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GamesMaster Sonic 20th Anniversary Magazine Special

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by The GagaMan(n) at SEGA Memories

Well didn’t this pop up out of the blue! To celebrate Sonic’s 20th Anniversary (I suspect you’ll be hearing that a lot in the next few months but especially this month), GamesMaster has just released a special 130 page magazine dedicated to nothing but Sonic! I only heard about it today via twitter and pretty much ran over to WHSmith to see if they had and sure enough they had a whole pile of copies. It’s £8 but trust me it’s worth it.

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SEGA Sequels: Risky SEGA Sequels Vol 2

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Apologies in advance for adding yet another Sonic story to our collection. I always cringe when I see Sonic dominating our weekly stories just because I know that there are so many other great IP from SEGA to focus on, and I know that, to a lot of people, Sonic is all that makes up SEGA, and that’s unfortunate. It just so happens though that there has been a lot more Sonic news this week to report on than usual, thanks in large part to his big focus at E3 and of course Sonic Boom, but in truth, I’d planned on writing this as far back as a couple weeks ago, so I guess it can’t be helped.

This week’s SEGA Sequel Saturdays will be taking a look at another risky SEGA sequel, Sonic Adventure 2, which, like Jet Set Radio Future of last week, made bold changes to what many thought was a successful formula and, as a result, delivered an experience that was entirely different from what people expected.

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E3: Rise of Nightmares Hands On (Plus, a celebrity appearance!)

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I finally got my hands on (well technically, my hands were not on anything) with Rise of Nightmares. The game’s brought to you by the same team behind the House of the Dead series and it shows. This is by far the most violent and gruesome Kinect title ever released: Kinectimals it is not. It starts off with your character waking up and watching as a mad scientist has another victim tied to a chair. He chops off the man’s hand just for the hell of it and then stabs him in the head. Before he can get to you, his nagging wife calls on the phone and he leaves you with a nurse zombie in your care. Just before this nurse checks your pulse with her teeth, another ally comes out and slices her in two. A gruesome way to start a game, but after he frees you it’s time to go find your wife and slaughter some zombies.

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The Weekly Five: Saturn in the Media

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Before Saturn Month is considered to be completely over, I thought I’d squeeze in one more Saturn related Weekly Five. This week, we combine our regular SEGA in the Media feature with the SEGA Saturn. That’s right, five times the SEGA in the Media in one day! So let’s kick things off with…

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Sonic Boom: Impressions from the Sonic fan event

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In the midst of the E3 craziness going on right now in downtown Los Angeles, SEGA chose to honor Sonic’s 20th anniversary and upcoming Sonic Generations game by throwing a free-to-attend-but-hard-to-get-into party for the fans in Club Nokia, just up the street from the famous Electronic Entertainment Expo. The party was probably both, at the same time, one of the coolest and corniest things SEGA’s ever done, but looking back at Sonic’s legacy, that sort of makes sense. Critics may bash the series’ recent installments (some of it well-deserved, don’t get me wrong) for various reasons, but when you have a group of fans in a packed party wearing Sonic hats and begging for an encore presentation after Crush 40’s (earnest as ever) performance, I think that pretty much speaks for itself.

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Captain America: Super Soldier hands on (Xbox 360)

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I’m weary about being a little too positive regarding games I play at E3. The splendor of it all and having the developer standing right next to you can really help skew the experience, especially for an E3 noob like myself. Even taking this into account, I do believe I can at least say this about Captain America: it doesn’t suck. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s a lot of fun. How fun the final product will be I cannot say, but my experience here was definitely a positive one.

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E3: Shinobi 3DS hands on

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I love Shinobi 3: Return of the Ninja Master. In my opinion it was easily one of the best games SEGA ever made for the Genesis. Needless to say, when I heard the series was finally getting a new game, I was ecstatic…and a little worried. After all, after the series hit its high point with Shinobi 3, it’s been subjected to some less than stellar games through the likes of Shinobi Legions and Shinobi PS2. I am happy to report that this game isn’t like those games; unlike them, Shinobi 3DS does indeed have a bunch of things in common with the Genesis games, including a few very obvious throwbacks.

