SEGA Saturn spotted on contemporary Fanta bottle! Clear sign of imminent return to hardware business for the once-dominant force in gaming! Fizzy pop tie-in cleverly designed to target youth demographic!

GLORY DAYS A-COMING A-BACK A-GAIN!

“No this isn’t some Fanta bottle I’ve been keeping since 1996 – this is a brand new Fanta bottle. What is on the side of it? ONLY THE BEST CONSOLE EVER CREATED WHICH HAS BEEN DEAD 10 YEARS! This can only mean… #1 SEGA is planning on re-releasing the Saturn and were planning some sort of launch with Fanta but they have accidentally leaked it….”

“#2 Fanta are giving away prizes which can only be appreciated by those loser kids who were in their late childhood/early teens during 1995 to 1998 and decided to get a Saturn and then stubbornly refused to admit that it was dying and convinced themselves forever that it was the greatest thing in existence and developed a life-long hatred for Sony Computer Entertainment….”

“#3 Fanta requested a nondescript ‘games console’ on the bottle and the art guy got lazy and thought he could copy some console that no one would remember – Louis”

IF YOU ARE THE DESIGNER OF THIS ARTWORK…
Please write in. Clearly whoever designed this is a Saturn fan, in their 30s, male, and loving the irony of getting the image of a Saturn in a modern mainstream media campaign. You no doubt thought the suits would reject the design and tell you to do something that looks more like a PlayStation, but they didn’t. You sneaked it through and can’t believe your luck. Well done. We salute you, anonymous Fanta campaign designer *PINS ENAMEL UKR BADGE TO CHEST OF DESIGNER*

Let this photo serve as a warning to anyone just about to start out in business – what’s popular now might not be so popular in two years (or six weeks) time. Be generic on your signage. Good luck telling the kid working there now that you want a VCD repairing.

“Just thought I’d send you a picture of this sign taken in Manchester’s China Town. The emporium in question stopped stocking Dreamcast stuff years ago, but the sign remains.”

“You can also wander around the surrounding oriental style streets, looking for sailors and fobbing advances from fit girls, like Ryo from Shenmue. That’s what I do. I have been punched a few times though. Cheers! – Father Krishna.”

We’re not just here to catalogue the banal SEGA and SEGA-like objects of yesteryear, you know. Here’s some other junk churned out for various elsewheres over the last seven or so days…

This thing which is a triumphant return to rabble-rousing. You’d think most of these people would have something better to do during the day.

This thing which is more of the same. If but one PlayStation3 owner forgets to login to “PSN” today and doesn’t impulse-buy a game because they were too busy “fire-fighting” on the internet, it will all have been worth it.

This thing which is a review of the Gears of War 2 trailer. Revel in our barely-concealed disgust of the tedious men-going-“HOLY SHIT” franchise.

This thing about Scarlett Johansson’s chest and new album.

This thing about our new internet boyfriend Aaron Greenberg being 100% AWESOME.

This thing about the Urban Tool Sportholster, because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along:

Not bad considering the hot weather and all the distractions it brings. 7/10.

Guess what’s SEGA about this photo? It’s the font. The font looks a bit like the SEGA font. That’s why someone went to the effort of taking a photo of the back of a bus and sending it in. Sadly we’ve lost the email it came with – or the guy would be in for a UKR KNIGHTHOOD.

Photos like this are why we will still be doing this site even when we are 86, weeing through a tube into a bucket, and paying £99 a minute to use the hospital wi-fi on a laptop.

This is the bottom. The absolute bottom. Touch it. It’s solid. It is not possible to go any lower than this. It makes the update about the SEGA carpet seem as exciting as smoking crack with Kate Moss.

PREVIOUSLY ON WORST SEGA PHOTOGRAPHS:

A Russian mask that’s a bit like Sonic

A Sonic balloon at a fair, from a distance

A chair logo that looks a bit like Dr Robotnik

A French menu that has the word Sega on it

Sonic tie :(

UPDATE: WE FOUND THE EMAIL IT CAME WITH!
“Look at this picture – it’s a French SEGA bus! Admittedly it doesn’t say SEGA, but the logo’s in a sort of SEGA font plus it’s got an S and an A and the S is even in the right place. This bus was parked next to the Eiffel Tower last week and I like to think that maybe Sonic was running up the tower and doing some daring jumps and that. Except he wasn’t, because I went up it and there were just a load of German wankers there hogging the telescopes. Although admittedly I only went up to the second level on account of it being knackering and me being quite fat, so maybe Sonic was at the top! Or whatever – Pete Raper (no joke).”

It’s certainly a pretty piece of artwork, we’ll give it that, but it’d be much more at home on a piece of paper or on the cover of your geography folder. Not on your whole arm until you die.

“Just copied of a random site… it’s sonic related and therefore incredibly relevant. Do with it what you please.. save it for your “private time” or share it with your readers. If you should against better judgement post the pic, keep my name out of it. I’ve got a family to think of – Anonymous Random Goth Photo Searcher.”

Forget humanitarian concerns regarding human rights abuse – China clearly ROCKS due to having a liking of Sonic The Hedgehog! Forget Tibet and child labour. If China’s bringing SEGA enough revenue for a triumphant future return to the hardware market, let’s all turn a blind eye.

“Saw this outside an internet bar in Chang An China, the middle of nowhere, borderline third world place where the sweatshops spread as far as the eye can see. Thankfully Sonic is there to brighten up the workers 14 hours days! – Chris.”

Two of them! This pair is helping organise GameHorizon, which is some sort of worthy development conference we can’t be bothered to read the press release about.

Borderline. Hard to say with any certainty. But if we absolutely had to decide and express the answer in binary, this would be a 01 – if only because 1 looks like it’d put up less of a struggle so we’d be out of there sooner.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Seeing as Sony’s best game of 2008 is a demo of something that won’t be out until 2009, it pulled out all the stops and hired a few ladies to stand beside cars in a practise we though died out in the early 1980s.

We have waited this long to feature the photos not out of laziness, but to avoid raising awareness of the game during its launch period.

The last thing we want to do is fall into some Sony-sponsored PR trap.

Remember – £25 for a demo is NOT a good use of your money.

Local newspaper in GLARING FACTUAL INACCURACIES shocker. At least they didn’t call it the Nintento PlayStation3.

This is what happens when women in their early 60s in small villages proof read the pages before they’re sent to press. Spotted by “Mark” who is still alive and well, but doesn’t send any regards.

Reader “JMB” correctly worked out that all you have to do to “get on” UKR is put “SEGA” into eBay then click through the pages long enough until something from before 1998 comes up. Here’s what came up for JMB.

It’s a Sonic Mountain Quest Cheap Plastic Christmas Present!

Buy it, put it in the loft. Then your grandchildren can callously bin it when they’re clearing out the house to sell a mere 12 hours after you’ve died.

Or just don’t buy it. Spend the money on something useful, like a nice bit of beef for Sunday.

By “nice bit of beef” we mean some meat for dinner, not a cheap prostitute.

“It has not been used as it has only been stored by a collector, not a child!” says the eBay listing. We already knew that.

Only a collector would know the value and importance of supplying a photograph of the almost entirely featureless rear of the machine.

That looks like 1982. Surely Sonic The Hedgehog wasn’t invented by Tomy in 1982 and then subsequently licensed by SEGA in 1989?

It’s OK. Any good collector knows that we’ll be needing a close-up of the game description text.

There you go.

It was on eBay along with some pinball thing. The listing has finished, which is probably for the best. We all have way too much of this kind of shit already.