The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

These characters are in the 1992 manga.

I could be mistaken, but isn't the dad labelled ポリー ? Which would be "Polly", but I think the consensus is that "Paulie" was the intention. At least some issues of the manga spelled it ポーリー , but they weren't always super consistent with name spellings.

Paulie, Brenda and Tania have their relations (father, mother and sister) in brackets next to their names, but the boy, Nicky/Nikki ( ニッキ ) doesn't have anything next to his name. Unless I've missed something somewhere? In the manga, Nicky is Sonic's younger alter-ego. Whenever there's trouble, Nicky unknowingly transforms into his older self, Sonic.

The other notes seem to just be about colors. The note under Brenda's name, pointing towards Brenda and Tania seems to say "oudo daidai" - which is "yellow ochre orange", apparently. Amy's shoes are "sumire-iro", violet color.

 

That piece actually has nothing to do with Sonic 2, so god knows why Time Out featured it. It is, however, very likely to be concept art of what Sega originally planned as their first ever full-scale theme park location. It's also featured in this coverage from Game Machine of the company's initial October 1992 announcement involving the parks, and in colour in this similarly low-res promotional scan:

It's possible that this outdoor concept never really was under serious consideration, and made merely as a suggestion of what could be done - indeed, the above Game Machine coverage only makes specific reference to plans for what would become the first indoor "pilot" facility Osaka ATC Galbo - however it is also worth noting that early patents for Sega attractions illustrate designs more suited to this location type.

And based on what Namco had already been doing with their own locations in 1991/2 (firstly, Plabo Sennichimae - smaller, indoors, part of a bigger complex, in Osaka; secondly Wonder Eggs, bigger, outdoors, freestanding, in Tokyo), I believe Sega were initially planning to follow this very same model, but presumably ran into issues. So we instead got Yokohama Joypolis - still much bigger and standalone, but now indoors.

 

Ah thanks for that!

 

To be clear my friend knows nothing about Sonic. Lol. I just got him to look at it because I find the picture incredibly funny. Then I remembered he can read Japanese and got him to translate it.

Apparently Amy is spelled Emi in the Japanese. It's interesting though that Amy's design and role was established this early.

 

Today on THE LIES THE LIES

I got very close to out-right removing pan-European release dates from our wikis once. They hang around like a bad smell thanks to our forebears buying into the myth (though I suppose since the Euro, it's more valid than it was, especially for downloadable titles).



A wrong Sonic Jam history page - join the club. But there's a nuance with Europe that's easily missed if you're not looking at magazine coverage:

Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine/Reception

Filter by date and you'll find all the UK reviews were published in December 1993. The German (PAL) reviews however came out in March 1994 - if you go by the logic that publishers reviewed games around their launch window (noting there's some officially licensed Sega mags in there), that's a three month gap between two key markets in Europe. And neither are November.

(I can't tell you when France or Spain received their versions - some countries just didn't bother publishing magazine release dates)

Staggered release dates are common with the Mega-CD, but there's an assumption that things were more synchronised on the Mega Drive (at least after the first year or two). Not the case!


So as a general rule, if you see any databases claiming there were "European" release dates 30 years ago, take it with a pinch of salt.

 

EDIT: It appears I am wrong on this. And that "Emi" should actually be "Emmy". I apologise for any confusion my mistake will have caused.

It is a transliteration artefact. エミー, "Emī" is pronounced "eh-mii" as it is the closest you can get to the word "Amy" given the constraints present in the Japanese language. Since Japanese is mostly a phonetic language, how words are written in Hiragana or Katakana are how they are generally pronounced since Hiragana and Katakana can express every "sound" in the Japanese language. So rather than taking a word in how it is written in another language and try to graft it into their writing style, Japanese speakers take a much more pragmatic approach to try and match the word phonetically when grafted onto the constraints of possible sounds that exist natively in the Japanese language such that it can be expressed in Hiragana or Katakana and readers gain an immediate understanding of how word should be pronounced. (Compare this to English where looking at the word "Hyperbole" for the first time may lead you to think it is "hyper-bowl" but no, its "hi-per-boh-lee".)

So if you break down the word "Amy" into its phonetic components: "Aye-me" you begin to realise how this transliteration occurred. The "Aye" got flattened into the Japanese "エ" or "eh" sound and the "me" sound almost exactly matches the sound of "ミ" or "mi". The final character "ー" is a "vowel extender", so the "i" in "mi" becomes "mii" essentially, it makes the speaker linger on the proceeding vowel in a word and that "ー" extension gives the "i" sound a much closer representation of the "y" sound at the end of "Amy" when spoken by an English speaker.

Another example: Take the name "Laura", break it down into phonetic components: "Law-rah". Now we have a problem, the Japanese language doesn't have a "Law" sound, there's no "Lah", "Luh", "Loo" sounds at all. The closest we can get is "Rah", so we replace the "Law" sound with a "Raw" sound and we get: ローラ or "Rōra". This is why you commonly see "L" -> "R" mistakes in Japanese translations. "Sonic Clackers" -> "Sonic Crackers", etc. If you come across the word ローラ you rely entirely on context to know if the word is "Laura" or "Roller", two words that look distinct in English but when you break down their phonetic components: "Law-rah" vs "Roh-lah", they are pretty close, of course that "lah" in Roller is lost in the transliteration into Japanese so both words enjoy being mangled on the way in.

