The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

A fun depiction of the two from a Japanese Sonic Advance strategy guide:


Both idiots in their way. Lol

 

Whoa. They made exclusive Dash & Spin chapters for the Japanese manuals? Or is it a reprint?

 

Oh, you're right. This is the same art style! I have no knowledge of such a reprint, though. These comics are from a strategy guide from 2002:
Sonic Advance Saikyou Kouryaku Guide (ソニックアドバンス最強攻略ガイド)

 

Randomly found this in a chinese gaming magazine

I think i should make a page for said magazine on the wiki?
Hopefully someone else in the community speaks chinese because i dont :p

 

If you can provide a higher quality scan I can ask my brother to translate it.

 

https://retrocdn.net/images/a/a5/Home_Computer_and_Game_CN_1.pdf
uploaded the full issue to retrocdn, the page i posted is page 17

 

I can also help a little bit with translation if needed. From a quick glance, this page appears to be sharing at least one cheat code for the Japanese version of the game (I instantly noticed the block of text on the right has C, C, up, down, down, down, left, right).

edit: I'm looking into this a bit more closely, and it is definitely a page sharing cheat codes. I'll be working on a rudimentary translation as there may be some interesting information to glean from it, especially since this would have been a magazine published in Mainland China.

edit 2: Here's my attempt at a translation, I am still working on my Chinese skills and some of the text is too blurred for me to make out what the character might be. So there may be some translation errors, but I hope it's a start while we wait for a better scan (and possibly more fluent speakers to translate):

It's pretty much what you'd expect, but the inputs listed for Debug Mode seem odd. There's no clarification at all what "F" stands for, and the rest of the code doesn't look quite right to my eyes either.

 

Today on weird tangents nobody cares about:

I "discovered" that Sony Music Entertainment Japan is not the same as Sony Music Entertainment, even though they both trade as "Sony Music"... and are both owned by Sony. So I did some quick sanity checks to make sure all our Sega-related material was pointing to the right place.

Sonic Mix has ties to "Sony Music", except a the Spanish arm. It's one of many albums that were released in the 1990s whose existence is questionable - the music has nothing to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, and just seems to be generic "Europop" that was doing its rounds on a number of CD and cassette compilations at the time.

You know what else keeps turning up in Sega products? The cola wars. For whatever reason, Sega happened to do a number of promotional deals with Coca-Cola - the brand just keeps turning up, and here's another one:



Track #4 is a song that apparently became famous for being used in Cherry Coke adverts in Spain. This one, specifically, from 1995:

is this 90s enough for you


So an album with Sonic the Hedgehog on the cover was promoting the fact it had the music from a Cherry Coke advert: "No Hagas El Indio, Haz El Cherokee". Okay then.



I prefer the original EP



not only is the disc coke can shaped, it comes with four extra remixes. 20 minutes of this noise.

 

Huh, I wonder if the above is related to the "Coca Cola Kid" game for the Game Gear, which uses the same engine as Sonic Triple Trouble. It can't just be a big coincidence.

 

Early '90s Sega: promotes Coca-Cola game
Late '90s Sega: makes Pepsiman a tournament character

Man, if Sega were a person, it would make the best worst politician.

 

In Sonic Frontiers' 4-5, all jump boards in the stage use a property unique to the stage that allows Sonic to have unlocked air control when using them, which is the level's main gimmick. Sounds obvious and fairly simple, but if you take a look at the actual stage data you quickly notice that these jumpboards are frauds.

In actuality, the jump boards all just exhibit completely normal behavior with Sonic having locked air control until he hits the ground, or another object. The real reason they act uniquely is because they have a web of invisible dash rings attached! This is what it looks like when you make those rings visible.



The jump boards are actually just purely decorative, they only have their locked control over Sonic for a few frames before Sonic hits the invisible dash ring and gets air control properties applied to him.

It does seem kinda silly on face value that they didn't just add a property for jump panels to not lock Sonic into a path, but this is still a clever trick to make this level without programming anything new into the game.

 

That explains why they have such a massive hitboxes. Its wild how we went from those to Update 3 being filled with natural ramps free of automation

 

that is so fucking cool LMAO, I love technical workarounds like that.

 

I don't think so. That game was based on an entirely different ad campaign from Japan.

Trying to find a Youtube upload of one of the ads right now.

Fun fact: One of the ads of this Japanese campaign had animation done by PDI (Shrek, Madagascar, the US Dreamcast commercials). It even made it to SIGGRAPH.

EDIT: Clips of it show up in this video.

 

I found the full commercial that CGI Coca Cola kid in a Siggraph 1995 video (at 27:21)

I had no idea Dreamworks made those Dreamcast commercials, that's cool!

 

It happens to look celshaded. I wonder how intentional that was to make it seem to "come straight out of the comic" versus just goofy early '90s CGI.

Also nice to see where the inspiration for Big Bad Beetleborgs came from. lol

 

Got this Spanish press kit for Sonic's 10th anniversary.

https://twitter.com/AstroSeedP/status/1760680967612834236

https://archive.org/details/astro-sonic-10th-anniversary-es-press-kit




The CD's contents are incomplete due to being partially unreadable.

 

Sonic Channel's latest calendar sheet features Sonic Man:

It's like he was never away!

 

Update: The CD's full contents have been recovered. The file has now been updated with the remaining SA2 screenshots.

 

Can I encourage someone with eyes and a brain to mirror these images on the wiki - I've done a few over the years for Sega Retro so that's a good starting point.

Usually I'd do this myself, but there's a couple that seemingly require proper versions of Photoshop or Illustrator - there are quirks not coming through with my freebie tools. Also it's good to share the love.


That accompanying document is really weird too - it reads like it was copy edited from the internet circa 2001. It mentions Sonic Crackers.