it also shows the full sign, which would have been very useful back before we were arguing about "nevergreen" for several pages
Much clearer, and yet... STILL tricky to read. But it looks like "never open". These are fantastic screenshots! Very exciting to see these.
NEVER OPEN? I wonder that they were thinking with that wording. The place is a closed off theme park? In terms of new info, the article mentions that the game opens with the Sega logo then shows two explosions before showing the title. That must be what those white blooms on the right are. I don't think that's been documented before? They also conjecture that since he's a hedgehog he'll probably roll into a ball like an armadillo, but also mention that in this demo his only action is jumping (besides running, of course). Looking forward to the actual scan!
Incredible stuff! Anything more on this is alwaya amazing to see, and such clean screenshots are a particularly astounding find. Can't wait until we get proper scans of the page in question. It'll be interesting to try and fit these in sequence with the ones we already have. I mentioned this already over on Twitter, but I reckon the one shot not seen in full - the enemy facing to the right - comes after the shot where it's jumping upwards (seen both cropped and in full on the page). From looking at its surroundings, it seems to have landed on the exact spot Sonic was standing in the previous shot - presumably he runs under it as it jumps, and it lands behind him, turning to face him. All the ground etc. matches the spot where he was stood perfectly, and the BG layer and far FG layer seem to have scrolled on a bit (the biggest clue being the far FG tree, which was on the far right of the screen in the previous shot, is now overlapping the bush that Sonic was stood next to), which supports the idea Sonic has run on further to avoid the enemy and scrolled the screen along a bit. Wish the shot had been published in full so we could be sure...! EDIT: Actually, one of the older images in the first post outright confirms this, as it shows the enemy coming down from its jump, looking like it's on track to land exactly where Sonic was standing, and shows Sonic has run to the right underneath it to avoid it. Should have thought to check whether any of the existing images corroborated my interpretation, haha!
Perhaps it was meant to be "Nearly Open" but the "no one on the development team actually knows english" thing happened
Or maybe they meant "never shown"? Maybe someone who knows Japanese can make an educated guess as to what they meant?
"MOVIE SPIN" ???? Also, woah, new stuff. We've been getting spoiled quite a bit. It amuses me that some of the newer folk around here seem to have no idea how little we had back when Simon ran this joint. Oh, and whoever has that magazine really ought to scan it in high DPI. While I'm grateful for the new material, this should be preserved properly. I also asked ChatGPT/DALL-E to analyze the image and I told it as much relevant context as possible, it says that it thinks "NEVER OPEN" is the most likely interpretation.
Because DALL-E can analyze images and hook into a vast knowledge database scraped from the net. I wasn't expecting much, I just figured it was worth a shot.
The arrow clearly is meant to be in place of the word "here". "YOU ARE [HERE], WELCOME: [WTFIS THIS]"
DALL-E is an image generator. It takes images from it's dataset and uses it to make new ones. It's not some hyper-advanced Google Lens.
Fair enough. Like I said previously, I wasn't expecting much but figured "why the hell not ask it anyhow".
Assuming it says "never open", it's probably an intentional distortion of the "always open" sign you see attached to 24-hour places:
