Most of this stuff was purchased back when it came out, and after time stored away so it didn't clutter up the place. There is some of the modern Sonic stuff but I don't generally touch any of that mostly ugly Sonic X stuff. A lot of this stuff is nigh on impossible to find now, so I'm glad I kept a lot of it. When I got a lot of this stuff I bought two sets so I could have one packed away brand new and one set to play with. I'm such a geek. =D
(Bumped back to the top because I've added a new picture, and it's Christmas day! Whoo!)
For the last year or so, you may of noticed a bunch of retro style Sonic merchandise being sold in GameStation, including T-Shirts, key rings, wrist bands, badges etc. Well just a couple days ago I was browsing in my local GAME, which being so close to Christmas was naturally packed with people running around like headless chickens because they leave their shopping till the very last minute, and I came across these new retro Sonic plush toys, one of Sonic and one of Tails. According to the back of the box there is also Knuckles and Dr. Eggman ones, but they didn't have these in stock. Best thing was they were only a tenner each, which isn't bad because there not too small and look the part.
Anyway, the queue was about a mile long so I didn't buy them then, but this morning I had another look and most of them had already sold, they only had 2 Sonics and about 5 tails' left, so that convinced me to grab one of each. While I have barely touched any of the modern Sonic X style stuff they have made over the last few years, I'm a sucker for anything that looks like the Sonic I grew up with.
What, an article that isn’t about Sonic? No, I’m not high, I just felt like being different. Variety is the proverbial spice of life. When I think of the good old days of Sega, one of the first things that comes to mind (once that blue hedgehog gets out the way) is Streets of Rage – or Bare Knuckle if you live in 
^ And what happens when you fuse these two together? Street Fighter... see what I did there?
...and ain't you glad it wasn't? Just look at those awful supporting characters! 'Princess Acorn', presumbibly a early design for who later became Princess sally in the 'SATAM' cartoon, looks far too much like a slutty Princess Toadstool from the Mario Bros cartoons (also developed by DIC), Poker Lewis has been turned into some kind of punk, and Johnny Lightfoot also has shades, for some reason, and I don't even know what they were thinking with the others. A walrus called Joe Sushi? Tex the Penguin? A Flicky in some kind of white suit? Even Sonic himself doesn't look quite right, and where's Tails? More after the jump..
You see the comic had a section every issue called the 'Graphic Zone' which is basically a fancy name for a fan art section. Getting an image in there would win you a little Sonic watch of some sort (worth a tenner). I always liked how one of the optional fields next to your name was what Sega consoles you had. I'd like to think stating you owned a Playstation would have S.T.C send shit through your mailbox. At the time I had a Mega Drive II, Mega CD II, Sega Saturn and a Game Gear. Oh how I miss that battery eating lump of plastic. Why did I sell it off so I could get a Game Boy Colour?
This wasn't the first or only time that I had won something in S.T.C, mind. One time I sent in some Sonic comics I scribbled up (it was pretty much all I did draw at the time, hundreds upon hundreds of Sonic comics), and in return they sent me a Sonic 2 jacket patch...which I don't have a photo of right now, but I'll go get one later and edit it into this post. There was also something else I won from them, but I'll leave that topic for another time..
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of love for the old SegaWorld Indoor Park that used to be in London (now just one floor of arcade games called 'FunLand'), but at least there is Arcade Heroes, who back in October got their hands on some juicy SegaWorld videos! The first video they managed to lay their hands on was is a promotional video showing off all the 3D concept planning of the place, and a bunch of footage of the rides that were there which bring back vague but fond memories. It also shows brief clips of what appears to be a Pirate Sega commercial for Virtua Racing on the Mega Drive!
Continuing from where I left off quite a while ago, here's five more installments of my personal most memorable moments in my Sega filled life of gaming. You can see the previous chapter HERE.
I still remember when I got my Saturn. I got it on my 10th Birthday in November 1996, if I remember correctly. This was probably the most Sega induced time of my life as soon after this Birthday me and some school mates went up to visit the newly opened SegaWorld (see the previous articles about that). It came from Argos and was £200 with a bunch of bundled games: Sega Rally, Manx TT Superbike, Sega Ages, Sonic Jam and Bubble Bobble Collection. I still remember soon after a mate telling me of a rumor that the Saturn could play Mega CD games, which I tried out and ended up having to get the system replaced! Doh!
