blazehedgehog - Tumblr blog

[blazehedgehog]

Is "Mohawk Sonic" even an intentional design change? As a kid, it always felt like a different artist's rendition to me, kinda like "Mullet Cell" from Dragon Ball Z...

I mean, there was definitely some confusion on how to render Sonic in 3D back then, yeah.

He's definitely meant to be drawn two-dimensionally first and foremost.

What I would say happened is that Sega of America probably thought Sonic didn't match whatever image/demographic they were trying to project, so they brought in their own artist to make him look... for lack of a better term, "more western."

Like what happened to Mega Man.

It's an effort to Americanize a design that is too much of something else.

And unlike Mega Man, which slowly moved closer, and closer, and closer to Japan's Rockman design with each passing game...

American Sonic "stuck."

It became the way people in America saw Sonic. It was punk. It was cool.

Mega Man probably got pulled closer and closer to Rockman because Capcom of Japan probably made comments on what they thought he should look like. But Sega of America was riding high on being the most successful branch of the company. If anyone in Japan had any complaints, SOA had the clout to say "Nah, we know better than that, and our sales bare it out."

[blazehedgehog]

Imagine if Sonic Team made a game similar to the storybook games, but where Sonic enters a classic movie instead. Which movies would you like to see used? Let's say one public domain movie and one copyrighted movie.

Something I drew many many years ago, we'll say around 2009 or 2010, was the idea that Sonic would enter a western.

It was based on two things:

I think Sonic in cowboy boots is a fun mental image

A lasso could be more fun than a sword.

I didn't have any specific western in mind or even any specific storybook in mind, I was just spitballing based on vibes alone. But Sonic the Hedgehog as "The Man with No Name" could be interesting.

Like right away I imagine Sonic is getting suspicious why he keeps getting transported into all these stories so he refuses to give his name in this one, and thus he earns that title and tries to feel his way around and figure out what's going on.

Unfortunately I am not well versed in public domain movies, outside of the usual suspects: Night of the Living Dead, House on Haunted Hill, Carnival of Souls, etc. I know there's a lot of silent-era (and early "talkies") comedy that's public domain now, too. But I dunno how well Sonic would fit there.

For a moment I realized those old classic Popeye cartoons are public domain, including the one where he fights Sinbad, but we already had Sinbad in Secret Rings. Which is a shame, because Sinbad goes on a lot of adventures and it would adapt into a game easily.

The movie itself isn't public domain, but Sonic in Clash of the Titans would be fun. That's my brain making a leap because The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad had special effects by Ray Harryhausen, who also handled Clash of the Titans. Sonic helping Perseus and fighting greek gods would be kind of cool. His friend roster would slot in well there, too.

[blazehedgehog]

how do you feel about Baldurs Gate 3 winning all the five major GOTY awards?

Good for them, I guess.

Outside of Diablo 2 and a bit of Torchlight I don't think I've ever played a CRPG before. Any of them. Ever. And I'm sure Diablo 2 and Torchlight aren't even considered CRPGs in the same way as Baldur's Gate or Lineage 2 or Pillars of Eternity or whatever.

[blazehedgehog]

This is probably a niche topic - but with how long you are a sonic fan, do you have some interesting examples of "revisionism" about the franchise and peoples reception of it. For example the infamous "sonic was never good xd" , things like that, lies that just get propegatiated by weird naratives and naive consumers.

I mean the general thing is that I'm getting old enough now to understand the generational shift in things. People who are now in their mid-to-late 20's putting games like Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog on pedestals.

I've talked for years about how there were games I played when I was 8-10 years old that, at that age, I had no idea were "bad games" and thus developed nostalgia for. The one I always go back to is Awesome Possum. To a 11 year old in 1994, Awesome Possum did not seem like a bad game.

Or maybe it did. I don't know. 1994 was a long time ago, and the thing about nostalgia is that memories get sweeter with age. So I don't remember hating it as a kid, but maybe I did think it was weird, at least.

Shadow the Hedgehog is a bad game. I will hear no arguments otherwise. You can love Shadow the Hedgehog, I won't deny you that, and I may even help you celebrate that game, because feeding on that kind of positivity is fun in and of itself. But on its own terms, taken at face value, it is objectively soul crushing.

And Sonic Heroes is a game that is deeply unremarkable. Recently when the fake rumors of a Sonic Heroes remake were being surfaced, I often described the game as "Not bad enough to make fun of, and not good enough to love." Which is its own special kind of curse and may even be worse than simply being "bad."

