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A Look Back at Sonic the Hedgehog
SonicHero writes "Part of its Essential 50 series, 1UP has posted a very interesting look back at Sonic the Hedgehog. It discusses how the character came about, how Sega marketed him, and how Sonic ultimately changed the course of the 16-bit platform wars."
But all I saw was a blue blur.
A cute little hedgehog is more marketable than a short fat plumber who plays with mushrooms.
My favorite had to be the Sega CD game...and it had a kickass soundtrack!
You're all bastards!
Take a look at the Open Directory Project's category on it.
God, I remember staying up nights back in 91/92 finishing the Sonic games. It's enough to make me want to go plug the console in right now and spend some time with Sonic&Knuckles + Sonic 1.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Okay, so he was introduced later, but what more can be said? The game's a classic!
Everyone knows that Sonic was stolen. Shlomo the Hedgehog, know THERE was a 16 bit hero! Y'know... his epic battle with Rabbi Rabotnik, Dradles, his sidekick... Does no one remember?
A hedgehog on steroids. My favorite character by far! Notice how he never gets tired... he's juicing for sure.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
All the times I've played Sonic it's been like... Hold down right and press jump on the right times, correct any silly little errors that I might make, and win the level. It's nothing fancy :P
and we all had a sister or cousin who thought green hill was hard..
I like muppets.
You can play a neat spinoff Sonic flash gamehere.
Anyone else think of this Penny Arcade strip?
My religion forbids the use of sigs.
Is how Sega ruined the series when it went to 3D by just translating the game directly into 3D, where the concepts didn't work, without trying to do any kind of process of understanding what had made the game fun in 2D and how to go about replicating that in 3D.
::clutches his copy of Sonic Mega Collection tightly::
"Oh" they thought. "All we need for people to enjoy a sonic game is a blue hedgehog moving quickly. Right?"
Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
On the same topic, Lost Levels had an interesting article awhile back on Sonic X-treme, the would-be flagship game for the Saturn and how it went through development hell and eventually ended up being scrapped. You can read about it here
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
still hum the theme to the Green Hill Zone? I swear that little ditty ranks up with the Super Mario theme for cachiness.
:).
Still, after the Green Hill zone the rest of the game felt a little rushed. Not bad, just not as fully realized as the Green Hill Zone. I remember seeing a magazine article with some of the features that didn't make it into the release cart. And the game just felt a little short (like most early Genesis games). Still an amazing game, and Sonic 2 more than made up for any short commings of the first game
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why has the popular percetpion of the "Gamer" been composed of bratty MTV esque focus group, as seen in this 1up sight, and on the G4 TechTV channel?
For example
Is truly a hero to the gay furry community.
His raw sexuality is so intense even non-furries have to recognize he's sexy.
I just finished playing Supertux. It brings back all those feelings of the old NES days. Highly recommended!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Read the article -- marketing term. I hear the dreamcast had "Hyper-Super-Uber-Blast processing"
There is no such thing as "blast processing" and never was.
The Genesis had no general performance advantage over the SNES.
.. on me at least.
As someone who was a SNES owner and longtime Nintendo fan, I remember feeling jealous of the Genesis after reading some gaming magazines which showcased Sonic/Genesis as a faster and cooler system. It is true that at one point the Genesis became the more desirable console to own, largely due to Sonic. The pure speed of Sonic appealed to me as a new angle for side-scrollers.
What this article didn't touch on was how Nintendo's SNES eventually won in the end (due to its much more extensive 3rd party library and probably a few other things). I did not regret going with the SNES after DKC. Zelda (Link to the Past), Super Metroid, etc.
The true timeline, sans hyperbole:
1 - Nintendo Entertainment System is popularized
2 - Sega Master System fails
3 - Sega Genesis is a moderate success due to Sonic the Hedgehog (but has no competition for 2 years)
4 - Super NES is popularized
5 - Sega Genesis moves to second place
6 - Sega Genesis fails
7 - Sega 32X and Sega CD fail (despite Sonic games for each)
8 - Sega Saturn released to mild popularity
9 - Nintendo 64 released to mild popularity, Saturn fails
10 - Sony Playstation popularized, N64 fails
Sega "fought" in the "platform wars". They never won. Their competitor lost, too.
