92 posts tagged with sega.
Displaying 1 through 50 of 92. Subscribe:
10 Years of Jeremy Parish's Works Projects
Jeremy Parish, dedicated game journalist and Retronaut, and creator of design deep dives, has been covering Gameboy (1989, gaiden), Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001), NES (1985, 1986, 1987, 1998, 1999, gaiden), SNES (1991, extra, gaiden), N64 (1996), Sega, Virtual Boy and Metroidvania games now for ten years! His terrific and scholarly videos don't get nearly the views that much less worthy series get, so please give them a try if you have any interest in this area.
a cyberfunk love-letter to Jet Set Radio
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Better Red than dead [Shack News] “Set in a funky, futuristic New Amsterdam, the world of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is ruled by crews of graffiti artists-slash-DJs-slash-superheroes(?). The constant power struggle is a bid to become “All City,” the top of the top. You start as Faux, someone seemingly crucial to the current rankings. But before you can escape a mysterious holding cell and figure out what’s up, another crew leader lops your head off with weaponized vinyl. You wake up with a new (robot) head, a new name (Red) and a new crew, and set off to get your head back and become All City on the way. [...] If you’re an old school Segahead, there are definitely a few holes in your heart in need of filling. Jet Set Radio, which hasn’t seen a new game since the Xbox, is one of the biggest. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has appeared like a beacon of hope to fill that void, and it does so while bringing new stuff to the table. This game is like a long-lost Dreamcast game in so many different ways, and most of them are good. Clearly, the developers at Team Reptile understand the concept of love.” [Launch Trailer][Gameplay Trailer]
high melodrama, ultra-violence, and slapstick comedy
How To Get Into the Ever-Growing Yakuza Series [Game Informer] It's never been a better time to be a Yakuza fan – if only due to the sheer amount of Yakuza games there are. Across the mainline series, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has released 15+ Yakuza games since 2005. But with that kind of output, it can be a little confusing to know where to start and in what order you should play the games (spoiler: not in release order or chronological order!). [Yakuza (franchise) wiki] [more inside]
he had a good run
Paper models of older computers
"Construct the computer from your childhood or build an entire computer museum at home with these paper models, free to download and share." via Ian Visits.
"CYBERBULLETS CAUSE NO PAIN!!"
How Games Marketing Invented Toxic Gamer Culture [Vice Games] How early marketing campaigns for online gaming platforms suggested toxicity isn't a bug, it's a feature.
“Companies like Microsoft and Sony frequently marketed toxicity as a key selling point for their new online gaming platforms. This is a puzzling strategy from the vantage point of 2020, a time when toxicity is practically synonymous with online gaming and too often spills over into real-world harassment. Perhaps these campaigns were eerily prescient in anticipating the downward spiral of gaming culture. Or maybe these edgy advertisements modeled the exact brand of toxicity that the same companies are now struggling to curb.”
Everyone's Hedgehog
According to furry historian Colin Spacetwinks in an article for New York Magazine (previously, Sonic the Hedgehog is a pop culture paradox - extremely specific in his design, yet also the ultimate blank slate who can be anything to anyone. So its fitting that after Shrek Retold, the collaborative remake of Shrek (previously), 3GI have done the same to the Sonic movie. No, not that one - the 90's direct-to-video animated movie, an oddball installment, even in a franchise consisting mostly of them. The result: Sonic Rebuilt.
Gotta Go Fa(n/st)!
