Monthly Archives

June 2015

Reviews

Sonic Runners: The Retro Review

Sonic Runners
Originally, I was just going to throw up a clip of The Critics’ Jay Sherman just saying his trademark line of “It stinks!” but that would be simply broadside-ing with an elephant gun what at its core is a good game wrapped up in layers of garbage, like one of those Babushka figurines.
So, let’s talk Sonic Runners. Even though Sonic Dash is still very much a thing and is celebrating 100 million downloads by shoe-horning in a brand it has no business even associating with in Angry Birds, Sonic Team decided it wanted to take a stab at this crazy bizarre world known as mobile freemium development.
Enter Runners. Simple enough premise: Sonic and friends run to the right and collect gems and rings through an obstacle gauntlet of spikes, enemies, dash rings, pits, loops–you name it. At the end of each segment, Sonic encounters Eggman hauling a stash of goodies and is tasked with smacking that old greedy capitalist of all his money for your own purposes. Then the level speeds up and repeats with a more difficult layout. Rinse and repeat two more times to max speed until you eventually die.
Throughout this, you’re treated to very simple stories of Team Sonic helping out Animal friends, lost Chao, and even scared groups of Wisps in their battle to stop Dr. Eggman from whatever anti-environmental/furry critter plot he’s hatching for that chapter. It may sound like I’m complaining or ready to just eviscerate the game, but this isn’t the case.
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Fan Works

Something For The Weekend: Sweet Dream – A Short Film

Here it is again, folks – after skipping out last week (how irresponsible of me!), I return again with a project that I think deserves a bit of time in the spotlight of our front page.

This short film was animated by Sonicpox along with several other names within the community, all of which can be seen in the credits at the end of the piece. It’s particularly well-done for something made in SFM and the first part of it really gives a more ‘real’ sense of how Sonic must have felt floating in space after the destruction of the Death Egg at the end of Sonic 2. It is of course a fully-realised, animated version of the pre-credits ending sequence from that game and while similar things have been done before, this is done extremely well and really holds up.

Hell, even the official Sonic YouTube account decided to comment on it! (I wonder who could have been responsible for that…)

I know it’s not a remix album or something along those lines, but I felt that in keeping with the promotion of creative talent in these collumns, this was deserving of a mention. As usual, enjoy your weekend whatever you’re doing and I don’t know, maybe come hang out in IRC or something.

Game News

Sonic Runners Releasing Worldwide on June 25th, Fire & Ice Coming to Japan (Update: Classic Sonic Joins Runners)

SEGA announced at the Sonic birthday event that’s taking place at Tokyo Joypolis that Sonic Runners will launch worldwide on June 25th. Despite only launching in Japan and Canada, the game has had a decent success up to now with more than 500,000 people having played it already. As of right now there’s little information about the worldwide release, but it’s safe to assume that it will launch on both iOS and Android.

It was also confirmed that the recently announced Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice will be released in Japan under the Sonic Toon name, with a live demo of the game being shown at the event.

Update: Turns out that the day after the game launches worldwide, that the classic, more pudgy Sonic will be an unlockable character. You’ll be able to unlock him between June 26th to July 10th.

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Fan Works, Music

Something For The Weekend: Sonic Tempo & Sonic London

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Returning to your regular weekly scheduling, my counterpart TimmiT graced the front page with a new Monday Links and it is with great pleasure that I bring you the return of Something For The Weekend! And there was much rejoicing.

Now, I wanted to feature a bit of music again this weekend and this time, the tunes are courtesy of Retro member Sean Evans. Coming from his album ‘Sonic Tempo’, Sean has created a soundtrack reminiscent of Sonic CD in both instrumentation and theme. An excerpt from his description of the album goes “When Sonic wakes, he discovers he’s on the Miracle Planet, but what’s more is that he appears to be in the Miracle Planet’s galaxy! In the distance Sonic can see a black hole, slowly sucking the planet in. The only explanation is that someone has been tampering with the flow of time, and if Sonic doesn’t hurry, Miracle Planet might just fade away, and him along with it!”

I highly recommend giving these tracks a listen as it’s clear Sean has put some serious love into them and they would sound right at home in a classic Sonic game. Check the bottom of this article for a playlist or click here to go straight to the album’s SoundCloud page.

In other news, community regular HelenBaby has transferred the running of the Sonic London meets to new organizer, ForeverSonic of RadioSEGA fame! In celebration of this, he will be hosting a comeback meet on Sunday 26th July 2015 at Regents Park in London. The event is an open invitation and you can sign up here or express your interest and ask questions in HelenBaby’s forum thread here.

And with all that said, I leave you with this weekend’s tunes. Enjoy! Continue Reading

Podcasts

SEGAbits & Sonic Retro present Boom Talkalaka #4: Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice Emergency Broadcast


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.
In this emergency broadcast, Barry and David discuss SEGA’s surprising reveal of Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice for Nintendo 3DS. That’s right, the games aren’t over yet! Oh… but the comics are, as we also discuss the sad cancellation of Archie’s Sonic Boom comics which will occur with issue 11. We also discuss the premiere of the TV series in Europe and *SPOILER ALERT* discuss a shocking revelation that alters the very fabric of Sonic Boom’s reality!
[Download] [RSS]

Game News

Sonic and Angry Birds cross-over in… Angry Birds Sonic Dash Epic?

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I honestly have no explanation for this. I’m not sure if this can be explained. Some guy from VideoGamer just tweeted these screenshots and I’m just incredibly confused right now. I mean, they’re both popular games sure, but… Angry Birds Sonic Dash Epic? Are they trying to outdo SONIC BIRDS vs. EGGMAN ROBOTNIK PIGS in the naming department? I’m so confused by this.
Okay, so it turns out that this is an in-game event that’ll go on for three weeks, in which you can unlock a different Angry Birds Epic character each week by collecting tokens. That, or you can just buy them. These includes Red ‘Knight’, Chuck ‘Mage’ and Bomb ‘Pirate’. You’ll still be able to use keep using these characters even after unlocking them. This event will be on all three platforms: iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
So uh, yeah, medieval Angry Birds characters in a Sonic game. Just in case for if you weren’t weirded out already by the Sonic Twitter suddenly becoming a lot more meta.

[Source: Invision Game Community]

Game News

Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice Announced

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So this is a surprise – SEGA have announced a new Sonic Boom title, named ‘Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice‘, coming exclusively to 3DS during ‘Holiday 2015’.

So far, details are pretty scarce but we can report that playable characters will include the main four and Sticks, with Eggman returning for villain duties alongside all-new bad guy, D-Fekt. Reportedly the game also features a new mode known as Bot Racing that will be tied to the single player campaign while featuring multiplayer elements. What this means is anyone’s guess at this point, but it will be focused on racing and speed (duh) where users unlock bots based on the characters.

Development duties are with Sanzaru Games by the look of the trailer, who were responsible for Shattered Crystal. Given the infamy of the previous two Sonic Boom-related titles, we’ll hold off on any excitement for now. You can check out the trailer for the game below.


Edit: Click below to check out the first handful of “Boom-tastic” screenshots.
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Miscellaneous

Monday Links: Downtime Edition

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Yup, the site went down for a week. The effects of which were catastrophic. For instance, the last three months of Monday Links were suddenly removed from the internet and nobody even seems to be able to remember them. A very strange occurrence that’s in no way an unfunny excuse for my laziness.
Anyway, while I was busy watching a 274+ episode anime, the other Sonic Retro staff launched a new front page. I also watched an anime about cute girls making anime. So in short, we all made some progress.
I need to stop doing these with only three hours of sleep.
Retro Stuff

Sonic Stuff

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