fandoms, seemingly only from Twitter. Data used is unspecified "negative words" out of 1000 (and then a similar chart was made for also unspecified "positive words")
Maybe those are the first ones under LoL? XD I don't know. It's not that I'm putting that much faith in that kind of articles, but Sonic > LoL sounded both terrible because LoL is terrible enough to be a reference for even worse things, because the whole world is terrible if even a game like Animal Crossing got a place in that list, and, of course, because I'm a Sonic fan and I don't want to experience that kind of shit.
The list was created by flagging "negative" words appearing in each game's social media. While there's no way of knowing which words got flagged, this post has the word "terrible" (twice) and "shit." Let's suppose those words are considered "negative." That would make this post 3x toxic. Which it isn't, but their list isn't REALLY a list of which communities are the most toxic, it's just a list of which communities use certain words a lot. And since we aren't told which words are being counted, it makes the entire thing completely meaningless.
Even if we did know the words it'd still be meaningless. Words themselves aren't toxic, it's the context behind them. Calling everyone who likes 06 an moronic idiot is more toxic than calling sonic 06 itself shit.
Right. The list admits to not being based on anything contextual, they're just counting words. So it's completely meaningless as a measure of toxicity. I simply meant that if we knew which words were being counted and how many times they appeared, that would at least be empirical data on what negative words get used most often by which communities. But they didn't bother to include any of the data they measured.
I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into this, but I'm 99% sure this is a sonic reference. In the first few lines Dr. Skull says "There is no way to perish in style so do not even try to" which is pretty similar to Eggman in Metallic Madness Bad Future from Sonic CD "You can't do anything, so don't even try."
You might be right, but the Grailknights aren't strangers to making 80s and 90s pop culture references
