Despite his recent downward spiral, the Blue Blur remains the U.K.’s top video game character, blazing past the competition with 24% of the vote. It remains a mystery as to how Sonic ranked so high (it must be something about his green eyes, his Nike Check™ like smile, or his ability to just not die.)

This aside, the Hedgehog’s come as little surprise, given the incredibly strong sales titles such as Sonic Heroes and, more recently, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games sported in the region.

The poll was conducted in honor of the opening of the London Games Festival, collecting the votes of 500 gamers. Other notables include Mario (at 21%) and Britain’s own Lara Croft (16%). Hit the jump for the full press release. You may be pleasantly surprised at some of the top 10.

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Back in the day, Sonic was quite a force, and you could find his name on practically anything. Those days are gone now, but it’s always interesting to look at what was there.

Some of these foods can still be found, although the non-candy ones are likely inedible now.

(Pictures from Sonicgear.org)

The pasta is the longest lived item, spanning the old Sonic to the one we see today. A rather plain tomato-based sauce was on it, and it wasn’t really the best pasta, but was fine for a quick lunch. There were many different offers related to it, and it can be considered the quintessential food item; when it ended, it was pretty much over for all the Sonic food items.

The gum… the gum. It came in these weird cases and had weird card-shaped pieces of highly dusted gum. It tasted sorta good, but had not so much flavor. It came with weird cards I wish I had saved… it was interesting, for sure. These cards could be worth something today.

Want to know more about these items? Just go to Sonic Gear’s US Food page for more info; they have pretty much all of the items.

Know an item not on that page? Post it in the comments!

Sega’s own amusement park, Joypolis, is kicking off Halloween this weekend—blame it on holiday creep or something—and in addition to the mysterious masked Pumpking running around and facepainting, you can have your photo taken with Sonic, all decked out for the holiday!

By which they mean you can get an image of Sonic as a frame around your picture. However, it’s still neat art, which is why we’ve included it here. If you happen to be visiting Tokyo over the next month or so and want to check it out, there’s more information at the Joypolis site.

This year’s Sonic Amateur Games Expo has come to an end, with this year seeming to be one of the best. For those that don’t know about SAGE is an online gaming expo for fan game developers to show off their Sonic the Hedgehog based games.

Some highlights this year included interviews and workshops with various people tied to the Sonic franchise including Chris Senn, Eric Iwasaki, Lee Brotherton, Mike Pollock, Richard Jacques, and Ryan Drummond. You can find various content including chat logs and workshop documents here under the Chat Transcripts and Logs section.

As mentioned earlier the main point of SAGE is the Sonic-based games created by members of the Sonic Community. Some rather interesting ones included:
Stealth showed off a new version his E02 Game Engine and Sonic the Hedgehog: Project Mettrix this year. Project Mettrix uses the E02 Game Engine which some may be familiar with having seen the level export feature in SonEd.
Sonic Rebirth is an interesting remake of Sonic 1 giving it updated graphics and a storyline to follow. For those of you interested in Sonic 2: HD or the Sonic 4 project this may catch your eye.
Saxman has made his first release for his long waited for project, ProSonic. It is still has much work to be done but it is definitely off to a great start.
There is also the final release of Sonic 1 Megamix by Retro’s Team Megamix. This is the last and final release we will see from Team Megamix with the game brought to the Sega CD.

Of course this is not all there was to SAGE, I invite you to take a look to see if there are any other projects and games that interested you.

SAGE Website

Most of us here at Sonic Retro would like to think of ourselves as hardcore fans: researchers, hackers, TASers, and all-around enjoyers of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. However, there has been a small number of people who have taken their Sonic the Hedgehog fandom to the next level by putting Sonic right onto their skin. While I personally plan on sticking to these Sonic tattoos, others have gone all-out in their inkings.

We’ve gathered a small collection of these tattoos, which you can see under the cut. Do you have a Sonic tattoo? Would you consider getting one?

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I was just browsing through my news feeder today and I saw an interesting post on the Archie Comics Sonic Blog. After 14 years of producing Sonic the Hedgehog comic books each month (for better or for worse), Archie has been recognized for having the longest running comic book based on a video game. For some this news is sore, but for those who still enjoy the Archie comics, this is great to hear.

For those who aren’t familiar with the series, Sonic’s venture into the American world of comicbooks started in Febuary of 1993 with a “zero” issue to promote the idea and see where the series could go from there. Ever since, Archie has been printing new comics every month and is the only Sonic the Hedgehog medium to continue the SatAM storyline.

Personally, I’m a fan of the series because I’m a fan of the SatAM story. =) So way to go Archie….but please stop with the evil twins shit =<

-Stumbles onto the blog looking rather tired and worn out.-

Yes, I know. I haven’t been posting much. Sorry guys, but I’ve just been pretty busy lately! Anyway, I was checking out one of my favorite gaming blogs, Joystiq.com, and thought it would be a nice idea to post a link to their view on Sonic Unleashed. All together, they seemed fairly up-beat about it and said “Even with rough shadows and unfinished lighting physics, the game looks gorgeous.”  for the version they saw at E3. They also warn that they hope it controls as good as it looks, so here’s hoping for that too. An interesting bit is they say that Sonic’s Warewolf form looks like it’ll be fun for those who love good old fashion platforming. Follow the link below for their full perspective on the game.

Joystiq E3 Eyes-On: Sonic Unleashed

We all love it when something pretty highly-anticipated (Well, it was in my case) is finished, and so it delights me that Nineko has released the latest version of his awesome hack and XM3SMPS showcase, SoniNeko.

Though I’m generally a fan of layout and art hacks, this is a super-cool showcase of how the way you play Sonic can be drastically changed — try Panic Mode, or set the time limit stupidly-low, for example, and you’ll see what I mean.

Play it. Now.

Well, not quite. British member DAGarden has completed and released his hack Sonic the Hedgehog - Westside Island, which is a palette and layout hack.

“Is that all?”

Well, if you asked yourself that you’d be missing out on something awesome, because there are some truly inspired moments of insane genius in these layouts, and enough interesting alternate routes to justify repeated plays through. If you’re sick of Newbie Template Hacks, get this hack!

One of the most awesome sites I found only recently, Zone:0 updated it’s Sonic 2 section recently with the stages and story updated. According to LiQuidShade, he’s tackling Sonic CD afterwards, which makes my Awesome-O-Meter tick with some fury, I can tell you.

Check it out, there ain’t a single place on the Internet with a deeper description of Sonic 1 and 2 (As yet) — even though there’s nothing really new, it’s so well put together one can’t help but sit and read everything.