Sonic the Hedgehog is unique. Not only is Sega one of the only two companies with a fangame community that it tolerates (the other being Capcom via Mega Man fangames), but it can be argued that Sonic IS its fandom - a fandom that thrives despite multiple unpopular games while other franchises can be killed by just one. Will there ever be a good 3D Sonic game? The answer: Sonic Robo Blast 2, the Genesis-inspired 3D Sonic fangame (over 20 years of devtime - begun before Sonic Adventure came out!) using a modified Doom source port, recently getting its biggest update yet. In addition to the main game, with its action, exploration, SA-style emblems, Chaos Emeralds and unlockables, mods have been made for it, too - see a bunch after the jump, plus instructions for running them. [more inside]
🩸
Nearly 30 years ago, Mortal Kombat’s blood forever changed the video game industry [Polygon] “Mortal Kombat’s fatalities were so graphic that they had to literally be seen to be believed. One kid would hold court on a playground and strive to convince a jury of peers that he’d seen one character rip off his face and breathe fire, reducing the other guy to ashes and bones. Another kid swore up and down that a fighter in a white jumpsuit and straw hat could zap characters’ heads off with a bolt of lightning. “That breeds interest and foot traffic,” later GamePro editor Dan Amrich said of the rumors surrounding MK’s gory finishing moves, “and before you know it, you have people looking closer because that controversial thrill was so unexpected. And that’s going to be very powerful with kids whose media is largely — and rightfully! — gatekept by their parents. Here’s a game you’re know you’re ‘not supposed to play,’ even if you haven’t been strictly forbidden to play it. It tapped into the lure of the forbidden.”” [more inside]
The 2019 Sonic The Hedgehog film trailer has finally landed
and yeah it's a .. uhm.. trailer. Due for release in December 2019, the film features - as part of an ensemble cast - James Marsden, Jim Carrey, and Ben Schwartz as the voice of Sonic. [more inside]
“Oh snap! It's ToeJam and Earl.”
ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove [YouTube] “The original ToeJam & Earl turns 28 this year. Released for the Sega Genesis in 1991, the roguelike adventure game features two wacky aliens with big personalities and a passion for bass-heavy funk. The game didn’t sell remarkably well when it first came out, but its unique aesthetic and Saturday morning cartoon-style humor set it apart and helped to give it long-lasting cult appeal. Unfortunately, any momentum it might have had was torpedoed by a series of lackluster sequels. Now, thanks to a $500,000 Kickstarter campaign, non-traditional investors, and years of additional development time, gaming’s favorite aliens have returned. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is outstanding.” [via: Polygon]
SAVE? ● YES ○ NO
Saved, But Not Forgotten: The evolution of saving in video games, from the password to the cloud, and nearly every obscure memory card format in-between. [Tedium] “Earlier this year, a Twitter user named Paul Hubans shared a screenshot from his 87-year-old grandmother’s long-running Animal Crossing session; after four years of daily play, she had logged 3,580 hours—nearly 150 days—of total playtime. Being able to save progress in a game and return to it later has enabled some amazingly deep experiences. It wasn’t always like this, so how did we get here? Let’s find out by taking a look back at the history of saved games.” [more inside]
Off-White Game Boy with the Planet Hollywood logo printed on it
Console Variations collects pictures and information about limited-edition versions of video game consoles.
“Don't hug me. Go play with it!”
The gift of gaming: the joys of getting a console for Christmas [The Guardian] “We all remember that one Christmas present we got as a kid. The one we’d begged our parents for all year, the one we’d looked up 100 times in the Argos catalogue or on Amazon, depending on our age … For many of us, that present was a games machine. Whether it was a ZX Spectrum or a PlayStation 2, the process of unpacking these technological marvels, getting our mums and dads to set them up, then finally playing with the whole family, was magical.” [more inside]
“Sega Dreamcast at 20: the futuristic games console that came too soon”
The Guardian: “The Dreamcast, in its first two years, saw a burst of creativity and gameplay innovation that has perhaps never been surpassed. Sega’s talented internal development teams were utterly inspired. Games such as the urban skating adventure Jet Set Radio, the fast-paced puzzler Chu-Chu Rocket, the massively multiplayer role-playing adventure Phantasy Star Online and the open-world masterpiece Shenmue introduced whole new forms and conventions of interactive entertainment. There were astonishing arcade conversions in the shape of Crazy Taxi and Soul Calibur; there were oddities including the subaquatic life sim, Seaman, and the zombie-infested keyboard tutorial, Typing of the Dead.”
