All the S@nics - the end

[kurt91]

Somebody in the video comments had a good point.

Eggman sent out a worldwide broadcast. He stated that he was in space, and had the Eclipse Cannon. He fired said cannon at the moon, blasting it in two. This cannon is powered by Chaos Emeralds.

Not only did Tails have to "deduce" that the Chaos Emeralds were no longer on-planet, but he chased down and broke into the President's limo to track Eggman's call and find out that Eggman is not only in space like he said he was, but also at the location where the Eclipse Cannon that he fired is located. All of this work, and pissing off the government further, just to discover information that was already specifically given by Eggman himself.

And you can't even argue that it might have been a mis-translation or poorly-worded, and that the crew was actually hunting down the Pyramid Base that holds a connection to Space Colony ARK. Like raocow pointed out, Knuckles was the one who led the group there, the rest of all of this had nothing to do with it.

On another note, absolutely nobody seemed surprised that Knuckles just popped out of a sewer. Does Knuckles just pop out of weird places with no explanation on a regular basis (Suddenly the fridge scene from "Helluva Boss" comes to mind), or are we already at the "We've fought living water monsters, knocked the same space station out of orbit half-a-dozen times, time-traveled so many times that we really should have invested in lottery tickets, navigated a fortress built out of pinball tables, and all shared a mass group-hallucination where we were more interested in beating the daylights out of each other due to arguments over Monopoly games instead of a villain who also took a strange interest in said Monopoly arguments instead of his own scheme. We've stopped questioning logic at this point, just roll with whatever crazy stuff comes up." stage now?

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

I don't have much to say here; I just wanted to mention that I love the way Knuckles just pops out of the sewers here, and seeing raocow's reaction to it was also pretty great.

[TiKi]

Knuckles' very first appearance WAS popping out of the ground...

[Mata Hari]

Hello my name is Mark President, before you ask, it's actually short for Marchael

[Heavy Sigh]

Fun Sega Facts! *Electronic Antagonism*

While the throwaway and incremental nature of sports titles are derided, their incredible popularity is not something any console can do without. It was the genre of gaming that buttressed the Sega Genesis in North America all the way up to its discontinuation, and was a key reason to side with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox over the Gamecube. More importantly, Sega spent a great deal of time in North America marketing their systems as a home for sports games - with advertising that featured NFL players, and much closer ties with sports giants like EA.

But this all fell apart with the Dreamcast. For Sega's newest console, then president/CEO Bernie Stolar was looking to revive the old Sega Sports brand on the Dreamcast, and had just bought studio Visual Concepts for 10$ million to make it happen. Then he approached EA president Larry Probst to get their support for Dreamcast.

All three branches of EA (development, sales, and business), were wary of SEGA's new console, as not only had their previous releases like the 32X and Saturn flopped, much of the info they had gleaned about the Dreamcast was not promising. But while things like SEGA's broken contract with graphics chip manufacturer 3DFX over the Dreamcast's chipset and the subsequent new chipset being a non-standard pain to develop for, plus their constant flip flopping over shipping with a modem had them worried, they weren't dealbreakers, and EA had made it big off the back of the Genesis.

But if they were going to support SEGA and its dire financial situation, they didn't want to share what could be a lucrative new market. To get them on Dreamcast, they wanted full sports title exclusivity. Bernie refused, arguing that there was room on the system for both first party titles and EA's offerings, even offering lower royalty payments, but Probst wouldn't have it. SEGA would go it alone, and EA was not confident SEGA would succeed, with EA's Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon telling the press "Dreamcast can't succeed without EA". (This would be quite funny in hindsight when the global president of EA, John Riccitello kept bleating out statements like "Dreamcast won't sell even 1 million units over its lifetime", something it did in three weeks, or that EA would only support it if it sold over 5 million units, something done by at latest April 2000)

At the time, Gordon's statement was an absolute hammer blow to the Dreamcast before it even launched, as many developers (and consumers) took one look at the fact that EA, one of SEGA's biggest partners, was walking away from Dreamcast, and pulled back from supporting SEGA's new console. Even as Visual Concepts managed to produce genuinely knockout hits, they were based around popular North American sports like Football, Baseball, and Basketball, leaving the Dreamcast without acceptable titles for others sports games like golf, or extremely critically, soccer.

