When you’re a beloved blue eulipotyphla with the speed of a race car, all the golden rings, a pal like Tails, and even a pair of hit feature films, you start feeling like you can do anything. That includes typing on a truncated mechanical keyboard without letters, numbers, or any other legends written on the top of the keycaps.

Higround, known for gaming gear, is releasing today a trio of 65 percent mechanical keyboards made in collaboration with Sega, as spotted by Nintendo Wire, as well as other Sega-focused gear, including keycaps and mousepads.

Pictures from the brand show a trio of keyboards coming to life with colorful details delivering nostalgic imagery anywhere from, depending on the keyboard, the loops and rings of the Green Hill Zone in 1991‘s Sonic the Hedgehog to the contrasting profiles of Sonic and Knuckles from 2001’s Sonic Adventure 2 to the rainbow-colored arrow keys mimicking console controller buttons in tribute to Sega’s last globally released console, the Dreamcast.

The PBT, dye-sublimated keycaps on the keyboards are 1.5 mm thick, according to Higround, and ditch informative legends on their topsides in favor of an artful appearance when viewing the keyboard from the top down. But from a typical seated position, you should be able to see legends side-printed on the front of the keycaps. You don’t have to be a touch typist to use the Sega keyboards, but if you’re not, they’ll be harder to use at first than the typical keyboard.

Sonic’s gotta go fast, so it’s fitting that the keyboards use Speed Silver linear mechanical switches from TTC. They’re specced for about 3.4 mm total travel, with a 1.08 mm actuation point and 45 grams of force to actuate (if you’re unsure of what that means, check out our mechanical keyboard guide). Those numbers make them a bit shorter to actuate and bottom out than the common Cherry MX Red switch (4mm / 2mm / 45gf); although, Higround could have gone shorter with low-profile mechanical switches to fit the speed theme even more.

If you’re looking for a speedy way to complete those spreadsheets, the Sega keyboards aren’t a winning fit since they lack a numpad.

Ultimately, you need a combination of Sega and linear typing fandom and the ability to work without a numpad (some touch-typing skills wouldn’t hurt either) in order for these keyboards to be something that can help you level up your productivity, rather than an interesting collector’s item.

But the keyboards aren’t as polarizing as they could be… at least they don’t make you type in Elvish.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1871810

Three weeks after its launch on modern consoles and PCs, the retro gaming collection Sonic Origins has continued coming under fire from various fans and critics, each uncovering issues that range from nitpicky to noticeable. Without any formal response from Sega on if or when the collection may receive a patch, one group of fans took it upon themselves to deliver their own mod on PC—only to then confirm that they were immediately halting and deleting their efforts.

The mod in question, dubbed BetterOrigins, was poised to correct apparently unfaithful elements found in the Sonic Origins versions of classic Sonic The Hedgehog games. In particular, the mod had already swapped art and sprites due to fact that some of them had been lifted from different games. (As an example, the “skidding” animation in Sonic Origins‘ version of Sonic 1 was actually lifted from Sonic CD, which the mod corrected.)

But as the group of apparently three modders made progress on various art swaps and patches, the team ran at Sonic speeds into a brick wall: The game’s “script” access was closed off. “After really digging into the files for this game, its [sic] become way clearer that this game is absolute shit,” a modder by the name of XanmanP wrote in a post that has since been deleted. Until Sega opens up fan access to the game’s scripts, he wrote, “there’s not a whole lot we can ‘fix’ without just redoing sprites.” (XanmanP did not immediately answer Ars Technica’s questions about what this script access could look like.)

The mod page originally suggested that the project might return someday, then added, “for now, screw this game.” This update, posted on Tuesday, was followed hours later by a total shutdown and deletion of the acrimonious update text. XanmanP clarified why: “This mod is never coming back now. All these news sites posting about what I said is way too much for me. I’m done.”

Stealth comes out of hiding

Examples of significant Sonic Origins bugs, which were not addressed by the BetterOrigins mod before its GameBanana page was edited, include massive computational spikes on PC when the game is left in its “main menu” interface, full of 3D models of classic characters; a bug in Sonic 2 that leaves the series’ popular sidekick Tails endlessly jumping (and making repeated jumping noises that cannot be stopped) and wholly stuck outside the screen’s field of view; a video playback issue in the Switch version of Sonic CD; and a bug that can erase progress in the collecting of “Chaos Emeralds” in select games.