The bytes used in this post could be used to make an entire level
GameHut is the personal YouTube channel of industry veteran and Traveller's Tales founderJon Burton, featuring short, yet thoroughly explained programming tricks and behind the scenes material from his career, such as how TT accomplished the FMV intro on Sonic 3D for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the super smooth SEGA logo on the same game, the origins of the bizarre game cartridge wobbling "cheat" to select levels, how they squeezed the minimum possible space to draw Sonic, and well as coming back to the game to fix some common grievances towards the game, and releasing those changes as an xdelta patch as the Directors' Cut. [more inside]
tea and mealworms
Reading the Old Testament of Sonic The Hedgehog
Let me tell you about a little thing known as “The Sonic Bible,” a beautiful, wonderful and bonkers version of Sonic lore developed by Sega of America. The Sonic Bible was an internal document made during Sonic the Hedgehog’s localization that invented a backstory for the world and characters of the game. Sega of America developed the document because Sega’s Japanese headquarters hadn’t provided them with any original lore—a common situation at the time, but possibly a result of the ongoing disputes and rivalry between the two branches.[more inside]
NOW YOU'RE PLAYING WITH ALL OF THE POWER
“This is the stuff childhood dreams are made of.”
You can now buy a pair of Nintendo-themed Air Jordans for $1250 [Moneyish] [Pepsi Nintendo Blue] “Only ten pairs of the Jordan “NES” IVs will be made, but at $1,250 each, they aren’t cheap (FreakerSneaks is selling an “NBA Jam”-themed pair of kicks at a similar price.) That said, though the shoes weren’t made with the imprimatur of Nintendo, FreakerSneaks knows there’s a market of now wealthy Gen Xers who grew up playing NES that will be willing to shell out.” [more inside]
Duke it from obit
Aliens: Colonial Marines (prev) is a 2013 FPS developed by Gearbox for Sega, that promised an immersive experience in the Alien universe, but after a troubled development cycle was widely panned at release, with the inexplicably poor AI of the enemies being a common target for complains.
More than five years later, a modder working on the game discovered a single-word typo that prevented some of the AI code of the xenomorphs to be executed, making the game ever so slightly better. (Via)
BEEP BOOP DING DING BWOOONG BEEP BOOP DING DING BWOOONG
SEGA Mega Drive Classics Launch Music Video by Eclectic Method [YouTube] “A collaboration with Eclectic Method. The trailer features an original track of classic 16-bit sounds composed solely of memorable thwacks, zings and booms from fan-favourite SEGA Mega Drive titles, which plays alongside visuals of landmark locations and famous characters found in the collection.”
Let's Not Play
Idle Animations, depending on who you ask, are either the animation a video game character plays when no input is given, or the animation played when no input has been received for while. Read what a number of game developers have to say about their favorites, or maybe you'd just like to sit through 20-odd minutes of sprites killing time.
"It makes me really happy to know that people still remember the game"
"I think I was inspired by Nausicaä. I like that movie and watched it many times. I didn’t want to admit it, but I think it did affect my design. In regards to Dune, I actually only saw it for the first time a couple weeks ago. Many people have mentioned similarities between Panzer Dragoon and Dune, so I finally watched it. I was very impressed with the product design in the movie."
Panzer Dragoon Saga: An oral history
Welcome To The Next Level
Two Guys Making New Sega CD Jewel Cases Are In An Accidental War "The cases didn’t stay shut, for example—there was no “click” that held the front cover in place when it was closed. If you tried to insert the piece of protective foam that originally came inside a Sega CD or a Saturn case, plus a manual and a disc, all those contents wouldn’t quite fit inside the case without the front bulging out. The problem that everyone seemed to bring up was that the black inner tray that held the discs sat loosely in the clear outer tray, and if you turned the case over, the tray would likely fall out."
The Ice Cap Zone discovery shocked me, at least.
Turns out there's perhaps even more than we thought to the "Michael Jackson made music for Sonic 3" thing.
Previously.
“This is 'Sonic,' pure and distilled.”
