Sonic Toon (Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric) | Weekly Famitsu Issue #1345 (JP) | 9/25/2014

I actually really hated Knuckles' awkward redesign.

Yikes, it's that game. 

Sonic Boom was a catastrophic failure of a game that no one wanted, expected or cared about. As we all know, the damage made to the brand after having it being partially restored to greatness by Sonic Generations (and brought down again by Sonic Lost World) has arguably been done worse than 2006's abysmal Sonic The Hedgehog. A feat that many didn't think was even actually possible, yet it did. Lone wolf game investigator Tamaki has a terrific video of the whole situation over at his YouTube channel.

The Japanese weren't spared of this game either and from the looks of it, they received it better than the rest of the western hemisphere did, at least under Famitsu's reviewers (this was the same magazine that gave the original Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure a soaring score of 38/40, Sonic '06 a 30/40, and Generations a 35/40), so take their credibility with a grain of salt.

So I bought this magazine at a Japanese bookstore in San Francisco's Japantown about a year and a half ago. At first, it was about seeing what cool stuff I'd find about Super Smash Bros. for Wii U / 3DS but then I stumbled upon an article about Boom. Page 232 of Weekly Famitsu Issue #1345 is the article about Sonic Boom. If the language itself won't do anyone any favors, then surely the images - and the characters, Metal Sonic and Shadow (at least his katakana-written name) - may.

It always seemed as though the pre-release material made the game looked
better than it did (but then, that's almost always been the case for video games).
Watching that Game Grumps series has made me realize that.

Higher resolution scan can be found and downloaded here.

It's really too bad at this game ended up the way that it did. I knew that this was a spinoff but I thought it was going to have something rather interesting environmental art style going for it. This game was being made by a developer who formally worked on the Crash Bandicoot series under Naughty Dog so with such credentials it's actually disappointing this project resulted in the mess that was but for all I know, it may have just been a case of publisher-interference on Sega's part. That's never a good thing.

Oh well!

Scans: Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo 64) | Famitsu PS (Japanese) NO. 81 | 5/12.26/2000

Oops. This article was meant for yesterday, and I was working on it then, but time management is a skill I have a lot to improve upon. But here it is, a scan about Resident Evil Zero as it was meant for on Nintendo 64.

Ignore the Japanese text below Rebecca, that's just part of a copyright notice
in another part of the page that is little to do with the game.

Anyways, page 148 of Famitsu PS (Japanese) NO. 81, 5/12.26/2000 gives a small column of their Capcom page about the Item Box function in the game -- or rather, lack of. The ability for your character to drop items in any room, was evident in this version, and the column specifically refers this to Sweet Home's inventory system. Having never played this game personally, I have no clue as to how much both game's have in common (besides the series' roots to the Famicom game).

For those that need a little context, Zero was a prequel to the hit survival-horror franchise that was meant to be the game that carried the same level of ambition and quality its CD-based predecessors had onto a small-capacity Nintendo 64 cartridge. The N64 port of Resident Evil 2 cemented that probability in late 1999. But that's not to say things would go smooth for this title.

Basically, while the game had a much less chaotic development cycle compared to previous entries, the only major roadblocks for Zero were basically both the memory capacity limitations and the timing of its projected release date. The game was simply becoming too big to fit into a cartridge and the hardware transition from the Nintendo 64 to GameCube was fast approaching. The only logical solution was to adapt to then-upcoming sixth generation, and release the game as a GameCube-exclusive in 2002.

As with many of the Japanese I will be posting on The Game Informant, let's hope someone plucky will be willing to translate this article and enlighten us the details of this column. The front cover and entire page can be found below.

Coming up next, I'll post up more scans other some other Resident Evil games from this era of gaming. Stay tuned!

Front Cover of Famitsu PS
NO. 81 | 5/12.26/2000

Page 148

Scans: Sonic 3D Blast (Saturn) | Dreamcast Magazine (Japanese), Volume 6 | 12/25/1998

So shortly after the Sonic Adventure AutoDemo was released early last summer by Orengefox at Sonic Retro, I bought this magazine on eBay. It's got lots of info on that game, plus coverage of Shenmue's Nov. 1998 unveiling in Japan, and other awesome games, but this article concerning the former is what motivated me to write about this.

The article covers the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast that was released much earlier in North America and Europe than it arrived overseas. Interestingly, this game wouldn't be released in Japan until October 1999, alongside the International version of Sonic Adventure. As we can see, the release date is given as "'99 (to be decided)." Since that Saturn port was already released internationally years prior, there isn't anything prototypical seen in the screens of this article.

What is interesting though, is apparently in the last page of the article is a sort of mini-interview with a Japanese developer of 3D Blast, or someone of significance to the game. 

I hope by posting this on my blog that someone would be willing to translate this article and enlighten us on the development of this game, from the Japanese perspective.

Coming up tomorrow, I have an overdue proposition that I've yet to fulfill. It's related to scans of a Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo 64) article that I've promised on Tumblr but haven't delivered on. Stay Tuned!