As much as I love Sonic, I can't stand what they keep doing to him.
My gf and I both own Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut and Sonic Heros (game cube games). While the games are both fun, the image that Sonic and friends give off is excessively Tacky. Tacky in a really annoying matter (ie: they have dumb sayings like "Lets Blast off with sonic speed! Alright! OK!")
And have you seen the sonic cartoon currently playing on The WB ? Those characters are beyond goofy and dumb. When I was a kind (10 years ago?), There used to be a really nice sonic cartoon on Saturday mornings (ABC broadcasted), and it had a much more serious look and feel (animation wise).
Sega & Sonic Team: Stop screwing up Sonic and licensing it to all the wrong people
Sunny Dubey
NO spellcheck of any kind was used, deal with it.
Ya know, I try to be nice on these forums, but could you RTFA before asking questions? 'Cause this is answered there. 'Blast Processing' refered to
1) the fact that the CPU in the Genesis ran more than twice as fast as in the SNES (7.6MHz vs. 3.58MHz) and
2) that the Genesis could draw one screen while rendering another.
Yeah, I know, I shoulda just linked to the article. That woulda been the smart-ass thing to do...
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Not mention eventually inspiring the name for a crucial signaling pathway, one imperative for the normal development and patterning of numerous human organs.
But I'm not a fan of the early Sonic games. Maybe you don't get the same experience from playing the Mega Collection disk on your 'Cube, but I played each for about ten minutes before getting bored. It's just so repetitive. Run to the right, don't get hurt. That doesn't apply to Sonic 3D, but I don't like that either. The same goes for the early Mario games as well. Super Mario World is often thought to be a simply amazing game, but after a few days with the ROM I got bored.
It's like that with any 'mindless' game. I don't know why I can't them for long. Maybe I just don't feel like I'm progressing. Maybe I just suck too much and am too lazy to keep playing until I improve. I dunno. There's no doubt they're good games - but they just aren't my style. Everybody else seems to love them, I hate 'em.
Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
;)
Are you sure? This sound like an average dance or trance party to me
only the color of the pills have changed, they are mostly blue now
all the computers in your house have sonic the hedgehog related hostnames..
I'm on flicky right now... Mobius is my file server.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
i don't think that quote works so well on a geek site...
Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
f ields_aug/Creamfields_2003_058.jpg
http://www.uk-cl.com/club_pictures/03/large/cream
I rest my case.
Don't forget the inspiration of the name of the morphogenetic protein.
So Sonic is the meth monster?
"2 - Sega Master System fails" - True, it didn't dent the NES's popularity in the US, but it was by no means a failure. Lots of sales, lots of support.
"3 - Sega Genesis is a moderate success due to Sonic the Hedgehog (but has no competition for 2 years)" - What rot. The Mega Drive quickly lassoed upwards of 80% of the market and didn't drop below 50% until a significant amount of time after the release of the SNES. That success was not due solely to one game, nor lack of competition. This is where Sega most significantly influenced the course of the 'console wars' - the MD completely wiped Nintendo's incumbent NES monopoly, and indisputably brought forward the development and release of the SNES.
"6 - Sega Genesis fails" - I think you'll find the machine was still healthy up until the point Sega prematurely pulled the plug on all their existing systems to concentrate all resources on the Saturn. Even the Playstation took a little while to inherit all of the 16-bit market.
Hmm, so every machine that doesn't have at least a 90% stranglehold on the market 'fails'? My advice would be don't get into any arguments with Apple fans.
Preferences > Homepage > Customize stories on homepage > Authors > Zonk > Uncheck
Right then.. Sonic.. what can we say about it.... hmm.
:( ). Labrynth still haunts me.. the jaws theme has NOTHING on that thing...
Sonic was so reconiseable in the early 90s (my era as a kid) that even my parents reconised him. I didn't have a genesis for quite a while (I had a SNES instead. I got the choice, a SNES or a pony... I picked the SNES and never looked back).
