#11 Sonic & Chip are LULZ

Watch  all 3 bonus Chip movies from Unleashed!Why? Well we personally liked Chip and found these movies to be quite amusing. It’s a shame people were too lazy to unlock all three videos! Tuttage!

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Pick up the Pieces: Sonic World Adventure OST Out Today!

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Tasty Gatefold Artwork!

Whether or not you’ve decided that Sonic Unleashed is a good game or not, you’ve probably heard a handful of tunes that have got your feet tapping as you blast through levels at break-neck speeds or smack goofy enemies with your Wolfy pimping-hands. So for those of you who are bonkers for Sonic soundtracks, you can rejoice in the knowledge the Sonic World Adventure: Planetary Pieces Official Soundtrack has been released today.

Once again, the usual suspects Tomoya Ohtani, Kenichi Tokoi, Fumie Kumatani & Hideaki Kobayashi have teamed up to create another monstrous album containing a comprehensive collection of all the tracks from the game. The staggering 91 track list includes the rather sexual Werehog Battle music, Jaret Reddick’s “Endless Possibility”, several versions of the game’s theme, and the pleasant “Dear My Friend” from the ending titles. Not only that, the presentation of the box is of the usual incredible standard (there’s a CD with Chip on it!)

You can check out the track listing over at the Video Game Music Data Base, and if you’ve got some coins to spare you can buy yourself a copy from Play Asia or CD Japan for about 4200 Yen...a bit steep at around £31 ($45 – and don’t forget you’ll have to pay for International Postage on top of that), but well worth it if you’re as mad as me for these soundtracks!

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OPM: Unleashed 1 of 4 Biggest Diaspointments of 2008

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In their latest issue, Official Playstation Magazine: UK have revealed their 2008 game awards as voted by you the public.

Sonic Unleashed was 1 of 4 games to be voted ‘Biggest Disappointment’ for 2008, the other 3 titles are Haze, Need For Speed: Undercover and Army Of Two.

Here’s what OPM:UK had to say –

Only disappointing in the same sense as a wayward child’s final, severing act of betrayal. We fervently hoped the hog would come good. He didn’t.

Many fans of the series have seen this game as a high turning point for the series, a step in the right direction but it looks like the general UK Playstation public don’t feel that way about the PS3 version at least. The PS2 version of the game has been placing pretty high on Chart Track in the UK Budget Priced charts since release.

The UK Playstation public didn’t stop striking Sonic Unleashed there, oh they had a problem with a certain someone from the game… Namely, Chip who was unfortunately crowned ‘Worst New Character’ for 2008.

Here’s what OPM:UK had to say –

Another year, another disastrous attempted comeback from Sega’s answer to Elvis. But for all the bile Sonic Unleashed triggered in our bellies, we reserved the purest rage for our spiky (ex-)friend’s latest sidekick, Chip: a purple douche who loves ice cream, trots out an endless stream of banality and looks like a flying Chihuahua. Which is kind of fitting given that we’d rather let a lap dog gnaw on our own undercarriage than play the big bag of balls that was Unleashed ever again.

That has to be the biggest over-exaggeration I have ever seen, there is no real reason given as to why he has been voted Worst New Character. Anyone can say they hate a character and just describe said character with vulgar words and phrases. Oh well, I guess this childish rant fits in with their review score of 4/10

Do you agree with the UK Playstation public’s votes? Let us know in the comments.

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Channel Watch: Get Romantic With Chip Wallpaper

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Sonic Channel, for the uninitiated, is Japan’s official Sonic the Hedgehog website. It’s about ten thousand times better than the American counterpart, Sonic Central, and is currently 100% better than the European Sonic City, which doesn’t exist yet (expect that to change when it re-launches though). It’s updated on a regular basis and provides plenty of decent fanservice for Asian fans of the blue blur. Every so often, we’d like to track the updates we find on Sonic Channel, so you don’t miss out on some good stuff.

Every month we’re treated to a new desktop wallpaper and calendar PDF, which features the talented artwork of Yuji Uekawa (who should really do more artwork for promotional purposes like game boxes – too many CG pieces flying around) – and every so often a little bio written by SEGA Europe’s Community Team as well. Recently the character art has been in a sketch style, which is a cool way of seeing how Sonic and Tails are usually drawn.

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February’s calendar character is none other than Chip from Sonic World Adventure / Unleashed. I guess it makes sense – Valentine’s Day is the time of love, and Chip just happens to ‘looooooooove’ chocolate. We’re glad the little random sprat is getting some facetime. Even though it’s pink, it’s on my desktop. Because hey, I’m comfortable with my sexuality. Are you? Click here to grab the wallpaper and here for the calendar PDF.

The other main activity on the Japanese website appears to be on the official microsites of Sonic World Adventure and Sonic and the Black Knight, with the latter updating with a pretty cool video featuring Jun ‘Junny Baby’ Senoue and Johnny Gioeli performing ‘Knight of the Wind’ in a SECRET LOCATION. Well, a studio. A studio in a SECRET LOCATION. It’s pretty good stuff, head to the microsite and click the video called ‘Hey All’ to see it.

Finally, even though they’re really old items on the website, we want you to take a look at this video featuring Junny Baby and Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (of the SEGA Sound Team live performance band) singing Happy Birthday to Sonic (totally epic), and some awesome ‘Basic Sonic’ stationary that you wish you could buy.

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Another off-screen Sonic Unleashed video

On the heels of GameVideo’s off screen video, Gamekyo has come up with their own video. While the quality isn’t quite as good, what with all the people walking between the camera and the screen, this video does help add some persepective to just how many different paths there are in Unleash’s first level. At the very least, it looks like this game will have some nice replay value.

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Meet Chip

Game Videos have posted a cool off-screen video of Sonic Unleashed in action at Leipzig’s Game Convention. The most notable about this video – despite the fact that you can see for yourself how awesome it’s looking with it’s alternate paths – is the rather random first appearance of a new character called Chip. Now, remember when we broke news that Sonic Unleashed would add a new character to the series? Looks like we totally called it, but we never thought Sega would reveal his/it existence so unceremoniously. Seriously, we’d have thought there’d be some sort of super-announcement for it or something.

Chip, from what we’ve seen and heard, appears to be some sort of tutorial pal and may well be integral to the story. Long as he doesn’t say a damn word during levels (so far so good) and stays on a totally platonic relationship with Sonic, I think we’ll be OK. Seems kinda cute actually. I hope Sega are as careful with Chip in consideration for future games as they have been with Blaze and Marine and not, for example, Shadow, however. I wouldn’t want to see this purple thing in every Sonic game since.

Check out Sonic’s assessment of his ranking at the end of the level with Chip, and the proceeding breakdance once he’s discovered he got an ‘S’ ranking. Pure Sonic gold, that is.

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