My Sonic Fan-Girl Chronicles: Chapter 2

1992—Sonic the Hedgehog the handheld game

Hanukkah holiday, November 1992.  My sister and I were in second grade.  It was one of the two years that we got presents on Hanukkah as well as Christmas.  It was only one gift, I think.  But it was a really cool gift.  Both my sister and I each got our own Sonic the Hedgehog handheld video game.  The screen was LCD, which I, as a seven-year old, thought it meant “liquid video game.”  XD

At this point, I’ve never played a Sonic the Hedgehog video game—not Sonic the Hedgehog, not Sonic the Hedgehog 2 since I believe it had yet to be released.

Needless to say, we were very pleased to have any kind of Sonic game, not to mention our very own (I guess if we wanted to play it at the same time, it was possible.)  Of course the game was in black and white: the background was a pre-painted color of a sort but the moving characters (Sonic, the badniks, Dr. Robotnik) were all in black digital form with pre-planned moves. I forgot how often I played it, but I’m sure I was entertained, as long as I got past at least the first level.  Did I even finish the game?  I believe I beat it once, but never again.  And oh—the music is the same for all…six…levels.

Something bizarre happened with both of our handheld devices.  After bedtime, we heard noise coming from the bookshelf.  It was one of our handheld Sonic games.  The music from the game was playing on its own.  It played the stage music and then a “tic” sound, then the game-over music.  As if…it was haunted!  Was a ghost playing it?  I was still in my afraid-of-the-dark age so it was scaring me that the handheld game would do that.

I think both of our handheld Sonic games went through the same thing the same week.

It turned out that the battery power was low, and so the game looping the stage music and the game-over music was just a sign that the battery needed to be replaced.  Okay, so that was all it was.  I forgot how long ago we started playing and when the freaky “automatic music” thing happened.

My Sonic Fan-Girl Chronicles: Chapter 1

1991—Sonic the Hedgehog

As fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, my sister and I temporarily subscribed (our parents did, anyway) to a magazine that was dedicated to those famous four turtle brothers in a half-shell.  :D  It had to be, I dunno, maybe winter or spring of 1991, that in this magazine there was a page or two about video games coming up, and one of them was the very first Sonic the Hedgehog.   There was at least one little screenshot of the video game.  It was a tiny picture, one that my six-and-a-half year old eyes could see very well, and I saw a blue character with red shoes trying to keep balance on the edge of the cliff and trying not to fall off.  I don’t know what came over me; I could not stop staring at the picture.  Who is this little thing?  I forgot if I saw the title of the game, but even if I did, I never knew what a hedgehog was.  It was the first time I ever came across that word, and little did I know that we were about to have our young gaming lives changed forever…

Our parents had a friend who hosted a pool party summer that same year.   We went along with them because other kids would be there too.  We of course ate first, and then a little while later we were in our swimsuits in the swimming pool. It wasn’t the first time we were in a swimming pool; we had relatives in Canada we visited two years ago who had a pool too.  So we had a lot of fun in the swimming pool, needless to say.  But I gotta say, too…I think after we got out of the pool, we never went back in.  Because after we got out and wrapped ourselves in towels, we stepped into the house and spotted some kids crowded around a TV set.  One of them was playing Sonic the Hedgehog.

All we could do was just stand there, in our swimsuits and towels, and watch the game—watch the blue hedgehog run across the screen and jump and attack the robots with animals in them, and run and run some more, running in loop-de-loops and helixes and grassy moving platforms.   If there is one phrase I can use to describe this experience, it was “love at first sight.”

So this blue thing’s name is Sonic and he’s a hedgehog, huh?  That was neat!  It was—it was better than Super Mario Brothers—and just the previous year we got the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Mario Brothers for our sixth birthday!  Yeah okay, Mario and Luigi run from left to right too, but…Sonic did the same thing and was freakin’ ten times faster!  And the colors were so vivid and the graphics so rich.   The video game music sounded way better to us than the 8-bit music for Nintento.

Our dad was talking to one of the other adults.  I went to them and, with a feeling of guilt (I felt like I was asking the world, though I know Dad didn’t think I was), I asked them, “Can, can I play, the Sunik the Hetchog game?”  The other man repeated “’Sonic Hedgehog?’”  And then I guess from what I remember, Dad explained what it was.  He may have seen that my sister and I were watching.  Maybe that’s how they knew we liked this amazing thing.

I think later after that was when my sister got a chance to play soon after.  One kid soon said, “Watch out.  There’s a bad guy at the end.”   That kid was referring to the main villain Dr. Robotnik, and back then we didn’t know the name of the villain.  I didn’t get a chance to play the game back then, but still, the fact that we were watching or somehow experiencing Sonic the Hedgehog being played live was astonishing.  It was that blue guy in the TMNT magazine that I stared at for some minutes before moving on in the magazine.