But for a person who was the right age when these games came out, their memories sweeten with age, and they seek to recapture what it felt like to be 11 years old and playing Sonic Heroes for the first time. And hey, unlike Awesome Possum, Sonic Heroes is not actually that bad of a game. So it's even easier to reinforce that nostalgia.

Quality is not an objective, timeless scale to weigh things on. Quality changes on the moment it's presented it, and the mood it has been received with. Quality changes. Which is why, in the right audience, even a soul-crushing game like Shadow the Hedgehog can be enjoyable.

I don't know where I'm going with this but it will always be funny to me how many people 10-15 years younger than me express love about Sonic Heroes just because they were too young to have a bigger, more nuanced critical opinion about it when it was new.

[blazehedgehog]

[blazehedgehog]

It's pretty disingenuous to say it was only the actions of "a couple people." When a company makes a statement, that reflects on all of the employees who work there.

When a company says, "We're going to remove hate speech" and then pulls a 180 and uses it as a place to take a stand against "SJW Censorship" or whatever, that feels really gross. And it feels equally gross that you'd bring up cancel culture, because that's not what this is about. This is about me supporting my LGBTQ friends.

If Voidpoint not getting my $20 is all it takes to cancel them, then they're pretty fragile.

This whole post was about trusting your personal beliefs, go take your culture war campaign bullshit somewhere else.

Where do you draw the line on the game industry's bad practices and no longer buying their stuff? Like I personally try to avoid buying Nintendo anything after the Gary Bowser thing and numerous piracy-related oversteps, but I still buy Metroid games and merch so I doubt it means anything. Hate seeing SEGA's union busting, probably still buying Origins Plus and Superstars. I dunno, I'm just frustrated with the industry and my own failure to commit.

It's entirely personal. Everybody has their own standards and limits. Where the breaking point lies is for you to decide.

And you gotta realize that as much as it matters for you to take a stand and defend your beliefs, you're also just one person. If you cave and buy something, unless there's an actual picket line, you shouldn't beat yourself up too hard over it. It's not the end of the world.

There's different levels, too. Like, there are some things where I am hardline, ironclad, total boycott on. Like, Ion Fury. When Voidpoint was called out for having homophobia in the game and then doubled back around with some stupid stance on "refusing to censor their game" it felt a little bit like someone was blowing a dog whistle.

In the five years since Ion Fury came out, I've had opportunities to get the game with minimal guilt; there was a Humble Bundle a year or two ago where you could donate your entire purchase amount to charity and thus block Voidpoint from getting paid, and even then I wouldn't do it.

But even though I took a stance on Sonic Origins Plus being too expensive at +$10 DLC, I'll probably end up buying it eventually anyway. To some degree, the "statement" you make even has a shelf-life. Denying them sales at launch matters a lot more than denying them sales two years after it matters.

If you try to make a statement but cave, at least you tried to begin with.

[blazehedgehog]

That's twice now the Tumblr app has brought my phone to it's knees over basically nothing. It seems like some advertisement or something gets stuck in the background and won't let go, until either the app crashes or even the entire phone crashes (I just got a "System UI isn't responding. Wait, or close?" popup)

Curiously, both times it's happened, I get the little "this app is accessing your location" map pin icon up by my battery indicator, even though I've double checked Tumblr's permissions and it is not allowed access to that. Nor can I ever remember it asking.

I'd report this to Tumblr support but every single time I interface with that arm of the support team it is maybe the most infuriating experience of my life. I don't think I've ever successfully reported a bug here ever, not in a decade of use, because across three different company ownerships, the bug reporting process is like dealing with a baby sensory video for a space alien.

[blazehedgehog]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[blazehedgehog]

Why do you think people get so mad about Pokemon getting criticized.

People who get into Pokemon sometimes get way into Pokemon, planning builds and working on raising the specific perfect creature. It's a lot of calculating stat growth, breeding traits, and good old fashioned grinding.

They probably don't like it when it feels like their work (and the satisfaction they get from that work) is invalidated or trivialized.

[blazehedgehog]

Where do you draw the line on the game industry's bad practices and no longer buying their stuff? Like I personally try to avoid buying Nintendo anything after the Gary Bowser thing and numerous piracy-related oversteps, but I still buy Metroid games and merch so I doubt it means anything. Hate seeing SEGA's union busting, probably still buying Origins Plus and Superstars. I dunno, I'm just frustrated with the industry and my own failure to commit.

