The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

It never struck me as a companion to anything tbh

 

I can believe that. Lots of things in that game point to it starting as a Classic Sonic game before being reskinned with the Modern designs.

 

One of my favorite Sonic artwork ever.

 

Yes, I thought it bore a resemblance to the Saturn era silhouette. I guess that confirms it!

What strikes me though is the date: 1991. I don't recall every seeing Ueakawa style Sonic that early.

 

I don't know the intricacies of how copyright works, but needless to say, that copyright date isn't reflective of when the phone card was actually produced. That Sonic Team logo didn't exist until NiGHTS into Dreams..., for one thing.

 

They were shoving 1991 copyrights on Sonic merchandise for years. Pretty sure that artwork's from 1997.

 

Heck the fact it wasn't consistently reskinned (Eggman in particular uses both a classic and a more modern design depending on circumstances) is arguably evidence for this

 

https://archive.org/details/saturn-fan-1996-no.-4-2-16/page/74/mode/2up
Some AM2 coverage from Saturn Fan turned up last night, mostly concerning Virtua Fighter Kids and what was then known as "Sega Sonic Kakutou" セガソニック格闘 (Sonic the Fighters). February 1996.

OCR only gets you so far with translations so there might be more here but:

- Virtua Fighter Kids came into being for the same reason Sonic the Fighters did. Someone saw Sonic and Tails in Fighting Vipers and thought "we could do that for Virtua Fighter".

- Both games were designed for more casual players, as there was a thought that Japanese game centers were oversatured with complex fighting games (Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter, Tekken etc.)

- One of the first people to see Sonic the Fighters in action was Steven Spielberg and "his son"

- They're play-fighting in Sonic the Fighters. It's not meant to be violent and nobody is meant to get seriously hurt (although there was a worry about how that would translate to Metal Sonic with all his pointy edges)

 

Makes sense when you add a few things up - the Spielbergs seem to have been shown a multitude of in-progress projects on their January 1996 visit to Sega's R&D offices, including Sonic Team's own NiGHTS

It's also previously been reported that he helped Shenmue get greenlit after seeing and appreciating its early 'Virtua Fighter RPG' form

 

(a.k.a. ... soon on Retro CDN)

 

This might be a long shot, but I've created an initial wiki page for the Sonic XS Flash game, and I'm wondering if anyone here remembers anything about the cheat codes in the second revision of the base game. All of the cheat codes appear to have been added to the game's original web page an unspecified amount of time after the game was updated, but the game itself states "Watch 4kids TV This Saturday To Get The New Sonic XS Cheat Codes!", so I'm wondering if anyone remembers seeing this being broadcasted.

 

I found these:

• https://archive.org/details/sonic-xs_202101
• https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Sonic_XS#Cheat_codes

 

Going back to this, what is that above Rocket Sonic and to the left of Kumachan? Is that regular P1 color Honey the Cat?

 

Saturn Fan, March 1996
https://archive.org/details/saturn-fan-1996-no.-6-3-15/page/145/mode/1up

Amy is announced for what is now called "Sonic CG Taisen Kakutou" (ソニックCG対戦格闘). Don't know if these are official Sega designations, but yeah, no official title yet.

Incidentally I'm pretty confident now that these were all mocked-up renders than something actually playable.

 

There's something wrong with our upload wizard... "could not write to temporary file" ... again...

 

Pretty sure it's the file size (again). Retro has a tool to change DPIs, but I have yet to understand how it works. Photoshop usually did the trick for me, but this time, believe it or not, the file gets larger when halving the DPI. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

It's easier than you think:

https://retrocdn.net/File:Dpifix.7z

1) Extract to a folder
2) Put your JPEGs in that folder
3) Run dpifix.bat

And in theory every JPEG in the folder should have had its DPI set to 96, which is what we want. It's 96 because... historical reasons.

You can verify the change has occurred in Windows by right clicking the JPEG -> properties -> details -> horizontal/vertical resolution.

dpifix.bat is literally just a one line command (which calls exiftool.exe - you need that) which saves you having to type stuff out in a console window. The size of the file shouldn't change significantly - it's should just be altering some metadata rather than touching the image itself. If you're seeing a file size increase in Photoshop, chances are it's re-encoding it as a JPEG, attempting to compress an already compressed image.

And every time you compress a JPEG it creates lossy artifacts, which are then interpreted as more complicated data in which to try and compress and yeah.


My dpifix.bat actually looks a little different:

Code (Text):

1. cd %~dp0
2. exiftool.exe -Xresolution=96 -Yresolution=96 *.jpg -overwrite_original
3. pause

"cd %~dp0" sets the working directory and I forget why I added this (I might have been trying to chain something together at one point?). But if you add a "pause" command at the end, the console window won't close straight away and you can see what the output looks like. If it didn't succeed, it should give a clue as to why.

 

Love it, but the upload still failed. I'll have to try later again.

 

As expected, the "Sonic the Fighters" name debuted at the 1996 AOU show, along with the other remaining characters:

https://archive.org/details/saturn-fan-1996-no.-7-3-29/page/158/mode/2up

The only interesting things in this interview far as I can tell are:

- This build was 50% done (and represented 3 months of work?)
- The "barrier" system exists because unlike with other fighting games, where you'd have high, medium and low attacks, you can't easily tell if Sonic characters are ducking
- Metal Sonic walks in the AOU version, but they wanted him to fly
- They hadn't decided whether Eggman should be in a machine when he fights
- Nobody was keen on the 2-player colours, which are meant to be "fighting your shadow", but there wasn't a better idea
- Yuji Naka is in that interview for some reason and Naoto Ohshima was consulted on character design, but it's mostly AM2's work.

Both Virtua Fighter Kids and Virtua Fighter 3 were announced as Saturn-bound in March 1996. I think it was assumed Sonic the Fighters would be too, but it's just an assumption at this stage.

 

Don't know if this has been pointed out already but there's a pretty interesting thing I noticed on page 12 of the UK Sonic Unleashed 360 manual;



I outlined it in red. It appears to be some sort of gauge with a sun on the far left and moon on the far right. I personally speculate that in the build used for screenshotting for the manual, perhaps time would pass over in-game time and wouldn't necessitate the giant hourglass object being flipped to change the time of day.

In addition, Apotos has a different map description on the world map than in the final game. On the same page 12.