November 2014
Clips of an Unused Animated Opening for Sonic Chronicles Found (UPDATE: Or Not)
UPDATE: The animator who made this video, Joel MacMillan, has pointed out in a comment on the video that it wasn’t meant to be used in Sonic Chronicles but was instead a personal project a couple of people at Bioware made in their free time and thus is not officially made by Bioware. He also said that he’ll see if he can find the fully scored sequence.
Turns out that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was going to have an opening with some very nice looking 2D animation. Shadzter from the Sonic Stadium did some digging around and found a demo reel by Joel MacMillan, an art director at Bioware who worked on the game. The video contains some clips of this opening starting at 1:12. The animation made use of both screens on the DS, with stuff happening on both of them.
Why the final game didn’t have this opening isn’t known. Our best guess is that it’s because the stylistically it looks incredibly different from the game. It’s a shame, because it’s clear that a lot of work was put into making this.
SEGAbits interviews Mat Kraemer of Sanzaru Games, developer of Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal
This week on the Swingin’ Report Show podcast Barry and George are joined by Mat Kraemer, Lead Designer at Sanzaru Games, developer of Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal for the Nintendo 3DS. Topics covered include the development process of the handheld title, how Sanzaru interacted with various teams including the TV show crew and the team at Big Red Button, what Sonic games Sanzaru looked to for inspiration, and Mat’s favorite classic SEGA games and consoles.
There has been a lot of talk about the Sonic Boom franchise this past week, so it was great to sit down with Mat to learn more about how the 3DS game came to be. Hey! Why are you still reading this when you should be listening?
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SEGAbits and Sonic Retro team up to bring you a podcast focused on SEGA’s new Sonic Boom franchise! Hosted by Barry the Nomad of SEGAbits.com and David the Lurker of SonicRetro.org, Boom Talkalaka features discussion of the many aspects of Sonic Boom – from comics and episodes of the cartoon, to the video games and toys.
Give the show a listen and in the comments tell us what you think! If you have any questions or comments you want David to read on the next episode, leave your message here with the subject line “Boom-Grams”: http://segabits.com/contact/
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This Saturday at 1pm EST/6pm GMT, the guys at Find the Computer Room will stream Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric to help raise money for Emily Monroe, a 3-year-old girl who has been diagnosed with cancer. Special guests lined up for the event include Mike Pollock and Cindy Robinson, among others.
FTCR member FTA has provided a video detailing everything that will go down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD1ShRFesS4
The stream will take place on the FTCR Twitch page. If you would like to donate immediately, you can visit Emily’s GoFundMe page.
Sonic X-treme. Just the name can send a shiver up the spine of anyone who anxiously awaited the release of the game, reading the Red Shoe Diaries over and over again, trying to dissect each screenshot and guess what obstacles were in store for each new zone. Meant to be Sonic’s first foray into the world of 3D gaming, the title was quietly cancelled during 1996, a Sega Saturn port of Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island filling the hole in scheduling. For years, speculation ran wild as to what happened, and over time many of those involved in the project have spoken about it, including Chris Senn who created an entire compendium chronicling the development history of the game.
But with all we’ve come to discover in the last 18 years, there are still aspects that have been hidden away, the most glaring being how it would feel to hold a controller in your hands and move Sonic about in his fish-eye world. The only playable build thus far had been the test arena from Christina Coffin’s boss engine, a green hill-esque terrain with not much more than random Flickies populating a finite plane with no end goal. That, however, is about to change in a very big way.
Read more after the jump.
Want to give Sonic’s new sports-tape gift-wrapped adventure a go just before its U.S. launch next week? For those that missed Nintendo’s Direct for today, then the good news is you can! Sonic Boom: The Shattered Crystal‘s demo is now available on the 3DS eShop for the U.S. and Europe.
It was also confirmed that a Sonic Boom 3DS theme is planned for release, and a Puzzle Swap panel centered around the game will be piped in to 3DS systems very soon. Let us know what you guys think of the demo in the comments below.
And on the subject of Sonic development stuff, this book by Read-Only Memory has lots of never-before-seen visual material from Mega Drive games and the console itself. This of course includes stuff related to Sonic as well. Forum member 87th has been kind enough to post a photo of the design documents for Sonic 1 showing some storyboards of the original ending. If you want to see more of it, you can buy the book here.
Also, yes we know that all of this news is old. We’re playing catch-up. :V