Category Archives: Gaming

Space Harrier Jazz

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About a month ago, I opened Garageband on my Mac and started experimenting with sounds. This led to me recording a twelve bar blues accompaniment with a swinging style baseline. From here I thought, “Hang on, that sounds familar. Why not try it with Space Harrier”; and so Space Harrier Jazz was born!

“So, why are you telling us about this now and not a month ago?”, I hear you ask.

Well, as I normally do with recordings and remixes, I have an idea and then upload it to SoundCloud as a “Work in Progress” track. This unfinished track caught the attention of SEGA Nerds as my SoundCloud feed is linked up to twitter and facebook. You can read the article by heading over to:

http://www.seganerds.com/2013/04/07/fan-stuff-chill-out-with-some-space-harrier-jazz/

As a way of saying thank you to them for promoting my music, I decided to allow them to have the initial exclusive on the track (although it was available from SoundCloud), before I posted about it here.

Summer of Sonic 2012

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So, the time has come (and gone) for the annual community gathering they call, Summer of Sonic.

Normally, these events are held in London of which I normally stay in a nearby Travelodge – but this year was different. This year’s event was held in Brighton, near the south coast. My very dear friend “Page” invited me to stay with them as they are only two hours drive away.

Having mentioned that Summer of Sonic was in Brighton this year, I offered to drive another dear friend, Beth down there to see her poorly sister.

Disaster almost struck as the event venue originally planned developed an electrical fault midday and so, it was all hands on deck to clear everything down and move everything to another venue down the road. With everyone helping out where they can, disaster was averted and the day went smoothly.

For those who have seen me at other Summer of Sonic events, they will know that I usually take a musical instrument with me. Normally, I take my acoustic guitar, but I decided to do something different this year. Adam, better known as T-Bird made a comment on the Sonic Stadium Message Board for me to bring a saxophone. Now, I don’t own one of these, nor can I played it, so I decided to take something that is a similar colour – my trombone. The number of requests for Casino Night Zone, as the track was featured in Sonic Generations, was greater than the number of fingers on both hands!!

Once again, I was allowed to help out on the day. This included setting up the RadioSEGA live feed, narrowing down the finalists for the cosplay competition and packing and distributing the goody bags to attendees as they entered the building.

I would like to wish a heart-felt congratulations to the core staff and the volunteers for another successful event.

What made the day though is not what was on offer to the attendees, like the goody bags, the live show by Crush 40 and the playing of Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed, but the meeting up with familiar faces and new faces. Having spoken to people online, it’s always great to actually meet them, face to face; and it’s always fantastic to see people that you haven’t seen for a year or more.

One of the personal highlights of the day would be getting lost around Brighton trying to taxi people back to their hotels. Which way is left again? ;)

Why people love Sonic the Hedgehog

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To this day Sonic the Hedgehog is without a doubt one of the most iconic characters in the gaming industry. Whether you loved him back in the 90s (the height of his success), or see him occasionally on recent console games that combine characters from different franchises, you might not be aware of why you love him.

Let’s think about it. He’s an older character that still popular 21 years after he was created. You still pause your partypoker and Angry Birds games and think “I want to play Sonic.” Let’s investigate why.

Nostalgia – People have a nostalgia for the characters they grew up with. In the case of Sonic, anyone who was a child during the 90s, and owned a Mega Drive or a Master System, will have a sense of fond nostalgia when they think of the blue hedgehog. Sonic will always hold a special place in the hearts of 90s children, in the same way that Nintendo fans will always love Mario, the fat plumber.

He’s a trademark – As SEGA needed a new mascot to rival the success, Sonic the Hedgehog is in the same league as Nintendo’s Mario. The blue hedgehog is an icon of SEGA, and therefore he’s a very recognisable character. Even if people don’t like Sonic, they can still identify him.

He’s fast – Back in the 90s especially, Sonic was one of the most animated games you could play. While other games had characters toddling along, Sonic would curl up in a ball and whiz around the level collecting rings. It was fun to watch him loop around all over the place. It was a nice change, and one we still appreciate today.

Hedgehog – What’s not to love about a blue hedgehog who goes around saving everyone from the super villain Dr Eggman? At the time of his creation he was a breath of fresh air in the gaming industry.

Spanning New Horizons

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I’m slowly seeing more and more of the United Kingdom every year and it’s thanks to some of the people I’ve met from the Sonic community.

I’ve been invited to stay in Newcastle with a very dear friend of mine, Tru (CapnCloudchaser), and her husband, Michael, up in Newcastle.

We’ve ventured around Tynemouth and Whittley Bay via the Metro, from North to South Shields by Ferry and all over the place on a number of buses.

What’s more is that we are going to be meeting up with other community members later on this week as a few other friendly faces live nearby, including Scott (SJSSF) and I’ve been told, Mark (Sonicmark).

After finally finishing work, (despite being on annual leave, I still end up working), I was introduced to a number of games that I’d pre-empted not to like, including Rez, Child of Eden, Valkyria Chronicles and Guardian Heroes. Of course, there’s also been time to play a little Rock Band!!

As a thank you gift for allowing me to stay, I sketched a certain hedgehog from the game we played in co-op mode…

Finally Reached EggmanLand!!

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Yay!! Woohoo!!

To some, Sonic Unleashed is distant memory. For me, it’s an ongoing nightmare as the game itself hasn’t been too kind to me since I started playing it, way back in…???

“What is the EggmanLand that you speak of?”, I hear you ask… Well, it’s the level after the restoration of 6 out of the 7 continents. It’s where Eggman’s dreams come true.

But why such excitement? Well, my last achievement on the Xbox 360 version of the game, the restoration of the fifth continent, was achieved 14 months ago – back in January 2011. Yes, it has taken that long!!

Oh well, it’s not over yet. Might just leave the game another fourteen months and then see what happens…

New YouTube Videos

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A couple of weeks ago I recorded a couple of videos which I uploaded to YouTube. After searching for videos of people playing Smule’s Ocarina app for the iPhone on the Apple iPad and found no results, I decided that I would be the first to do so!

Here’s a video of me playing the theme from Labyrinth Zone from the first Sonic the Hedgehog game on the Master System…

… and Jungle Zone from the same game:

Please note: It seems that my webcam has an auto-tuning feature in which it decided to go flat halfway through. Hmm…

Move Complete(-ish)

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Well, Monday has past and we are now in Norwich.

I managed to pick up the van fairly early on Monday and we got cracking with the move.

When we moved from Norwich to Diss, we managed to move everything we needed in one van load but unfortunately this time round, it took 3 runs! I suppose this was due to furniture arriving after we moved to Diss which we now had to bring back.

However, we have moved, the keys have been returned and now it’s a waiting game as to whether we have been careful enough not to cause any damage. The money from the deposit could sure come in handy in the run up to Christmas.

One funny part of moving was the cancellation of services. It turns out that we owe TalkTalk around £90 for terminating the contract 6 months early, but on the other hand, we seem to have accumulated the same figure in the amount of water we’ve paid for but haven’t used so Anglian Water could bypass the middle-man (me) and just pay TalkTalk!!

The reason I’ve put “complete(-ish)” is because now that we have loaded up the house with the boxes from the flat, we need now to find homes for all of the junk. We can now see some of the carpet but not really enough to say that we’ve competely moved in :)