Welcome to the Archive site of The Sonic Stadium (2008-2023)
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Crisis City was once a shining and prosperous metropolis before Iblis was unleashed upon the world, and the immortal Flames of Disaster turned the city to ruin and brought all life in the world to its knees. The apocalyptic city appropriately set the tone for the rest of the plot in Sonic ’06, and not even it being wiped from canonical existence prevented its return in Sonic Generations five years later.
For today’s Mash-Up Monday, we take another look at the music of Crisis City across its ’06 and Generations incarnations, all composed and arranged by Tomoya Ohtani. YouTuber Aeon Eric already mashed the original, Classic, and Modern themes up together in the past, but a remastered edition was produced not long after. As a bonus, keener listeners might pick up on a Kingdom Hearts-related surprise towards the end of this mashup.
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The Sonic Amateur Games Expo—or SAGE—is finally returning for another round this year, as novice and aspiring developers from all over the web come together and share their efforts with the Sonic community at large. It is at SAGE where people enjoyed a wide variety of fan-made games and ROM hacks, such as Sonic: Before the Sequel, Sonic Time Twisted, and Sonic 2: Dimps Edition, or some intentionally awful and crudely put-together monstrosities at RAGE (Really Amateur Games Expo), which is also hinted to return.
Among this year’s lineup is the open-world 3D fan-game Green Hill Paradise which took the Internet by storm over the past summer, a 2.5D sidescroller with Sonic Incursion, and a Smash Bros. clone with a Sonic Boom coat of paint called Sonic Boom and the Smash Crew. There are too many promising gems to namedrop all at once, but you can check out the SAGE 2016 trailer below to see more fan-games in action!
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Over two years have passed since the hundredth episode of The Completionist, where Jirard Khalil did the inadvisable and went on to complete Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 at a great personal cost. Since then, the game has been dethroned by another, one which has drawn more ire and infamy than its predecessor ever did: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Naturally, Jirard went and did the unfathomable… or he almost did.
The troubled development process behind Big Red Button’s project—stemming from both SEGA’s exclusivity deal with Nintendo, and incompatibility between CryEngine 3 and the Wii U—led to an incomplete and bug-ridden November 2014 launch that even a one-plus gigabyte patch couldn’t fix. Jirard dIves into depths never explored of just how broken Rise of Lyric is, as a game that likely cannot ever be 100% completed. Check out the latest episode of The Completionist below, presented in a brand new format!
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Twenty-five years ago, a blue speedster ran his first loop-de-loop on South Island and captured our hearts. Sonic the Hedgehog made a ton of friends and foes, and has travelled through a great many locales and environments since then, ranging from the colourful and fantastic to the familiar and lifelike.
To celebrate his silver anniversary, SEGA and art dealership Cook & Becker will be releasing a commemorative art book. The book will encompass the expansive history of the franchise and include a variety of design sketches, official character illustrations, in-game art, pixel art, rare promotional art and game box art, all on top of never-before-seen art and interviews with key artists and designers who worked on the franchise over the years.
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Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was a perfect game back when it launched in 1992, pushing the known boundaries of blast processing even further with faster gameplay and more expansive Zones. The Genesis classic also introduced series mainstays Tails and Super Sonic, it marked the beginning of the Death Egg saga, and most importantly, it slices, dices, and makes thousands of julienne fries!
And to top it all off, who could possibly forget the climactic showdown between the fastest thing alive and the Death Egg Robot? Innumerable tributes to this fateful battle have been made already, but that of animator Hat-Loving Gamer—who previously worked on Sonic in the Mushroom Kingdom (1, 2) last year—puts a whole other unique spin on it! Eh? Ehhh?
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SEGA showed off a very tongue-in-cheek infomercial two weeks ago for the Collector’s Edition of Sonic Mania, which starred familiar faces such as Aaron Webber and Kazuyuki Hoshino. Fans of old loved the nostalgic infomercial parody advert for parodying the original Sonic 2 commercial… which was also a parody of infomercials in itself. The rabbit hole gets so much more nauseating from there…
If you were interested in the filming process behind the Mania infomercial, then have no fear: Sonic’s got you covered. Check out the behind-the-scenes below!
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Tommy Thunder and Trash Can Head Guy in “Late Night Wars.”
Sonic Boom premiered in November 2014 and wrapped up its first season a year later, and fans of the show are eagerly awaiting the day season two will premiere at some point this fall. Now, it turns out that they won’t have to wait for much longer, as a date has dropped by way of TV listings site Zap2It.
Mark your calendars, as Sonic Boom is expected to return to Cartoon Network’s airwaves on October 29th, with the season premiere episode “Tommy Thunder: Method Actor.”
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The Xbox One has a growing list of backwards compatible games from the previous generation, be it from a retail release on the Xbox 360 or a digital title via the old Live Arcade. From it also comes a steady stream of Sonic games, with the classic games, Sonic the Fighters, and both episodes of Sonic 4 having been rereleased onto Microsoft’s modern console.
Earlier today, Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb announced that three more games are relaunching on Xbox One Backwards Compatibility today, including Sumo Digital’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. The second All-Stars racing game originally launched in November 2012 across several platforms to a positive critical reception.
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While Sonic celebrates his 25th anniversary, there is another SEGA superstar whose milestone we should honour: Naoto Oshima’s own NiGHTS, who debuted in NiGHTS into Dreams… on the SEGA Saturn over twenty years ago. The androgynous Nightmaren keeps watch over the dream world of Nightopia and protects it from the evil Wizeman.
Since their premiere on the Saturn, only one other game exists to their name on Wii with Journey into Dreams, and barring their appearances on several spinoffs, it is unknown if we’ll ever see NiGHTS again in the future, but hope yet remains. We pay tribute to NiGHTS for today’s Mash-Up Monday with a pair of mash-ups by Chiruliru and James Fisher, featuring the Japanese themes of Stardust Speedway from Sonic CD and “NiGHTS and Reala” from NiGHTS into Dreams… Check them out below!
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Title: Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice Platform: Nintendo 3DS (played on 3DS XL model)
Developer: Sanzaru Games Release Date: September 27th, 2016 (NA), September 30th, 2016 (EU), October 1st, 2016 (AUS), October 27th, 2016 (JP)
Review copy provided by Sega
Here we are at last. It’s been almost two years after the Sonic Boom branch of the series launched with the TV show and the accompanying Wii U and 3DS games. We now have the second main Sonic Boom game (depending if you view Rise of Lyric on Wii U and Shattered Crystal on 3DS as a sibling pair of games), and this time it’s only on 3DS. Like Shattered Chrystal before it, Fire & Ice is once again developed by Sanzaru Games, who is also known for the Sly Cooper HD trilogy remaster and the fourth Sly game a few years back on PS3 and Vita. While Big Red Button’s Rise of Lyric launched in a poor and buggy state on Wii U, Shattered Crystal on 3DS was considered to be at least decent, though it had issues of its own. The question is, how does Fire & Ice fare?
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So it’s no great secret that the Canadian dollar has flopped quite a bit over the past decade, with prices on imported goods having seen a major increase in order to make up for the drop in our currency’s worth. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime members in the US of A have enjoyed their exclusive 20% discount on the latest and upcoming hits in gaming while their northern neighbours wondered why they were still subscribed to this service in the first place if no such incentive was available to them.
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