So that’s where my history of being a Sonic fan-girl began, and it gets better…

On a Mission to Find Remixes from Sonic the Hedgehog games

It started on June 6^th this year.  One late night I was listening to one of the podcasts—the Sonic Jukebox from the SEGA Jukebox, episode 8—and I heard this really neat track called “Symphonic Ruin,” which was a remake of the music from Sonic 3D (SEGA Saturn) “Rusty Ruin Act 1”  and I fell in love with it immediately.  The artist goes by the name Jivemaster.  I was entranced by how it began with the sound of a thunderstorm and rain.  I rewound the podcast to listen to it again (because I was using my 4^th Generation iPod).

I love the beat, the bass, the melody, just the very sound of it.  It took me to another world.  I could hear it like it was playing on 94.7 the Wave.  I was like, there was a Sonic 3D?   Is that different from Sonic 3D Blast?  The music is different from the SEGA Genesis version and the SEGA Saturn version, I realized.  Man, what a treat it was for my ears to hear this remix.

So I was especially excited when I learned I can listen to a radio station devoted to just music from the Sonic the Hedgehog video games.   Sonic Radio is the one I use the most now; I tried RadioSEGA too (which I got just in time for the Sonic Fan Music Festival on June 23^rd ), but I’ve never played Shenmue or Panzer Dragoon Orta.  There was something from the Legend of Mana that was nice, though.  Eventually I heard the original version of the Sonic 3D track of Rusty Ruin Act 1 (I think the artist was Richard Jacques) and I overjoyed.  Where can I find that, where can I find that?  I found it in another Sonic-music-themed podcast.  Joyyyy!

I tried to find some more podcasts on iTunes that had Sonic remixes so I won’t have to rely on the live radio any time I felt like listening to Sonic music while not on the Internet. 

So I went to the website OverClocked Remix, http://ocremix.org/.  There are remixes of video games that can be downloaded for free.   Here are several of my favorite Sonic music remix tracks:

“Symphonic Ruin”…………………Jivemaster

“Sonicquarium” ……………………..The Cynic Project

“Icecapped”……………………….McVaffe

“Hogtied”……………………………..Brandon Strader, Rexy

“Absolution Comes in Dreams” ……………………… Cyril the Wolf, M-One

“Sonik Eletronik”………………… PrototypeRaptor

“Chemixtrixx” …………………..…PrototypeRaptor

“This World of Absolution”………….………….TrickyWolfy (track found at www.newgrounds.com. She also has a YouTube channel!)

“Walk on Water”……………………..housethegrate

“Blissful Eruption”…………….………LeeBro  (aka Lee Brotherton aka Bentley Jones!!) :3     

 

I realize that not all of the music that I hear in Sonic Radio is either in an OST in iTunes or even in OverClocked Remix.  I was disappointed, but I understand that the artists are all over the place on the Internet.  There are other websites where video game music aficionados share their arrangements and remixes of many video games. I shall find some more.  www.newgrounds.com is one possibility; it is where I found TrickyWolfy’s “Hedgehog’s Lullaby” and “This World of Absolution.” What I really also wanted to do was go to The Sonic Stadium and find some more music from my favorite remix artists.   Unfortunately I can’t listen to them on the TSS Music Album website and I will have to download the whole album (if I can)  and I’m not sure I want to do that.   I am having a hard time trying to find the artist Gario.  I haven’t been disappointed with anything I heard from him so far.  But I don’t know where his remixes can be found.

Starting a Series of Posts about my History as a Sonic the Hedgehog Fangirl

I want to take this opportunity, this post, to announce that I will be starting a series of posts that will chronicle my history as a fan-girl of Sonic the Hedgehog.  It starts all the way in spring of 1991 and goes just about to the present, whenever that is going to be.  Most of the next couple of months it’s going to be this; I don’t know what else to be posting about in the meantime except for my progress in the games I do currently play.  There will be an occasional “regular” post.  But for now, the thing that dominates my mind the most for this blog is Sonic the Hedgehog—nearly a month after I watched a YouTube video of PewDiePie playing Sonic.exe that scared me breathless. (see separate page from the list on the top left:  My reaction to watching the PewDiePie video for Sonic.exe =O!!!! )

I am writing my history as a Sonic the Hedgehog fan-girl because I’ve wanted to do it for a while in Cyborg Haven. This desire is only pushed into urgency due to watching that horrid video.  I want to rekindle the nostalgia factor of all the old Sonic video games I’ve played and some I’ve known about.  It’s sort of a healing process now, psychologically.   It will be good for me.  I have a lot of memories playing the SEGA Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games.  The music, the laughing, the bosses I finally beat, the gameplay, the stages, so many things that made me love this little guy.  He was a big part of my gaming life.