It's entirely personal. Everybody has their own standards and limits. Where the breaking point lies is for you to decide.

And you gotta realize that as much as it matters for you to take a stand and defend your beliefs, you're also just one person. If you cave and buy something, unless there's an actual picket line, you shouldn't beat yourself up too hard over it. It's not the end of the world.

There's different levels, too. Like, there are some things where I am hardline, ironclad, total boycott on. Like, Ion Fury. When Voidpoint was called out for having homophobia in the game and then doubled back around with some stupid stance on "refusing to censor their game" it felt a little bit like someone was blowing a dog whistle.

In the five years since Ion Fury came out, I've had opportunities to get the game with minimal guilt; there was a Humble Bundle a year or two ago where you could donate your entire purchase amount to charity and thus block Voidpoint from getting paid, and even then I wouldn't do it.

But even though I took a stance on Sonic Origins Plus being too expensive at +$10 DLC, I'll probably end up buying it eventually anyway. To some degree, the "statement" you make even has a shelf-life. Denying them sales at launch matters a lot more than denying them sales two years after it matters.

If you try to make a statement but cave, at least you tried to begin with.

[blazehedgehog]

I may not like Maekawa’s writing style for how overly convoluted it is, but I will give credit where credit is due and say that at the very least the characterization was somewhat consistent and there were some high stakes to appreciate. Games like Adventure 2, Heroes and even Black Knight feel like stories with actual heart and identity, which is something I can respect. Something that Pontac and Graff’s writing was surely lacking in and I could not vibe with it.

Over time I've been feeling more sympathy for Pontac and Graff as more information comes out to suggest they really were just localizers, not writers. They were there to punch up the translation but were not there to craft story beats or anything like that.

And which is easier to believe? That Sega brought in new guys that ruined the story for those games, or that somebody at Sega wrote yet another clumsy Sonic plot?

Baldy Nosehair was pretty bad in retrospect, but Sonic Lost World not making any sense wasn't their fault, I don't think. And in places where they have been given more control over writing (Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice, Team Sonic Racing) their output is actually fine.

I was talking it over with my Discord recently, but I personally really enjoyed the writing in Team Sonic Racing. It didn't have a lot of depth, but it was breezy and cute. I likened it to one of the Dragon Ball Z movies: kind of inconsequential, but not without some fun to be had as long as you don't take it too seriously. And it's just a spin-off game anyway.

I think we as a community did those two dudes dirty and they deserve some kind of an apology.

[blazehedgehog]

What did you think of the Occupy Wall street movement?

I feel like this ask is about 13 years too late for any meaningful discussion about that, and it's either bait or has some other bad-faith ulterior motive.

I will say if you've read my blog for any extended length of time, it's pretty clear that I've always kind of been poor. I've been so poor for so long that I feel like it's kind of effected my brain. As in, part of the reason I'm still poor is because I'm just used to living like this. I know how to get by on the barest minimum. Money seems to come to others so easily, but it never has for me. Never ever. Not in my entire life. Could it be self-sabotage?

But, given the state of the world, maybe there are more in this boat with me than I realize. The class divide is very wide in 2024, and getting wider all the time. It's definitely not just a me problem.

I don't have much sympathy for anyone with more than two million dollars in the bank, and the more money beyond that point, the less sympathy I have. Like, if you get lucky and suddenly find yourself super rich, great! It's pretty easy to run the figures on something, like, say, Lethal Company and see that a player peak of 230k users equals out to a minimum of 2.3 million dollars in sales. If you consider far more than 230,000 people probably own Lethal Company (it has 300k+ total reviews on Steam!), it's probably easier to say Zeekerss made in the realm of 4-8 million dollars on that game. And Zeekerss is fine by me (for now).

But if you're a suit who just hoards infinitely more money, year after year, forever? The kind of shareholder that demands the line always go up, despite the fact you own multiple homes and a fleet of cars? If you have more money than you can spend in two lifetimes, but still need more?

That's a villain.

Extrapolate how I feel about Occupy Wallstreet from there.

[blazehedgehog]

I have unlocked the power known as "OBS Stinger Transition Masking" and now I'm passing the savings on to YOU!

What the hell are you talking about?

