Not quite. The whole Jaguar thing is a bit of a distraction - something Scot Bayless remembers from a phone conversation early on. Both Nakayama and SOA vice president Shinobu Toyoda have clearly said the 32X came about because SOA thought the Saturn was too expensive and wouldn't be marketable in America early on (this is documented in the Collected Works book). Kalinske was also very vocally against the Saturn as early as 1993, saying he would never sell a $500 console. In the end, the 32X was a compromise. Nakayama insisted that something be released, whether it be an upgraded Genesis or the Saturn or something in-between, and SOA developed the idea for the 32X and worked with Hideki Sato to realize it. SOA liked the 32X because it gave them some form of control on the hardware they were marketing, and Nakayama liked the 32X because it meant he could focus on the Saturn in Japan and let SOA handle the 32X. It's something I've spent some time on. An easy place to start is SOA's official magazine, Sega Visions. Compare ads for games like Gunstar Heroes and Landstalker (hint: there are absolutely none) with Eternal Champions or Jurassic Park. There are a few Japanese games that got advertising after 1993 (not counting Streets of Rage)--mostly Shining Force II and Phantasy Star IV, as I recall. I'm sure there are more, though. But yeah, a lot of the Japanese games that did get published by SOA later in the era just seemed to be shelf fillers to pad the library. If they sold, great, if not, no big loss.
I can use wiki power: https://segaretro.org/index.php?tit..._by_options[0]=ASC&limit=1000&offset=&format= https://segaretro.org/index.php?tit..._by_options[0]=ASC&limit=1000&offset=&format= That's every game we think Sega published for the Mega Drive in the US and Japan. I'll look into the details when it's not last thing in the evening.
SA2 is where that stuff came in much more strongly. The rock style stuff was only in like character themes and such in SA1, the majority of level themes themselves were pretty much classic Sonic all the way. That only applies to songs with lyrics though, most background music in TV and movies do not have lyrics. There's no reason they couldn't have kept the orchestral score in DBZ instead of edgy and cheap sounding MIDIs, other than they thought it would make it appeal to western kids more. FWIW I thought the show was pretty weird when it came out (why are these people flying, why does this guy have 3 eyes, what), it probably would've seemed even weirder to me with the original score, I can see the logic in replacing it. It's still unfaithful and unfitting in retrospect, however. I uh... what? I'd say Comix Zone OST is about as American rock as a Genesis OST gets, Dreams Come True is J-pop (which has American influences but I would hardly call it "American rock").
The common explanation/theory going around years ago was that Sega of America changed them because they wanted gender-neutral colours on Axel, Skate and Blaze, although I've never seen any solid evidence to back that up. Personally, seeing as Zan didn't receive a colour change, I reckon the real reason was to make the game stand out in comparison to Streets of Rage 2, as a common observation in previews of Bare Knuckle 3 was that it looked the same as the second game. Either way, it wasn't just a quick palette swap for this change - the sprites were actually altered (with one of Axel's frames being corrupted as a result) and some of the cutscene art redrawn. All of SoA's meddling just ended up hurting 3 in the end anyway. Bare Knuckle 3 is the "real" version of the game as far as I care.
@Blastfrog yes, there where some themes I liked in SA1 for example Windy Valley, but they where closer in style to the Japanese vision of Sonic. I may be the minority here but I still think that try hard dad rock has no place in a Sonic game, and that it was a major style misstep. It tipped Sonic over the edge from being 'cool' to action hero cheesy. I say I may be in the minority because I realize that I'm an old classic fan now, and that a large portion of the current fandom is the Adventure generation.
I love Sonic CD's Japanese soundtrack (well, most of it), but it was completely at odds with the vaguely-punkish turboradical 90's cool dude image SoA obsessively pushed. It was too whimsical, too groovy, too funky. History vindicated the JP soundtrack to the point where Mania effectively used only it in Stardust Speedway and Metallic Madness, but yeah.
I forgot about these, it does seem to fit into place with what's been said now. I;m glad this never made it in, it's early megadrive generic sounding, worse then spinball in every way.
