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!

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.

Scans: Resident Evil: Gun Survivor (PlayStation) + Review Score | Famitsu PS Issue #76 (JP) | 2/11/2000

Front Cover of Famitsu PS Issue #76

I'm a fairly big fan of old-school Resident Evil. Anyone remember that spin-off that came out for PlayStation in 2000, where you're actually controlling your character in a first-person viewpoint without any pre-rendered backgrounds? I didn't. I never cared about the spin-offs but some fans do, and its those fans I have a treat for tonight.

Issue #76 of Famitsu PS contains both a six-page strategy guide and a scored review of the critically-panned light gun shooter Resident Evil: Gun Survivor. Along with a reprinted review of Resident Evil 3 from an earlier issue of Famitsu PS, there are also other articles of Resident Evil: Code Veronica and the Nintendo 64 port of Resident Evil 2.

Tonight's focus will be Gun Survivor however and once again I do not provide translations.

So let's go over this quick. Pages 32 to 37, starting from the left at the top row to the right and following that same orientation on the middle and bottom, are just strategy guides with supplemental maps and enemies of the game.

Review Scores
(Click to enlarge)

The common format for Famitsu reviews are presented in a four-score column with four reviewers in a row providing their scores, individually. On page 39, Gun Survivor scored a 8, 6, 6, and 5, totaling 25 out of 40.

The average-level scores given by Famitsu PS' reviewers do reflect the same overall attitude toward the game at the time of it's release. It actually got a lot of venom from many publications, particularly from Game Informer who called the game one of the worst horror games ever made. Interestingly, Weekly Famitsu scored the game six points more than its PlayStation-specialized publication. How interesting indeed.

Page 39

I've never played so I didn't care much for scanning these articles at first. But I figured, I should just archive and scan all Resident Evil content from this magazine for the sake of archiving (I'd be happy to look into other games that I haven't scanned and released on my blog too).

Having just sampled a video of the game in action though, it does have that consistently dark, industrial atmosphere of Resident Evil 2 that I adore so much. Maybe I'll give it a try myself sometime.

Coming up next are scans of magazine coverage for Code Veronica, the Nintendo 64 version of Resident Evil 2, and a review of Resident Evil 3.

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!