Sonic Mania: The Return to Form You've Been Waiting For [The Verge] “For years, Sonic has been in need of a shake-up. Ever since the 16-bit era ended, the iconic mascot has struggled through one console generation after another. Some of his post-Genesis adventures were terrible, a handful were good, but most were aggressively mediocre — a sorry state for one of the biggest names in the medium. While Super Mario evolved over the years with inventive new takes on platform games, its longtime rival stagnated. Sonic has remained an enduring brand, thanks to comics and cartoons, but it hasn’t been an important force in gaming for some time. Sonic Mania has been billed as a return to form for the series. It’s far from the first game to claim that mantle, so it’s easy to be skeptical. But Mania is different than its predecessors. Most notably, it brings the series back to what made it so popular in the first place: blazing-fast side-scrolling action.” [YouTube] [Trailer] [more inside]
Rag Rappy Ad Astra
"One of the biggest things I can think of off the top of my head is when my grandfather died. It was a Thursday in winter. I was living at school at the time. When I got the phone call, I needed to be alone at first, so I went home and cried. It sounds weird, but after that I needed to hear people talking. So I logged onto the voice chat here, and just sat in and listed to the banter and bickering. I logged in and did a run or two with some friends. And by the end of the night when I went to sleep, I was feeling much better." | Wes Fenlon writes about Phantasy Star Online and the people still playing SEGA's first MMO nearly 17 years later. [more inside]
“...perfect for running, driving, flying or ring collecting.”
OC ReMix Presents Speeding Towards Adventures: 25 Years of Sonic the Hedgehog! [Overclocked Remix] On the final day of Sonic's 25th anniversary year (gotta go fast!), OverClocked ReMix today released its 62nd free community arrangement album, Speeding Towards Adventures: 25 Years of Sonic the Hedgehog. Featuring 23 tracks from 30 artists, Speeding Towards Adventures pays tribute to numerous titles from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and is co-directed by Russian community member Stepan "Black_Doom" Sudilovsky & Dutch musician Jorrith "Jorito" Schaap. The album is available for free download. [more inside]
TOTALLY STOAKED = VERY HAPPY!
Remember awesome Mario miscellany Tumblr Supper Mario Broth? (Previously) Here's some equal time for the other side of the console war: Sonic the Hedgeblog! SPECIAL STAGE: Sonic Retro's epic list of romhacks. [more inside]
Behold the Precious Wings
Saori Kobayashi is best known as the composer for the Panzer Dragoon series of games and its kind-of-cousin Crimson Dragon, but in addition to numerous other soundtracks, she also produces original music albums as a solo artist and with Yumiko Takahashi (Suikoden) as "AKANE." Soaring, strange and anachronistic, Kobayashi's music blends traditional Japanese composition with electronic elements to create a dreamlike future folk music from that borderless country, Imagination. [more inside]
Sega Digitizes What Nintendon't
Let's play Global Thermonuclear War: lasting impacts of WarGames
If, after the media dubbed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (YT video, Wikipedia) as "Star Wars" (transcript) in 1983, you might quesiton his concerns triggered from another movie mere months later. But after watching WarGames, he was informed that "the problem is much worse than you think." WarGames was that accurate thanks in part to input in the script from an engineer named Willis Ware, who had concerns about network security (PDF) for decades before the movie. Reagan's fears lead to the first cybersecurity directive from any U.S. President and the first concerns about the NSA's potential role in "data base oversight" (Google books preview), as well as an attempt to regulate teenagers and teenaged technology (Gbp) that impacts US internet use to this day. And then there was the USSR computer program that nearly triggered WWIII. What a year. [more inside]
In a seedy basement laboratory...
The Sega Saturn is a home video game console that was released in 1994, and in the subsequent 20+ years many of the Saturn CD drives have failed. But a tinkerer known as Dr Abrasive has finally cracked the console's DRM. This in-depth video of his process is technical, but probably/hopefully interesting even for non-programmers.
Also a stealth documentary on young white people fashion in the 90s
It's 1996 and you've been hired as a game tester by Sega's Test Department. How will you get acquainted with the corporate culture? Lucky for you, Sega has commissioned a "trainumentary": This is SEGA TEST
"Sonic was alive and breathing, and Sonic was our friend."
