Wulfsbane

An update from the IDW Sonic Comics group

22 hours ago, SonicSatamX93 said:

I'll answer my own questions from before eventually, but I'd like to ask one more thing before I do for now.

#1: How would write the series finale and how would you do the final battle between Sonic and Robotnik with everything on the line?

For a series like SatAM, it would have to be an "All or Nothing" situation where whomever wins decides the fate of the world. Doomsday was essentially that.

Maybe something that ties in their stamina/physical condition as they fight: the more Sonic loses in the fight, the more everyone gets Roboticized. More Robotnik loses, the more people that are freed. When one side Robotnik is defeated, everyone is free from the roboticization and Robotropolis begins to heal

https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/09/21/nintendo-grants-terminally-ill-fans-wish-to-play-super-smash-bros-ultimate

Unfortunately, Chris passed away yesterday afternoon. At least Nintendo granted his final wish.

1 minute ago, TheRedStranger said:

Well...have you?

 

Like 4 or 5 episodes

Today (9/18/18), 25 years ago SatAM debuted on ABC. So this topic will be for celebrating it as well as talking about some favorite memories and other fun bits about the show. You can talk about how you found out about the show, what impact it made to you, or anything else related to it.

I credit it for helping me get into Sonic itself. I vaguely remember re-runs back in the late 90s right before Adventure 1 came out and I got hooked on it immediately. Unfortunately when it did run it was rather sporadically. After getting Adventure 1 I found out about the Archie comics and had them for a time, though I do not know what happened to the issues I had at the time. Years later I found the series again on YouTube as well as it being up on Netflix. I watched it over a few times and when I got my Macbook I dug around and found out about a certain webcomic that was a continuation of the series and moseyed onto the forums there.

And the rest is history.

5 hours ago, WarTraveller said:

Yep, probably both. This Is, after all, the same company who used Hooters to advertise their game in what they are absolutely adamant is a kids game franchise. 

Hooters in Japan is apparently a bit different than the one in the US

4 hours ago, WarTraveller said:

Is this just another Japan-only thing or are SEGA into some rather weird stuff?

Both?

On 8/21/2018 at 1:43 AM, SonicSatamX93 said:

I'm surprised nobody's asked this question yet, but...

If Sonic 06 was ever to be remade, how would you do it?

1. Major plot overhaul. I would obviously make it more SatAM based with Sally replacing Elise, Knothole/Mobotropolis/New Mobotropolis/etc. replacing Solenana, etc. The whole 9 yards. As for the plot itself, there's some aspects that can be kept such as Robotnik/Eggman trying to take control of the city, the Flames of Disaster is an interesting concept, but I wouldn't tie it with Sally. The plot I would need time to refigure out.

2. I'd keep the 3 distinct story's and all that. Team Dark actually wouldn't be touched as much, though I'd remove the vehicle stuff from Shadow's. I would make Silver a bit faster and make his glide last longer and his would be more platform element. Amy won't turn invisible. Knuckles has a sideplot with the M.E. Have all 3 stories intertwine better.

3. DON'T RELEASE IT UNTIL IT'S READY

So there's an interesting tidbit about Blaze that was scrapped in the Japanese manual for Sonic '06:

Blaze styles herself as protector and controller of the Sol Emeralds (which are antithetical to the Chaos Emeralds).
She comes from another dimension, where she plays a role similar to that of Sonic and Knuckles combined. Normally very cool and collected, deep down, she harbors very real emotions. If she is angered and loses her composure, she can be a frightening woman indeed.

She is shy and withdrawn, and puts up walls between herself and other people. (As a result, she ends up building up upon her own secret feelings.)

Typically, she wears a cape.  This is to hide the fact that her body can control flames, which she was treated strangely for when she was younger, and so she makes a point to only use it when necessary. When push comes to show, though, she will toss of her cape and become quite proactive indeed. She has a rather unique costume on under her cape, and it also seems that she is bothered by underendowed chest (comments on which will rouse her anger).

Apparently Blaze is “bothered” that she has a small chest... despite still being that age where she would still be growing. Most of the text made it over to the Japanese and US version of the manual and I believe were used as the official descriptions for a time. Yet the bolden part was going to be apart of the Japanese manual but was scrapped for reasons unknown.

Why was that necessary for the game manual in Japan? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It does provide an interesting, abet very strange, characteristic for Blaze.

On 11/28/2017 at 2:21 PM, Mike Arcade said:

How do you think Archie Sonic would have continued had it not been cancelled?

