The following was written by forum member Hinchy, who was a personal friend of Polygon Jim.
Cody “Rick ‘Polygon Jim’ ‘Pegleg Jimmy’ ‘Grand Master Jimmy’ ‘PeglegPolygonGrandmasterJimmyJimJimmy’ Fields” Lawrence
April 10, 1992 – May 18, 2013
This is the picture I took the last time I was ever with him. I’m still amazed that he managed to make that domino tower while drunk.
What can you say about Jimmy? He had a goofy sense of humor, hilarious to some, aggravating to others, but I don’t think anyone would deny that he was a man of charisma and fun. He was the most reckless guy I’ve ever met in my life, that’s for sure. He lived and died with the spirit of fucking around.
I’d known Jimmy for a good 5 years. During the lead-up to Sonic Unleashed, he was 50% of the reason I decided to check out Sonic Retro in the first place. Last fall, in the span of about 24 hours, he drove to Louisiana and became my roommate and hang-out buddy. There were ups and downs, but we had the time of our lives. Unfortunately, he couldn’t maintain the rent and moved back to his home in Pennsylvania. My chief concern about it a couple weeks ago was that he and I didn’t get to go see Iron Man 3 in theaters like we had planned… now that he’s dead, I have to get it through my head that I’ll never see him ever again.
Though he leaves this world today, he will live on in the Sonic community through the best hack ever and the phrase “assface Sonic”, which he coined.
Rest in peace, you magnificent bastard.
Read the local news report on the incident here.
Having raised over $1800 for Child’s Play back in August, members of The Sonic Center, along with some speedrunners from Speed Demos Archive and SpeedRunsLive, are again running about 50 hours of Sonic Team games. Proceeds from this year’s marathon will benefit the American Cancer Society, and your donations can determine what you see, such as Chaos Emerald collection, fishing for Froggy, or stage selection in Sonic Shuffle.
Join in for both speedruns and casual play of all of your favourite and least-favourite games, playthroughs of other Sonic Team IPs such as NiGHTS and Burning Rangers, as well the ever-popular Tails Skypatrol, as audience play for Puyo Pop and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed for Xbox 360, and- wait, what do you mean you don’t know what Puyo Pop is? We didn’t work on Sega Retro for you to ignore it!
View the stream through the main site here: http://www.soniccenter.org/stream
Or you can view via Twitch.tv directly: http://www.twitch.tv/tsc_streams
We first reported on the Unleashed Project over a year ago, when Sonic Retro community members (and all-around beautiful people) Dario FF, Twilightzoney, and Chimera revealed the earliest footage of their experiments with porting stages from Sonic Unleashed into the PC version of Sonic Generations. Today, thanks to the incredible efforts of Dario and his team, they’ve released the first completed version of the project, including all eight major daytime stages from the original Unleashed ported to Generations, along with a redesigned hub world and reworked level progression.
Now you can play through all of the best parts of Unleashed without having to endure the suffering caused by Werehog fatigue and medal-hunting. Plus, you can enjoy the beautiful art direction of each stage in full 1080p at 60 frames per second (provided your computer can handle it – my Phenom II X4 cries during Jungle Joyride), and many of the game’s lower-resolution textures have been recreated in higher quality so you can get the most out of your PC’s graphics card. Of course, the stages also benefit from improvements and changes Generations made over its predecessor, such as tighter controls and the addition of customizable skills.
Be sure to check out the trailer after the break, complete with an orgasmic remix of the Unleashed final boss theme by Retro musician Falk, known for his work on fan games such as Sonic Before the Sequel and After the Sequel (and who also did the hub world remixes of the Unleashed stage themes for this project). You should also head to the project’s ModDB page, where you can find links to download the mod for yourself. Finally, a tremendous thanks to the Unleashed Project team for all the hard work they’ve put in over the past year to get this polished up and ready for release. This project is a stellar example of the kind of awesome stuff we love to see from the Retro community.