Everything was perfect in the original 2 sonic games (Sonic1 and 2). They did everything right and it was down right fun. I still look back and remember that video I got with a magazine showing hill top Zone and going "FUCK I WANT IT!". At the time I didn't have a mega drive (genesis) so I waited for the Master system version (took a while but it came).
So it wasa school day and I remember sitting there itching to get back to my MS, The weather was vile (rain and wind), the shops had a huge queue but my parents agreed to get it for me (I was disabled for some of my life so they never objected to my games playing).
So off I dashed, home I met and played Sonic 2 I did. Everything felt good and right with the world... Untill I got to that fucking hang glider. Even to this day I don't know how that fucking things works, but it sure drains lives.
So years later I get a Mega drive to go with my SNES (and like 9 games with it, so lots to play). and I remember thinking I'd just got a few videos, maybe a SNES game and a football or some crap I didn't want (my parents tend to get what I ask rather then general crap, it's easier and cheaper in the long run). So there I was with my Mega drive, playing sonic over and over.. cursing the spikes (why didn't we get the updated version with the fix?
Sonic 3... well what can I say.... lost it's feel. It was all "COOL KNUCKLES!" and then it became "..just fucking kill him already!" and so on and so forth. The feel of the originals (bright, colourful and damn fun) just seemed lost.
Apply knuckles and repeat 3 and you get the same. It's not sonic no more... I miss tails being a cute little kid who can't write (they will show the classic sonic on satalite here... Nothing says fun like Sonic telling kids not to be molested).
Sonic Xtreme gets canceled due to health and polotical issues, we all lose the saturn and in turn lose Sega.
Dreamcast comes out, everyone adores it, yay for dreamcast (still love mine). Sonic totally rockson it, keeps the original feel but adds in cool new elements (and loads of extra characters no one likes).
Rinse and repeat for the cube.
Advance comes ago... takes sonic 3s feel and then adds in attacks (WTF!?). It becomes almost a parody of it's self losing the fast feel more for "pick a path, any path you'll never remember them all because they all look the same".
Sonic Advance 2 and 3 comes out. I ignore
Sonic heroes come out.. every character gets majorly nerfed... I buy, find fun but semi regret..
So yea thats a better idea of sonic. It started out amazingly well, I have OC remixs of Sonic 1 and 2 music on Winamp all the time. I still adore Sonic 2 (and 1) and even set up my Mega drive to play them some times. After that Sonic starts to lose his edge on the market, loads of spin offs take place and it just feels cheap and nasty now.
Once when you said Sonic you had the picture of a blue hedgehog tapping his foot and waving his finger and then dashing off across the land scape, he WAS the cool guy of the 90s, to me that Sonic still is cool and always will be.
Now he's "just another platformer" blending in with all the others. His design has changed (you probably won't notice much, but the spikes are very different now), his character has become "lets do whats right!" rather then "Meh, it's fun lets annoy him some more and laugh" (Heroes even says Sonic is no longer a danger to robotnik and more of a "friendly rival" ffs!).
I'd point out all the flaws with the other characters (Shadow, Rouge, big etc.) but yanno, it's not worth it.
To me Son
I like muppets.
nintendo made money with the n64.
though its true that it was in second place to the playstation.
it didnt fail. (though I think it sucked)
Methinks this was the point of his post.
Congratulations on your bright and shiny "Missed the Humor" award.
To all those replying to the parent, STOP. The parent poster *knows* there are people in darkened rooms taking magic pills listening to repetitive electronic music. That was the *POINT*.
Do posts need bludgeoning straightforwardness before anyone here on slashdot understands the punchline?
Sig: this is a bludgeoningly straightforward post
I've read that a few times on other geek threads. Where's the quote from?
oh sorry, I'm pretty tired... so could be.
