There was an announcement that I spotted a while back for the Project 20 music album, created and produced by the folks over at Sonic Paradox. Now while I was interested, I kind of forgot this was happening until AAUK of Sonic Wrecks mentioned on his Radio Redux show about the album.
To which I was reminded of it, and promptly went to download it from their site, and have been listening to the tracks for the last few days to get a good feel of it.
There is a lot of nostalgia value in the 28 odd tracks available, there are certain tracks you can expect to be about, and a few of which you don’t. An example of which, is currently my favourite on the setlist, goes by the name of “The Burning Wing”, which is a remix of a track from Sonic the Fighters.
Don’t get me wrong of course, there is a lot of good tracks for perusal there. Most of which use different melodic tones and styles. A name that jumped straight of the composer list was Blake Robinson, as I remember certain Sonic related sites linking his orchestral medley of a smittering of tracks from Sonic’s 1,2 and 3. His outing on Project 20, certainly doesn’t disapoint either. Going by the name of “Flight of the Robotnik”, which is a combination of boss themes from Sonic’s 1,2,3 and Knuckles. The first time I had actually heard this song though, admittedly, was via Mike Pollock‘s Facebook feed, I enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it even more so that I can listen to it at my leisure.
My only complaint, overall, with the album, is that there is a few tracks done by one composer, instead of one track per composer. Probably due to time restraints on both composers and a set time limit to get the album out to general populace.
By checking the Sonic Paradox forums, you can see that there was an original load more songs ot be there, which would of made the album really big. As such, it’s a shame that all are not available, as it would of most likely added a lot more depth and variety with a more varied composer list.
The music album is available via direct download and torrent from the Sonic Paradox Project 20 site.
Feel free to mention in the comments below what your favourite track from the album is!
A while back, while doing reviews for Radio SEGA, I did a small review of Spiral Knights a little while after it’s release back in it’s infant days. upon reflection and considering it’s considered to be a “MMO” game (Massivly Multiplayer Online, for those of you not in the know).
Considering that there have been several updates to the game in general, including two low-tier bosses, and more recently a Player vs Player arena type option, I felt like a link to the previous review I had once done for Radio SEGA before I take an updated look and do a re-review of how I believe, in my opinion, the game now stands.
Spiral Knights is a “Free-to-Play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Developed by Three Rings Design and published by SEGA.
A free-to-play MMO, doesn’t really appeal to me at a perspective off the bat, mainly due to the fact I will know, from experience that it will cost some monetary in-game item. But with this in mind, I hooked up with Capn Cloudchaser and The Tall Guy, and we set about discovering the wonder of what Spiral Knights had to offer.
Jumping headlong in, the character creation screen offers few choices, but enough to get a semi-unique look to get you started. So after spending a few minutes finding something that looked decent and grabbing a name, our newly created hero finds themselves thrust headlong into our tutorial level to learn how to move and attack.
Now, while the tutorial doesn’t show and tell you everything off the bat, you do learn enough to get started. Which is always good in any game. Learn by doing, and you do quite well. Get introduced to some starter enemies, and then proceed thusly into your first town. Where, by talking to some of the ever-present NPC’s you learn about your vendors and also, some lore about the game and area itself.
Your next area, is the intermission “training area” between this hub and your main hub staging areas, and the main thing this part of the tutorial teaches you is the party system. Unlike some other MMO’s, you don’t form your parties in the hub worlds and more when going to your dungeon areas. Now for your tutorial dungeon, you can complete it solo, or you can form and gather a party as you go, when you get into the “main” dungeons you can form your parties from your friends list and guild, which is what we did, and while talking over Skype had a fun time of it as well.
There are a few limitations to just constantly dungeon running though, each floor you trek in requires a cost of 10 energy. Now overly this isn’t an issue, because energy can be regained in a few ways. You can regain 1 energy every 15 minutes, and for you math buffs out there, that would make 25 hours to regain your entire energy bar. So, for something a player can generally empty in the space of 1-2 hours, takes more then a day to refill naturally, and at time of writing, I am unaware if this can happen while you are offline from the game.
