Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 3: Wallpapers!

The same images you just saw the scans of, but now as wallpapers. They are all 1280 X 1024, so if they're too big just shrink and if they're too small, sorry! I could maybe make bigger sized versions of some of them if anyone wants them, but for now these will do.

More wallpapers after the jump!

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 2: Scans!

As I promised here are some full scale scans from that wonderful Sega game illustrations book.

Here's a scanned example of one of the pages, which not only contains all that lovely felt-tip pen colored art from Sonic 1, but also talks of the characters' "charming and saucy nature". Hmm. No doubt the PAL Sonic 1 box art was nicer, though. More scans after the jump.

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty

Now, video game art books are by no means a rare thing in Japan, but Sega ones seem to be few and far between. However, I manged to find this one on Ebay some time ago and won it for about £12. The book contains a variety of artwork from many Mega Drive and Game Gear games, starring the main front cover art as full page spends and littered with character art from the lovely full colour manuals they got over there. More after the jump.

Classic Sonic Figures possibly delayed

Remember those rather fantastic classic style Sonic figures First4Figures announced some time ago? They were listed as due this month (and still are on Play-Asia) but on Play.com it now lists them for the 30th of September. Maybe the vague "July" date was just a placeholder but either way it means we've got a wait a bit longer to own what look like the nicest pieces of Sonic plastic ever made.


In other news the 12" limited edition statue of Sonic from the same range is up on both Play-Asia and Play.com, with the same date included. Above is a rather fancy picture of it as seen on First4Figures' website, where they state that preorders start on the 31st of this month. Since we saw it in those Toy fair photos it has gained a fancy Green Hill zone-like stand. My wallet is going to HURT when this stuff comes along in a few months time. Either way I've pre-ordered it with Play.com as it's £65 (and free postage) rather than the RRP of £85.That website is UK only though so sorry Americans!

Oh yeah, and remember those classic sonic range concept images from Impact Innovations? Well all those images have completely vanished from the website, replaced with simple "Coming soon!" buttons and no PDF file links. At least this most likely means those designs were far from complete and the final toys will look much nicer.

Possibly the greatest Sonic tie in the world (and some caps)

Ok, so that's maybe a exaggeration but it's still rather classy. I remember dad owning this back in the day, and on one day of sorting out from a pile of ties what to sell, my child self made sure he didn't get rid of this one. In all honestly for the last few years I had forgotten I even still had this lying around somewhere, but recently in a sort out of my wardrobe I found it tucked away in the corner where I evidentially never look, next to a pair of Sonic caps I also left down there to be forgotten about. More stuff after the jump.

Boot Sale Season: Another Megadrive Horde

(Apologies again for lack of updates. I actually have quite a back-log of unfinished articles to get working on. This one, for example, should have been posted about 3 weeks ago..)

Sometimes at boot sales you just get lucky. This horde of Mega Drive games here is one of those times. A bloke had a huge huge box full of about 50 Mega Drive games, many very good ones. In the end I picked out 19 of the, leaving the Sonic and sport games that show up all the time. He was selling them a pound each but let me have this lot for £16. Fantastic.

There's a good few games in here I haven't come across often, or at all, outside of Ebay. I had never even heard of Sub Terrania before but picked it up based on the sticker attached that quotes from a magazine: "Most polished gameplay since Gunstar Heroes" or something to that effect. Clayfighter would have been nice to own but sadly I could not get it to work at all. The highlight of the lot is probably Flink, as it's a very hard to find platformer by good old Psygnosis, before they were gobbled up by Sony. Another game of theirs, Puggsy, is also amongst this lot. Other highlights include Ranger-X, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Battletoads and MERCS. Most were mint but a odd game, including Flink, were unfortunately missing their manuals. Oh well.

The ugliest Sonic soft toy you will ever see.

After well over a month of silence, Sega Memories is back from the dead. Been far too busy up until now, and Smindas has been on Holiday to Japan, the jammy git.

