Blue mascot now A CANCER on the high street.

“You might remember me as the ‘other’ poster from Phorenzik’s blog Stupid Fucking Customers. I’m still alive and I thought I’d send you these images from my local video shop as it has an interesting picture of Sonic on the shop sign. I’ve always thought about sending them in but I’ve never had the bottle to do it, but now the shop has shut down so I thought I would.”

“Sorry about the poor image, I was scared because some kids and the security guard at the Morrisons store next to it was watching me, so I had to rush” – Mark.

We ignored the recent Dubai shopping centre SEGA theme park news on account of there not being any accompanying imagery. Fortunately, SEGA has now prodived some on its world-consuming Flickr presence.

Flickr Account Monitor “Anne” provided all the links and captions. We did the really hard bit in uploading all the pictures. If anyone’s a hero today, it’s the man who uploaded 11 images and pasted 11 bits of text below the right ones.

It is good (AKA heart-breakingly sad) to see that the arcades of Dubai are just as empty as the arcades of the UK. Although the Dubai one has the excuse of not being open yet.

[1] “Sega has apparently decided to open a new country in the Mall of Dubai.”

[2] “They seem to have set up public works programs building futuristic halfpipes in order to jumpstart their economy.”

[3] “The almighty visage of Sonic watches over the workers and inspires them to greater heights of glory.”

[4] “Not sure what Spingear is. National sport? Game show? Way of torturing PS3 owners (i.e. political prisoners)?”

[5] “The Sega Republic seems to sparsely populated. Perhaps the population will rise as word gets out that they offer billiards?”

[6] “Children of the Republic can acquire all sorts of Sonic plushes. Though none of Cream the Rabbit. :(“

[7] “Magic thought-projecting bubbles (separated by gender) help to keep the citizens thinking in the proper Sega frame of mind.”

[8] “The great leader lets the citizens know they’re doing A-ok!”

[9] “The Sega Republic’s military is trained on state of the art simulators.”

[10] “Immigration kiosks stand at the entrance to the country. Becoming a citizen is easy, and mainly involves swearing never to buy a PS3, and to laugh at Ken Kutaragi whenever possible.”

[11] “The card that identifies one as citizen of the Sega Republic. It provides a mild electric shock to the citizen whenever they think about buying a Sony product.”

There’s another one of those fan events going on, the sort of gathering we pretend to be cool to attend, but actually don’t go to because of a fear of ENTHUSIASTIC PEOPLE and the OUTSIDE WORLD. Oh, and also because games are all shit now. There’s a new Summer of Sonic on like there was before, featuring the signature of Richard Jacques assistant TJ Davis.

There’s a web site about it all, but it doesn’t seem to be loading at the moment. But there’s the link to it. Apparently that’s the polite thing to do on the internet these days.

“Spotted this at the Summer of Sonic convention thingy. Take a peek at the comment beside the Richard Jacques program. I’m sure you’ll probably have about a few dozen photos of this whisking your way for the next few days if you haven’t seen it a few times already, most likely using better cameras too, but oh well” – Gagaman.

This photo set has reached CRITICAL MASS. We’ve had more emails about this than we’ve got baked bean tins in the recycling bin. None of the emails were overly complimentary.

Spotted by pretty much everyone on SEGA’s Toronto Fan Expo 2009 page. We’re going to have to launch an internal policy review regarding updates based on SEGA’s Flickr output. It’s putting out more content than we can handle.

There’s a Sonic painted on a wall somewhere in Munich! He would appear to be directing traffic – sounds like another thrilling Wii game is incoming.

Sent in by “Cristoph” who claims to be a “weisswurst lover” who comes from “Nuremberg/Bavaria”. We’re fine with that. UKR is a gated cosmopolitan community, like Babylon 5 but with fewer female officers.

We’ve had loads of these. We’ve ignored at least five emails regarding the SEGA Vision in the wild (sorry (not really!)) but shall use this one, as SEGA has bizarrely decided to declare the SEGA Vision is “New for 2009” even though it isn’t.

The box is more colourful than before. Perhaps that’s what it means? A new box for 2009?

This was sent in by “GigerPunk” who was given the photograph by “a friend”. His accompanying email was about 5,000 words, so all we’ll take from are his informative links to the motorway service station in which the image was captured.

Official Sonic The Hedgehog underpants! If no one else ever sees your pants, these are the pants for you.

Nice that they come in adult sizes. Good old ASOS has done its market research on these. Don’t follow their advice to “move mouse over image” though. You probably will anyway out of curiosity, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Submitted by “Joe” who advises zooming in to see the shame on Sonic’s face. And that’s all you want to see, IS IT JOE?

There doesn’t appear to be any Sonic-branded ladies underwear, but then we only got to page six before strangely and suddenly losing interest.

In San Francisco? In need of a large amount of office space in a street that looks to be in a pretty “affordable” part of town? Don’t get too excited – it looks like someone’s already nicked the sign, unless it’s just been Photoshopped off the estate agent listing.

“I was in San Francisco earlier in the month on my way to a friend’s place, when I just happened to pass by the Sega of America building. I figured I’d try doing that “progressively getting closer to the focus of the image” thing you seem to like a lot.”

“The security is pretty tight; presumably to prevent people like me from coming in and asking them to make GOOD GAMES AGAIN. I doubt the overweight hipster secretary in the front even knows what VF5R is, since she’s too busy watching the latest Michael Jackson tribute videos on Youtube via her iPhone.”

“Just slightly ironic that Sega’s being advertised as AVAILABLE, when in fact they’ve never listened to their fans about anything ever.”

“Obligatory ‘I don’t know how to take pictures’ angle, complete with view obstructed by power lines.”

“It’s a sad day when the skies over Sega start to turn gray. I guess I’ll just cry myself to sleep tonight and wake up to swirls on carpets tomorrow- without Shenmue 3, VF5R, or a decent 3D Sonic game” -Alex.

Why is it you can never tell if people who are EXTREMELY INTO this sort of thing are men or women? It could be a man, or those sideburns might just be fake lesbian comb-downs.

Taken from SEGA of America’s Flickr page, which we’re still having to trawl through ourselves every day.

Some bloke called “Manu” has alerted us to the existence of this – a superb collection of video game t-shirts. Superb, that is, if you haven’t graduated to wearing proper clothing for adult males yet, like, say, long-sleeved shirts with collars accompanied by jumpers with no obvious branding on them.

Imagine a time when dreary, long-sleeved black shirts were in fashion. That, children, was the early-to-mid 1990s. Not many of these will have survived in their original, unwashed black state.

The shirts are not for sale. They are too important. We understand that.

Let’s all get angry about SEGA blowing all its money on this again.

LINKS TO ALL THE SEGA-RELATED ONES:
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=124
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=2
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=5
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=12
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=30
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=44
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=58
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=61
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=67
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=84
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=96
– http://www.videogameshirts.net/index.php?id=101