Anyone with problems, I implore you to get in contact with C&B. These kinds of companies pride themselves on collectibles worthy of the premium price tags, so you'll normally find they'll take care of you if something is amiss.
Big update to this. Cook and Becker are doing a new printing of this and expanding it by 32 pages by including art from Sonic Mania, Sonic Forces, and Team Sonic Racing. Not sure if I'll double dip to buy it, but it's cool either way. https://www.cookandbecker.com/en/ar...og-art-book-expanded-with-32-extra-pages.html
it also appears on EU Sega Shop now, I haven't checked which version but I suppose it'll be the newer one. BTW, I'm not getting the new one unless they trade it with the old one for free or sell the extra content as a separate thing for the people who already bought the first version.
This new book is low, especially because they talked about the first book being a limited run. "Hey, loyal supporters who bought our first book, which was pretty underwhelming and poorly designed, buy it again to get the full product." And it looks like they are still giving full pages to the stock art, and putting the interesting sketches as tiny thumbnails. They could at least do a PDF type deal for people who purchased book 1.
Welp that's a definite purchase. I wish it ended at the Dreamcast era while still maintaining the same size, though. Edit: ehhh, nevermind, it does look like lots of standard art and screenshots as opposed to really interesting stuff. Oh well.
It's nice that this is getting a reprint for all those who may have missed it originally, but I don't be supporting the producers on this. It's pretty egregious to do this to the fans who supported the original, limited edition run. Don't get me wrong, I dislike making products limited edition from the offset because it's unfair to those unaware or unable to purchase the product for the short time that it's available. I'd rather they were just made to meet demand. But the fact is that this was a limited edition product that was sold as such. I wouldn't have bought it if there wad the slightest indication that an updated version was ever on the cards.
Sigh... I took the bait and ordered it. But looking at the detail I'm... Well, the feeling is somewhere between not as excited and kinda regretting the order.
I also purchased the orginal version and it does feel like a bit of a kick-in-the-teeth that they're releasing another version so soon with extra content. We got a fuck-ton of Mania's art/concept art in the art-book included with Mania Plus' physical release, so I'll be very surprised if the updated version includes any new Mania art. So I'll pass.
I just got my shipping confirmation email. The tracking isn't working yet (No surprise there), but this looks like we're getting them this week! Yay?
Well the book arrived and... Your enjoyment of it is really going to depend on a lot of factors. For starters, if you don't own the original, then yeah the 2019 version is definitely worth a pick up. But what if you do own the original? Unfortunately most of the 'new' content isn't that new, most of the art has been seen before, most of the Mania section has been printed in the Mania promotional artbook/instruction manual and the Mania Plus collectors edition. The Forces stuff has all been seen before, in fact they just use the concept art that was used on the art cards which came with one version of the game. The Team Sonic Racing page is laughably bad, aside from it being just a standard promotional image, they don't even include every racer in the game or a full team. It's such a cheap and poor inclusion. Did a very extensive video on it, the new content is at around 13:50. P.S. Yeah I pulled a YouTube face for the thumbnail... for some reason the book looked a bit odd on it's own so included my very orange looking mug in there.
In the French version, there's a mistake where it's said that Ray and Mighty appeared in SegaSonic but weren't playable until Mania. Is it in the English version ?
Minimum effort went into this, Wang errors as blatant as that tell me that this is nothing but cash grab.
I only like one thing about this art book and it wasn't even intentional. It has this piece of SA2 art. It was commonly used in materials for the game but online you can only find a fan remake (by tails_ttf) or the art assets remake. If anyone's able to get a good scan of it for the wiki that'd be great. Dumb book is still dumb though, the page it's on is a clusterfuck that not only implies this is SA1 art, but also that Sonic X concepts drawn by a different guy (Satoshi Hirayama) were part of the original concepts for Sonic's redesign, stuff that's been available for years. It was thanks to this book that when SA1's Wikipedia article got featured it was proudly showing Sonic X art, though it's gone now.
That reminds me of the Sonic The Hedgehog Wikipedia article saying that he was once called "Mr. Needlemouse", goofs that become citation-worthy just because they've been featured in a book or known website.
As far as YT thumbnail faces go, this one's pretty wholesome unlike most of them which just come across as someone trying too hard, so it's a good balance! (Also, unrelated, but I realised I was chillin' behind you during the Meet & Greet line and didn't realise, WHOOPS I am dumbo)