Reading articles like this really upset me. Sega is (or was) a brilliant company. For years I was amazed by the risks that Sega would take to release some really brilliant games. While everyone else (i.e. Sony and Nintendo) were releasing the same old first-person shooters and guaranteed sellers, Sega was taking real risks with trying new types of games. Some of my favorite Dreamcast examples are
- Samba De Amigo
- Jet Grind Radio
- Seaman
- Typing of the Dead
- Space Channel 5
- Chu Chu Rocket
- Ooga Booga
I'm sure there are some I'm forgeting.The Sega Dreamcast was an absolutely great console. The games for it were bizarre, but brilliant and amazingly fun. Their biggest mistake(s) was not basing it on DVD and of course their partnering with MS. The death of the Dreamcast marked a severe turning point in my thinking. It was when Sega announced the death of the Dreamcast that I truly became a hater of MS and it marked the end of me being an enthusiastic gamer. Forget the XBox and the PS2, when I want to play some fun games I still turn on my Dreamcast
As a side note I would have loved to be in the room during the meeting when the idea for Samba De Amigo was pitched
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc, 1989
'Tis from a shirt, I've seen my fair share of them at my school.
When I was a kid, I spent many hours paying sonic 2. Now I can play it through emulations on my computer or xbox. It's the perfect example how a good game doesn't depend on great graphics or an internet connection, but just a good idea.
Maybe you should have read the article.
"Sega had come up with the buzzword for another bit of technology that the Genesis used to speed up its games: Blast Processing. Technically, it was to describe the way the Genesis could display one image while loading another into memory -- something the SNES couldn't do"
Nothing about rendering images because, frankly, no console back then had a real concept of a per-pixel frame buffer to render to without resorting to raw CPU usage. You had to doctor up both consoles to do that. Sega had the SVP (Virtua Racing) and Nintendo had the SuperFX (StarFox, Yoshi's Island, etc), which actually could plot pixels locally to a framebuffer in the cartridge and DMA results back to the SNES when ready. Effectively a double-buffer concept.
While I doubt SNES' pokey CPU could compare to a 68K at double the MHz, adding such coprocessors to the cartridge definitely helped. How many cycles does the Genesis CPU take to multiply? 8 or 10?
SNES CPU has no multiply instruction, but SuperFX takes what? 2 or 4 cycles, worst case? So even at 11 MHz the SuperFX could bowl over the 68K inside the Genesis or Neo-Geo at doing multiply-intensive math used for polygon rendering.
Back to the article. I'm not familiar with SNES DMA but I don't believe you can't display an image while loading another into memory. That's pure baloney. If that was true every SNES game would freeze or drop to a blank screen every time the cartridge was accessed and that is definitely NOT the case. In fact, some games DMAed audio from the cartridge on the fly instead of storing it in SNES audio RAM. (64KB audio RAM was nicer than Genesis' 8 KB audio RAM, but definitely not copious.). The SuperFX does have to be halted when SNES DMAs results back from the cartridge, but that's about it. I don't think the SNES CPU needs to be halted during DMAs, unlike stupid GBA. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here.
So I submit that "blast processing" is still just a marketing term. Interplay coined "Blaze Processing" for their SNES "Claymates" game in response.
You know, everything I've read indicates that quote has been frequently _misattributed_ to a Nintendo executive, and that in fact it was never said by a Nintendo employee. Go google for "Kristian Wilson", you'll find some discussions on this that seem to indicate nobody can ever cite a real original source for the quote.
The Sega Genesis didn't fail. It was manufactured and sold until 1997 -- it had a run longer than most consoles. The reason probably had to do a lot with Sonic: The Saturn didn't have a significant Sonic release at all (yes, I know NiGHTS was cool, but Sonic was money in the bank).
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Genesis couldn't touch the Mode 7 effects either.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Ya know, I try to be nice on these forums, but could you RTFA before asking questions? 'Cause this is answered there. 'Blast Processing' refered to
1) the fact that the CPU in the Genesis ran more than twice as fast as in the SNES (7.6MHz vs. 3.58MHz) and
2) that the Genesis could draw one screen while rendering another.
Well, all I can say is don't believe everything you read.
Your point #1 is accurate. Point #2 is dubious at best - I suppose you could probably figure out a way to argue this on semantics but it'd be a stretch. Every system has to "draw one screen while rendering another"; otherwise you'd get massive flicker and screen blanking, which is something we haven't seen since the days of the Atari 2600.
