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!

Song Similarities #1: Sonic CD and Slam Dunk

Ever watch a show or a movie and notice a song in the background you thought sounded remarkably familiar to another song you've heard elsewhere before? I have. Which is why I made the unoriginally-titled Song Similarities. I'm sorry.

Inspired by the Sonic Retro forum's "This Song Sounds Like X" thread, I've began making a short clip, of hopefully several to come, that highlights interesting similarities between a pair of songs that strike me as strong coincidences that particularly resonate with me.

Now, one thing Id like to note. I'm not trying to persuading my audience that "OMG (insert artist) must have done music for (insert IP), this is like MJ/Sonic 3 all over again!" I am just simply creating these videos of what I find are trivially interesting that I nonetheless feel would be worthy of bringing up

In this specific comparison, a BGM from one scene in episode 22 of the hit anime Slam Dunk features a melody structure that sounds quite similar to the present version of the level Tidal Tempest Zone from the popular game Sonic CD. Yes, it may seem like a generic beat today but one of the

Sonic CD came out in Japan on September 23, 1993, while the Slam Dunk episode aired on TV Asahi in Japan on April 16, 1994. Any possible referencing, if at all, would have to have occurred after the game's Japanese release.

Watching prototype footage of games are like dreams (NiGHTS Into Dreams...)

Or I don't know, I'm just trying to be clever.

Anyways, one of the best ways of preserving and observing video game prototypical media is collecting footage of them in action on game catalog tapes.

Sega Video Magazine is a good place to start. They're a series of game catalog VHS tapes distributed in Japan by Sega Enterprises that promoted and centered exclusively around Sega's own games and games from other publishers during the Mega Drive and Sega Saturn eras. A lot of these tapes have footage of games that haven't taken their final forms yet, which oftentimes can exhibit strong, interesting differences in the content from the final releases. The spectrum of this can range from minor to extreme.

NiGHTS into Dreams... doesn't really fall on either side, but lies more in the left-side of the middle. The clip below covers the world unveiling of the game that took place inside the Tokyo Prince Hotel on March 27, 1996 in Japan. Following that segment is an on-screen interview with some of the then-most respected developers at Sonic Team within Sega, who were also responsible for Sonic's greatest games ever. Producer and main programmer Yuji Naka, director Naoto Oshima, and co-game designer Takashi Iizuka take screen time to tell us their stories as to how the beginning of development came about. Unsubbed.

Scattered throughout the interview is footage of the game in it's early stages of development, including the first level Spring Valley that has a different level and object layout. Many of the sound effects differentiate from the final and even the music sounds unrefined, particularly The Dragon Made a Loud Scream. Turn on the video annotations and it'll elaborate the specifics to you.

I've said this many times already but Nico Nico Douga is quite the treasure trove of Japanese gaming history, featuring various promotional videos of various games spanning several decades starting from the 80s. I remember that Super Mario Bros. 3 video that was a big hit with proto enthusiasts in 2011 after it was found on NND. Hopefully, someone will be kind and interested to provide a translation of the interview above.

Buried Game Treasure: Next Generation Magazine CDs

(Originally published on 1UP.com and Tumblr. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because I don't give a damn anymore.)

The front disc envelope of
Next Generation (Sept. 1997)
featuring Cupid probably praying
for a giant meteorite to drop on
to Mother Earth anytime now.

Remember those times when you bought a shrink-wrapped magazine from a supermarket or a bookstore, and you got a free disc of cool stuff inside them? Back then, the internet was this underdeveloped, yet still awesome tool to find the latest news on anything in general at the time, especially gaming news. Yet, anything through a crappy dial-up connection (remember that too?) would take forever for things — like videos — to finish downloading onto our PCs, so for a lot of us we resorted to these discs that came with image and video previews of upcoming games.

A few years years ago, I discovered an ISO on my hard drive called the Next Generation - September 1997, an example of disc containing such cool content. These were discs that were distributed in copies of Next Generation Magazine when you bought the magazine at the time. Included in this particular disc were lots of low-quality 320x240 MOV videos of PlayStation, Sega Saturn, & Nintendo 64 games that were featured at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) at Atlantic, Georgia in mid-June of 1997.