Seasons greetings, dear Retro readers! Last night, jolly old Santa Claus visited the Retro HQ, ate all our cookies and milk, and didn’t leave us a damn thing. Fortunately, we managed to pull his bag off his sleigh as he tried to escape from our armed pursuit, and in his wonderful bag of gifts, we found a hundred pounds of solid gold ingots. We promptly sold all the gold, and I’m happy to report that all of the Retro staff slept on mattresses made entirely out of cash last night. In the spirit of the Christmas season, we thought we’d pass our frankly tremendous fortunes on to you, so today we’re holding a giveaway for a Sonic Franchise Steam Bundle. This bundle includes every single Sonic game available on Steam (see complete list below), and only one lucky reader is going to walk away with the whole thing. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post before 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time on December 31st, 2012, and include an email address we can contact you at in case you win. Make sure to read the rules below as well. Good luck, and may you enjoy these games as much as we are enjoying our endless pits of money.
Complete List of Games Included:
Contest Rules
Clarifications:
Confirming rumors that have been circulating for some time now, Sega today announced the Model2 Collection, a digital collection of five classic Sega titles originally developed for their Model2 arcade hardware. Among those titles is Sonic the Fighters, a somewhat obscure Sonic-themed fighting game built on the Fighting Vipers engine and previously rereleased as part of Sonic Gems Collection. Most interesting to note is that this new release appears to include several characters not previously playable in the game, such as Metal Sonic and Eggman (who were previously bosses), as well as Honey the Cat – a character based on Candy (known as Honey in Japan) from Fighting Vipers. Retro aficionados will know that Honey was actually buried in the data for the original arcade release but not playable without hacking the game, so to see Sega put in the effort to make her (and the boss characters) playable is truly refreshing after some of their more lackluster porting efforts in the past. The Japanese site for the Model2 Collection also makes mention of online play, which could be a big selling point for this rerelease as well. Currently there’s been no information about an overseas release, but Sonic the Fighters is due to hit Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network this fall in Japan. See the trailer after the break.
(SPOILER WARNING: This review contains unmarked spoilers. The game is over a decade old and well-known amongst our readers, so we deemed it unnecessary to refrain from spoilers. If you’ve never played the game before, you’ve been warned.)
In a franchise like Sonic that has been on such a rollercoaster of quality for the past twenty years, Sonic Adventure 2 somehow sticks out in the franchise as possibly the most polarizing game in the series. To one part of the fanbase, it’s the pinnacle of Sonic. Because it was the first major Sonic title on a Nintendo platform, many people cite SA2 as their introduction to the franchise. And yet to others, the game symbolizes the start of everything that nearly killed the franchise forever. So as I review Sega’s recent digital rerelease of Sonic Adventure 2 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, I feel it’s necessary to frame the game in context.
Outside of the broader fanbase context, I – like many others – have my own personal relationship with SA2. I was but a wee child when it first came out for the Dreamcast in 2001, and I spent a frightening number of hours engrossed in the game. It wasn’t my first exposure to the series; that title goes to Sonic 2 on the Genesis, whose predecessor and sequels received a similarly obsessive amount of my attention. In fact, the sole reason I asked for a Dreamcast for Christmas in 2000 was so that I could play the original Adventure. So, being the fanatic little child I was, Sonic Adventure 2 earned a special, fuzzy, nostalgiatastic place in my heart. The question, then, is: eleven years later, can it keep it?
For the past few years, Sega has struggled to keep important information on upcoming titles from leaking to the public before an official announcement – and by “struggled”, I mean “failed spectacularly”. Sonic Unleashed saw promotional images as well as an early video of Savannah Citadel find their way to the public before the game was even announced; Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I leaked in its entirety prior to release, and the negative reaction to the game at the time led to a six month delay; Sonic Generations had its entire roster of levels, bosses, and characters revealed months in advance; even Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II was accidentally released several weeks early on Steam.
And so the cycle has continued with the upcoming high-definition remaster of the Dreamcast’s swan song, Sonic Adventure 2. Waaay back in April, we reported that the title had been spotted in a massive leaked list of upcoming Xbox Live Arcade titles. A month later, Major Nelson of Xbox Live pseudo-fame accidentally posted that Avatar items based on the game were due for release. And finally, just last month, Microsoft themselves posted an official listing for the game on Xbox.com, complete with screenshots, box art, and a release date of October 3, 2012. At this point, presumably Sega realized that keeping the game a secret any longer would be utterly futile, so Ken Balough and the Sega of America superteam took to the stage at Sonic Boom on Friday to show the first official trailer for the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network rerelease, poking a bit of self-deprecating fun at the company’s inability to keep a secret. Oh, and apologies in advance for the overly-enthusiastic crowd.
[Video courtesy of YouTube user joshua593210.]