The newest Swingin’ Report Show marks my triumphant return to the podcast, that should be enough for you to download, right? This week we talk about the latest SEGA news and show a special soft spot for Shinobi on the 3DS. This week’s guests include George, Barry the Nomad, Shigs and special guest Asher, illustrator and YouTube animator of Sonic Paradox.
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SEGA is awesome, there is no doubt about that, but they’re not infallible. Back in the hardware days, SEGA made their fair share of mistakes. I won’t name off the 32X and SEGA CD like a lot of gaming sites do, because to be honest, as an owner of both systems I have to say they have some really great titles. I’ll even defend accessories that only exist for the sake of a few games. Just because the Dreamcast fishing controller is rarely used, due to the limited library of fishing games, does not make it a bad accessory. It’s just highly specialized, and when put to use it is very effective. Same goes for the Samba de Amigo maracas and Virtual-On’s twin sticks. But there are SEGA accessories and add-ons out there that were failures, or were simply too weird to take seriously. This week we’ll take a look at five of these hiccups in SEGA’s history.
In February 2007, Sonic the Hedgehog was still fresh in the memories of Sonic fans. Yet they already had a new game to play in the form of the Wii exclusive Sonic and the Secret Rings. Secret Rings was a radically different kind of Sonic game, featuring on-rails play and a heavy emphasis on motion controls. Secret Rings had been championed the previous year by journalists as a Sonic game that was actually good, that took a radically different approach to the formula to solve the franchise’s problems. What gamers actually got was a mixed bag of great and poor design decisions that was still a huge step up from Sonic 06, and would start Sonic on his slow, winding road to recovery.
When the first Mario and Sonic title hit in 2007, it was a major deal. Two video game rivals competing in a shared title! Unfortunately, once the novelty of seeing Nintendo and SEGA’s mascots together wore off, what players were left with was a so-so mini-game compilation with the best moments being the Dream Events and remixed music tracks from both series. In 2009 the series returned with Mario and Sonic competing in the Winter Olympics, and while it wasn’t a huge improvement over the first game, it was a better title thanks to improved controls, more characters and more events. Now the Mario and Sonic universes go head to head in a third Olympics, is this time just more of the same or is the third try a charm? Read on to find out!
Welcome to the new theme for SEGAbits. I hope you guys all like the changes we made to the blog. Instead of having quotes in the banner, we now have changing pictures. Refresh the page to try that out.
We are always looking into improving the site, so if you have any comments or questions make sure you contact us. You can comment as well and let us know what you think.
Enjoy!
Shadi Edit: We are also working on a mobile version for those of you with smartphones, I’ll be making a post about that once it’s up. Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about you smartphone users.
Here in America, we just finished celebrating Thanksgiving and went through hell with Black Friday. Now I’m sitting here putting together a list of why I’m glad to be a SEGA fan this year. It seems that SEGA hardly gets the credit they deserve for some of the things they do, but when they do something wrong everyone notices. So why am I a SEGA fan?
After SEGA retired the Game Gear in early 1997, they suddenly found themselves on the market for a new handheld to support. That same year SEGA threw its weight behind the Tiger’s Game.com, offering Tiger the licenses to several of its franchises, including Sonic. This deal would give rise to the worst shit SEGA ever slapped its name on. As the Game.com quickly dropped dead at the sight of the Gameboy, SEGA threw its support behind another, much better handheld: SNK’s Neo Geo Pocket Color. This support would only yield one SEGA game in the American market, in the form of Sonic’s last portable adventure before going third party: Sonic Pocket Adventure.
Back in August, George shared five SEGA games on the Game Boy Advance totally worth playing. All those games, which included classics like Chu Chu Rocket and Gunstar Super Heroes, are worthy of any GBA collection. But guess what? SEGA’s GBA goodness doesn’t end with those games, this week I’ll be highlighting five more GBA games worth playing!
Not that we were making a lot of cash from Adsense, but it did pay some of the bills. It seems that Google thinks there is some invalid clicking going on on our site, which lead them to disable and take all our money from our account. Shame really.
The SEGA Saturn was something of a black sheep in SEGA’s family of consoles. It divorced itself from many of its predecessor’s most well-known franchises, and instead focused on a slew of original IPs. Even Sonic Team would take a big break from Sonic, instead focusing on NiGHTS into Dreams and Burning Rangers, the former becoming the Saturn’s mascot. This would lead to the Saturn becoming the one and only SEGA console to not feature a wholly original Sonic platforming game. Instead, the Saturn merely saw a trio of spin offs, in the form of Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R and the subject of today’s review, Sonic Jam. The first two were fairly mediocre spin offs created by Traveler’s Tales for the purpose of filling the cap by the canned Sonic X-Treme game. Sonic Jam was easily the best Sonic game on the Saturn, though largely because it capitalized so heavily on the past: it was a compilation of the best Sonic titles ever made.
While Sonic Generations is just over a week old, fans from all corners of the interwebs have started to discuss what’s next for the hedgehog. I would say it’s a bit too soon to start speculation on the next game, but even series producer Iizuka has started hinting towards the future. So with Generations considered completed and released, let’s look towards 2012 and beyond, and just what we might expect from the next Sonic game!
This was the same demo available at E3. As such, there are certain things I don’t cover in this preview. For the full picture, check out our E3 preview!
Back at E3 I previewed Shinobi 3D for the first time. I loved what I got to play, but my time with the game was limited. At last month’s New York Comic Con I was able to give the game another go, so I’d like to talk more about it.
Since the reveal of Binary Domain’s box art, I’ve been thinking about just what is it that makes it so… ineffective. I hesitate to use the word “bad”, as artistry clearly went into producing the cover. However, I think the reason for the cover’s failing is that not a lot of thought went into it. Sure they threw a lot into the scene, but perhaps they threw in too much? I’ve been working in the graphic design industry for five years now, so I thought I’d put some of my professional experience to practice and pick apart Binary Domain’s cover art problems, and perhaps find a better solution. Is it worth the time picking apart the game’s cover? Of course it is! As a new IP, the only thing the game has going for it is SEGA’s name when it comes to appearing on a shelf. First impressions are key for a new franchise, and sadly Binary Domain is not making a good first impression.
SEGA’s next big Sonic game is centered around his 20th anniversary. Even though Sonic started off this console generation with some awful games, Sonic Team has been learning from their mistakes and perfecting their skills. Have they finally delivered the Sonic game that all their fans want?
On this week’s show, -nSega54-, nuckles87, shigs, and special guest GX Echidna from the Spindash podcast discuss Sonic Generations, which just came out a few days ago (in America), along with some other tidbits, including discussion of some bad boxart. Sadly I couldn’t make it to this week’s show, but the table was filled with regulars.
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