I was going to ask why they'd need to do that given the VA was obviously available for the rest of the game. Makes sense.
So I knew this wouldn't happen so I did it myself. ... for the Dreamcast game nobody cares about, Sonic Shuffle! Sonic Shuffle/Magazine articles Sonic Shuffle/Reception (we don't have that many magazine scans from early 2001) Again the numbers aren't "reliable" per se but I do have a theory about Shuffle. It seems to have been received slightly better in the US than the UK, and I wonder if that's due to greater exposure to Mario Party (2). Mario Party is not a game I remember seeing or hearing much about back in 1998/1999*, but comes up all the time online, which suggests to me that perhaps that style of game was more popular in the US, probably because the UK was very much a PlayStation country by then. i.e. "it's like Mario Party, but not as good" vs. "why have they made a board game featuring Sonic this is a stupid idea" Not being able to get past the concept, because there was less awareness of this being tried on the rival franchise. Although I suppose you can't read too much into it (yet). Sonic Shuffle has horrendous loading times and the computer cheats. It's a troubled experience. *apparently there's some controversy about having to rapidly rotate analogue sticks, which physically hurts on an N64 controller. There's a suggestion Nintendo are reluctant to re-release the first game, and in my mind that could suggest a shorter European print run(?). Dunno.
I think it's been confirmed that Nintendo hasn't been rereleasing Mario Party 1 because of the analog issues. That was the reason they rushed out Mario Party 2 so quickly, which is much more common (and has actually been rereleased) than the first one.
Ya said game resulted in a lawsuit and Nintendo had to give out a shit ton of gloves to prevent hand damage as a result. No way in hell they ever want to touch that game again
I'd go along with that. I know people who owned an N64 but OOT and Mario 64 are the only games I recall actually entering the mainstream consciousness. The UK had been a sega mainstay through the Mega Drive era then switched to become a playstation one when the saturn failed. I honestly had never heard of Mario Party until the gamecube games came out. The only curiosity is the views in France of shuffle are much more positive, at least from this initial glance. Which chimes with the weird fact thst I... I actually only decided to buy it because I was in France and saw it being advertised everywhere. Posters in shops, demos of it playing on screens in shops as I walked past. I wonder if its because Nintendo (I. E. Mario Party) did better in France than the UK thus setting precedent, or if its because Sony were not as dominant? I do recall seeing a positive push for this game in electronics shops on the high Street in France thst just didn't exist in the UK, where almost everything had become about the playstation.
Consoles + has a habit of scoring things highly. With more scores, outliers like these would be less of an issue.
Definitely true, I just found it weirdly chimed with my own experiences flitting between the two countries around the time Shuffle came out
In other news: Brand new old screenshot of a Sonic Jam prototype. We had a similar one already: but this has an option highlighted! Guess they forgot multi-language PAL manuals exist. We've had varying quality scans of this for a while but nobody picked up on the difference - there could be subtleties to Sonic World that I'm not seeing.
I just came across this beta footage of Sonic Unleashed from E3 2008: A few interesting changes, like the early HUDs, the ring collection effect being the same as the Wii/PS2 versions, and the jump ball looking a bit more like SA2's. Also, is it just me, or was Sonic's model changed for the final game? It looks a bit different. Also it's mentioned that this is an alpha build, even though it's only around four months before the game came out... yet another Sonic game rushed to meet deadlines, I suppose
As an extension of "that other topic of mine": Sonic Labyrinth/Reception When I started my internet career in 2003/2004, Sonic Labyrinth was widely considered to be the worst Sonic game ever made*. Except it's looking like those considerations were made years after release - the 8-bit release of Sonic Spinball**, alongside many other Game Gear games fared worse in the eyes of critics. Although I haven't gone review hunting - the numbers could change. Surprisingly we haven't recorded a single review of Sonic Blast. *nobody had access to Sonic Jam on the Game.com back then. **There's a negative bias against pinball video games in the 90s, because a) pinball is old lol b) why waste your time with a digital version when you could go and play the real thing Today it's much harder to find the real thing... because society decided pinball was old lol. And society was wrong - pinball is glorious and wonderful and video games could stand to learn a lot from it - there should be a negative bias against 8-bit Sonic Spinball on the grounds that it kinda sucks. And that's coming from someone who doesn't completely hate its 16-bit counterpart.
real pinball is soooo good. I'm not into digital pinball because no one can replicate the physical *feel* of the ball hitting things, the clickiness of the flippers. Word!
I have a Sonic Spinball Pinball Machine. It came from Europe. Beyond that I have a DBZ Pinball Machine that's the same size as the Spinball one in my garage somewhere I believe.
I'm actually surprised there was never a full, proper Sonic pinball table back in the 90s. Street Fighter and Mario had them (and despite the SF table's flaws, I played that, alot). That recent fanmade one is pretty good though.
https://twitter.com/GAMEGEAR_/status/1322970105437827072 Torarete Tamaruka!? (とられて たまるか！？) - A game I never knew had more Sonic references in it on the Game Gear!
Have the comics from "Sonic & Knuckles: Le Guide Ultime" ever been scanned? I've never seen them anywhere. On another topic entirely: https://twitter.com/Ral4Sal/status/1323401971345272833 Bit of an update from the fan campaign to get Princess Sally in Sonic Dash/Sonic Forces Mobile. Correspondence from Sega of Europe confirming that WildBrain owns the rights to the 1993 "Sonic the Hedgehog" cartoon itself, but Sega of America owns the rights to all the characters created for it (Freedom Fighters, etc). However, Sega does not own the rights to Archie's redesigns of the Freedom Fighters, from when they rebooted the series (issue 252 onwards).
I've scanned pages of the books yeaaaars ago. I think someone uploaded them here. Might not be mine, but I remember scanning these specific pages.
Brilliant! Thanks! The first four comic pages don't have numbers in the corners, am I right in thinking that they're two separate strips? Is there anything else of interest in the book?
