So I went into one of my 3 local GAME stores(All 3 in the SAME shopping centre, why?) today and noticed they had display boxes for Sonic Chronicles all over the counter with the full box art and a 5th September release date sticker on the front. I snapped a couple of pics of the front and back covers for you guys to see.

Look’s like Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection has been scrapped as there’s no logo but there is the multi-card wireless 1-2 player connection logo on the back for close-by connecting, so no Chao trading over the interwebz. Another Sonic game rush job? It’s also odd that they put a screenshot of Green Hill on the back with the older more detailed map in the top screen rather than the newer cartoony simpler design.

For those who can’t quite read the text on the back cover it says -

“A brand new journey of battles, exploration and discovery!

Select your team of sonic and his friends to fight new enemies.
Explore new worlds and defeat a mysterious new menace.
Explore over 20 areas with up to eleven new characters.
Defeat enemies with combo power moves.
Collect and trade Chao with friends.”

aisha13 over at the Official Nintendo Magazine forums is also reporting that the latest Argos catalogue has Sonic Chronicles down for this new 5th September release date. Let’s hope this new date is true so we can get our filthy hands on the game next week but lets hope this doesn’t mean the game’s been rushed.

In other news, Bioware have released the 3rd of their video insider episodes, you can check it out here.

Ahh, that’s great. So…this may be a question you answered long ago, but when Sonic was created, Sega, as I understand, wanted a mascot. So how were the three of you chosen, or were you just coming up with this yourselves? Like, Ohshima, Naka and yourself.

HY: Like, how we wound up choosing between an armadillo and a hedgehog?

Did they tell you three to do it, or did they say “OK, everybody at Sega, come up with an idea”?

HY: No, it was just us three, and the mission statement was just “You guys have to make a mascot for Sega.”

How many design iterations and ideas did you go through before you came up with this?

HY: Well, in the very beginning, the project staff consisted entirely of Naka and Ohshima, back before I joined them. The main thing Naka had thought up at that time was a game engine that scrolled really, really fast — the problem after that was to figure out what kind of game we could make with that.

We didn’t have any game at that time, so we had to think about that first. I thought it’d be enough to have a game where you ran really fast, but we couldn’t get anything to work. Naka was really adamant about the idea that the game should be playable with one button, since Mario needed two — jump, and run or attack.

My response to that was that if you have only one button, then all you can do is jump, so we need to find some way the player can attack at the same time. So our character needed some way to deal damage just by jumping, and from there, we came up with the idea that he should roll himself up into a ball while in the air. I think that was how we first started off.

Did Sega want the mascot to be specifically popular in the US?
HY: Yes, that’s true.

Is that why he’s red, white and blue?

HY: Well, he’s blue because that’s the color of Sega [the Sega logo].

Oh! But then, the red and white shoes…

HY: Well, that…hmm, that I’m not sure about; you may want to ask Ohshima about that.

Okay. Someday, I’d love to.

HY: Maybe there was that sort of meaning, since we definitely were trying to make this popular in America.

I also heard that originally, when Sonic would get hit, the rings would not come out. Is that true? And then that was later implemented to make it more interesting.

HY: Well, I think the way rings shot out of you when you got hit was there from the beginning. But the Genesis’s power means that you can only show so many rings at once, so we experimented a lot at first with having the rings flash and not overlap with each other and so on.

After a while, though, we realized that having a ton of rings onscreen would be a selling point — it’d show how cool the Genesis was, and it was visually interesting. So we tried our hardest to make that happen.

You can read the full 5 page interview here, it’s an interesting read.

The ring scatter thing is interesting too, now we know why only so many of your rings scatter rather than all of them. That would be alot for any console to handle. I’d never thought of Sonic’s colours symbolizing the U.S. flag before, could that be true? Share your views at the SSMB here.

When it came down to gameplay, the physics are similar to Sonic Panic, in that they are manageable and are not intrusive to the action. A much needed improvement that I noticed this year was the beefed-up spin-dash. It only takes one touch of the space bar to power up Sonic to full speed and that is a godsend, in my opinion. The core gameplay experience does not twist the fun, but there are a few questionable gameplay choices that will. For example, ring loss is, apparently, absent. Sure, it happens, but I cannot collect any rings. None.