Sonic the Hedgehog's Long, Great, Rocky History by Blake Hester [Polygon]
Sonic the Hedgehog has stood as an institution for Sega for more than two decades, a cultural icon with mass marketing abilities. He has appeared in dozens of games, numerous action figures and hundreds of comics. He’s had five television series and even his own tubes of toothpaste and cans of spaghetti. To date, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has collectively sold over 140 million copies, with some games regarded as some of the best of all time and others some of the worst.[more inside]
JET SET RADIOOOOOOOOOOOO
Did Michael Jackson write the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3?
Featuring "Diligent Cube" and "Gary Kasparov’s Extreme Beach Chess"
DEAR SEGA
A fan takes a look at the downturn of Sonic the Hedgehog, and presents some ideas on how to breathe new life into the franchise. [SLYT]
Kings of the beat and their all-star show!
Deavid Soul ("The Avid Soul") aka "Rich & Famous" are a Japanese duo who make house/disco/funk and, more recently, world music. You may remember them from such Dreamcast darlings as Jet Set Radio and Jet "Grind" Radio. Their style is an instantly recognizable mix of 90s house and classic disco with copious samples from hip hop, disco, R&B, reggae and 80s/70s film. For their latest album, they've collaborated with Exotic Light Orchestra to add a Latin American fusion sound to their already eclectic aural soup. They're real good. [more inside]
Aww yeah, this is happenin’!
During that same era, I had an insatiable addiction to Latin freestyle
Part 4 of an interview with noted video game developer M2, upon the completion of Outrun 3D, the latest on a series of 'SEGA 3D Classics', in which games from the golden era of arcades are meticulously ported to the Nintendo 3DS (!!) handheld system using a variety of interesting, fairly obsessive techniques. [more inside]
Tower of Power
"Brandon Sheffield, Gamasutra editor and director of Necrosoft Games, took to Vine last night to show the world what exactly happens when 13 Sonic & Knuckles cartridges are plugged into one another in a Human Centipede-esque disaster." (Warning: 30 Vine videos playing in one browser window.)
Counting Roses
Tomorrow: NiGHTS into Dreams on the N64
Remember playing Super Mario World on your Sega Genesis? Probably not, considering it's a rather rare bootleg. Well, thanks to the efforts of some determined gamers, you can now play it at home, although only on the Gens Plus GX emulator on the Wii (or through the Gens core via RetroArch.) [via]
Grab yourself a snack and a glass of orange juice
The Top Ten Hottest Female Sonic [the Hedgehog] Characters: You might not have realized this but the Sonic universe might also be classified as "Hot Chick Heaven". Hotties include Cream the Rabbit, who is "attractive and the size of an average human mother"; Princess Sally Acorn, who not only didn't wear clothes in the comic but also "grew very long hair and married Sonic in the future"; and not one, but two echidnas: "What's better than having a female with cascading quills? How about a female with cascading quills and hair?" Curiously, the list ignores the beautiful Fiona Fox, who readers will remember was Tails' first (robotic) love, and whose rusting prompted the legendary 1995 Tails Miniseries.
Looking Back With Virtual Boy Tinted Glasses
Classic Video Game Ads
This great Flickr album of classic video game advertisements is a nostalgia overdose for those of us who read video-game magazines in the 80s and 90s. From classic ads like the "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" ad to ads for Pac Man, The Simpsons, Super Mario Brothers 2 and ye olde Atari Lynx, this helps you relive the glory days of the medium, when even the ads were entertaining. And for those of you who never got to experience gaming magazines in their heyday, check out this entire copy of the first issue on Nintendo Power (PDF) from way back in 1988. And then get off my lawn.
Juu'nen hayain da yo!
"Designed to be understood easily, these training videos are meant for new players and for those who want to see what's new in Final Showdown." As part of their promotion for Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, released June 5/6 for PSN and XBLA, SEGA created surprisingly good tutorial videos to ease new players into the gameplay system of the latest iteration of AM2's Virtua Fighter series. [more inside]
I'm sorry!
VGJUNK looks at "Gonbee no I'm Sorry", a strange Japanese arcade maze game released in 1985 by Banpresto and Sega that mocked notoriously corrupt former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei "Shogun of Darkness" Tanaka, who was convicted in 1983 of taking 1.8 million dollars from Lockheed Martin in exchange for letting them sell planes to the national airline.
Page:
1 2