"Blast Processing" was just a buzzword. I've never heard the rendering angle to it; the main thing was just the CPU speed. Sega wanted to point out the difference in CPU speed and "blast processing" was a new "feature" they dreamed up to sound like the Genesis was not only faster, but also had extra stuff that the SNES didn't. Of course, this really wasn't true - Genesis was faster, but the SNES was able to display more colors, had higher resolution, and could display more sprites on-screen.
Anybody who knew anything at the time just laughed whenever these "blast processing" commercials came on, but you have to admit they worked... for a while, anyway.
You're right in that the terminology I used was incorrect. However, you seem to be calling those who wrote the article, and those who designed the original Genesis, liars. I'm not going to believe that (although I will believe that marketers will stretch the truth to sell their product). Rather, I'm going to believe the people who make a living researching and writing about games. What use do they have to lie? The Genesis could load one image while rendering another. This speeded up the game. It also had a faster processor. This as well speeded things up. You seem to know more in general about this than I, so I ask you - did the 16-bitness of the Genesis give it more pipelines to work with? How about across the controller boards? As far as additional procs in the game cartridges themselves, I've never heard of that, although it makes sense. Personally, I've always prefered cartridges over discs.
Again, if I'm misinformed, I apologize. But I did RTFA before commenting. The whole thing. Really.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
The article says that the Genesis could load one image while drawing the next. 'Rendering' and 'drawing' are pretty much the same thing (at least in this context), so yeah I definately mis-quoted. My bad.
As I asked the last comment, did it perhaps have more pipelines to work with, or some other aspect of the hardware that allowed it to perform multiple tasks at once?
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
And that, folks, was the worst joke I have told this month!
I'm here all weekend. Don't forget to tip your waitress.
Does anybody else find it ironic that Sonic is now on the GameCube and GBA?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
How fitting that this article should come out, as I've been on in constant euphoria playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles for the past week.
...but I'll tell you one thing, beating the crap out of Robotnik in the Doomsday Zone as Hyper Sonic has to be the best final battle I've played in any action game of its time.
It's as I was telling a friend a couple days ago: I loved it when video game companies could increase their already vice-like grip on the market by taking a tried, tested, and true concept and adding a "Super" in front of it.
"Hey kids, Sonic is pretty fuh, huh?"
"Sure, I guess...it's a little old now."
"Oh, really? Uh,...well...did I mention Sonic...uh,...can be Super Sonic, now?"
"Wow!!!"
Of course, when that got old, just change "Super" to "Hyper" (or, alternatively/additionally, throw in a "Turbo", "Ultra", "Mega", or perhaps "Neo").
Sure, it's the same old formula: Make the Chaos Emeralds into SUPER Chaos Emeralds, then instead of Sonic going SUPER Sonic, he goes HYPER Sonic...
THe original on the Master System is worth having a go at - it differs from the Genesis a lot - and is worth enjoying in its own right. It even has Jungle Zone, which wasn't even in the Genesis, plus you could actually have amazing speed contests on the 1st level of Green Hill Zone there.
Also have to chip in that sonic was only good for the 1st two games, as everyone else was saying. Mario (and in particular the SNES mario world which I still love playing to this day) was much better overall.
People who spend their entire lives in fast forward and obsessing about collecting gold rings... come on, this is clearly a rip-off of Smeagol.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
No way dood! The graphics were way better on the N64 and the control pad was better too. N64 had a killer game, Goldeneye. The James Bond games on the playstation just plain suck. There were really cool games on the N64. There were just loads of games on the playstation. Tomb Raider sucks. Mario was always way cooler than Sonic. Mario Bros 1 and 3 are the 2 best games of all time.
WELCO
METOT
HENEX
TLEVEL
Don't forget Nintendo's wonderful FX chip.
True mano... I was more into Sonic than Mario... I still have my Genesis and play when I am... infulenced... by... substances...
hehe... Knuckles..
while(1) { fork(); };
12 month ago when I read my embryology book, I read about sonic hedgehog proteins, a protein that controls development of left and right. It is rather funny that scientist name a protein after a character in a computergame.
Have anybody similar stories.