Probably another year of Ian's horrible doing-too-much-at-once world building, more open ended Sally/Nicole stuff which has become unpopular sans for a small group of fans, and a bunch of other odd decisions that would probably not make a lot of sense.

Honestly after reading the first 6 issues of IDW, while it's still not a good as it can be, I think the breath of fresh air is helping.

See, having played PUBG, I find the game really fun... though it's horribly optimized and really shouldn't have left Early-Access. This EC video explains why PUBG caught on the way it did.

The reason why it caught fire the way it did was it was something new and fresh. Most of the multiplayer games right now are MOBA such as League, DOTA, Heroes of the Storm, etc. as well as your FPS games like Call of Duty, CS:GO, Battlefield, etc. and your team based games like Overwatch, TF2, and Paladins (Battleborn is no longer with us because Gearbox's terrible decision to release it 2 weeks before Overwatch). While PUBG is an F/TPS game, it was something that was considered a breath of fresh air for multiplayer games. I saw on reddit and other places how it was the same basic cookie cutter games with little variations and people wanted something different. Now Battle Royale games were tried and tested before but the early technology made it not work the way it can now.

What was PUBG's strength was the fact that it actually was a Day-Z mod originally that got popular with allowed PlayerUnknown to initially release the game itself. Fun fact, for the first several months of PUBG's existence it was only PU himself developing the game. It helps that a lot of building, textures, scenery, etc. were open source and publicly available materials but he was able to combine it with gun-play that's actually accurate to modern weaponry and taking into ballistics and trajectories into considerations too. Basically it was a perfect storm of "right place, right gameplay, right everything, right time." Of course playing the game in Early Access it was a buggy mess and had a moderate amount of issues but it was getting patched constantly for the people. The fatal flaw was that I think it got too popular, too quickly and they had unreasonably high expectations from the player base for 1.0. The goal was to have the game ready by Christmas last year and I think PU would have felt like it was a disservice to delay the game because of the demand.

The big issues right now with the game is that it's still horribly optimized, though better from Early Access, possibly to how graphically intense the game is as well as the amount packed into the game. The joke is now that it has overtaken Crysis as the most internally intense game in terms of specs. (Can it run Crysis PUBG on High?). The other main issue is that,yes there's hackers in the game, in fact on of the first major championships was won by a hacker which outlined the issue. They've been trying to fix it but it's an ongoing battle. The main way to prevent it is to region-lock China (cause 9/10s of the hackers are playing from China).

On 8/4/2018 at 9:09 PM, WarTraveller said:

I don't find running around in a field for 15 minutes before getting my head blown off by some random Twitch streamer haflway across the map who will go on to accuse me of stream-sniping to be fun.

This has actually been cut down a lot. Stream Sniping has been called out by a lot from the community as a bunch of streamers and celebrities such as deadmau5 have been going after Streamers falsely accusing people of Stream Sniping (and since most have their streams on VOD, it's easy to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth) And the only real Twitch streamers you need to worry about sniping you from 200m+ out would be Dr.DisRespect and Shroud, but that's because they're both former competitive CS: GO players. Shroud has actually set the record for most people killed in a single game with 38, but that's because he's a former professional CS:GO player. His streams are actually fun.

Anyways, this is going to be a fad but it will have it's niche of a couple hundred thousand players who will stick with it because they enjoy it. Fortnite and PUBG are actually starting to tapper off because it's slowly running it's course. With others trying their hand in it, the market will become over-saturated and will correct itself in about a year+

Terry Crews has seen this and he loved it

That's actually not a bad casting decision. Jim Carrey is one of the best character actors out there. He could pull it off.

I mean he's very good at playing villains. I still think Count Olaf is one of his best roles. Yes, he's over the top, but you can see he puts his heart and soul into the character and make it out to be the best as he possibly can.

Curious, they're using Robotnik instead of Eggman.

On 6/14/2018 at 4:19 PM, WarTraveller said:

I'm fairly sure I've misunderstood this, but it still irks me.

Nintendo's disappointing E3 announcements send stock plunging

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/14/investing/e3-nintendo-stock-drop/index.html

Now, I feel that a lot of people would agree with the consultation that Nintendo, as bad as they are concerning business, is one of the few remaining publishers who at least adknowleges the players buying and playing their games. This doesn't extend to every game, but the general consensus is that they make games for the people to enjoy, rather than the investors to make idiotic amounts of money. And yet, because they have no lootboxes, no season passes, no needless DLC, the very idea that their games are not products to be sold to a sheep full of cash but an actual honest-to-Iwata game that people can enjoy...they get effectively penalised for it.

