Back in the day, Sonic was quite a force, and you could find his name on practically anything. Those days are gone now, but it’s always interesting to look at what was there.

Some of these foods can still be found, although the non-candy ones are likely inedible now.

(Pictures from Sonicgear.org)

The pasta is the longest lived item, spanning the old Sonic to the one we see today. A rather plain tomato-based sauce was on it, and it wasn’t really the best pasta, but was fine for a quick lunch. There were many different offers related to it, and it can be considered the quintessential food item; when it ended, it was pretty much over for all the Sonic food items.

The gum… the gum. It came in these weird cases and had weird card-shaped pieces of highly dusted gum. It tasted sorta good, but had not so much flavor. It came with weird cards I wish I had saved… it was interesting, for sure. These cards could be worth something today.

Want to know more about these items? Just go to Sonic Gear’s US Food page for more info; they have pretty much all of the items.

Know an item not on that page? Post it in the comments!

The Sonic 2 Hybridization project by Doc Eggfan took the Sonic 2 ROM for the Genesis, lowered the color palette, and inserted 8-bit sprites in an attempt to make a version of Sonic 2 for the Master System with the Genesis engine.  Now, Eggfan has introduced a new project that aims to take the completely opposite direction by incorporating the Genesis zones in the Master System game with Project H’ (pronounced “Aitch Prime”).

How is this achieved?  Well, Eggfan has included a downloadable package with instructions for making the Sonic 2 Genesis conversion as easy as possible.  By editing the existing tiles from the the standard mappings and collision set, posted by Ambil back in May, Eggfan will integrate the graphics back into the ROM as best he can.  If you would like to contribute graphics, visit the project’s thread.

For the longest time, the Sonic Retro community (and others) have debated the true name of the mysterious Dust Hill zone. Originally it was held that the true name of the Desert Zone (seen in mockups, like the one to the right) was named Dust Hill Zone. Over time, however, it came to be thought that it was not, due to a various events, including the concentrated posting of an image which screamed the whole idea was fake, and some conflicting magazine clippings. For the longest time, calling this zone Dust Hill Zone was considered the mark of a n00b, or otherwise somebody who hadn’t been paying attention. Flame wars used to (and still do) erupt over this topic, but a recent development appears likely to put all of the arguing to rest.

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Sega’s own amusement park, Joypolis, is kicking off Halloween this weekend—blame it on holiday creep or something—and in addition to the mysterious masked Pumpking running around and facepainting, you can have your photo taken with Sonic, all decked out for the holiday!

By which they mean you can get an image of Sonic as a frame around your picture. However, it’s still neat art, which is why we’ve included it here. If you happen to be visiting Tokyo over the next month or so and want to check it out, there’s more information at the Joypolis site.

The advancement of this game continues, with the new China level finally showing up for us here to see in depth. They’ve continued the pattern of spinning platforms and dragon pathways and added on some Chinese architecture to the fray, while at the same time throwing in a huge amount of enemies for Were Sonic to fight.

There’s also an instance where Were-Sonic howls (sort of weird feature) and one can see that the level is overcast. All in all, it has a little lag in places, but it seems to retain the quality expected so far. But of course, we can never know, having seen so many games which look good and then play horribly; though it seems to have had a better impact on people’s opinions than a previous video which showed the difficulties of a person at a convention trying to play through the first level.

Rather than continue talking and try to convince you, the reader, of the details, we have a nice convenient link to the highest quality version of the video we could find. Enjoy!

Yeah, the demo is here. Once we missed SAGE, we took our dear sweet time, but now it is here for you to finally experience. You can play two acts of Sunset Shore and that’s about it. However, the level is sprawling with branching paths, so it warrants a few playthroughs for you to see everything. Nexus truly illustrates what a person can do in the brand new Retro-Sonic interface, so we hope it is a clear too you indication that this summer was a long, time-consuming process on making a brand new iteration of the engine. We also felt that we should take our time in creating our ideal product, as a hasty release definitely will piss people off. It was time well spent.

Secondly, you can record your best time with screen capture software and upload it to YouTube for a chance win $15. Yes! All you have to do is post your time attack run as a video response to the contest “hub” video, WHICH IS RIGHT HERE!