Now there has been some tacky, crappy Sonic merchandise over the years, but this one I found at a car boot sale this morning does not only take the biscuit, but the whole ruddy jar. Some kid was given this and rightfully ripped holes in it before throwing it amongst whatever junk his/her mother shoved into her car boot, where I for some reason picked it up for 50p. More on this abortion of plush design after the jump.

More Sega Pirate TV ads!

The British Sega TV ad campain from the early 90's is under rated on this here internet of ours. Fussy old clips of the American Sega commercials from the same time are everywhere for all to see, but the UK ones are harder to track down. Thanks to the odd Youtuber such as SegaMarkUK and Chrisofthetube though, they are slowly all being dug up again so they can give a new generation of viewers a good headache or a healthy old seizure. To say many of these make little sense and are batshit insane is probably a bit of an under statement.



First off, some huge budget epic, probably shown at half time of footie matches, that has Pirate TV regular Steve O'Donnell AKA Spudgun from Bottom fighting mutant pigs using a mega Drive II and games like Street Fighter II and Shinobi III amongst others, with the mega CD 2 thrown in for good (or bad, which ever way you look at it) measure. "This is the end!...and this is the other end!" Yes, I have no idea what they were thinking with this commercial either.



As if that commercial wasn't baffling enough, here's one for Sonic Spinball that blows your brains out with subliminal nonsense before finally showing off the game itself, all flashing by with rock music in 20 seconds flat.



The Mega Drive Aladdin game next, and much like the last one it whizzes by so quickly you barely get a chance to take anything in. It kind of looks like an episode of the Games master on fast forward. In this case the American ad was actually better because you know, it made sense.



This rather earlier one, when the campaign was a little less noisy, has that bloke on the rotating chair telly thing again talking us through the first Sonic game, which then goes into some odd ninja action scene and some guy that sounds a bit like Benny Hill talking over the top with Monty Python style animation.



Finally, an extended and very high quality transfer of that Mega CD commercial I linked to before, with a whole lot more brilliant animation of the skull character and more shit interactive games being shown off. £270? No wonder no one bought the bloody thing. One again, I have no idea what's going on by the time it goes into some war movie parody, but then again, either do the guys singing in it by the sounds of it. I think this could be the explanation as to way Sega eventually went close to bankruptcy, this commercial must of cost a bomb.

Random odd fact: While Sega had Steve O'Donnell as a regular for their 90's ads. Nintendo in the UK went with another star of Bottom: Rik Mayall. Oo-er.

Didn't you hear? Sega T-shirts are trendy now!

This is pretty old-ish news, anyone who follows Sega related stuff around to no abandon like I do (or just anyone who visits gaming blogs in general) may of already seen these fancy Sega T-Shirts from Japan that are now being sold on London's oxford street in fancy pants clothes shops are generally infested with trendy skinny types with jeans down to their toes. Now you may just end up seeing them walking about with Sonic, Virtua Fighter characters or House of the Dead Zombies hanging from their scrawny hairless chests.

If you decide to hunt these down, you can grab them from a shop called UNIQLO, who have about three stores on oxford street alone, and they'll set you back £13 each or 2 for £20, which doesn't seem like a bad deal for tastefully done game shirt designs with brilliant blocky polygon blokes on them. You can't miss one of these stores as it has huge manga art on the windows at the moment. Of course, you could always just buy them online if you don't want to go mincing around London. More after the jump.

Sonic 3 Pins from CES 1994

There are lot of Sonic pin sets out there, but I cannot say I have ever seen these ones. Matt Hancock sent me these photos of a rather fancy five pin set promoting Sonic 3, apparently given away back at CES 1994 and bought in New Zealand.

I sure would have loved to have visted at least one gaming event when Sega were at the top of their game. They had Sega buses, celebrities holding Game Gears and everything. I'm sure those were magical times.