The first new character for Sonic Boom has been revealed. This character had already been spotted in a leaked poster and concept art and at the time some thought that she may be Marine the Raccoon from Sonic Rush Adventure, but it turns out that she’s just called Sticks. And no, her name doesn’t end with “the Something”, though she is a badger.
This new character is voiced by Nika Futterman, who describes her as really intelligent, but that the things that she says just come off as really strange. Or in other words, she’s the crazy character who comes up with conspiracies that don’t really make sense and puts sports tape around her boomerang. She’ll pop up in both the Sonic Boom games and TV show and will be best friends with Amy Rose. You can read SEGA’s official announcement and see some more art of her after the jump.
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Game News
Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis. Next stop: Empire City itself, New York City. Sega of America’s official blog confirmed that the East Coast now gets its chance to show the West Coast what kind of Sonic fans they are (sane, we hope.) Sonic Boom 2014 will be taking place in the evening of Oct. 4 from the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center. It’s safe to expect Sonic Boom (the game) to be at the event, along with a Crush 40 musical performance and a Q&A with Takashi Iizuka.
After last year’s Q&A, let’s just hope we get some better questions going so Iizuka, as entertaining as it was to watch, doesn’t go full troll mode. For example:
Fan: “Where’s Froggy?”
Iizuka: “He’s with Big.”
Fan: “…so, where’s Big?”
Iizuka: “He’s with Froggy.”
Priceless.
Interviews, Podcasts
Interview: Al Nilsen, SEGA’s Director of Marketing (’89-’93), appears on the SEGAbits Swingin’ Report Show
Al Nilsen, SEGA of America’s Director of Marketing from 1989 through 1993, sat down with Barry and George on the latest SEGAbits podcast to talk about the glory days of the SEGA Genesis. Al and his team were behind everything, including promoting the famous “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” campaign, the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog, implementing the legendary “Sonic 2sday” worldwide launch of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in 1992, and rolling out the “Welcome to the Next Level” campaign.
Al’s appearance is in anticipation of the release of “Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation” by author Blake J. Harris, which you can pre-order today from Amazon.com. “Console Wars” tells the story of SEGA vs. Nintendo during the early 90′s, as told from the perspective of SEGA of America president Tom Kalinske. Based on over two hundred interviews with former SEGA and Nintendo employees, “Console Wars” is the underdog tale of how Kalinske miraculously turned an industry punchline into a market leader. It’s the story of how a humble family man, with an extraordinary imagination and a gift for turning problems into competitive advantages, inspired a team of underdogs to slay a giant and, as a result, birth a $60 billion dollar industry.
Expect more “Console Wars” content throughout May, including a podcast with the author Blake J. Harris next week, and a podcast with Tom Kalinske the week after that!
[Download] [RSS] [iTunes] [Archive]
Like the photo showing various concept art from last month, we’re not quite sure where it came from, but a photo of an early version of Sonic Boom running on a Wii U CAT-DEV dev kit has popped up online. Of course, unless the final game will miss a lot of textures and run at 15fps and, this isn’t an indication of what the final game will look like. Be sure to click the image for a larger version.
Apparently Nintendo doesn’t want photos of the Wii U dev kit flying around, so to prevent us from getting our door kicked in we’ll just show the cropped version provided by The Sonic Stadium. Nothing is stopping us from putting a link to the full image posted by Spindash.de forum member Finn here though, which also shows us that the photo was taken in January 2014. So there’s your timeframe for when this build was made. A lower res version of the image was originally posted at AP, but has since been removed.
[Source: The Sonic Stadium]
If you have a PlayStation 3 system and still haven’t got your were-hog action going, the PlayStation Store now carries Sonic Unleashed in the US for $19.99 USD, and EU/AU territories for £15.99 GBP / €19.99 EUR / $29.95 AUD, with of course the usual complimentary PAL price gouging for no extra product!
Unleashed joins this week’s store update along with Persona 4 in the US for $19.99 USD as well as Football Manager Classic on PlayStation Vita for EU/AU territories £29.99 GBP/€39.99 EUR/$54.95 AUD. Xbox 360 owners have been able to purchase a digital copy of Unleashed for quite some time, and is now providing benefit to those who want to do away with their physical library.
Source [US PlayStation Blog] [EU PlayStation Blog]
Amazon’s set top box pulled a SEGA Saturn by releasing at the same time as it’s announcement, not only acting as a direct competitor to other multimedia devices such as the Apple TV and the Roku, but also acting as a dedicated game console as well, sporting it’s Android based operating system sporting games like Minecraft – Pocket Edition, Telltale’s The Walking Dead and more. With an Android based system comes SEGA with a number of conversions of their Android based Sonic games. Check out after the break below to see the list of games from SEGA that became available at the launch of the system as well as their price and more on these ports.