Best regards
Rune
> Do posts need bludgeoning straightforwardness before anyone here on slashdot understands the punchline?
Nah, but unless they are, there will always be people who won't understand it.
Arguably, SatAM was the most serious and well done (Character wise) and had a continual plot.
Amen. StH/SatAM really stood out as a grittier, more mature series than typical Saturday morning fare. That, the high-tech/sci-fi-ish setting, and the fact that all the good guys were furries (*grin*) made it my personal all-time favorite TV show. Still waiting for that DVD box set some day....
Sonic X is doing pretty good, but we'll have to wait and see how it finishes out.
I picked up a pirate DVD of that one, first three episodes. The whole Sonic/real world crossover idea is cute. I liked the fact that they took two of the Sonic-world characters to a military facility for "study," but the whole "police department that uses F1 racers to track down high-speed moving violations" schtick stretched credibility just a wee bit too far for me ^_^
iSKUNK!
"10 - Sony Playstation popularized, N64 fails"
30+ million units sold != failure.
"Derp de derp."
SEGA did a great mistake back then: they bet everything on a 2d horse (the Genesis/Megadrive), whereas the competition was moving to 3d (mode 7/super fx chip for SNES). Commodore also made the same mistake with the Amiga. The Sonic property was not enough to save them. They repeated the same mistake with Saturn, which was very difficult to program 3d graphics with (in constract with PS which was very easy).
And this was from a company that made its fame on 3d games! Space Harrier, Outrun, Afterburner, Powerdrift, Galaxy Force, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, Virtua Striker...SEGA has the best list of 3d arcade games, but they blew it in the console arena simply because they did not have good 3d!
http://www.marcusbrigstocke.com/pacman.asp
But with the Genesis' CPU power and smart programming, you could do 3D effects without special hardware. There was a never released Wacky Races game for the Genesis that was a Mario Kart clone that used the CPU to calculate an effect similar to what the SNES could do. Not as versitile or smooth, but still pretty good.
Look at these Genesis games. NONE of them used any special chips.
Gunstar Heroes (3D Treasure logo, crazy amount of explosions)
Contra Hard Corps
Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island (FMV Intro)
Duke Nukem 3D (More like Wolfenstein though)
Zero Tolerance (!!!HOLY CRAP!!! 0wns the above. You can even see blood splatter against the walls and slowly slide down.)
Kawasaki Superbike Challenge
Race Drivin'/Stunt Drivin' (Race is better)
F15 Strike Eagle II
F1 World Championship
F22 Interceptor
LHX Helicopter
MiG 29 Super Fulcrum
F-117 Night Storm
Out of This World (Better frame rate then SNES port and no load times)
Red Zone (!!!HOLY CRAP!!! FMV, scaling, rotation, polygons... By the same people as Zero Tolerance)
Sonic Advance for the GBA takes absolutely no skill at all. Sure, it's fun, but it's not a real Sonic game. Sonic games do take skill. Pick up Sonic 2 and play it. If all you do is hold right and press Jump at the right times, you'll Fail It in minutes. But Sonic 1 & 2 are still more fun.
Are people here *really* trying to figure out the source of a joke? No doubt someone (if not multiple independent people) came up with it while stoned at some rave. The comedian probably just borrowed it (and perhaps improved it) from one of his friends.
Why don't we try and figure out where the chicken joke came from.
I am also amazed that not only have many people here not heard the joke but took it literally. Then again I am replying to these people so I don't have much of a leg to stand on.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
And don't forget that the playstation was origionaly a cd add in for the Super NES that nintendo backed out of. Sony the partner in the deal produced the playstation.
The CD addin was intended to allow the SNES to have the capibility to hold as much game data as the Sega Saturn.
Poverty is not in and of itself a virtue.
Wealth is not in and of itself a vice.
Envy is in every way a vice (or worse).
Some people have parents that can afford ponies.
Some parents, like my own, can't.
Some people, such as myself, have loving families.
Some people don't.
Life is a mixed bag, and bitching about it just cheapens yourself, and causes you to overlook the good bits.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Those who were talking about Sonic and his fast speeds, check this out - a near-perfect play through Sonic 3 & Knuckles; do check this one out, there's an AVI up on torrent here.