If you stream using OBS, there's something called a "Stinger Transition" that lets you create custom fades between two different scenes. So if you have a static "be right back" scene separate from a live streaming scene, a transition will fade between the two.

A "Stinger" transition is something OBS added that lets you substitute a video file as the transition fade. Essentially, you'd have a (usually transparent) video file and at a specific point, that stinger video would cover 100% of the stream, at which point you'd tell OBS the time code of 100% coverage so it could secretly swap scenes underneath it.

But then OBS added "Track Matte" which lets you do fancy masking. Now there's a whole complicated process where, if you want full color animated transitions, you have to generate a special split video but that's too fancy for me. What isn't too fancy is just basic mask transitions, like the GIF you see above, and "Track Matte" lets you take the easy way out and do this instead. I promise, it's not hard!

So, I went through and converted my favorite gradient transitions I have for Vegas to work with OBS's Track Matte Stinger Transition Masks (wow, what a mouthful). And! I'm letting you download them and giving you instructions on how to use them. Before we get to how to install and use them, some credits:

Default Sony Vegas Gradient Transitions

Diagonal Wipe

Side Wipe

Swirl

Puzzle

Curling Smoke

Floral Growth

Iris In

Iris Out

Barn Door Open

Barn Door Shut

Shutters Open

Shutters Shut

Horizontal Alternating Bars

Vertical Alternating Bars

Gradient Transitions I Borrowed From My Old Roxio Gamecap

Quad Clock

Many Clocks

Maple Leaf

Mandelbrot Fractal

Bytes

Star Wipe

Butterfly Zoom

Blobs

Chomping

Diamonds

Checkerboard

Crusty

Balls Out

Burst

Swooce In (Pictured above!)

Swooce Out

Draw Box

Draw Box Smaller

Splat Top

Splat Explode

Overlay Stars

Stargate In

Stargate Out

Scraps

Pinch

(I may have gotten creative with some of those names)

Gradient Transitions I Made Myself

Pixel Infection

Scratches

Slime

Yoshi's Island Wipe

How To Install These

Download your chosen flavor:

OBS Stinger Masks [720p].zip

OBS Stinger Masks [1080p].zip

Extract all the MP4 files somewhere. Preferably to their own folder, and possibly somewhere inside your OBS install if you can help it.

Open OBS. You should have a little menu called "Scene Transitions."

If you don't have this visible, in the drop down menus at the top, click on "Docks" and make sure "Scene Transitions" is checked.

With your Scene Transitions panel available, click the + (plus) icon and select "Stinger."

This will prompt you to give your new Stinger transition a custom name and take you to the customization menu.

In the "Video File" field, we just point it towards one of the MP4s you just downloaded and extracted. In this case, I have chosen "Swooce In.mp4"

You can probably ignore everything else, but make sure to check "☑ Use a Track Matte" and under the "Matte Layout" drop down, make sure it's set to "Mask Only." The other two Matte Layout settings are for the fancy full-color alpha transparency video transitions, but we're just doing simple black-to-white masking.

At the very bottom of the menu (I'd have to scroll down on my sample image) there should be a "Preview Transition" button if you'd like to see a sample of what it looks like in motion.

Click okay, and you should be done! As long as the custom stinger you just made is the one selected under "Scene Transitions", every time you change scenes, it will blend between them using the video you selected.

Can I make these any faster? Or slower?

Not within OBS, no. You would have to change the speed of the video file itself. I tried to be mindful of how good these looked at what speeds, but if you think they're the wrong speed, you'll have to crack open a video editor for yourself and figure out how to change the playback speed.

And, obviously, if you have even minor experience with video editing, you can probably grasp the concept of how this works pretty easily, meaning it should be pretty easy to make your own stinger masks with all kinds of fun patterns. As long as it goes from black to white!

You could also be a psychopath with Adobe Premiere and learn how to do the full color animated transitions too, if you want. This seems like a pretty decent tutorial on how to do that, but like I said, that's way too much work for me.

[blazehedgehog]

In 2018 I paid Sony $10 to own the entire series of Cowboy Bebop digitally through their streaming service and now there's nowhere I can access that purchase

At best, it sounds like they will compensate me a one month subscription to Crunchyroll Premium for my trouble. One month temporary access to a streaming platform for my forever-purchase of something meant to live in a library eternally.