And this kids, is all the fun you can look forward to if you decide you want to learn Japanese. Come on in, the pool's fine.

 

Fang and Battle Kukku character designer TOUMA confirms there's no art or details about how Speedy's Powered Suit is supposed to look, in reply to me asking if there's any art since the sprites are so tiny.

https://twitter.com/toumartcom/status/1540591545262280704

 

Sonic 2 has a Perfect Ring Bonus at the end of an act if you collect all of the rings.
Sonic 3 has a Perfect Ring Bonus in the Special Stage if you collect all of the rings.

Did you know that Sonic 2 also has a Perfect Ring Bonus in the Special Stage if you collect all of the rings?



With the use of Tails and a lot of skill (or save states/slow down), it is possible to get all of the rings in a Sonic 2 Special Stage.
And your reward is 50,000 points; the same as your reward in Sonic 3.

Thanks to djohe for making me aware of this.

 

HOW IN THE SAM HELL DID PEOPLE FIND THAT OUT

Now that's obscure holy crap.

 

I thought it was common knowledge, I occasionally do that in my playthroughs since I like to max things. It's not possible in some stages, though.

 

This isn't remotely new, but if you've grown up in a world where you've never had access to a physical Sonic & Knuckles cartridge, this is what happens if you attempt to lock-on a game that isn't Sonic 1, 2 or 3 (or Sonic Classics):



You get the one stage, but you also get non-animated background characters with a blue tint. This is "Aladdin & Knuckles", which I suppose you could class as a game in its own right, if you wanted a very specific Blue Sphere challenge without faffing around inputing codes in the full fat version.

I've never seen these emulated before, probably because ROM sites have no desire to host every possible S&K combination out there. But it's really easy to create one - you just literally append the data of the "locked on" ROM to the end of a Sonic & Knuckles ROM, which you can do in one command line command:

DOS/Windows command prompt:
copy /b SK.bin + S3.bin S3K.bin

or in Unix world:
cat SK.bin S3.bin > S3K.bin

(this is also how you make full Blue Sphere and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Knuckles in Sonic 2 requires an extra step because there's a "patch" ROM in the S&K cartridge to change some things specifically for that game)


I've always found it unfortunate that Sonic & Knuckles doesn't detect other games, and I've found myself wondering recently, if S&K compares ROM headers... what if you took a non-Sonic game and swapped out its header for a Sonic 3 one? Could S&K be tricked into running arbitrary code as it tried to access (what it thought was) Sonic 3 data?

Nothing stupidly complex - I'm thinking along the lines of, if locked onto a modified version of Flicky, you get a red bird rather than a blue one. Little things.

 

Doing something like that makes the game hang on boot. Usually on a black screen, though you may sometimes get glitched graphics, depending on the game. You won't even get to the title screen, as S3K loads most of the the title screen graphics from the S3 data.

 

This was such a wasted opportunity by SEGA. Imagine just locking on to random games and getting cool Easter Eggs. I get that time constraints caused the issue, but there must have been games released thereafter which could have taken advantage of the lock on technology. Using it for three games only seems like a massive waste.

 

Blue Sphere was the Easter Egg. It was specifically designed to generate a different level per game.

 

I think that’s common knowledge at this point, but still, I don’t know anyone who went “aw yeah, MORE blue spheres!”.

 

Me. I love me some Blue Sphere.

Of course, if you have Sonic 1 you have access to all levels, leaving little reason to bother Locking On to non-Sonic games.

 

The benefit of Blue Sphere was greater in a time when you were lucky to get a new game and so you played all the games you did have endlessly.

As a kid though, we owned Sonic 3 but had to rent Sonic and Knuckles. So we spent more time exploring Angel Island as Knuckles than playing special stages.

 

This is not correct. The English name "Amy" is closest to the Japanese エイミー (Eimi).

The name of the character Amy in Japanese is エミー (Emi), which would most closely match the English "Emmy".

I don't know enough about the origins of the character, but if the Japanese came first, I would say it's unlikely they intended the name "Amy".

Source: I speak Japanese and do translation work. No translator would ever translate エミー to "Amy" unless they wanted to avoid "Emmy". However: there may be some historical precedent for エミー being Amy, but it's a bad fit in modern Japanese.

 

I haven't seen anyone post this here yet (sorry in advance if I missed it), but Yuji Naka has been posting a lot of things on Twitter now that he never would have posted before.

He is posting in English, and as he has said before, he is using Google translate, so don't read too much into the context of his words.

May 28, 2022: Naka seems to say that he didn't know about Sonic X-treme until after it was canceled. This in response to the tired old "Naka ruined Sonic X-treme because he refused to share his NiGHTS engine" comment. He says there are people out to make him look bad but who don't really know what they're talking about.

https://twitter.com/nakayuji/status/1530210990553387008

June 25, 2022: Naka, commenting on an (inaccurate) article by Sam Pettus about the creation of Sonic, states that Sonic was created with the goal of succeeding in the American market. This might not be entirely new info - I remember saying so before, but I couldn't remember where I read it. It confirms comments by Sega president Hayao Nakayama, who is quoted in the book Game Wars as saying something to the effect that Americans like action games, so they put their efforts into developing a hit action game to win the market there (and Sonic was born).

https://twitter.com/nakayuji/status/1540563106425819136

He also tweeted the same in Japanese: https://twitter.com/nakayuji/status/1540562142101118976

 

Then I stand corrected. I have been under the impression Amy has always been エミー.