Being a Sonic nut at the time (my birthday cake that year had Sonic Pogs sitting on it, for petes sake!), Sonic Jam was a dream come true: All 4 mega Drive titles, which had already given me hours upon hours of fun, all on one disc with lots of added options, modes, difficulty settings and best of all: a time attack feature. It was, and still is, the best collection of the original Sonic games ever made: far better than Mega Collection which was just a bunch of ROMs slapped on a disc.
This is my collection at the moment. Most of these games were bought back when the console was out, many of which were being flogged off as the Saturn was slowly fading from selves. Outside of Ebay the games are pretty hard to find now, but a few have popped up at Car Boot Sales from time to time, including Guardian Heroes, Street Fighter Collection and House of the Dead.
Oh, and make sure you check out the latest issue of Retro Gamer, it featured an article on one of the saturn's defining games NiGHTS, as well as a great article on the Official Sega Saturn magazine, all the issues I bought of which I still own and is my all time favorite game magazine.
I have wrote about this cartoon a few times before at my personal blog, mainly because a guy who worked on the series, and designed this cartoon's cone headed version of Dr.Robotnik, Milton Knight, has posted some wonderful concept art he did for it as well as some early footage on YouTube. Please make sure you check out all these blog posts HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Being a big fan of both Sonic and good animation in general gives the series a double interest to me even now, not just when I was a tyke.
The discs are packed in 4 extra thing DVD cases, 2 in each. One thing I can't congratulate them on is the lazy presentation. The box and discs use the same artwork of Sonic over and over again, and they haven't even drawn him well! For starters, his arms are blue rather than the skin tone they should be, and his shoes are all wonky looking at the bottom. Even the logo is squashed to buggery, and the back of the cases has artwork of the WRONG Robotink, it's the more menacing Robotink from SATAM rather than Milton Knight's crazy lard-arse. Compared to the wonderful presentation of the original videos this is just plain amateurish. There is a set of stickers in the box as well, again using artwork from the wrong cartoon. Doh!
The interactive menus on the discs themselves also leave a lot to be desired, with no extras and dull layouts. They also haven't really gone into any effort to re-master any of these cartoons, but these be honest it's hardly considered to be an important cartoon so it was obvious they were not going to bother. The company that has put this out have done the bare minimum but it's the content that counts in the end and there's a LOT of it. Some episodes are clearly better than others, but the cartoon is just as daft as I remember it, with it's surreal backdrops, occasionally great animation (again mainly thanks to Milton Knight's input) and plenty of laugh out load moments, wrapped up with a forced moral at the end of the episode. I'm sure you've all heard of the 'Sonic Sez' clip in which Sonic teaches kids about sexual harassment. In case you've never seen it, here is is!Considering Ristar only had the one game on the Mega Drive, there sure is a lot of nice fan art of the character floating around on DeviantArt (a majority of them are coming from one artist, mind you). The game itself was one of the true gems from Sega's 16-bit days, and one of the best platformers from that era.
This week I'm gonna look into fan art of Alex Kidd, the Ex-Sega mascot and Master System favorite. Give us a new Alex Kidd game Sega! You know, if you're not too busy.
Okay, well, I haven't actually got any new information for you readers regarding the wondrous SegaWorld unfortunately. However, I did dig these up;
First, the weird SegaWorld Sonic pom /banner thing. Apparently there were several different designs, but I only have this one myself. It proudly rests, stuck to my CD rack.
This is the glorious badge I was trying to get from the broken badge machine dispensing thing. Well, I got given it by staff along with the pom above as a friendly bonus.
And this is a pin I didn't know I had. I don't actually remember getting it, but I will make sure not to lose it now. Something about it's nice and stylish, even though it's just a little SegaWorld logo. I couldn't find the SegaWorld pen I used to have, but it wasn't all that fantastic. It was just a clicky white pen with the above Sonic / SegaWorld logo. So there you go, those a few of the pointless items I've acquired in my Sega fandom.