Finally, I encourage everybody to read our Nexus website and development blog, as the team and I will be updating it frequently, Smash Bros. Dojo style! You’ll see new screenshots, features, gameplay videos, and updates at least once a week, if not more. New music will be added to the on-site player periodically, as well. The community has always been left in the dark when it comes to Nexus’ development, as I only have been shedding light on details around SAGE time, but now, you can read about it year round. The website is essentially the game’s manual, so it will have all the goods. The first feature on the site is “Meet That Badnik,” where we go in-depth on one of Robotnik’s mechanical mercenaries. You can expect articles of similar quality coming down the pipe.

Oh, and hello, I am writing for this front page now.  I hope to contribute the same amount of news that I write for other Sonic blogs to Retro.  I’ll try not to copy and paste too much. 

With the annual Sonic ROM hacking contest’s deadline closing in, tons of prestigious, anticipated ROM hacks are getting new releases today! To name a few, we have:

Sonic 2: Advanced Edit:

A Sonic the Hedgehog 2 hack by Rika Chou, Sonic 2: Advanced Edit sports 5 brand new levels, three being entirely complete and fully playable. Each level has complete art and music revamps, and level design quality that far surpasses that of many amateur ROM hacks. New enemies, new gimmicks, as well as familiar graphics from other games (Quackshot being one of note) will face you as you play through this masterpiece. Definitely worth a look.

Sonic 1 Pixel Perfect:

A hack of the original Sonic the Hedgehog by JcFerggy and NovaWizard, Sonic 1: Pixel Perfect sports brand new level revamps, new music, and extremely comprehensive level design. Loops and curves have been placed into levels that did not previously have them in creative ways, and new boss arenas provide a refreshing look on an old classic. Highly recommended.

Sonic 2 Retro Remix:

Another Sonic 2 hack, this time by Thorn and DNXDelta. In the same reign as the previous two hacks, new levels and music are featured, but Retro Remix also contains new technical additions, such as a “field” level ala Sonic Advance 3 which allows the player to freely roam and choose which act of the current zone they wish to play. Each act has a different motif and theme song–for example, the first level in the game has an island/mountain backdrop in the first act, while the second act takes place inside a gigantic waterfall.

In addition, Retro Remix boasts the popular Jump Dash technique, as seen in Sonic Megamix and Sonic 2 Revamped. While not widely used, it adds a new degree of gameplay not seen in the original game.

More ROM hacks other than these three have been featured in the hacking contest submission thread. Check it out!

Just as we received Stealth’s great GBA hack, another technical hack has appeared. Drx, with the help of Puto, Upthorn, and Hivebrain, has created a version of Sonic 1 for the 32X. This has required extensive code changes and, most importantly, moving a sound channel based on the new hardware. More importantly, this hack has been made open source, allowing anyone with enough knowledge to try their hand at Sonic 1 with the possibility of using 32X features.

Since the hack is, currently, mostly Sonic 1 with changes to make it work on the 32X (mostly behind the scenes), rather than go on about it in length here, I invite you to see it at the thread here.

In other breaking news, drx has released five new Sonic protos. Sonic CD Prototype 806, several versions of Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Adventure 2. For more details, visit the thread here.

It’s been a very exciting time for Sonic hacking in general. Who knows what the future will hold?

In Stealth’s latest topic concerning his work (as mentioned earlier on this blog), a few rumblings were made concerning any sort of Sonic game on the Texas Instruments series of calculators. As it happens, there is (was?) development on a homebrew Sonic title for several different TI platforms by the folks at UnitedTI. There’s a mini-site that discusses progress made, though it’s quite outdated.

On the site’s forums, there’s been some more recent activity, with the lead developer coming back to at least put some work towards it. If you know anything about programming for TI calculators, you may want to stop by and help the guy out.

The Sonic community never fails to be just as bad as you stereotypically imagine it. As a promotion for Sonic Team’s upcoming Sonic and the Black Knight, Sega of America is holding a fan art contest, with the best 20 being featured in the game.

The results are pretty much what you expect.

The Minus World has taken the brave step of managing to pick out the 20 worst drawings and have collected them for your mock–er, enjoyment. Hopefully we’ll get some decent fan art in the game, but who knows.