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.

More upcoming Classic Sonic stuff from Impact Innovations

Decided to have a quick peek at Impact Innovations website to see if their Sonic page was still just a placeholder, and it appears they have completely updated it with the plush toys that are available to date, as well as bunch of new stuff, although a lot of them appear to be concept art at the moment, which is a relief as otherwise they would be rather ugly, some of them. They have Excel files with details on each product with additional images which I'll post here.

These, I take it, are early versions of the plush toys, as they look quite a bit different, especially the Sonic one.

many more after the jump.

The Itty Bitty NiGHTS Toy from Japan

When that new NiGHTS game came out for the Wii in Japan last December, many of the first copies came with a little NiGHTS toy as a bonus of some sort (as seen in the commercial above). When the game popped up over here however, we weren't treated to this little extra gift, much in the same way that we don't get a lot of things Japan does, like expensive box sets for anime games full of spoons and pillows. If you look around on Ebay for long enough, however, you may just come across one of these little figures separate from the game. Considering I only paid £20 for the game itself, paying £11 for the toy didn't seem like too bad a deal. They weren't kidding about it being small though, but with the amount of shelf space I have left maybe that's not such a bad thing.



The toy has been designed by besidegames as part of their PaPETCH range of little figures all based around the same template (in fact, it appears to be the first one released) and ever since this NiGHTS design it looks like video game companies have been jumping at the chance of having their characters re-created in tiny figure forms. Have a look at their line up and you'll see characters from Exit, the Kunio series and Hammerin' Harry. They also show artwork of a Reala toy, although it's hard to tell if that one has been released or how you could get it, though. maybe it's a special one you only get in the box if you're lucky (if someone could translate the text in red under Reala, that would be great as it could explain).

So not a lot can really be said about the toy, really. It's about 6cm tall, made of some kind of vinyl and comes with a little plastic stand so it doesn't topple over from it's large head. It's obviously a simplified version of the character's design but still a good likeness.

But what did I think of the game? Well, at first, it doesn't give off the best of first impressions. The FMV scene is the usual top north stuff we've come to expect from Sega games, but the in game cut scenes run at a low frame rate, look washed out and features voice acting that seems to be mostly done by one very annoying voice actor/actress. At least Reala and Wiseman's voices do their job well enough, but story scenes are really quite embarrassing to sit through and on the first run unskippable. Even the cut scenes from Sonic Adventure were a bit more bearable. Much like those 3D Sonic games, they also make you play away from the main fun of the game sometimes, with tedious missions and clunky exploring levels where you play as the children.

The main stages and bosses, however, are great. The visuals for some reason looks far better than the rest of the game here, as if all the extra stuff was thrown in near the end of production, and the game play is just like the original, if you ignore the fact that they changed the aim of each lap a bit. One thing that also bugged me at first were the Wii remote controls: the remote pointer is a joke and completely broken, and the Nunchuck mode doesn't quite feel right either because the analouge stick isn't quite up to the accurately needed for flying in circles, but once I had a go at using the Gamecube controller I never turned back.


As I got further into the game I found myself warming up to it, and the final stage and boss redeemed the whole game for me, and there was more beautifully animated FMV scenes to boot. I'm rambling on here but if you decide to buy this game and get put off by the start keep at it, as it gets progressively better and once you have completed the story you can go back to beat your scores (without having to see those cut scenes again), as well as have a go at the online racing mode, which is pretty limited but a nice addition. It's not the perfect sequel, but it's defiantly one of Sega's better games in recent memory. At least it was more fun than Sonic and the Secret Rings which almost drove me to drink from frustration. If you liked the Saturn game and can excuse some imperfections, get it. If you didn't play the original...play that first.

Boot Sale Season Returns: Megadrive Goldmine

The big car boots sales a short drive away finally started up again recently, and I went today after months of desperately trying to find bargains on Ebay. Anyone who knows me well enough will know of my jammy-git luck with finding some crazy cheap gaming stuff at them, like a game Boy Advance for £1, a Playstation 2 Slim with 16 games for £55 and my Sega Multi-Mega which set me back a measly £6.50, but these kinds of things very rarely happen, between week after week of the same old common shit (Read: Sports games. Anyone would think no ones buys anything else at these places). Oh how I have missed them for awesome shit like this raid I got today..

Here's a big blue box full of Mega Drive junk I bought today. What's in it, then?Find out after the jump!

More First4Figures Classic Sonic Goodness!

Oh wow. Chad at DeviantArt just pointed me towards these two sets of photos (Album 1 and Album 2) that were taken at a recent US Toy fair of not only the three upcoming Classic Sonic toys we saw earlier, but also some new even bigger pieces, including a Sonic "Wii Remote Holder" (a large figure that has a slot in his hand to hold a Wii remote) which according to a sign on the display is not due till July 2009 (I hope that's a misprint), and a even higer Sonic statue of some sort. They're all rather beautiful, yet bound to make my wallet cry with agony. Here are the photos, provided by the website Action-Figure.com

First off, the three figures we saw before, but in much clearer photos from many different angles. Sonic and Knuckles seem to have swapped names on the stands, though. Doh! Loads more photos after the jump.

A Goldmine of Sega Marketing waffle!

UK: Resistance, the original Sega nutters website and one of the main inspirations behind this blog, have stumbled across a video that pretty much sums up everything that made Sega so huge in the UK back in the 16-bit era, particularly in 1994. This two video spilt into two parts for Youtube and submitted there by Shenmueaddit, gives us a glimpse into all the marketing pies Sega had their fingers in at the time, from TV commercials (Remember the Pirate TV campaign I told you about? You'll see more of it here), radio competitions (Sonic CD music on the radio, folks!), merchandise, that awful Right Said Fred song, the Sega tour buses, the food promotions (Sonic tomato ketchup!), even the sponsorship with Damon Hill!

This, my friends, is why Sega ruled the world (or at least the UK), during my childhood. These videos pretty much sum up what this blog is all about, and the exact kind of content I've been looking for. If anyone can recall and bring up details on any of the stuff seen here (like photos, videos, magazine scans etc), please send it my way and I'll be more than happy to share it here. =)

Sega Fanart Showcase: gsliverfish Special

Michael Stearns (AKA "gsliverfish") is one of those artists on DeviantArt who is rather brilliant at capturing the atmosphere of the worlds you visted in the original Sonic Mega Drive game, including the obstacles you faced along the way. Each of these images seems to perfectly sum up each zone of the game with a distinctive perspective. Just looking at the art gets that levels' music stuck in my head! Make sure you check out his other works too!

More after the jump!

Sonic 6th Birthday event in Hamleys, 1997

Sonic the Comic were good to me. Hell, Sega in general have been good to me as a fan, but Sonic the Comic really did throw some good stuff my way when I was a wee lad. Not only did I win a Sonic 2 patch from them when I sent in some self drawn Sonic comics, get my artwork in an issues Graphic Zone section which won me a watch, but I also manged to win a competition they held in 1997 for a exclusive 6th Birthday party event in London. Only 100 invites could be won and you could take a mate along with you, so there was a total of 200 of us (excluding parents) going to this one-off party.

Here's the invite they sent me when I won. Yes, I still own it. How sad is that? I also have a letter they sent along with it..

 

Photos of the event after the jump! Whoopie!