Searching throughout deviantArt for great fan art of Sega games, here are some particularly nice one I found. I'm gonna make this a weekly thing, starting this week with the theme being...Puyo Puyo, that long running puzzle blob series I love so much (and have just brought a Gashapon figure of it's lead character Arle just this morning). I'm mainly counting the classic series, because as much as I enjoyed Puyo Puyo Fever I preferred the old cast of characters =)
Clearly SegaWorld was something extremely important to Sega fans. And by Sega fans, I mean Sonic freaks like Gagaman and myself. As such, I feel it’s only appropriate for me to write about this glorious place in my first entry for this blog.
(Click for a news snippet out of...where else? Sonic the Comic. Issue 2, to be precise.)
I remember there being, back about 1992, two Nintendo related singles that were somehow doing pretty well in the charts (they were in the top 10 for a week or two), one was some odd Tetris remix, and the other was a tune from Super Mario Land on the Game Boy with rapping all over it (ugh). I presume someone at Sega demanded that they jumped onto the band wagon, and not long later a Sonic single popped up out of no where.
I still remember reading magazines like Sega Power and Mean Machines Sega and getting to the fan art section in which you would be greeted to artwork of Sonic brutally killing Mario in sometimes rather inventive fashion, and this wasn't just going on amongst the "violent loving" Sega fans, as flicking through a Nintendo magazine would bring up the complete reverse. I don't have any of these magazines anymore, but you can probably use your imagination.
Sega's first collaboration with Nintendo was the Gamecube and Arcade title F-Zero AX/GX. This was a match made in heaven: Nintendo passed on their long running F-Zero racing series, which debuted as a launch title for the SNES,
This is why I believe Sega and Nintendo need to collaborate with each other more. The two studios have their own ways of running things and their own disciplines, and I think when they work together something magic happens. It's just like when Warner Brothers and Disney decided to team up on the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and got Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on the screen at the same time. It just worked so well, and I think the two could learn a lot from each other.
The newly formed Nintendo Tokyo EAD development studio started their production line with the Gamecube bongo based game Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Maybe it's just me, but this game really felt like a Sega game.maybe it was the simple yet deep control and combo set up, and arcade style game play. Currently this team is working on Super Mario Galaxy, and personally, I think these guys would do a mighty fine job developing a Sonic game. Just imagine the kind of imaginative gameplay these guys could bring to the Sonic series, while also going back to the series' roots which, to be honest, seem to have been forgotten in some of the recent Sonic games. The Nintendo mentality of not putting a game out until it's really ready could really benefit Sega's projects.
At the same time, Nintendo have been struggling to get the Starfox franchise back into gear. Starfox Adventures ended up as a bad move, and the Namco developed Starfox games of recent did nothing to bring the series back to the glory days of the SNES and N64 titles. This is where I think Sega could help. They could get the guys that developed After Burner Climax on this and give us a engaging, exciting Starfox game that we haven't had in a long time, with that Sega arcade magic sprinkled on.Now while I said this blog would mainly be about the non-gaming side of Sega, I think I can make some exceptions. Mainly, the kind of memorable moments in Sega games that are the reason I love Sega games in the first place. here's the first of many of these I plan to write up.
#1 Saturn Bomberman - Footie Level
I totally forgot I had these, and just found them in the loft yesterday. Released in 1992, this is a series of trading cards based around Mega Drive games, with 120 in the total set. I remember these being packed in little silver foil packets with a huge Sega logo and a little Sonic on, and managing after countless amount of packets to complete the whole lot. The cards are a little worse for wear with dented corners, but otherwise they see to be fine. More after the jump..
More after the jump.While I have run out of photos I took myself of SegaWorld, I've stumbled across some more SegaWorld related stuff I had up in the loft with my countless other Sonic junk. Firstly, here's a three-page preview of the place featured in a 1996 Summer special Sonic comic, and contains many details (such as the names of the areas and rides) which I had forgotten. Just click to full view and try to ignore the awful 'radical' talk throughout it.
More after the jump.
