Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: JumpingRyle - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

The KKM, on 25 May 2015 - 10:09 AM, said:

I don't understand. Vector is a common aviation term (lift vector, thrust vector, etc.). Mach is a common aviation term. Sonic is, well, probably not common but certainly associated with aviation. This is also true in Japanese. The fact that vector is used in other places does not somehow make it no longer associated with aviation. When 3 out of the 5 band member names have a strong connection with aviation (and a 4th member also, although more general), and a big part of one of the character's origin stories involves aviation, I don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to see where the names originated. Especially since these characters were meant to appeal to children, who were not likely familiar with Vector Synthesis (!).

エスピオナージ "Espionage" is most certainly a Japanese word, and it's in the dictionary: http://dictionary.go.../jn2/23825/m0u/

I'd say it's a less-common loan word, but a quick google search will show you that it's still used quite a bit.

I don't understand how there can be a "common" vector and a "specialist" vector in Japanese. They are different words, used in different contexts, to refer to somewhat different things. They are not interchangeable. It would be strange to suddenly call "Vector synthesis" Bekutaa shinseshisu since that's not what it is. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with English. These are 100% Japanese words. I think your knowledge of English might be deceiving you into seeing bekutaa and bekutoru as being basically the same thing, but they are only 50% similar in Japanese. Of course, I think most Japanese people would know that they are derived from the same word, but that makes them no more interchangeable than "hospice" and "hospital" in English (which are actually more than 50% similar).

The KKM, on 25 May 2015 - 05:04 AM, said:

Thanks for conveying the messages />

Bekutaa and bekutoru are two distinct words in Japanese. Just because they derive from the same foreign word doesn't change this. To a Japanese person, they are different and are used in different contexts and are not interchangeable. To be clear: They are not just "a literal spelling out of the English term using a Japanese writing system", they are words that have been fully incorporated into the Japanese language and there is no ambiguity about their use. A Japanese person does not have to have any English knowledge to use either.

An analogy for English: "hostel", "hospital", and "hospitality" all derive from the Latin "hospes" but we would never confuse the 3 and can clearly use them without knowing Latin.

The reason why both bekutaa and bekutoru are used in Japanese is that bekutaa comes from the English pronunciation and bekutoru from the German pronunciation. Bekutoru is used more in the fields of physics and biology, which due to historical reasons have a lot of German loan words.

Sorry to go into this detail, but I want to make it clear: If the character of Bekutaa had been based on "Vector Synthesis", then it would make no sense to use "Bekutaa" rather than "Bekutoru", as they are distinct terms.

If you really want to argue for this, you should also disprove my argument concerning the more logical association with flight. Bekutaa has very clear associations with flight in Japanese, and Sonic has a strong connection with flight. Yuji Naka even used to wear a leather flight jacket with the Sonic logo on it.

I will agree with this: The choice to have Vector play a keyboard in the band might have resulted from the similarity of bekutaa and bekutoru, but I think the name was ultimately chosen for the association with flight. Occam's razor and all that />

Looks great!

Mark Cerny (who wasn't really involved in the development of Sonic 1) said this about the color: "the character's color was changed just prior to release. Sonic had been a lighter blue, but he was very hard to see against the ocean backgrounds, so his color was darkened at the last moment."

http://www.sega-16.c...iew-mark-cerny/

360, on 20 May 2015 - 04:13 AM, said:

MWIV came out in early '94, so it wasn't quite at the point where Sega was abandoning anything. There are a few reasons that it wasn't localized. Mac Senour, a producer at Sega of America, described the rather arbitrary process to determine which games were localized. A producer at SoA would take a look at the game, and if they thought it would sell well they would recommend it for localization. Famously, Gunstar Heroes went through 12 producers and assistant producers who all refused it before Senour decided it had potential. The way he describes it, the decisions were based almost entirely on the marketability of the games, not their quality. Apparently nobody liked Gunstar Heroes because it had small sprites. It's easy to see how MWIV was rejected: The "IV" meant it was nothing new (which is why Thunder Force IV was changed to Lightning Force in the US); the game looked too "cute" and had a female protagonist, which clashed with the target demographic of male teenager in the US; and it looked like just another ordinary platformer. At this time, also, Japanese games were not selling well in the US. If you look at US sales charts for the Genesis, most of the top 10 games from that era were sports titles. SoA was marketing the hell out of those, while Japanese games were, with a few exceptions, afterthoughts. Of course, this only applies to games localized by SoA. Third party developers were free to do the localization themselves.

http://www.sega-16.c...iew-mac-senour/

The "vector" in Vector Synthesis is written "bekutoru" in Japanese, which does not match how the character is named.

http://ja.wikipedia....%82%B7%E3%82%B9

The character is named　"bekutaa" as in the flight-related terms.