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
I still play the game today. No really.
It's all down to the amazing time attack mode in the Sonic Jam collection (Saturn). Try and beat these times:
Green Hill zone: Act 1:21"96.... Act 2:15"89
Spring Yard zone: Act 1:23"13.... Act 2:27"49
Labyrinth zone: Act 2:1:01"01
StarLight zone: Act 2:17"68 !
You wouldn't believe the subtle and surprising intricacies that one can discover by choosing the best route (I'll have to put videos online one day). Of course, if anyone get even close to those times (within a few tenths of a second), don't hesitate to contact me. But I bet that nobody, but nobody, could ever beat those times. I worked on them for ages!
By the way, Green Hill Zone is a nice website on the game, and contains trivia about the Sonic team.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I'm really starting to hate that I never have mod points when I actually want to USE them......
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
There is so MUCH Sonic fan art on deviant art that it practically deserves its own category.
Since the only Nintendo fan art I've seen on DA is fetish pr0n, I guess that attests to the popularity of the Sonic series.
Me, I was more of a Mario fan.
was bad marketing and too many hardcore games. It's all well and good to have lots of innovative and cool titles, but you need a healthy dose or solid and simple platformers and RPGs to draw the general masses in. The sports games where top, but that wasn't enough.
And dear God, did the marketing suck. I mean, whose idea was it to spend your whole comercial time showing off how cool Sonic and crew were instead of showing off the (at the time) mind blowing graphics? When the DC came out nothing was even close. It was like comparing the playstation to the NES.
Ultimately Sega was doomed from the get go though, since Sony recognized the threat and put the smack down on them with marketing so clever it puts DeBeers to shame. Sony was pulling the crap Nintendo did with the N64 (showing off screenshots that weren't actually rendered on the console, at one point Nintendo was running booths with $10,000 SG workstations render stuff and saying it was running on an N64), but nobody called them on it. Probably because noone in the Game Biz in their right mind wants to see the current gravy train fail.
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3D graphics where nowhere around the time the genesis was created. At most they where a clever idea done in a few games. Space Harrier, Outrun and Afterburnner wheren't really 3D and wheren't anything new technology wise by the time they where out. 2D was still where it was at. If you where talking about Saturn, then you're kind of right.
From what I understand, Sega didn't expect the PSX to be as powerful as it was. They where still shooting for a $200-$250 dollar console. When the saw what Sony was doing, they panicked, and instead of redeigning their console, dropped another main processor in it to make up the difference. Problem is this was a hack, and a bad one. There was a ton of bugs in Saturn hardware, it was more expensive to produce, and the main processors where a bitch to program for (only one could access memory at a time, and you needed to do some complex tricks to use both because of it. This lead to a lot of programmers only using 1/2 the Saturn's power). Virtual Fighter 2 may have been amazing, but it was also hand coded in Assembly by Sega's best programmers. Third party venders couldn't really be expected to do that.
It didn't help that Sega of America treated their 3rd party venders like shit. Look up the crap they pulled on Working Designs some time (long story short, Working Designs wanted to sell Sega memory cards to thier users so they's stop bitching about losing saves due to bad memory cards. Sega basically said no/fuck off, and no one's sure why). Oh, and sega kept other 3D fighters out of the US market to decrease compitition with their own games. For a company that relied so much on third party developers in the Genesis days, who knows what the hell they where thinking. One thing's certain, Bernie Stolar will forever be hated by all true Sega fans. After running the company into the ground in the Saturn days he ejected with a nice fat Golden Parachute.
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One of the very best ads I have seen was the once called Apocalypse (sometimes called Thief), featuring a latex catsuit clad female thief battling against Sonic in VR-space.
I have the 60 second ad but have heard there is a 90 second varsion. Does anyone have a copy? I would be very grateful for a copy of it.
The reason is that it is clearly cyberpunk, using tons of Gibsonisms, at high density.
Thanks in advance.