And don't think this won't set a precedent. Unless someone holds their feet to the fire about doing this, the ball is already in motion and it will start happening more, and more, and more. Warner will do it. Paramount will do it. Universal will do it. The moment they think it's acceptable, and more importantly profitable, they will kick you into the gutter.

"If purchase isn't ownership, piracy isn't theft" is true, but that doesn't mean you should let them get away with taking your money, either. Find a way and take action.

reminder that digital libraries aren’t owned, also why pirating digital content is a necessity

[blazehedgehog]

So if we ever get Metal Sonic in the movie universe, what would you want them to do with him?

My main concern is Jim Carey. He's been threatening to retire for a while now, which I assume is just him holding Paramount's feet to the fire. But I feel like something there is going to give.

What I could see happening is Robotnik seeing Shadow, his grand father's creation, and realizing he could build something "better than Sonic." I could see Metal Sonic appearing either in Sonic 3, or if they get to it, a Sonic 4.

I don't know if they need to "do anything with him." I feel like out of a lot of characters, Metal Sonic is better suited to just showing up in the movies as-is as this cold Terminator-type character.

If they lean into the whole "operating on a scan of Sonic's brain" angle, maybe we could have a plot about bringing that out. Weaponizing Sonic's sense of friendship as a way to undo Metal Sonic. Like maybe Tails is in trouble and Metal is the first one to save him.

That's kind of what the Sonic OVA did. Metal Sonic kind of ends up being the one to save the day at the cost of his own life. They could even one up it -- it kind of bothered me that Metal just randomly decides to stop fighting Sonic and save the President, conceding that "There is only one Sonic." It feels like there should be a moment where we see Metal Sonic have a realization of some type, but it just kind of happens without any setup.

The movie could actually build up to Metal Sonic's programming breaking down and more of Sonic's personality coming through until we get to Metal's big hero moment.

[blazehedgehog]

Do you really believe Tails and Knuckles should NEVER be major characters again? Ever? Isn't that disrespectful to their fans? What's stopping them from having new arcs? Why must every character be shoved aside to become Sonic's cheerleader's forever?

I'll answer this by asking you a question: in the James Bond franchise, is Q a "major character"?

He generally only shows up for a couple minutes at the start of the movie to dispense Bond's arsenal of gadgets and then usually disappears. The catch being that he's in every single James Bond movie, and a lot of them use the same actor, even as Bond himself changes.

Q is just as iconic as 007, despite having maybe 5% of the screen time. The same goes for the rest of MI6: Miss Money Penny and M are generally considered to be very important, iconic people in these movies, even though their total dialog can sometimes be measured in seconds.

I don't think anyone has to lecture me on the importance of story and character in the Sonic franchise. Even when it's not good (which has been more often than not), characterization was kind of the first thing the Sonic franchise hung its hat on all the way back in 1991. Sonic had a personality that very few had the fidelity or need to display. Sega was showing off.

And Sonic games continued to have a lot of story. There were periods of time where the only major thing people interacted with was Sonic's story. People get attached and have expectations of development.

But I also ask you: what are you actually attached to? Are you just clapping for the familiar? We've had tag-a-longs in the story before. Remember Amy and Knuckles in Sonic Lost World? Did they really need to be there? Before Sonic Frontiers, what value has anyone brought to the narrative development of these games? What exactly are you "losing"? Having a chorus of keys jingled in your face every single game? Should Sonic the Hedgehog's story just be a baby sensory video?

You can have these guys be important, you can give these guys arcs, but they do not need to be riding Sonic's coattails in every single game at all times. That's still storytelling.

You will still survive after you cut the umbilical cord.

[blazehedgehog]

Completing the "scripts I've written but haven't produced videos for yet" backlog, here's a Shenmue do-over script I've mentioned here and there, with a meaty text post explaining why I decided to create a do-over and why it never came out.

Trying something new over on my Patreon I'm tentatively calling "Very Early Access" wherein I post basically the first draft of an upcoming video script, as read by a TTS. Having a script read back to me by TTS has become an important step, because being able to hear it spoken out loud (especially by another voice) helps shake me out of comfort zones and identify when things are worded wrong.

So I figured... why not post that. There ARE typos. The script WILL change. But you get to hear the most firstest of drafts as read by a robot who sometimes pronounces things a little weird.

Maybe it's a bad idea? Maybe it's too ghetto? We'll see how it goes. Even if you don't sub to my Patreon, there's a 30 second sample you can listen to if you click through.