These issues come on top of the general price-to-content ratio that I called out in my review of the Origins collection, which were exacerbated by a puzzling decision to lock certain aesthetic and “museum” content behind DLC paywalls.

Today’s mod project shutdown follows a troubling launch-day statement in June made by Stealth, a longtime Sonic game modder and programmer. Stealth is credited as a member of the Headcannon development team that is beloved in the Sonic community for its work on the series’ widescreen ports to smartphones, along with its contributions to the critically acclaimed Sonic Mania. On Origins‘ launch day, Stealth warned that “wild bugs” could be found in the collection, for which he took some responsibility.

“Every one of us is very unhappy about the state of Origins and even the Sonic 3 component,” Stealth wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread. “We weren’t too thrilled about its pre-submission state, either, but a lot was beyond our control.” The thread claims that requests to delay the game or submit major last-minute fixes were denied by Sega, though while Stealth clarifies that certain Sega staffers were great to work with, the thread doesn’t single out the biggest sources of these grudges.

Stealth has not posted on Twitter since the late-June thread went live. As of this article’s publication, Sega has not responded to Ars’ questions about if or when fans might expect patches to Sonic Origins on any of its platforms.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866158

It’s hard to believe two years have passed since the outcry over Sonic the Hedgehog’s live-action film debut led producers to rethink their toothy, tiny-faced, pointy-nosed version of Sonic.

The resulting CGI redo pushed the film’s release date to Valentine’s Day 2020—and for Ars, the film gets the dubious honor of being the final film we were able to screen in a theater for the rest of 2020. But it wasn’t the worst film for that, as it included enough humor, charm, and salvaged CGI to squeak into that year’s best-of list.

But there was certainly room for improvement—which is why I’m already optimistic about how the sequel is shaping up, as evidenced by Sonic 2‘s Thursday night world-premiere trailer.

Sonic is still a plucky, young-yet-eager superhero trying to come to grips with his powers, while his caretaker and human best friend (again, played by James Marsden) reminds the otherworldly hedgehog that maybe he should slow his spin-roll instead of causing trouble as a makeshift vigilante. “There will come a moment when your powers will be needed,” Marsden’s character says in the trailer. “You don’t choose that moment—that moment chooses you.” This earns a snappy retort from Sonic, again voiced by Ben Schwarz: “Did you steal that from Oprah?”

Almost immediately, the trailer homes in on the best part of Sonic 1: Jim Carrey’s return as Dr. Robotnik. This time, he’s accompanied by an army of floating droid robots that much better resemble the machines his character rides and pilots in Sonic video games’ boss battles. Carrey is immediately eager to continue carving his own Robotnik identity, announcing his entrance with a nearly Mask-like cry of, “Papa’s got a brand new ‘stache.” (The end of Sonic 1 shows Carrey’s character getting electrocuted, and thus, transforming his somewhat overkill mustache into an absolutely cartoony exaggeration. Sonic 2 leaves this mustache in place, and I give it a giant, white-glove thumbs-up.)

After a brief, chuckle-worthy exchange between Carrey and his Sonic 1 right-hand henchman, Sonic meets longtime series character Tails for this film universe’s first time (with their introduction left unexplained in this trailer). The duo immediately spins up a few nicely staged action sequences. Sonic perches on the wing of Tails’ classic bi-plane before approaching a massive Robotnik missile-launching installation. Sonic super-runs through a lava-lined catacomb, bouncing off its walls to boost his speed. And in an assault on an apparent snow-capped fortress, Sonic rides in on a snowboard, then grabs a rocket mid-launch, flips, and throws it back, shouting, “Return to sender!” This flurry of action plays out like a high-budget Saturday morning cartoon, and it implies the film will revolve around a Sonic and Tails relationship—which I’m hopeful proves more fruitful than the serviceable Sonic-and-Madsen bonding of old. (In one brief snippet, the animal duo walks into a rough-looking biker bar, which immediately makes Tails faint. Cute.)

The trailer concludes with our first-ever look at a live-action CGI Knuckles besting Sonic’s taunt by growling, “Do I look like I need your power?” before throwing our blue hero down. This one-line dialogue hints that Knuckles’ new voice actor, Idris Elba, is aiming for a very different combination of voice and accent than we’ve heard from him before, particularly compared to his wicked, Queen’s English take on The Jungle Book’s Shere Khan. Honestly, it sounds interesting and makes me more excited to hear how Elba might transform the game series’ most mysterious hero—and to see how Elba and Carrey might play off of each other as different kinds of bad guys, each with designs on harvesting the game series’ mysterious Chaos Emeralds.

