Have you ever wondered how Sonic Frontier's would sound like with Jason Griffith? Now you can hear it. I don't really give a damn about AI, but a possible Voice mods with previous actors? I would love that to become reality some day. Not sure how I feel with the usage of somebody's voice without their consent though.
The better method is voice conversion, which is how all the music covers are made. You keep the performance and timing completely intact and can pretty much do it in bulk if you know what you're doing. The bigger struggle is having a decent dataset or getting the original audio as clean as possible and sometimes voices just don't match right (all 3 of which can be responsible for the *bad* sounding music covers) This can also somewhat successfully "restore" low quality voice recordings if cards are played right, but I've never seen anyone else try. Would be good for content creators with a bunch of old footage or recordings that they'd like to touch up to match their current recording standards, or if they recorded something from somewhere else with noticably different audio.
The Michael Jackson fandom have been tackling this for a while Original recording "Remastered" It's not quite there yet but it's a pretty cool use.
Back in 2016 one anon in /co/ wished that Mako was back to do Aku's voice, so another anon wrote up a hypothetical on the grim circumstances that'd result from that. Now with AI we don't have to deal with such horror stories... although with that comes the odd pickle of "resurrecting Long John Baldry's vocal cords using countless AOSTH clips".
So I've rarely seen it mentioned in detail, but lately I've been doing some perusing on some old Mega Drive games and came across After Burner 2. Being infamous for its violent low volume distortion abuse aside, I heard rumors about how it used the PSG chip as a sample player, but I couldn't find anything on how it was achieved. I even heard strange murmurs on how it used both the YM2612's PCM mode and the PSG chip at the same time for both sound effects and drums. Thankfully, BlastEm incorporated a oscilloscope that you can access by pressing "O", starting a few months ago. So while talking with my friends I loaded up my copy and probed the game's sound test. Go figure, it was even weirder than I assumed. So After Burner 2 is possibly one of - if not, the only, games to use three PCM channels for the Mega Drive, and especially the only one I've seen that uses the PSG chip in the similar fashion of how arcade boards have a co-sound chip for samples. From what I can tell, this is achieved by setting the frequency to supersonic levels and spamming the ever living crap out of the volume register, which is pretty similar to how many personal computer games used sample playback. I'm genuinely impressed: this was very early on the Mega Drive's life span - heck, the Japanese version doesn't support TMSS, that's how old it is - and Dempa managed to pull off what I can only describe as black magic. One more thing: apparently the VGMs were improperly logged with a ancient emulator 20 years ago, and as a consequence the samples play too fast. Using BlastEm I relogged the music so that the drums sound normal, but I couldn't figure out how to loop them, so they fade out. Here are the VGMs. Hopefully someone out there rerips them. Maximum Power Final Take Off Red Out Super Stripe After Burner City 202 EDIT: Now on the wiki... but I have a feeling I'm missing about half of the story. Who first discovered this? I know that one Genesis PCM video mentions it offhand. But my Google-fu is failing me.
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet but Sonic actually has a signature. It's used on letters of gratitude sent to those who submit fan art apparently (From what I've been told, the letters are written as if they're by Sonic himself.) Cursive! And if you take the name on the bottom of his shoes of his model in Sonic Adventure as another indicator, he has a habit of lengthening the strokes on his letters.
PSA: if anyone wants to own or scan these rare Sega of America cards for the festive season, your chance is soon via Beep in Akihabara They also have a Sega Technical Institute-branded pen calculator going up for sale with it. Excitement.
I've been thinking about musical parallels between Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. Both games have compositions which originated in the 1980's: Ending ("Sweet", 1988) and Ice Cap ("Hard Times", 1982). A sample from "Entrance of the Gladiators" is featured in Mystic Cave and Carnival Night tracks. Music used in final parts of those games was released as songs: "Sweet Sweet Sweet" and "Stranger In Moscow".
This is because Sonic 3's ost was based on unused Sonic 2's Masa tracks K, maybe I can sound rude, but I really don't like the stuff like "yo, song from Sonic 3 sounds like music from Sonic 1, they has same composers!!!111" I know, it just funny parallels, but I feel that the last time here is too much facts and theories that came from nowhere and has no sense. Again, sorry if it sounds too rude, I just hope that you got my point of view. Same elements can be caused just because of tendentions in music, or musical cliché, or because of similar synths used in soundtrack writing.
Everyone always talks about the animals falling to their deaths in Sky Chase Zone, but has no one given thought to the animals that will drown in the oil of Oil Ocean Zone? If anything, the animals in Sky Chase probably won't die when they hit the ground because there's no fall damage in this universe, but they will drown in the waters of Oil Ocean. At least give them some pool floaties or something!
This comic implies Sonic didn't notice that the animals in the badniks throughout the level probably drowned in oil
I've been reading about Sonic 1 development. One unused level concept art was called "Gold World". Ah well, link to "Golden Capital" seems to be even stronger.
The postcard print of it seems to be very slightly cropped, but if I'm not mistaken, that's the exact screenshot used as the background for Sonic's ending screen in the actual game! It's mirrored in the game itself, but the framing looks the same, and even the rings in the background are rotated into the exact same positions. Guessing they manually painted out the in-game Sonic before overlaying the rendered elements, which to be honest seems like a needlessly time-consuming way of doing things...!