I, myself, preferred Ecco to Sonic. But one thing stands out from the past favorite games: most of them are cute creatures or funny characters with high entertainment values even if the plot is somewhat thin. They are fun to play even as repeats. Sometimes, I think that they were more fun to play with compared to the current games which mostly are violence driven without plots and rely on 3-D graphic rendering. OK, maybe it's not entirely fair, but I think there is a truth to that. Game publishers put too much emphasis on the technology than to the entertainment value of the games.
This is just like saying to the current Sonic Team "This is what you could have been". I think it's about time we dropped the whole "Adventure" crap, Sonic was meant to be fast. The games should go back to that old school side-scrolling style, perhaps even with 3D graphics, and dump all these stupid humans. Mobius was never about humans.
Do you see what I did there?
I think your timeline is a bit off; if I recall correctly, Sonic The Hedgehog was introduced in 1991, the same time the SNES was released; the system didn't have competition for 2 years, but it didn't gain popularity until Sonic either. That said, I would call the Genesis the 2nd place console(dude to Donkey Kong Country in the end), but it certainly wasn't a failure either.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Curse them for releasing all those first-person shooters... like, um... well, there was Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, though those were made by Rare... and, er, Metroid Prime was KIND OF a first person shooter, but not really (just first person perspective)... and...
CURSE THEM FOR ALL THOSE FPSes!
heh, you're right! a library of thousands of games, many of which went on to be classics in their own right are nothing beside Goldeneye 64, Mario 64, and Zelda!
;)
Now I'm going to go play on my halobox--I mean, X-box.
It's been a long time.
Even though at the time I was a Nintendo boy, I enjoyed the original Sonic games (that would be 1 & 2) immensely. Mario's great, but I got more enjoyment trying to zip through green hill in under 30 seconds than I ever did in any mario level. It's the speed, the ability to let loose, that makes the Sonic games so fun.
Well, that and the Casino Zone in Sonic 2 (love playing the slots )
Sounds like the article's full of shit. The Genesis had one 'frame buffer', tile-based, 32 or 40 tiles wide and 14 or 16 tiles high (8x8 tiles). The Genesis, like all pre-3d raster-based systems, drew the image on the fly, basically, from the top of the screen to the bottom. On NTSC Sonic 2, remember that little bit of flickering white shit at the bottom of the screen? That's the game setting up the next frame, by writing the positions of the sprites, setting up the VDP's scroll RAM, and setting up the hblank IRQ in the case of water, for the mid-frame palette changes. Similar crap can be seen inbetween the playfields in 2p mode - that's the game setting up each individual playfield at the point on the screen where it needs it. There is no 'drawing a frame ahead of time' or anything. As the Genesis runs, it draws the tiles for each of the layers and then draws any sprites necessary on the current scanline. The only real advantage was DMA, which could move data from ROM/RAM to the VDP's RAM areas, faster than the 68k could itself. However, this was only really beneficial in areas of the screen without addressable pixel data, as the DMA has to yield to normal VDP behaviors.
I've never heard of the Genesis 'loading one image while drawing another'. If you change the VDP setup midframe, the changes should reflect immediately, or at the very least on the next line, for most things. There is no doublebuffering in hardware, and I'd think it would be quite hard to do software doublebuffering given the VDP's port-based access (even with DMA, you can't really load 64k of VRAM on a oneframed basis, and still actually display the screen).
Hmm, so every machine that doesn't have at least a 90% stranglehold on the market 'fails'? My advice would be don't get into any arguments with Apple fans.
Failure is coming up short, no matter by how much. It doesn't mean "50% or worse" like an "F" grade does in kiddie-school. Sega had goals... and they didn't meet them due to outcompetition. That's failure.
Anyone familiar with Apple would also be familiar with their repeated failures. I don't see that an argument would be necessary to establish this. Today, Apple profits more from selling MP3 players than they do from selling PCs. A much younger company, Dell, has eaten through and surpassed their market share, and taken their niche.
Sega has been similarly outcompeted. Today, they're strictly a collection of software devs that can no longer effectively compete in their old primary market. It's entirely possible that Sega will become a subsidiary of a larger corporation in the near future.
If that's your definition of success, I guess Atari was also "successful".