Obscure Sonic Games
Looking into some of the wacky wonders of Sonic's past!
Summary
Obscure Sonic Games is a collection of projects showcasing, documenting, and reviewing video game titles of the classic Sonic era that largely went under the radar or went unreleased. Many of these games debuted in arcades or on region-specific hardware that was hard to come by and some were near completion but never hit the store shelves. The projects are sorted in the order of several showcases followed up by a review and then a crossover project that simulates what multiplayer functionality would look like for one of the titles that did not include such a feature. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Obscure Sonic Games YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
Putting together the showcases and surrounding content for these titles was harder than expected since the source material was a bit underground. Once the necessary content to showcase was acquired, I went about drafting up concepts for how I wanted each thread of the project to tie together. That is when I decided to showcase each title individually, giving myself time to research and experience them, before then combining all of what I learned about them into a single review that was followed by a conceptual design demo that capped off the entire project. Recording was done in 8 different sessions over the course of 4 weeks in order to capture all of the appropriate footage and then map it into a timeline of which videos were going to uploaded in what order based on the latter artifacts of the project. For some titles, setting up the necessary emulation environment was tricky due to a few of the games such as Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car having an unconventional control scheme as it was an arcade game designed for children to ride in.
Reflection
This project included one of the first reviews that I ever did after failing to publish a Mega Man 8 review video several years earlier in the 2010s. While the Mega Man 8 review eventually was properly completed as a full project later on, Obscure Sonic Games was the primary testing grounds for how I wanted to construct review videos and what sort of writing style fit my approach the best. Pacing and visuals could have certainly been better had I re-created the project for a third time, but I was overall satisfied with the jumps in quality between my initial attempt at the beginning of the 2020s and my most recent one that was done here closer to the middle of the decade. Some of my first pieces of review work dates back to 2014, but it was never as coherent or official as my initial “failed” (it basically got stuck in development hell) production of the Mega Man 8 review and later on with the Obscure Sonic Games review. The experience gained in re-creating the Obscure Sonic Games review and my Big Brain Academy x Sonic Edusoft project was leveraged later on in other reviews and digital interface projects.