Amazon UK has Christmas day down as the availability date. Despite being 27 and employed I just can't afford this right now at £30. I pray to god that they've got ample stock, don't want to be paying over the odds on eBay for one of these.
Got a confirmation e-mail last night that my order has shipped. Should be here around the 2nd. Right on.
I got a copy on Boxing Day, was surprised to see it on the shelf. Haven't delved too deep into it yet but it looks like a great book and I'm really happy to have it.
Just bought my copy today (my local comic book store had it). Winced when I handed over £37 for it but after getting it home and giving it a quick read I realise it was well worth the money.
The book is truly awesome. Real solid feel and high quality. Only have been able to read through the contest at Sega for their new mascot. I love the vivid, awesome photographs from Sega's history they detail-- I know I'm going to love the Sonic stuff.
Amazon has let me know that my preorder has finally shipped. Everyone else who preordered should check to make sure.
RBG blue is very difficult to 'translate' to CMYK. Even if the image is converted correctly, the Magenta printing cylinder was probably with more ink than it needed. Still, could have been fixed. I'm gonna buy this as soon as I can, though. Also: Wow the French cover is 10x better (material-wise of course, the design of the american version seems better).
Although it was delayed a little past Christmas, the book itself is another top-notch piece from Udon and well worth the wait. I'll be putting up a little review of it on the front page once I've had time to go through it a little more in-depth than a quick skim. I do hope this does lead to more projects for the Sonic side from Udon. They've done a bang-up job with the Capcom side of things.
Well we have been getting a number of Sega artbooks. Heck we even got Valkyria Chronicles 3, despite Sega's best efforts to not bring the game over here.
Great book, but parts of it are still awkwardly written. Makes me wonder how the pre-delayed version of the book read. Also, I got to the section about Sonic 2 and didn't notice anything about t3h baeta. I don't think the book should be Sonic Retro, but still, the Sonic 2 beta is one of the most infamous protos of all time, Sonic or otherwise. Otherwise it's an amazing book and I'll quit nitpicking.
Honestly nothing that I have seen so far, and they totally don't talk about S2beta. The book really seem to focus in the first half about development and why SOJ hates SOA. The last bit just goes through a list of games released, then character profiles....
S2B is also something Sega doesn't like to talk up too much, as there's no real need to. Yes, it has cut content (that ultimately found its way in some shape to Sonic 3 or even Sonic Spinball) and Hidden Palace is a sore spot for some people, but what else is there to say? "It was found by a fan in 1998, leaked, and showed x and y examples of cut content." Really, unless you're a diehard, there's hardly anything special about S2B.
The only stuff to note is the cut levels, but to be fair, a number of games have lost levels. It may be good for a book on development, but not as a book on the chronology for Sonic as a whole.
The book later on proceeds to drop tidbits about items cut out (most prominent one I can remember right now is the book stating that you can discover different characters in Sonic the Fighters via hacking) So, I can see how mentioning things in the tidbits section is still different than giving deleted levels a page/paragraph in the book, but it's not like the book is above giving some sort of insight into the development process and what gets cut.