It’s been a while since SEGA unleashed Sonic into the world of Yoshi’s Island to save the rainbow-hued miniature dinosaurs. For those of you who haven’t given in and traded your Wii U copies of Sonic Lost World, SEGA’s Aaron “Ruby Eclipse” Webber, aficionado of all things Sonic and Hatsune Miku, revealed ever so suddenly that their second Nintendo-themed DLC for the game is going live tomorrow for the ridiculously expensive price of free.
As hinted back in a Nintendo Direct, the second DLC is centered around the world of The Legend of Zelda, and Sonic takes the theme to heart by sporting the legendary iconic green tunic of Link. In stark contrast to most of Sonic Lost World‘s offerings, the level is quite vast and focuses much more on exploration than just running through the level like you’re trying to beat that blasted mailman to the Kokiri Forest.
Webber mentions that this level complements the Yoshi DLC’s ability to score lives rapidly by focusing more on amassing Flickies rapidly, the little birds required to get past certain roadblocks between levels, and that many little secrets are hidden throughout the stage.
It may be a bit too late for a chunk of Lost World’s Wii U‘s players to get much out of the DLC’s intended purpose, but the level of work that went into the level is certainly impressive. Perhaps a sign of things that can be done with the engine given proper motivation? Let’s hope so.
We’re not quite sure where it came from, but a new photo of the Big Red Button office has surfaced. This photo shows Bob Rafei sitting next to a board with concept art for new characters and enemies that will appear in the Sonic Boom game for Wii U. The image was found by Sonic Stadium forum members Eitarou and A Real Human Bean, though where they actually found the photo isn’t clear. Be sure to click it to see it in the full resolution. Another SSMB member, Storme Prince, distorted the picture to give a clearer view of the new characters.
[Source: The Sonic Stadium]
So due to me completely screwing up my sleep schedule while having a week long vacation last week (gotta stay up til 3 AM man), I only had a couple of hours of sleep today because I couldn’t just wake up at 1PM like I usually do when I don’t have any obligations. So apologies if this week’s Monday Links has terrible writing and/or spelling mistakes. Maybe I’ll mix up the words “then” and “than” again, maybe I’ll accidentally put a Tegra link in the Sega links, maybe I’ll fall asleep on the keyboard anfdsniodfsoNOFDSNOINDVGOIVBDSNJaacnbsadvbiouAUIOFDFNVXZSNFOINIXODNoinboixFDIO NSMDVCPC
Retro/Bits News
- SEGAbits had a podcast with an interview with Sonic Boom producer Stephen Frost. Of course everyone else and their mom had interviews with Stephen Frost as well but we were first so pfft [Swingin’ Report Show]
- Barry the Nomad looks at the past redesigns of Sonic the Hedgehog in this installment of the Weekly Five [Because Sonic redesigns are cool again]
- Here’s a new show: This is Saturn by TrackerTD. This first episode looks at Fighters Megamix [Because SEGA Saturn will always be cool]
Sonic/SEGA News
- The Sonic Boom hype train keeps on going with this new Behind the Scenes video that shows off some behind the scenes stuff [Like behind the scenes videos usually do]
- All of these upcoming Persona games are coming to the US, we don’t know yet when they’ll be released in Europe though [I’d import all of these but I can’t import Persona Q cause 3DS isn’t region free 🙁 ]
- Nintendo is shutting down online features of all Wii and DS games, which includes SEGA games [DIGITAL FUTURE]
- SEGA of Japan got a new president [I honestly have no idea what this means right now]
- A couple of Virtua Fighter characters appear as bosses in Degenki Bunko Fighting Climax [Aka Japanese fighting game that will never be localized]
- Here’s a Japanese commercial for Hero Bank [Japan sure is wacky or something]
It’s not often that we get a look at how Sonic games are made, so it’s surprising that SEGA suddenly released a behind the scenes video for Sonic Boom. While there’s not much new info, it does show a lot of new concept art for the game and a couple of voice recording sessions for the TV show. There’s also one very small bit of new gameplay that you will probably miss if you blink.
The cast for the game and TV show was also revealed, which confirms that Orbot and Cubot will be present in this spin-off. It also shows that Tails now has a new voice actress, with Colleen Villard replacing Kate Higgins. This isn’t the first time Villard voiced a Sonic character, as she is also the current voice of the beloved Charmy the Bee.
[Source: SEGA Blog]