Monthly Archives

October 2012

Community, Game News, Sega Retro

Retro Stream Today at 4PM Central — Play Sonic Free Riders and Guardian Heroes Online With Us

Watch live video from vidyaretro on www.twitch.tv

We’re throwing out another Stream today! We’re going to be playing a random assortment of games, however starting at 5PM Central we will be inviting everyone to play Sonic Free Riders and Guardian Heroes for the Xbox 360. If you haven’t already, send your friend requests to VidyaRetro and we’ll try to add your name to the friends list.

Arcade Games, Game News, Game Secrets, Uncategorized

Sonic the Fighters Coming to XBLA/PSN, With New Playable Characters and Online Play

Confirming rumors that have been circulating for some time now, Sega today announced the Model2 Collection, a digital collection of five classic Sega titles originally developed for their Model2 arcade hardware. Among those titles is Sonic the Fighters, a somewhat obscure Sonic-themed fighting game built on the Fighting Vipers engine and previously rereleased as part of Sonic Gems Collection. Most interesting to note is that this new release appears to include several characters not previously playable in the game, such as Metal Sonic and Eggman (who were previously bosses), as well as Honey the Cat – a character based on Candy (known as Honey in Japan) from Fighting Vipers. Retro aficionados will know that Honey was actually buried in the data for the original arcade release but not playable without hacking the game, so to see Sega put in the effort to make her (and the boss characters) playable is truly refreshing after some of their more lackluster porting efforts in the past. The Japanese site for the Model2 Collection also makes mention of online play, which could be a big selling point for this rerelease as well. Currently there’s been no information about an overseas release, but Sonic the Fighters is due to hit Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network this fall in Japan. See the trailer after the break. Continue Reading

Game News, Game Secrets, Interviews

Retro Interview: Steve Lycett on Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing

All Stars Racing Transformed is only a little over a month away at this point. With this close to release, a number of people may be looking to retire their copy of Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing. Comparing the two is almost like comparing apples to oranges. That said it still acts as an important stepping stone that deserves an honorable mention. Before it becomes overshadowed from it’s upcoming sequel, we rattled the memories of Executive Producer at Sumo Digital Steve Lycett in an E-mail interview regarding development for Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing and what it’s sequel has benefited from their efforts.

 

Continue Reading

Reviews, Uncategorized

Sonic Adventure 2 (XBLA/PSN): The Retro Review

(SPOILER WARNING: This review contains unmarked spoilers. The game is over a decade old and well-known amongst our readers, so we deemed it unnecessary to refrain from spoilers. If you’ve never played the game before, you’ve been warned.)

In a franchise like Sonic that has been on such a rollercoaster of quality for the past twenty years, Sonic Adventure 2 somehow sticks out in the franchise as possibly the most polarizing game in the series. To one part of the fanbase, it’s the pinnacle of Sonic. Because it was the first major Sonic title on a Nintendo platform, many people cite SA2 as their introduction to the franchise. And yet to others, the game symbolizes the start of everything that nearly killed the franchise forever. So as I review Sega’s recent digital rerelease of Sonic Adventure 2 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, I feel it’s necessary to frame the game in context.

Outside of the broader fanbase context, I – like many others – have my own personal relationship with SA2. I was but a wee child when it first came out for the Dreamcast in 2001, and I spent a frightening number of hours engrossed in the game. It wasn’t my first exposure to the series; that title goes to Sonic 2 on the Genesis, whose predecessor and sequels received a similarly obsessive amount of my attention. In fact, the sole reason I asked for a Dreamcast for Christmas in 2000 was so that I could play the original Adventure. So, being the fanatic little child I was, Sonic Adventure 2 earned a special, fuzzy, nostalgiatastic place in my heart. The question, then, is: eleven years later, can it keep it? Continue Reading

Merchandise

“Where’s Sonic?” Does Waldo’s Gimmick With More Speed

Never one to back down from some odd releases, Sega is teaming up with U.K. book publisher Pan Macmillan to release Sonic’s return to hiding in giant pictures with lots of stuff around so you can seek him out. All those nightmares of Where’s Waldo on the NES are coming back, only in the original book form.