Sonic 2 arrives in theaters on April 8, 2022. And while next year should be fruitful for live-action video game adaptations, most of the ones we’ve heard about thus far are slated for TV and streaming, including The Last Of Us on HBO, The Witcher‘s second season on Netflix, and Halo on Paramount Plus. (The latter got its own world premiere peek on Thursday evening, as well, but it proved incredibly short on details, lacking conversational scenes for any sense of how Master Chief will sound or talk in the show.) Meanwhile, the live-action Detective Pikachu fork of the Pokemon series has been dormant for some time, with the last news on that front being a pessimistic “on hold” description from actor Justice Smith.

Listing image by Paramount

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1819474

How many more Star Wars films and TV series do we need? Our answer to that question became “at least one more” when we learned on late Thursday that a pretty juicy Lucasfilm project is in the works: the first-ever Knights of the Old Republic film.

Buzzfeed News says the project is currently linked to only one person: screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, who has worked on scripts for Terminator Genisys, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, and Alita: Battle Angel (meaning no actors, directors, or producers are currently attached, which should indicate how early-stages this project currently is). This script, according to Buzzfeed, is the first of a possible trilogy. If true, that would slam Kalogridis’s project up against Star Wars film trilogies from Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff and from The Last Jedi director/screenwriter Rian Johnson.

There’s always a chance that this KOTOR-linked screenplay is the first step in a protracted process that never leads to production (spec scripts tend to come before true film development) or that it turns into something tailored for the upcoming Disney+ streaming service. Still, the KOTOR video game franchise, shepherded by the game makers at BioWare, has always been beloved for its characters and scripts. Even its MMO incarnation, which launched in 2011 to uneven reviews, has been consistently lauded for its engrossing universe and stories. Hence, we’ll join our fellow Star Wars nerds and begin optimistically drooling already.

Speaking of optimism: our hopes that the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog film’s visual design and digital effects will get a legitimate revision went up after its director confirmed a three-month production delay. Director Jeff Fowler took to Twitter on Friday to share the news—the film will now launch on February 14, 2020, bumped from its original November 8, 2019 release date.

Interestingly, Fowler’s tweet used a very cartoony silhouette of Sonic’s telltale head and an apparently hand-drawn model of Sonic’s hand… wearing white gloves. The film’s reveal trailer included a version of Sonic who, instead of wearing gloves, had white-colored fur over his bare hands. These are the clearest signs yet of changes that Fowler alluded to in his previous mea culpa tweet about the launch trailer’s Sonic treatment.

Rounding out the Friday nerd-film news is word that Taika Waititi’s next live-action film project, a remake of the classic Japanese anime Akira, has a release date: May 21, 2021. This, coincidentally, places the Thor Ragnarok director’s next film directly against the already announced sequel John Wick: Chapter 4, which for now will also launch the same day.

Listing image by Paramount / Sega

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1510697

On Thursday, 48 hours after the world finally saw what this November’s Sonic The Hedgehog live-action movie would look like, its director took to Twitter with a surprise announcement: that’s, uh, not what the live-action movie will look like.

“Thank you for the support,” film director Jeff Fowler posted to Twitter on Thursday afternoon. “And the criticism. The message is loud and clear… you aren’t happy with the design, and you want changes. It’s going to happen.”

After acknowledging the support of film studio Paramount and game company Sega, Fowler included a pretty telling hashtag: “#gottafixfast.” It’s not just a riff on the series’ iconic “gotta go fast” slogan” but rather a stark admission that Fowler’s vague suggestion for a “changed design” is running headlong into a six-month timeframe. The film is still scheduled for a November 8, 2019, release and will be Fowler’s feature-length directorial debut.

Fowler’s tweet doesn’t acknowledge months of public questions and comments about the live-action Sonic design. The murmurs and furrowed brows began in December of last year when the film’s premiere poster debuted, showing a silhouette of the redesigned gaming mascot—long, thin legs and all. The redesign ran head-long into years of 2D and 3D renders of the character across a multimedia landscape of video games, comic books, dolls, and animated series, and it followed a prior teaser poster that showed a real-world city from the perspective of Sonic’s crotch—thus emphasizing his new design’s long, thin legs.