I've found many clips of many different games in their prototype forms, including Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Mega Man Neo (Mega Man Legends), and Sonic R, all in their pre-release glory. The following videos have been edited to correct the contrast issues the videos had when it was first produced. They looked terrible (view this comparison: twitpic.com/9d1v6q).

This old early prototype footage of Crash Bandicoot 2 features several differences that indicate how early into production this game was when it was first announced at this convention. The video above features brief annotations that go over said differences, including the original HUD font used from Crash 1, different object placements, etc. There's more footage where that came from too (give it a watch too).

This footage of Sonic R features what appears to be a slightly (don't quote me on that, watch and decide for yourself) stage layout at the end of the stage. Different HUD (this was a common beta trait from those days, wasn't it?), and character icons, camera angles, etc. There might be a better quality version on YouTube somewhere, but I didn't find it until after this video was uploaded then.

Next up, sp,e old prototype footage of one of my closest-to-heart games ever, Mega Man Legends, which was known at the time as Mega Man Neo. Just like the first two, this video includes annotations that accentuates the various rudimentary differences that indicate just how early into production this 3D Mega Man title was when it was first quietly announced at the time. It's amazing seeing how much content and concepts were experimented on this game, it doesn't even strongly resemble the final game know today.

Last but not least, another valuable video I found was an video interview of former CEO of Nintendo of America, Howard Lincoln. Topics discussed in this interview include the Nintendo 64's early performance in the west of that year and their strong relationship with Rareware, the developers of Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and GoldenEye 007. You know, really great games.

Backside.

As the internet grew to become the multimedia world it is today, the necessity of CDs packed with videos shrank as sites like YouTube and Google Video took over to allow users, fan communities, and media and game companies to upload videos without worrying about their own bandwidth and file sizes. I remember Nintendo Power coming packed with DVDs of trailers and such, but that was like in 2006 just as YT got around. YouTube and the internet has really made our lives easier.

Before I forget, I can't remember where I found the ISO in the internet originally, but in case the download source is no longer available, here's an ISO of the disc that's now readily available at the Internet Archive. I hope you guys get something neat out of this.

Old prototype footage of Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast) running at 60FPS looks totally unbelievable

As the Sega Saturn console was in its twilight years, players were bummed-out that they didn't get a major Sonic game for the ill-fated console until the next-generation. Then in August of 1998, Sega dropped the bombshell and announced Sonic Adventure, the long-awaited 3D installment of the then-dignified Sonic franchise, as a launch-window killer app title for their upcoming Dreamcast console to be released at the end of 1998 in Japan. Enticing gamers worldwide, the game offered impressive graphics with high-resolution graphics and a fluid sense of speed that was almost uncontested for the time. And at 60fps, too.

"Hold up, 60fps?," you might be asking. Yes, Sonic Adventure was originally rendered at a higher frame-rate than it ended up being. The earliest footage of the game, shown at the Tokyo International Forum public unveiling in August of 1998, had shown the game to run at that frame-rate. As we can see from the footage of the unveiling seen in the one-off VHS magazine Fuse, we can clearly see how unbelievably fluid the game's motion is at this game's prototypical stage. Or was, I should say. If you guys would see it in action, I think you’ll get a kick out of it.

This early prototype footage exhibits the game originally ran at 60FPS, the level highlighting the game, we see, is Speed Highway. It looks particularly impressive given the time this game was unveiled. Its really a shame they had to had the drop the frame-rate down to 30 for the final Dreamcast version. 

What's interesting to note is that the AutoDemo isn't necessarily running at a much higher frame-rate than the final or the Forum build. So by that point, the frame-rate had already been dropped by the time the demo was made. Another interesting tidbit, if you noticed even Sonic's jump momentum seems different when he bounces on those enemies on Speed Highway.

Honestly, I wondered if this was a whole other game altogether. The game's original frame-rate at this stage of development makes it look more polished compared the final version. While the rest of the footage around the Speed Highway stage is less than 60FPS, I believe that that footage was actually edited deliberately to reduce the fluidity of the motion. Why that's the case, who knows.

But yeah, Sonic Adventure. What a time to be nine years old and seeing a 3D Sonic game in action on then-powerful hardware. Good times.