The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

I didn't think to check the hits, I only recorded the amount of balls, good thing that I saw your message before I uploaded the video.

 

It's partially documented on the wiki - Bead Worm.

Amusingly whoever wrote it thought it was a bug.

 

For the record, on the Game Gear, the number of balls is always 3, but the number of hits required does change.

Top: 3
Middle: 4
Bottom: 6

EDIT: wrong numbers

 

Documented:

 

I did some brief experiments and it doesn't look like you can obviously manipulate the other bosses by taking certain routes. It doesn't seem to be a feature present in our earliest prototypes either, which is a surprise to nobody.

But yeah, nifty stuff. I imagine it's been posted about before but these things are easily lost to time.

 

Reading up on a old 2017 thread about Clackers reminded me of the existence of... probably in my opinion one of the strangest mysteries regarding Genesis Sonic. I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, so I thought I'd throw it out here.

Buried deep within the code of Sonic Clackers (or Crackers) at offsets 0x21672 and 0x22BEE are two voice samples.

One of them is a woman saying "Let's go!", and the other is her saying "Hey!". While this was known as far back as the Sonic Cult page, the samples always sounded "scratchy", and no one could figure out why. That is... until sometime in September 2021, when a TCRF user by the name of Beta Filter found out that the samples are actually in a variant of the DPCM format. When run through the game's sample playback, they sound a lot clearer.

But where they're supposed to be used has been something of a mystery to me. None of Chaotix's prototypes and the final game have any voice samples (in fact, in 1207 they were removed from the data). There isn't any place for vocals to be used in the existing BGM in Clackers, and overall the samples are out of place.

Given that it's bunched near the drum samples, my speculation is that the two voice samples were leftovers from another indev Sega project that also used PCM drums. It isn't too far fetched: in a Treasure YuYu Hakusyo prototype, for some strange reason there's graphic leftovers from Clackers that are speculated to be from a newer build due to the presence of newer animations not present in the Clackers ROM.

I tried scouring through 1994 - 1993 Sega games, but ehhhhhhhh it's a bit too daunting for me. Anyone with more free time and information, please to reply to this post. It's one of those mysteries in Clackers that I can't wrap my head around.

 

Can we be absolutely certain they weren't intended for Sonic Crackers? "Let's go!" and "Hey!" both make sense as phrases that could be used in a two character co-op game. The final game had the characters "speak" with the comic book style "Hold!" word balloons.

 

Well, I would start by checking out the whereabouts of that YuYu Hakushyo game, ¿did it have any voice samples at some point? It would make sense to me that overriding one game with the other happened both ways.

 

Makyou Toitusen uses voice samples in both final and prototype (in fact... this game has a ton of them used in-game). Just for the sake of combing the desert, I checked the ROM for both.
Taking a look at the PCM data... yeah, I'm immediately ruling this out. None of the samples have any recognizable gairaigo/English of any kind, and they're very low fidelity compared to the Sonic Clackers voice samples. I even checked with a hex editor. Nope. Not there either. So we can rule that out.

See, I thought that too since it seemed a little strange at first, but checking the game and other Sonic games and how they used voice samples... ehhhh I can't really see it? The only games I can think of that used voice samples are SegaSonic the Hedgehog and Sonic CD.
Both used storage mediums with a ton of storage (IIRC Sonic CD is 600MB something? SegaSonic has around 8MB), and both have little bits of voice clips sprinkled throughout the games. Sonic Clackers is 1MB, and 1207 Chaotix is 3MB. While there is space for voice clips with that size, I don't think they intended for Sonic/Tails to speak. Of course, Clackers has no sound effects ingame...

 

Continuing on the Sonic Chaos theme, has anyone ever actually got the 'free chaos emerald' code to work listed in our hidden content page?

Sonic Chaos/Hidden content - Sonic Retro

Seems a bit suspect to me as hitting button 2 on the character select screen is just going to select your character. I tried it on both the Europe & Japan versions with no luck. Figured I'd throw it out here before removing it, someone out there must have let curiosity get the better of them and given it a go.

 

It might be worth trying on the title screen as well.

 

Did we know that this existed?

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/the-ultimate-sonic-bundle/9PHZ4ZPWKHGN/0010

 

Vaguely - I don't keep up with digital bundles but I think I've seen an image of it before. I'd have assumed it was on the wiki, but maybe not.

 

It isn't. No idea if it's on non-Xbox consoles or if it's region specific.

 

I was doing a thing, then started doing another thing, and I ended up emulating the Japanese version of Sonic Jam. Don't ask why.



Did you know, the entire Hall of Fame was translated... and some of it is slightly different? Or specifically they culled some information about the Sonic OVA in the overseas version, and maybe other things. I'm not sure I have the patience to check everything.

Don't worry, it has the same mistakes, such as claiming 23rd June is Sonic's birthday.

 

It’s not really much info. It just says they were rental OVAs and feature an original story.

Edit: Oh, it looks like they just moved some of the info to the left side of the divider.

 

You also get things like this. In Japan, Sonic's "weak point" is "Kanadzuchi" (カナヅチ) which is apparently a word for a... metal hammer?

 

That's an idiom for not being able to swim haha. As in, "He sinks like a hammer." If it meant hammer, it'd be written with the kanji rather than kana.

 

Here is a source to back that up: http://zokugo-dict.com/06ka/kanaduchi.htm

"A metal hammer, a person who cannot swim"