For the world's most popular sport, The Dreamcast lacked games that could surpass the likes of FIFA. Earlier homegrown attempts such as UEFA Striker, Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000 and Sega's own Virtua Striker 2 Ver. 2000.1 laboured under mixed reviews by critics (though Virtua Striker 2 was more of an arcade game with a soccer ball in it than a standard 'simulation type' sports game) and middling sales. Even when Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000: Euro Edition was released, most reviwers only conceded it was an improvement over previous SEGA soccer games, and exhorted consumers to get better experiences on N64 or Playstation. Every single missing or even subpar game bit SEGA deep in their rapidly shrinking pocketbook, and even the games they did have required significant investment, though at least that bore fruit in commercially and critically acclaimed titles.

(Though there was some modest schadenfreude on SEGA's part as EA's stock tanked in late 1999, thanks to poor N64 sales and flooding the PS1 market, and again in the PS2's launch period when EA couldn't sell over 300,000 units on the most hyped console of all time.)

But then, by 2001, there was no more time to invest in more first-party solutions to third-party problems. A lack of investment meant the firm had to pull out of events such as Tokyo Game Show 2000 Autumn and Tokyo Game Show 2001 Spring, and it all culminated on Jan 31st, 2001. Where SEGA announced that the Dreamcast was dead, and, behind closed doors, so was SEGA.

Fun Level Facts!

Big's not far off the beaten path in Hidden Base! Once you get past a trio of collapsing platforms, you'll see statues being built on either side of the path. Big's sitting on the scaffolding of the statue on the right.

[Grounder]

seems to me that this level would have been way easier if tails got out of his plane-mech for a bit

[raocow]

imagine how easy it would be to 'scout' a place if you could do so from the air

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

I always thought that the implication was that Tails was clearing the way for everyone else. After all, even though you don't play as them here Sonic, Knuckles, and Amy have to get to the entrance somehow, and with all the enemies in this stage it seems clear that Eggman is keeping his base heavily defended.

Anyway, this is a level that I didn't really like when I first played this game, but I've started to appreciate it over time. Looking at it, I don't see anything I would have taken issue with; I think I just didn't like desert levels in video games when I was young. Actually there is one other thing; I used to dislike the way that giving animals to your chao would change their appearance, and so I'd always just give them the chaos drives from the gun robots. This level though is mostly populated with Eggman's robots, especially towards the end, meaning you'll most likely end this stage with an inventory full of animals.

[Mata Hari]

Skunks don't actually smell any more than any other mammal! Their stench is only unleashed when they spray, and they only do this if they feel threatened. Some people keep them as pets! In the UK, where I am native, it is legal to do so, but it is illegal to have their scent glands removed as it's considered unnecessary surgery. And to upset one enough for it to spray at you would have to be an actively bad person, especially since they give plenty of warning beforehand.

Those are my skunk fax

[Mata Hari]

[BobisOnlyBob]

And to upset one enough for it to spray at you would have to be an actively bad person

or an excessively curious dog, which is a problem as skunks warn by raising their tails. This is why dogs have a longstanding to the point of infamous habit of getting sprayed by wild skunks!

[Mata Hari]

It's also pretty common for black cats to get stalked by amorous skunks after getting white paint on them

I think

[Crow]

@Mata Hari the gold beetle is down there

[Grounder]

It's also pretty common for black cats to get stalked by amorous skunks after getting white paint on them

I think

reminder that pepe is fake as all hell and also cheating on his wife

[Reecer7]

why did eggman cask of amontillado a skunk and a tiger into his base

[Grounder]

i dunno what langauge raocow was singing in, but it sure as hell wasn't french

[Heavy Sigh]

Fun SONY Facts! The Dreamcast Killer

One of the biggest sticking points in any discussion about the Dreamcast is its relationship with the PlayStation 2. That, and the fact that despite having a thirteen month lead in the US and a whole two years in Japan, nothing it did could wrench the publics eye off the PS2. Much of the gaming media were giving their blessing to the PS2 before it was even released, just off the strength of the PlayStation brand in 1999.

Sony was often accused of announcing "vapourware" at its first PlayStation 2 conference in March 1999. On display were no games, but a raft of tech demos that pretended to be games, with appearances including Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy VIII, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken and Ridge Racer - big releases on the original PlayStation, but which would not materialise on the PS2 for years, and in almost unrelated forms (save for launch title Ridge Racer V).

Sony's figures were also rather disingenuous, boasting the possibility of its processor rendering many millions of textured polygons a second while forgetting to mention that it didn't have near enough VRAM to actually do that. The inflated specs were in-turn picked up by the gaming press and referenced uncritically and extensively in the months leading up to launch - with tidbits like US gaming magazine Next Generation's claim that the PS2 was "20 times more powerful" than the Dreamcast and "100 times more powerful" than the original PlayStation before a single game was ever shown.