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SEGA Sequels: Risky SEGA Sequels

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Has it really been 20 weeks? Holy crap! Well, at any rate, for Episode 20 and probably the next episode or so, I’m going to be taking a look at sequels that really pushed the boundaries of what one would expect as a followup to another game. When making a sequel, a developer has a few different choices. Sometimes, they choose to take the easy way out, simply repeating the formula from the sequel’s predecessor and hoping that their audience is simply looking for more of the same….something that didn’t work for The Hangover 2, that’s for sure. Other times, a developer might try to tweak the formula, but still aim to deliver the same overall experience, abeit one that’s been improved. Then, there are developers who decide to take their sequel in an entirely different direction, by far the riskiest strategy of the 3. Sometimes it works, and the fans accept it, and then other times….tweaking the formula too drastically can result in a sequel that the fans hate. This week I’m going to take a look at Jet Set Radio Future, a game I’ve talked about in this feature before; what made it so different, why it was such a risky game to make, and, well, did these changes work?

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Weekly Five: Saturn titles that should be on modern consoles

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One of the best things about the SEGA Saturn is it’s wide array of exclusives. While Dreamcast lost many of its best exclusives to its competitors shortly after it died, the exodus of Saturn exclusives has been painfully slow. A port here, a remake there, but nothing like the sort of treatment that Dreamcast, Genesis, and even Game Gear/Master System libraries got after SEGA’s departure from the console business. Heck, when a Saturn game does get ported, it doesn’t even get localized much of the time. Why the general lack of porting or emulation? Well, according to Panzer Dragoon series director Yukio Fatatsugi, it’s because SEGA has misplaced the source code for many of their Saturn games, meaning that many games now on the Saturn will never see the light of day on another console unless they are completely rebuilt from the ground up, something that is probably unlikely to happen.

Hey, a gamer can dream, right? Here are five Saturn titles that I think should see the light of day on modern consoles, whether it be a port, emulation, or a total remake for a retail release. Since I recently wrote an entire article demanding an Astal remake, and since Guardian Heroes is now going to be the latest Saturn title to make the leap, obviously those won’t be counted.

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NiGHTS into Dreams into Comics – Issue 1

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Originally written July, 2009 for The Saturn Junkyard

While the Saturn hit the US in 1995, it wasn’t until late 1997 that I bought a system. A large part of why I held out was money, $399 is a fortune to an 11 year old. Also, I was having way too much fun with my Genesis at the time, a testament to the quality of the 16-bit system. The Genesis had everything I wanted: Sonic the Hedgehog and Disney Interactive games. The Saturn had a Sonic compilation of games I already owned and some goofy jester game. At the time I was oblivious to the fact that NiGHTS was a Sonic Team game (no Wikipedias or SEGAbits back in 1995, kids) and so I went on ignoring one of the greatest games and systems of the mid-90’s.

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Saturn Month: Sega’s Big E3 Saturn Surprise Debacle

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The year was 1995. The Saturn had already successfully launched in Japan, and was preparing for an American launch later in the year. Sega of America was eager to bring the system to the states despite the fact that the 32x had been launched during the previous holiday season. With the mediocre sales of the Sega CD and the failure of the 32X, Sega was starting to do poorly, and they wanted another hit console on the market soon. Perhaps a little too soon.

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SEGA Sequel Saturdays: Golden Axe

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Welcome back to SEGA Sequel Saturdays. For Episode 19 we have our first reader-submitted Sequel Saturdays column, and the honor goes to CosmicCastaway, who’s going to be telling us about Golden Axe, a series I know almost nothing about. There happen to be lots of those, so if any of you out there have an idea for an episode of Sequel Saturdays that hasn’t been done before, and want to write one, hit up my Private Messages and, as long as it’s not for a series that I was already planning on writing about, I’ll see what I can do. Anyway, let’s get right to it. Hit the break to read CosmicCastaway’s feature on Golden Axe.

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