It makes me wonder why they named the polar bear Bark (or Ray for a flying squirrel for that matter [not forgetting Amy Rose])? The main characters all make sense, and I don't think I'd need you guys to be reminded of them :P And funnily enough, a quick search for those 2 brought up Bark 'N' Bean dog wash and coffee shop, lol :p
I'm not sure about Bark, but I made some guesses a page or two back in this very thread. I assumed the Rose part of Amy's name was due to roses being sweet-smelling and covered in thorns, like a hedgehog is covered in spines. Yes, of course. Your point being what, exactly? If anything, a non-native speaker drawing from a reference source only to come up with something utterly archaic to a native speaker seems exceedingly likely. Like, y'know, using "donkey" as a synonym for stubborn and stupid.
RE: You could probably map out Resort Island: Sonic R/Development Spent a few days on this now - there is a lot more work that can be done, but brain cells etc. For example, there's loads and loads of footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIruU7VWBl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evym525rUYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0lWQbrHvwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRHkCD4lr9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmmUkdVO0vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uaLWzFnY3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nozTKk4_wtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrYwWefW2eU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b9Y1YVq4A4 All useful to Sonic Retro... but I don't know where the highest quality versions live. Also count how many times a player literally walks through a door. None of these builds line up with Sonic R (preview) which makes that prototype all the more remarkable.
The file downloader on my phone says the first video is 1280 x 720 at it's highest. Assuming the other videos are similar, is that good enough?
Resolution isn't necessarily an indication of quality. Anyone can take a crappy 320x240 video and reencode it to 1080p, gaining nothing in the process (this will actually degrade the quality further). Even a good quality video will gradually degrade with each reencodind. For archival/research purposes, you'd want whatever is closest to the original source.
There's awkwardness in the analogue-to-digital conversion but good rips wouldn't be in 16:9 widescreen and shouldn't have more than 480/576 lines. But we can cope with slightly dodgy placeholders as long as they're marked as such. I'm not pretending those magazine scans are great either.
Here's a fact lost to time, owed due to the way the community has handled prototype coverage over the years. These three shots of Sonic 3D all came from Sega during E3 1996. They're all mock-ups. When the internet started collecting these things, they were often bundled together with later screenshots without sources being logged. So in a sense, we "forgot" these were the first screenshots of Sonic 3D. This means not only was the crab a scrapped badnik, it could have easily been the first badnik in Sonic 3D. Certainly it was the first one shown to the public. I mean okay it's not that impressive since Sonic 2 managed to demonstrate two scrapped stages in its initial public debut, but idk... always check your sources I guess. Yes clearer versions would be nice.
...we know the crab is a scrapped badnik, because Gamehut showed off the debug tools for 3D Blast and it has the crab in them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I4ZFpC6bbQ
Sorry, did I say "Sonic 3D"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoImUoHTgSk I meant "Sonic Blast". So I guess that solves the age old question about whether "3D Blast" or "3D: Flickies Island" came first - neither of them! EDIT: Incidentally, the use of circular shadows in this build means that none of the prototypes that we have which claim to be "E3 demos" were actually shown at E3. Exceptional.
Speaking of E3, I've been analysing a lot of Sega footage because... reasons. Sonic X-treme/Development/E3 1996 I don't have the patience to untangle our X-treme coverage but I was able to write up its showing at E3 1996. From what I've seen, it was a pretty apalling display. Other games were sidelined so that a tech demo and some sloppy videos could be put up in lights - this was front and centre of the Sega booth, right next to NiGHTS. The prototype that was leaked a few years ago offers more content than this - even magazine coverage steered clear of the playable demo in favour of the trailers (which are also pretty bad). Both Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot were at this event, just fyi.
I remember the UK's Channel 4 Teletext's Digitser section mentioning they saw Xtreme at E3 and it looked rubbish. I think it might even have been one of the final times I saw the game mentioned before I got online in the late 90s. Did notice on that Cybernet clip of 3D that the GG Blast is being demoed right next to it. I've got plenty of old episodes on VHS so might be worth digging through them at some point. Off the top of my head I remember them showcasing some unreleased stuff, like an arcade version of Formula 1 97.
https://twitter.com/DaEgg123/status/1104896194390589440 Huh. I don't know if it's intentional or not but the intro cinematic to Sonic Jam could reference the gradient used in the Sonic 1 and CD title screen font.
'fraid not - it's just chrome lettering. There was a lot of that in the 80s - I think we traced it back to Mad Max in 1979. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p6tvs-qjpA etc
Oh yea I'm aware that it was a commonly used design back in the day, I just wonder now if the Sonic Jam intro was giving a nod to that design given it's color palette (and that you'd think otherwise they'd have Sonic running in a green field and not a desert).
A sandy desert plain is easier to convincingly render with computer graphics than a green field, I imagine. Although, if the Mad Max connection is true, then it could be congruent with a desert setting considering that's where the Mad Max films take place, albeit in a roundabout fashion. P.S., I need to stop clicking twitter links; I don't need the reminders I'm ancient.
Gun-Nac had a very similar chrome effect on its logo too. https://twitter.com/CoolBoxArt/status/1105181753457721345