 

There are going to be some 20-odd posts in this series.  I will include them all in the label for the series of posts, and for the series and the label “Reminisce”.   There will also be occasional “Bonus Chapter” posts, in which I may write about other video game-related topics in the SEGA universe, such as Galaxy Force II, and the first time I saw Espio the Chameleon, and yes I have to write about starting to be a NiGHTS fan too because I would say that was love at first sight as well.  All that purple.  I couldn’t miss it.  Hah, both Espio and NiGHTS are purple, is that why I liked (still like) them so much?

So, brace yourself?  Because there is going to be a whole lot of Sonic-related posts coming up very soon.

Four-Year Anniversary of Cyborg Haven: Blog of a Gamer Girl

Four years ago on September 3^rd, I launched Cyborg Haven: Blog of a Gamer Girl.  I had wanted to start this blog earlier than 2009, but while I was attending CSUN, I didn’t have the time to commit to it, let alone know what I wanted to write about or how to design it.  It would be my very first blog, so I didn’t know the routine of creating a blog.

I first heard of a “blog”—web log—back in 2006, when one of my instructors in my previous college suggested Blogger to students as a method of writing journals for the reading we do for the class.  It was an interesting idea: an online journal for reading assignments.  I was new to doing that sort of thing, and I wasn’t comfortable with writing for the public quite yet—not the World Wide Web, at least.  I think I just used a folder with fasteners to hold lose paper together and used that as a notebook for my reading journal.

Then in 2008 I was re-introduced to Blogger in a Popular Culture course.  There was even a book all about blogging as a recommended text for the course.  It is called The Rough Guide to Blogging by Jonathan Yang.  It wasn’t required reading.  But I knew that eventually I wanted to write a blog of my own (because for the class we were going to have group blogs not individual ones).  I at least read what I needed for the blog me and my group would write and maintain, but after graduation in 2009, I returned to the blog book and read up on Blogger, tags, HTML, and design tips on things such as font, template and background.   I also had to think about what topic I wanted for my blog:  what topic or aspect about my life would I be able to have something to write about more often than most?  I didn’t want to write about my everyday life:  I wanted a topic I thought would be fun to update progress or reactions to.

I decided on Blogger as my host because I was introduced to it twice before and it was one of the simpler ones, plus I already had a Google account when I made my Gmail, so I just sign in with my Gmail. 

I forgot how exactly I came to the decision, but I decided that videogames would be the topic of my blog.  Video games played by me, a girl.  But what should I title it?  Well, before I realized how much of a robot enthusiast I was, I came up with “Cyborg Haven”, which made me think of a human connected to a computer or a television set.  This online journal would be a place where one who is a causal gamer girl (who feels out of place with other girls who don’t play video games) can go to rant or reminisce or gush or fan-girl about topics related to videogames, such as favorite characters or new videogames I’m looking forward to trying out or owning.  I ultimately had to add the subtitle “Blog of a Gamer Girl” because I didn’t want to confuse other geeks about what kind of blog it is.  So the full title on the top of the blog became “Cyborg Haven: Blog of a Gamer Girl,” which may be longer than it should be, but I’m happy with it.

Keeping the blog was also a way to keep my typing skills.  In addition, I had a way of keeping a log of what video game I played and when, and what I did, and how I felt at the time.  I love how I can search for the video game subtopics by tags that I give them, such as Nostalgia and Reminisce, Progress, Mega Man X, or Sonic the Hedgehog.

Then the design questions came up.  I wanted to put a picture of my own creation, not someone else’s picture.  I spent about an hour a day for a few days on Microsoft Paint 2002 to draw a cyborg girl specifically for this blog.  NOTE:  For the 5-year anniversary of Cyborg Haven, I may place an entirely different drawing of a cyborg girl for the top of the page.  Maybe then my drawing skills will have improved.
 

The reason why the background color is a dark navy blue and the text light gray is because I figure that if anyone is reading this late at night, it should be easier on the eyes, rather than having dark text against a bright white background.  It could be dark green…or dark red…but the blue is a bit more calming than the other colors.  Even purple might not be bad if I give it the right hue.

As for how often I will be posting on Cyborg Haven: I realize that some of my posts have been few but big.  I think from this point on, I might try something and post more often but keep the posts down to two big paragraphs or three shorter paragraphs.  If I want to update what missions, stages or tasks I’ve accomplished in a video game, I can list them and talk briefly about one or two of them in detail.  Eventually when I start working, hopefully around mid-autumn, it may be harder to get a chance to play a good video game session.  I don’t want to stop writing for Cyborg Haven.  My interest in video games should survive even when my lifestyle gets busier.

Here’s to another year of blogging about my favorite childhood pastime: playing video games!  And yes, it’s not just a “childhood” pastime.  You’re never too old to try new things.