It's often been claimed the slight distaste for house + techno in America in the 90s can be traced back to was going on with the whole 'Disco Sucks' movement in the late 70s, which was largely down to bigoted rock fans who were either consciously or subconsciously uncomfortable with dance music often being made by gay black people - and that was also the case with house music back then, certainly in America at least. I think it'd be quite a bit of a reach to claim anyone at SoA took advantage of small-minded attitudes to change things, but their want for a more contemporary sound to CD's OST on their shores could be a by-product of what those other people thought, for the purpose of marketability and also fitting in with what Sonic's image had became there. And either way, I'd wager the fans of the original OST outnumber the American one now anyway, so it's not like it mattered in the end.
Ironically, when Pokemon was first brought over to the US, Nintendo of America wanted to change the creature designs to be tougher - they didn't think Americans would like the cutesier Pokemon like Pikachu or Jigglypuff. Can you imagine? I think part of what made Pokemon such a big hit was that it had everything ready to go. The manga and anime tie-ins, trading cards, toys - all of which would have needed to be redone top-to-bottom if they decided to give Pikachu angry eyes or something.
Um no, Disco was hugely popular in the US. It was so popular that it took over nearly all of the mainstream radio leading to a lot of lousy cash-grab albums. Much like the Atari video game crash people eventually realized that low-quality fad music wasn't good and Disco died a rather sudden death.
To be fair, consider that in America, guys like Mewtwo, Charizard and the various dragon legendaries do seem to more popular than guys like Pikachu, at least among the older fans (and I don't just mean nostalgic 30-somethings, I mean like age 13+).
The tougher ones are probably more popular among fans, for sure, but it still would have been a terrible idea. Look at the anime, Pikachu is the main character's main monster. If they'd altered Pikachu's design substantially for Americans, they flat-out could not have brought over the anime without major overhauling. (On a side note, I can only imagine if they would have ever tried to revert to the Japanese designs in future games, the whole "genwunner" stereotype would be about a thousand times more annoying since you'd have older American gamers complaining about the "new" designs as well) Bringing it back to Sonic, I've mentioned this before in a different thread but it's like how DiC redesigned Eggman/Robotnik for the cartoons and Sega of America started using that design in the games' promotional artwork. Like... why? He looks nothing like that in the games themselves. Greg Martin and whoever else may have tweaked the designs for Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Eggman here and there but they at least didn't diverge from their game appearances THAT much, if at all (a lot of those changes were too minor to show up on a tiny game sprite anyway).
I wish I knew was SOA was smoking when they decided on Robotnik's localized design, like I can kinda understand the mohawk-sonic thing (because that hairstyle was still considered "cool" up 'till like, the early 2000s) but Robotnik just kinda looks like a mess imo.
SoA thought consumers would be too dumb to tell the difference between DiC's Robotnik and his in-game design. I'm not being snarky, they really believed that, going by the fact they (in)famously tried to pass Amy and Sally off as the same character.
I mean, redesigns happened in Japan too with the early manga and Green version. Clefairy was supposed to be the mascot. I have no idea what you are talking about here. I almost feel like you are talking about the cartoons.
This is obviously a discussion better suited for somewhere else, but I wasn't saying Disco didn't become massive for a time - it's that the backlash against it didn't help its 80s successors, electronic dance music genres like house and techno. It's not a coincidence that they became massive pretty much everywhere else before North America (bringing this back to Sonic, he even got a house-influenced pop single in the UK before SCD was made). And it's been agreed upon by many people that Disco's downfall was down to bigotry, potentially more than the cash-in stuff which also didn't help. Genuinely can't detect much of a difference between this and the classic JP art besides the lack of glasses and gloves, so not too sure there's a worthy argument to be made here that it's a 'mess'.
Different nose and moustache, no gloves, pitch-black eyes instead of sunglasses, permanent angry expression
I don't see those as pitch black eyes since there is white in them, especially since the cartoons and comics go with red dots in black eyeballs.
https://info.sonicretro.org/images/a/a1/SSS_SONICF_.png https://info.sonicretro.org/images/2/25/SSS_SONICO_.png
