say what u want about the manscaped ads I know they are shit, all of them but the “evil, sinister, malcontent, balls” one puts me into fucking hysterics actually
for those of you who happened to miss it, Ryan Drummond, the first English voice for sonic the hedgehog (specifically for Sonic Adventures 1, 2, and Sonic Heroes) was recently found to have had an extramarital affair with Emi Jones, a cover artist and VA in the sonic fandom whose prior engagements included recording a fanmade audio drama together with Drummond.
one of the encounters of this affair apparently involved Drummond (who has a wife and children) using the voice he did for sonic during sex with Jones. it should also be noted that in the above-mentioned audio drama that Jones just so happened to have also voiced tails the fox
Can’t imagine what my life would be like without this fandom
he walked on water once and led the echidnas to the promised land
he also sacrificed himself when he was green and then was reborn by the will of god (also an echidna) without his powers
thats knuckles’ empty grave after he rose again btw.
You . Were not kidding
not an actual microwave thats just what fans call it. it was actually called the chaos chamber, and knuckles’ dad put his unhatched egg in there (without telling knuckles’ mom) after a god projected images of the apocalypse into his mind while he slept and told him this was the only way to save the world. it gave knuckles superpowers basically
Eggman also tricked him into becoming a god again so he (Eggman) could turn Knuckles into an infinite energy source (it backfired). He also stripped his distant techno-cult cousins of all their augments and it caused a religious crisis for them.
SEGA actually made pinball games for a while in the ‘90s too, after it absorbed the pinball arm of Data East, which it had previously distributed abroad. The Japanese tables aren’t well respected by competitive players - though the playfields were often pretty interesting and they introduced some major technical breakthroughs, the tendency was to have poorly designed rulesets.
Sometimes this meant the “best” move was to ignore all the interesting stuff in favor of doing one boring thing with an unbalanced risk/reward ratio over and over; often it meant that scoring didn’t scale with difficulty of starting features, such that a player that completed numerous intricate maneuvers to start advanced modes would be outscored by someone that started a trivially easy mode and got a few lucky bounces.
This was during the golden age of arcades, though, you could make an argument that the extensive (if competitively worthless) novelty and the front-loaded scoring were reasonably aimed not at the narrow market of pinball theorycrafters but at the broader “children who like flashing lights”. Also helping to draw eyeballs, SEGA/Data East were pioneers in theming their games around big-name licensed properties.
Now, American manufacturers had donelicensedtables for a while, and off-brand and ersatz themes were a tradition -
Hollywood Heat was really Miami Vice, Black Belt was kinda Karate Kid,
No Good Gofers and Teed Off were more or less a competition to pull off a better take on Caddyshack, F-14 Tomcat was Top Gun. The licensed Space Invaders was actually Alien, oddly enough.
(and the Spanish and Italian ones seemed to have the same relationship to IP as t-shirt manufacturers - SONIC [by then independent of SEGA] did a Star Wars that I’m not sure is any more legitimate than Turkish Star Wars)
But those had traditionally been mixed in with original properties or generic themes. Popular subjects were various sports, pool or casino gambling - which were the themes of “last man standing” manufacturer STERN’s lastthree non-licensed games, complete turds largely dumped on the European market in 2000.
Now that pinball’s in a renaissance new manufacturers are showing up but it’s not clear that’ll break the trend. Jersey Jack, the first people to actually deliver on their “let’s make a pinball game, gang!” mission (this usually goes the same way as “let’s make a retro JRPG, gang!”, there was an Arkh Project thing with a Big Lebowski table last year) are polishing a Hobbit table now, after making their debut in 2013 with, of all things, The Wizard of Oz.
I was going to say that the very newest underdog startup, Spooky Pinball, finally broke the trend with their America’s Most Haunted table. But on further investigation that’s not true - of all things, it’s based on an independent film that’s parodying basic cable “paranormal investigator” docu-reality shows, apparently playing up the fact that they’re a bunch of grown-ass adults running around playing Scooby Doo.