Time Twisted, as stated earlier, takes after Sonic CD and its time travel element. In previous years, I did not think there was a reason for the time travel, as Overbound, the creator, might not have thought of a purpose for it at the time. That said, now that development is three years in, there should be a reason why I should even bother going back to the past. I had to destroy something in the past levels of Sonic CD, so there was a reward for keeping my speed up in the present. Here, I am simply unmotivated to brave the journey through time. Time Twisted treats this feature like a novelty and it feels phoned in for the sake of having time travel while other fangames do not.

Now, to bring up the topic of “motivation” once more to discuss the level design. The level design just does not flow enough to allow me to keep my momentum up to allow time travel, with Sonic getting nailed by a poorly placed badnik, wall, or loop (which causes deceleration and City Edge has lots of loops). That said, when it does allow me to, I do not want to time travel. Most of the time, I ended up time traveling during the straightaways at the end of the level after failing to do so the entire time. If the levels were a tad more open, as they feel confined right now, I think it would allow for greater use of the time travel feature. Perplex Puzzle is probably the most guilty of a claustrophobic feel and it was hard to get anything going. That, and I noticed a distinct lack of water physics.

Now, onto the new content, Majestic Mine. What an aggravating level it is to play. The first thing you will be confronted with is a blue badnik on green foreground. There is not enough contrast to notice the badnik and it will probably slap players upside the head on more than one occasion. Second, the badnik that shoots you with laser-beam eyes will hit you before you even see it on screen. Finally, the level lets you build up speed, only for it to send you careening into rotating spike balls or more contrast-less/laser-shooting badniks. These three things happen way too often and I made it to the end of the zone after dying about 10 times.

The aspect bringing any redeeming quality to the game is the use of level-specific gimmicks and the graphics. There are a few objects to interact in Majestic Mine and Perplex Puzzle and they add a spark of personality to each level. Graphically, Perplex Puzzle takes the prize for having the most foreground variety, but it was not that hard. The other two, for a large majority, just repeat the same tile over and over again. To close out the graphics discussion, there is no parallax whatsoever, resulting in a static scene.

In the sound department, there is only one key annoyance: Sonic landing. Sonic has to jump…a lot. To hear a click with every return to solid ground is, quite frankly, the most irritating part of the demo. Clicking aside, sound effects are fine. Musically, the zone themes sample from rock and roll tunes, so there is a common theme in that department. However, the Sonic CD invincibility, super shoe, and end level themes utilized are considerably louder than the zone themes, so some leveling out is in order. Majestic Mine’s theme sounds low quality, too.

In short, Time Twisted takes a step backwards with each zone. City Edge has been bearable for two years now, but Perplex Puzzle and Majestic Mine just are there to gradually frustrate you more. Badnik placement is at Terror Alert Level Red and the foregrounds need some sort of spark to keep them interesting. It is fantastic that there is more content than most other fangames, but when the quality is this flawed, the quantity becomes a moot point. Hopefully, the game can get its act together before its next release, or else the project will become a thing of the past.

VISIT TIME TWISTED’S SAGE BOOTH.

Upon hearing the news, Sonic promptly dashed off to his local Woolworths to lay down his pre-order. His store is in Louth, it appears.

Want Sonic Unleashed when released in November? Of course you do! What if you’re running a little low on pennies though?

Well not to fear because UK retailer ‘Woolworths’ has an offer you just can’t possibly refuse! The online website for the company currently has Sonic Unleashed on PS2 up for pre-order at the most convenient of prices, £17.99. The PS2 version of the game may not posses graphical awe like on next generation consoles, although Dimps has issued a helping hand with development and the concept remains the same.

If that isn’t the bargain of all bargains we don’t know what is.

Thanks to bcdcdude for alerting us on the forums earlier today!

Aye, naturally the controls will be slightly different. What I mean is that the basic game and levels will be the same on each version.