Also, to put this into perspective, EA (generally considered to have had the worst E3 presentation in years) put on a cringe-inducing show with little game details, some fairly obvious lies concerning lootboxes and angered most people with a mobile Command and Conquer game...and their stock went up by 12%.

If I remember correctly, Nintendo's stock usually shoots up with a great release cause I remember BotW and Odyssey sent stock up and then EA had the Pay to Win controversy and buying heroes (sense of Pride and Accomplishment anyone?) with SW: BF2.

Just because stock prices change at E3, doesnt mean it can't be reversed when the game releases

Fallout 76 announced.

Takes place in Virginia in Vault 76 and the aftermath of The Great War. So it looks like we get to see the aftermath of the Great War and the first survivors rebuilding the US.

From the Wiki: Vault 76 was a "control" vault, with 500 occupants. The vault was designed to open 20 years after a nuclear war, and was among the seventeen known control vaults, meaning that it was used as a baseline to compare to experimental vaults. It is also mentioned in one of the alien captive recorded logs (no.13) recorded by Giles Wolstencroft, a Vault-Tec official who was abducted while inspecting the vault's construction site. In Fallout 4, the newsreader in the prologue mentions Vault 76 debuting in 2076 in honor of America's tercentenary when discussing Vault-Tec's plans to expand.

The game that was teased at the SXSW panel a few months ago has been revealed: Team Sonic Racing.

Steam Page

15 playable characters from across the Sonic Universe. So Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Shadow, Eggman, Blaze, Silver... who else?

She huffed and puffed before calming herself back down. "Why do I keep going back to that dream? Doc said it should have gone by now..." She outstretched herself then jumped off her bunk.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/05/21/sonic-sally-the-quest-to-save-the-last-remaining-pieces-of-sega-world

Remember when someone posted about the Sonic and Sally statues from Sega World sitting in a junk yard, well a former Sega employee is trying to obtain the statues so that he (or someone with the capability to) can restore the statues

1 hour ago, WarTraveller said:

Well I guess that explains why Shadow's story for a few games was so rough and tumbled. They really didn't want him to return. I...think he shouldn't have, though. Also Chaos didn't die. He's a god, he kind of can't. And Gamma being dead didn't stop them from bringing him back in Battle for the GBA, so all the stuff around Shadow makes even less sense - and paints SEGA as even more unstable and incompetant that I thought!

On the plus side, it does show us that Mighty, Bean, Bark and the like WERE actually intended to return in some fashion. Perhaps they really did want to bring them into the Modern (or in this case, retroactively Dreamcast) era. I guess upper management put a bit of a stop to that, probably because one team in particular wouldn't make much sense and the others would probably be too ambitious for both the consoles and the timeframe on display here. I guess after that, Shadow and the infamous reboot that forced a lot of those characters to go away, they probably deemed it too risky to use them again - until Sonic Mania, of course, which clearly showed less risk of them cameoing.

Which makes me wonder, if a Sonic Heroes 2 ever happens (which is extremely unlikely now that Mania's success and Forces'...not success paints a clear picture of Sonic's future), I wonder if any of those beta teams would be finalised and would return?

I dont think Sega was "unstable and incompetent" or that they didn't want him to return. I think in the terms of Heroes it would be odd to have Shadow return after his perceived death (though if they go with the Shadow Android route as they kinda did in Shadow it would make sense). Omega did say at the end of Dark's Story that Eggman "needed the real one" so there's a few ways they could play that off.

The PS2 could have handled the 5 teams at 14 stages a piece. I mean you can take a look at San Andreas for example and RockStar took the PS2 to it's limits. Remember, this was the initial plan for Heroes so over the course of development things can and will change. Take a look at any E3 footage from a game like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Assassin's Creed, and even Mario for example: there are things shown that don't make it to the final game, whether if it's due to time constants, unable to get something to work on full scale, or perhaps a change in story. We honestly do not know why the things changed the way they did and we might not learn.

Forces sold about 1.3 million copies, about the same as Mania. Much better than recent games outside of Generations

Apparently for Sonic Heroes, the teams were gonna be very different:

https://twitter.com/SonicJPNews/status/989898578595405826

Some rather interesting combinations. And the thing about Shadow? Well...

So how do you guys think the teams would have gone?

Speaking of Mania, it has sold around 1.2 million copies. Forces apparently did the same amount

Alexia shook off the snow that was gently powdered on her as the bombardment ceased. She waited for a few moments to see if there were breaks in the wind so she could see if Karen was still calling out to her.