During this years Summer of Sonic, Lewis of SEGA Driven and I were given the opportunity to interview the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog Yuji Naka, and the current head of Sonic team Takashi Iizuka.
Many of you will have already seen the post over on Sonic Wrecks and on Facebook that T-Bird wrote asking for voluntary donations towards the running of SoS. Us here at EC would like to help this cause a little more and I don’t believe in letting generosity go unrewarded, so I’m offering my artistic talents towards the fundraising!
I’m opening up an initial five commission slots at £10 each for fully coloured and shaded SA-style art, and a further five at £5 each for A4 sketches. You choose the character, I will draw it for you… And if you’re coming to SoS, you can even have a print/the original sketch of the work waiting for you if you want! 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the SoS fund, and if you’re lucky (and I get my new computer fully installed with fun things), you could even see your commission being drawn LIVE on my Livestream account!
So! If you’re interested in helping SoS out and want some art as our way of saying thankyou, please contact me directly or reply to this post stating what you would like! Please note that multiple characters will count as separate slots so be certain to get your commission requests in quick as I’m sure these spaces will not hang around long!
Footnote: For those of you that were kind enough to donate towards Sonic Relief a while ago… Don’t worry! Urth is starting your drawings as we speak, and you will see them soon!
The teaser trailer left the fans hungering for more info and today it’s been revealed that the trailer was for the brand new Sonic game Sonic Generations, the title rumoured throughout the fanbase over the last few months. SEGA officially announced the title on their blog today, along with a snazzy logo. Below is a new trailer featuring gameplay snippets… Full credit to IGN for this!
Are you excited? We sure are… Well, all except Urth.
Unless you live under a rock (and hey, as a geologist I quite like that idea), you’ve no doubt heard that SEGA planned to release a Sonic related trailer today. I think we were all half expecting a game announcement/confirmation, but who saw THIS coming?
So T.A. Black did something a bit different, and yet still awesome. T.A. was the first to get his entry in (VERY early) but gave us huge entertainment with his novel, and yes I am happy to call it that because it is massive! Yet you’ll be riveted all the way. Since it is not a comic all you have to do is hit the jump button to read the entire thing.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy your booty bewby prize!
Tall Guy who is a beloved fan and friend of EC has put up some ebay items for sale, with all the proceeds going to Sonic Relief. While not quite the same rarity as say Sonic 1 signed by Yuji, there are some nice posters which are hard to get a hold of.
Up for grabs are 3 Sonic Free Riders Posters, linked here, here and here.
With the heartwarming co-workers I have being busy, Nemain with Uni and Vger with world conquest, it was decided the heartless one had to do something to help people… Why?
So here is my proposition to you guys, i’m willing to draw you a sketch if you donate a least £1 to sonic relief, yep just 1 quid and i’ll draw ye a sketch of your favourite character or fancharacter either live on the boombox livestream or hand drawn sketch, and anything you donate goes straight to help less lucky people, and ii get drawing practise.
So how does it work?
Well go to the sonic relief page linked above, and donate at least 1 british pound sterling with a comment saying it is for EC to draw you something, then put a comment here or send us an email (urtheart at gmail dot com) linking to your comment and i’ll get on it asap.
I say at least £1 please feel to donate more, if you are lucky I might do more than one for ye, or colour it, even vger and nemain might take time out of their busy schedules if you donate a good amount.
Today marked a rather sad day for British gaming. British gaming studio Bizarre Creations have closed down. Known for a lrage libary of quality games, including the Project Gotham Racing series, Geometry Wars and of course the SEGA title The Club, it is a shame that these games in most cases did not sell as well as they deserved. While I can’t say the studio was particularly dear to… whatever I have in place of a heart, they will be remembered, and it is a shame for us to loss one of the decent developers in the UK. Sadly it is only one duff game that can cause them to go, and Blur was sadly that game for them.
While their new 007 game has come out with music from one of our favourite composers, Richard Jacques, they leave us with one last thing, this video.
RIP Bizarre Creations, may your games lvie on in the minds of gamers for years to come.
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