Complaints reached a fever pitch when a series of promotional slides about the Sonic film, prepared by an associated promotional company, leaked in early March. The film’s trailer has since confirmed the accuracy of those March images, though that leak didn’t include one particularly stomach-churning detail: live-action Sonic’s mouth of teeth, a first for the character since it was introduced in 1991.

This week’s Sonic film trailer appeared just as promotions for next week’s Pokémon: Detective Pikachu film ramp up. While longtime Pokémon fans may bristle at the CGI-ized versions of certain characters, those fans certainly dodged a bullet compared to Sonic’s diehards. P:DP adds a handful of sometimes-lovely, sometimes-odd real-life effects to its character renders, but their designs otherwise conform to the 3D specs that series developer Game Freak has established and refined in years of games dating back to the N64 era.

Since the new Sonic design’s leak, original members of the Sonic the Hedgehog 1 development team have offered their own conflicting opinions on the matter. After the March leak, series programmer Yuji Naka said he was “shocked” by the redesign and was particularly baffled by why the character’s hands had become covered in white fur, instead of being covered in gloves. Another Naka tweet expressed hope that a live-action Sonic eventually conforms to the “rounder” shape of head and eyes from his original design.

Meanwhile, shortly before Fowler’s change of heart, original series artist Naoto Ohshima posted his own sketch of the new live-action design (shown above). The sketch’s caption includes a message of support for the film and concern about knee-jerk reactions: “I was expecting adults to have fun, too. I am worried.”

In the meantime, while we wait to see whether next week’s live-action Detective Pikachu film truly breaks the “video game curse” on movie adaptations, I recommend enjoying last year’s Rampage—which doesn’t necessarily break that curse, but at least has a darned good time playing fast and loose with its ’80s arcade inspirations.

Listing image by Paramount / Sega

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1499649

SAN FRANCISCO—With every year of the Game Developers Conference, there comes a rash of panels. This being a developer- and coder-centric event, they focus largely on niche game-design topics like rendering techniques, procedural generation, and art pipelines. That’s all informative and thorough, well and good, but one animator’s treasure can be another programmer’s trash.

For nerdy panels that have something to offer everyone, we look to GDC’s classic postmortems: the stories of long-ago games from the designers who led the projects and still remember a lot from those ’70s, ’80s, and (now) early ’90s games.

This year’s two best GDC postmortems landed firmly in the early ’90s, with one of the games in focus, NBA Jam, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Both postmortem’ed franchises exploded as rebellious, industry-shifting upstarts during their era, and as such, their GDC origin stories included plenty of attitude and jokes. Even better, the staffers for both of these series came with reams of data in hand—and in one case, there might be delectable, super-rare EPROMs to follow.

In NBA Jam‘s case, famed series announcer Tim Kitzrow served as both MC and court jester while series co-creator Mark Turmell led the proceedings. There were also occasional, informative interruptions from another co-creator, Sal Divita. (Kitzrow’s random exclamations leaned heavily into NBA Jam catch phrases, particularly when Turmell began talking about the series’ fall-off in quality once Acclaim acquired its license. That’s when Kitzrow shouted a perfect “nail in the coffin!”)

The above gallery includes explanatory text about much of the panel’s historical details. Turmell admitted during the Thursday panel that the game began as a generic basketball title, mostly out of his love of the sport, before a Midway executive suggested the team actually ask the NBA for a shot at the license. Parts of Midway’s first pitch video appear in the above gallery, which was ultimately turned down because they “didn’t want our NBA logo in these seedy arcade locations.” Turmell thought that was because NBA’s corporate headquarters was in Times Square, whose arcades in the ’80s and ’90s operated feet away from drug deals and prostitution. Another pitch video, showing off test NBA Jam sessions at bowling alleys and family-friendly locales, went over way better.

Astonishingly, as part of the licensing agreement, Midway only had to pay the NBA roughly $150 for every sale of a $3,500-3,900 arcade cabinet for the rights. Even crazier, the NBA didn’t provide any assets to Midway for the sake of the game’s production. Midway had to source images of its players’ heads from sports magazines and VHS recordings of TV broadcasts.