Other PS2 pipe dreams included movies on demand and an e-commerce system similar to what would eventually be on the Xbox 360. Both claims went nowhere, but that didn't stop Sony's Phil Harrison, who in 2000 began mouthing off about 100Mbps internet connections for PS2, hard disk drives and servers containing downloadable versions of every original PlayStation game ever made, and for aspiring publishers in hell, the idea of server-generated in-game advertisements, pay-per-view events and episodic titles, a nightmarish vision that would bypass the console but never came to be. These announcements, alongside the entire gaming press acting as the PS2 Hype Men, led to the Dreamcast's record launch being utterly, utterly crushed by the PlayStation 2's launch, and over the next year the total domination of the video game market.

The PlayStation 2 hype reached its peak when the Japanese Trade Ministry imposed shipping limits on the console (stopping sales to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea), through unfounded fears it might be used as a powerful weapon by international terrorist groups to calculate missile trajectories. US and UK governments were also concerned, and labeled the system as a "Super Computer", banning its sale to rogue states.

I wonder if anyone reads these facts?

Fun Level Facts!

To find Big in Pyramid Cave, head to the second checkpoint. Once you pass it, you'll be on a roller coaster of a rail ride. after the first few dips and hills in the ride, look left as it flattens out, and you'll see Big through a grate.

[raocow]

I read them!

[thatguyif]

I wonder if anyone reads these facts?

I do! You know why? Because one of your facts is wrong!

Sony was often accused of announcing "vapourware" at its first PlayStation 2 conference in March 1999. On display were no games, but a raft of tech demos that pretended to be games, with appearances including Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy VII, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken and Ridge Racer - big releases on the original PlayStation, but which would not materialise on the PS2 for years, and in almost unrelated forms (save for launch title Ridge Racer V).

That's not true, at least for one game. Final Fantasy VII was never showcased in a PS2 tech demo form.

There was, however, a tech demo of Final Fantasy VIII's ballroom scene, shown as a real-time render (as opposed to a pre-rendered FMV) to demonstrate the power of the Emotion Engine. Remember that being a tech demo clear as day.

(I guess Remake fever's confusing you)

[Blivsey]

if you enter the chao garden from a stage, leaving it takes you right back to the story. going in from Level Select lets you go back to the hub and, therefore, the school et al

also you jerk you woke the baby up from its nap of course it's cranky

[Heavy Sigh]

I wonder if anyone reads these facts?

I do! You know why? Because one of your facts is wrong!

Sony was often accused of announcing "vapourware" at its first PlayStation 2 conference in March 1999. On display were no games, but a raft of tech demos that pretended to be games, with appearances including Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy VII, Crash Bandicoot, Tekken and Ridge Racer - big releases on the original PlayStation, but which would not materialise on the PS2 for years, and in almost unrelated forms (save for launch title Ridge Racer V).

That's not true, at least for one game. Final Fantasy VII was never showcased in a PS2 tech demo form.

There was, however, a tech demo of Final Fantasy VIII's ballroom scene, shown as a real-time render (as opposed to a pre-rendered FMV) to demonstrate the power of the Emotion Engine. Remember that being a tech demo clear as day.

(I guess Remake fever's confusing you)

Nope, but I am too trusting of old magazine sources! Specifically the May 1999 issue of "Next Generation", which actually did miscredit the ballroom scene as being from Final Fantasy 7!

[kitikami]

The PS2 causing an international ruckus because politicians thought it was a supercomputer is kind of hilarious and probably a sign Sony's marketing worked a little too well, though apparently people did actually make supercomputers out of PS3s by wiring 100s of them together because it was cheaper than buying a proper supercomputer.

[Le Neveu de Rameau]

Why did that happen? Why do you have the ability to attack in the garden?

I imagine Tails just insisted on it during development.

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

With me not liking desert levels when I was young this stretch of levels used to be my least favourite part of the game, although nowadays I like them as much as any other level. Like all Sonic levels I find this level to be fun to run through, and I also really like the music here. Also, the Bounce Bracelet is here, and I love this thing. In fact, I generally like Sonic's levels more than Shadow's, and the fact that Sonic gets the Bounce Bracelet while Shadow doesn't is a big part of the reason why. I just find it really fun to bounce around with this thing.

[Piesonscreations]

I wonder if anyone reads these facts?

I do read them! It's fun having every episode of All The Sonics go with an All The SEGAs excerpt.