I don’t know what the Wii controls are as yet because I didn’t go hands on with it. I believe it’s movement with the analogue stick though. I’ll be getting to play it in a week or two so I’ll let you know.

Incidentally, a couple of people have mentioned to me that other sites have complained about the 360 version’s framerate. This game is still in early stages of development: please don’t think for a second that the finished game will have the noticeable framerate problems the demo I played did.

Link

Chris had recently been to GDC Leipzig to try out the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed but unfortunately when he got there he was told by a Sega rep that the Wii demo isn’t working and got directed to the Xbox 360 demo instead.

Here are his brief impressions of the Xbox 360 version -

Unfortunately the Wii version wasn’t working but I was assured that other than the obvious graphical limitations, it’s exactly the same game as the 360 version with exactly the same levels, so I played that instead. I can’t talk about the graphics obviously, but the controls are great: it reminded me of the first Sonic Adventure because you actually have some control over Sonic now and it’s not so frustrating. Finally, a good Sonic 3D platformer! Um, except the werehog sections. I didn’t like those so much. They seemed too basic and slow. Anyway, not bad at all.

Link

We’ll be keeping an eye on ONM like a rabid Nintendo fan for more updates

Here’s ArchangelUK’s Blognik update -

Hi guys, letting you know that Sonic now has his very own official Facebook page - http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Sonic/23050342417

Join and we’ll keep you up to date with things, also we’ll be running Facebook specific competititions so worth you joining eh?

If you were already a member of the unofficial Sonic page or any specific Sonic page baring the Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Chronicles ones you should get transfered over in the next couple of days or so by Facebook so don’t worry.

Blognik entry

Sonic’s Facebook page

Good ‘ol AAUK, isn’t he just grand to the community.

At the time of writing Sonic’s Facebook page already has 2,945 ‘Fans’ as members who join the page are known as. That’s alot of members in just the one day it’s been open. If your a Sonic fan and a closet Facebooker go check out the page and register yourself a fan now.

On the heels of GameVideo’s off screen video, Gamekyo has come up with their own video. While the quality isn’t quite as good, what with all the people walking between the camera and the screen, this video does help add some persepective to just how many different paths there are in Unleash’s first level. At the very least, it looks like this game will have some nice replay value.

Sonic’s big RPG debut is only a month away, and BioWare’s getting us Sonic fans ready for it via a series of YouTube videos on their own Youtube channel. It’s good to have a video to explain just how this game works. For those younger Sonic fans, unitiated in the ways of the RPG genre, this video should give them a clue of what their in for.

Sega have released yet another new trailer for upcoming Nintendo DS RPG title Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. This latest trailer showcases a few POW moves and how their pulled off. The trailer continues the dramatic music heard in previous trailers and ends with a battle against the Zoah displaying a team POW move using Amy’s hammer swinging abilities which look’s quite cool. The trailer is an American one and finally gives you guys a release month of September but no actual date yet though unfortunately.

Source: Gamespot

Game Videos have posted a cool off-screen video of Sonic Unleashed in action at Leipzig’s Game Convention. The most notable about this video - despite the fact that you can see for yourself how awesome it’s looking with it’s alternate paths - is the rather random first appearance of a new character called Chip. Now, remember when we broke news that Sonic Unleashed would add a new character to the series? Looks like we totally called it, but we never thought Sega would reveal his/it existence so unceremoniously. Seriously, we’d have thought there’d be some sort of super-announcement for it or something.

Chip, from what we’ve seen and heard, appears to be some sort of tutorial pal and may well be integral to the story. Long as he doesn’t say a damn word during levels (so far so good) and stays on a totally platonic relationship with Sonic, I think we’ll be OK. Seems kinda cute actually. I hope Sega are as careful with Chip in consideration for future games as they have been with Blaze and Marine and not, for example, Shadow, however. I wouldn’t want to see this purple thing in every Sonic game since.

Check out Sonic’s assessment of his ranking at the end of the level with Chip, and the proceeding breakdance once he’s discovered he got an ‘S’ ranking. Pure Sonic gold, that is.