Where’s Sonic? A Search-and-Find Adventure takes environs based on classic Sonic stages, which judging by the cover we can safely assume they mean stages used in Sonic Generations, and tasks the reader to find Sonic wherever he may be hiding in thickets of side characters, villains, badniks, rings, and a whole laundry list of other things. The Generations theme is an appropriate choice considering Sega teamed with Ladybird publishing house back in the ’90s to release a similar book called, you guessed it, Where’s Sonic?

The book is set to hit British bookstores as soon as next Friday, Oct. 19 and can also be purchased from the official Sonic Merchandise site for those of you who can’t be bothered picking this up in public.

If anything, this may be a better alternative for the younger Sonic fans who may not show as much interest toward 300-page anthologies chronicling Sonic’s history, but no doubt some of you will be swinging for both.

[Source: Joystiq]

Merchandise

Today Only: “The Hog In The Clogs” Sonic Shirt at TeeFury

Hog in the Clogs Teefury

TeeFury are at it again! The same store that brought you the comedic Cash For Gold t-shirt has released this little gem depicting Sonic and Tails in the style of a Dr. Seuss book. Like standard TeeFury fare, this shirt is on sale for only 24 hours, and will not be brought back after that. As of this post, you should have a good 20 or so hours to get your hands on it, so don’t fret! You can pick it up for $10 USD (plus shipping starting at $2.75). Click here to get it now.

Comics

Sonic Underground To Be Finished…In Comic Form


Sonic Underground wasn’t a series anyone asked for. In 1999, the west was finally able to experience Sonic Adventure, a game that, for better or worse, redefined Sonic for a new generation. At the same time, DiC entertainment, who had developed two Sonic animated series concurrently back in 1993, decided to take advantage of the license once again and create a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog series. Instead of trying to base it on the new game, however, the company went in a completely different direction. Making Sonic a prince and giving him two siblings, the trio fought Dr. Robotnik with the power of music in each episode while looking for their long-lost mother. Yes, the show didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and though 40 episodes were produced, it was lost in the shuffle, a strange child that reflected neither what SEGA was trying to do with the character or what even DiC had done a few years prior.

That’s why it might come as a surprise to find that, after all this time, the Underground will be revisited. Announced on the gaming site Destructoid, Issue #50 of the spin-off title Sonic Universe will feature the return of the Sonic Underground universe, picking up right where the show left off. Penned by current comic scribe Ian Flynn, not much has been revealed aside from the cover art and the fact it will serve as an epilogue. Though Sonic Underground isn’t the first Sonic series that comes to mind when thinking of much-needed conclusions, I must admit that I am a bit tickled at the prospect. Will Sonic jam with his siblings for one final time? Will their mother finally be found? Will Robotnik’s final demise come from the wailing tones of a magical guitar? Whatever the answers, they’ll have to fit in a single issue, since that’s all we’re getting.

This isn’t the show’s first appearance in the pages of the Archieverse. For those who remember, the Sonic Underground universe originally appeared in Issue #10 of the short-lived Sonic Super Special series, a simple crossover that simply acknowledged a new show had begun airing without trying to incorporate its continuity in a comic that was already dealing with multiple personality disorder brought on by DiC’s other Sonic cartoons. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until March 2013 before we once again visit the world of Sonic Underground. I just hope that Ian doesn’t take this trip down memory lane too seriously, because if he does…well, that would just be missing the point.

[Source: Destructoid]

Game News

RUMOR: Sonic the Fighters En Route to Xbox Live Arcade?

Spotted by a few eagle-eyed fans on NeoGAF, it looks like the USK, the equivalent of the ESRB in Germany, has listed a few classic Sega fighters that appear to be coming soon to Xbox Live Arcade. Joining Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers is the whimsical arcade brawler Sonic the Fighters, wherein Sonic and his friends decide to… beat the living snot out of each other.

The game was first made available to home consoles through the Sonic Gems Collection in 2005. Color us unsurprised if this port of the game turns out to be an upscaled version of the title included there. As with the rest of Sega’s digital releases, it’s safe to assume a PSN version will be coming down the pipes, and likely a Steam version as well. We’ll bring you more as info from the game is surely to come out of Sega in due time.

Special thanks to forum member grap3 for the image below.