The trio also talked about a few specific programming challenges, particularly the energy spent getting ball-passing just right. In most sports games up to that point, any pass’s receivers would stop running, turn their bodies, and reach out to catch a ball. Thanks to NBA Jam‘s lack of penalties, that kind of stop-and-wait wouldn’t fly—you’d get knocked down while waiting for a crucial pass. Thus, the team rambled on about the right mix of mathematics and character pathing to ensure passes would always land in running players’ hands while they still animated like they might in real life.

Other tidbits included an origin story for the game’s “on fire” system, which was invented and mapped out during a single Burger King lunch. When Divita heard about this idea, he rejected it soundly—”I liked exaggerated stuff, but I wanted to maintain some level of realism”—and pointed to a rejected design decision to add “bunny” shoes that would temporarily make players run faster and jump higher.

The night before the panel, Turmell appeared at a film screening and shared a story about one test location for the game. At this arcade, one character stood out as a clear fan favorite: the one who wore a bowler hat. This character, NBA Jam developer Sheridan Oursler, was one of the game’s many unlockable characters, and the kids at that location were far more interested in unlocking and sporting a hat and a mustache than in faking like a real NBA star, apparently.

Most intriguing was Turmell’s response to one fan who asked about one version of the game (which had a 3D tank game as an easter egg) being impossible to find in MAME-compatible form. Just give me your email address, he said, and I’ll send you a ROM if I can find it. Turmell also admitted that he has EPROMs of special, rare versions of NBA Jam in his archives—particularly a famed, unlicensed version made for celebrities with players like Michael Jordan and Ken Griffey Jr.—and would do something with them if only he could test them. Minutes later, acclaimed games archivist Frank Cifaldi rushed the stage to hand Turmell his business card. Stay tuned…

Sonic showed up, too

The Sonic the Hedgehog panel included art and design staffers from its original run, and the panel mostly focused on the how Sonic was conceived as a mascot. Naoto Ohshima discussed how his original selection process for the right mascot took place in Central Park during a brief Sega-related trip to New York City. While hanging around the park with a sketchpad, he showed passersby drawings he’d made of various creatures. In his own informal poll, he found that his hedgehog design was overwhelmingly picked by strangers as their favorite, with a Robotnik-like old man coming in second. (I have to wonder if anybody at the park that day ever stumbled upon a Sonic game and realized what they had been a part of.)

Mostly, the duo from Sonic’s original era talked about coming up with an emphatic brand that would represent “cool” and “rebellious” attitudes, which isn’t news to anybody alive during the “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” era. But Ohshima also finally spoke at length about the weirdest part of Sonic’s origin story: the character was sold to Sega executives as a reference to a real-life story that never actually happened. I snapped a photo of the original “history” document that Ohshima crafted for Sega, along with a slide that translates its basic gist. You’ll find those in the above gallery, along with a ton of original, hand-drawn concept art that was used to develop the game’s eventual sprites and animations.

Additionally, one of the world’s first “massively multiplayer” games, Ultima Online, received a brief spotlight. We’re lumping a bit of its panel into this “upstart ’90s games” selection, if only because series co-creator Richard “Lord British” Garriott dressed up in his usual ren-fair garb. We already lucked out with a nice Garriott chat a while back on some of UO’s “war stories,” so the panel wasn’t entirely revealing, but it did have a few tidbits.

My favorite was Garriott’s explanation of the concept of “shards,” which is a term used to this day in explaining how online players are typically split permanently amongst various servers. This term of “shards” was used to answer Garriott’s concerns, knowing that his original “lofty” expectations of a 300,000 player count were exceeded by initial sales exceeding one million.

“[As a result,] we couldn’t fit everyone into one world,” Garriott said. “That was sort of a tragedy. We’d have to separate people who’d have different experiences than each other. How can we fictionally make that okay? Make this multiverse feel like a single world?” His answer was to reach back to the fiction of the first Ultima game, in which the evil wizard Mondain split the universe like a gem into multiple identical shards, and that Ultima Online carried this idea forward with different populations living on different servers. He confessed that there’d been an original plan to eventually unite all the servers with a big quest line, and the fiction would have revolved around undoing Mondain’s action from so long ago.

Noting that the term “shards” has become standard among online game structures, Garriott laughed: “Other industries picked up this fiction about Mondain’s gem!”

Listing image by Mark Turmell

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1280661