And let's not forget the context of the situation. Sega needed SONIC ADVENTURE 2 to be a hit. It needed people to buy more DC's at that time because Sony was winning the battle from the get go. So i wouldn't be surprised if they had gone out and bribed people especially at the climate where most magazines were hostile against Sega.
Hostile? That's an understatement, they were downright murderous towards Sega. It was an all-out war, not that any FAKERS who weren't around in 1999 would know this. Pfft, nothing personnel kids, but I think you need to realise how malicious magazines were towards Sega back in the halcyon days.
I still recall a particular hatchet piece being written about Sega in Edge Gaming Electronic Magazine by Steve Jarratt in 1999. It was particularly curious, because Steve worked for Sega Power magazine, and that particular publication had gone the way of the dodo two years earlier. He claimed that Sega was directly financing terrorists in Syria through a 'black budget' that was supposedly being used to develop their next 'Killer App' Jack Lumber. The fact that he was right about all this was pure coincidence, his article was nothing but libel (or slander if spoken instead of printed).
It was tough. Really tough. I still remember being at a Sega fan club meeting and Rich Leadbetter (who previously was editor of Sega Saturn Magazine) was in a frenzy. He was calling for Sega fans to raise arms (and in addition, their legs and other peripheral body parts, presumably in a fast and violent manner) against the journalists. I saw a young girl in her twenties who came just to play 'NiGHTS' and ask about a sequel to 'Exhumed' try to run out the back door when Rich was describing his plans for an improvised letter bomb addressed to the office of Famitsu. She made it to the door, only to find it locked and blocked by a burly man wearing a Clockwork Knight T-shirt that was clearly bootlegged, as they mis-spelt the word 'Clock' and it featured a picture of Donkey Kong.
Richard swooped onto her immediately (I mean literally 'swooped' as he was wearing a pair of functioning artificial wings and a jetpack at the time) and when she told him he was going too far, he grabbed her by the arm, pushed her against the wall and said 'we'll never rest until they treat this video game publisher with the respect they deserve'. He produced a razor blade from his pocket and began yelling to everyone about how we we 'don't take one step back!'.
It all got a bit strange, but we ended the night playing Vectorman 4 player mode with multi-taps which was quite fun.
And @TA:
Burnout? I'm glad somebody finally mentioned this. Burnout is what Sonic Adventure 2 was MEANT to be. Trip Hawkins stole the design plans from Sega and EA then made the original Burnout instead. Burnout was intended to be the killer sequel to Sonic Adventure One but because EA no longer had access to the Hedgehog Engine (TM), they couldn't make a game that fast with Hedgehogs. After a long night of brainstorming and the removal of the jump button, they decided to replace the anthropomorphic rodents with... CARS! You can see the similarities in hindsight, even though Sega tried to cover it up at the time of release. If you crack the disc open, you can still find the source code that refers to the cars as 'Hedgehogs' and the remnants of the platforming segments.
Truly a shame that it got scrapped.
As for the pictures you posted, I see you conveniently didn't post the score... Nor did you post the 'post mortem' feature they had in the following issue where they made mention of the tennis segment and showed pictures of the cheques from Sega.
