So you all had the duvet and some of you had the curtains. But how many had the accompanying bean bag? Or, should we say, SEGA THRONE OF POWER? It’s like real life Animal Crossing. Imagine combining it all with the carpet as well.
“The Sonic duvet set also had a bean bag to make your Sonic shrine of a room complete. I would only sit on it when I played the Mega Drive so I could sit on something SEGA while playing SEGA. One time, my brother was playing the Nintendo while sitting on it but I told him that was wrong.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of placing it on top of a ladder to demonstrate how the years have taken their toll on a once proud piece of SEGA merchandise. See how it flops?”
“I honestly don’t know where the beans went. Maybe my sister ate them, maybe I ate them in a fit of rage and self-harm when my brother told me Knuckles was a girl and wouldn’t listen to reason. I keep it in my wardrobe with the clothes Mummy bought from Asda and a copy of Sonic 3D – Sonicsaiyan.”
Definitely remember lusting over this in the Argos catalogue, and begging mum and dad to buy it for Christmas. Even though, being 23-years-old and in full-time employment at the time, we could’ve just gone down to the shops and bought one for ourselves.
TOUCHING HUMAN INTEREST STORY: “My grandma bought me this duvet set back in the 90s and I’d use it whenever I went to stay over.”
“Somehow it ended up fully in my possession and I still use it to this day. I’m pretty sure I had a notepad and pencil tin back then with the same design on as well.”
“It’s definitely my favourite duvet cover set and always a good conversation piece. I used to think that the golden outlines on the text on the pillow case glowed in the dark, but they don’t – Joe, Sheffield.”
A reader has discovered a new niche area of pornography – the “almost upskirt”. It’s where you can almost see beneath the skirtage of a lady, but can’t quite. No doubt this just makes it extra arousing as even more is left to the imagination than usual.
Hopefully the camera has a manual override on it, at least in the post-point replays. If not, PUT ONE IN NOW, please, Sumo-Digital. It could be the difference between 9/10 and 10/10.
This has to be a comedy edit of the Unreal Tournament 3 entry, otherwise civilisation as a whole is in a far more rapid state of decline than we initially projected.
Or it might be an ironic stream-of-consciousness style essay by someone who’s had too much Coke today.
Here are some videos that were too poor even to be used in Part One of our ATEI 2008 once-in-a-lifetime mega-update. Plus loads more photos of vaguely interesting things, most of which say “SEGA” on them somewhere.
She says “SEGA” on her somewhere, only we weren’t granted high enough access levels to find out where (full-size original here for personal/educational/research use only).
It’s Mad Wave Motion Theater! A thing you lie on and get shaken around, like it’s still 1987 and those rides you sit in and get shaken from left to right while watching film footage of a rollercaster ride are still cutting-edge.
So anyway. ATEI. It’s not all glamorous. There are lots of empty cash-generating machines lying about the place.
About two-thirds of ATEI is relatively dingy booths based around gambling – ie, using a machine to take money from people, often for money-laundering purposes.
Here’s SEGA boasting about how much money UFO catchers rake in. Or how much we spent on Mega Drive games in the early 1990s.
“Shoot This, Win This” – some rather damning evidence that the death of all arcades is only about 18 months away.
Bowling game. Small balls. Stupidly shot holding camera sideways, hence worse than usual quality.
Some men dancing. If you’re finding all this a bit heavy going, there’s an edited highlights version of all the video footage over on Tech Digest with a little story attached to it as well.
AMAZING SEGA FACT: This is the advice sticker on the back of the OutRun2SP DX twin-player cabinet. This sort of thing is why it’s worth going to ATEI.
And this is the front of it.
And this is why it’s also not really worth going to ATEI.
A machine full of Bob The Builder toys. And there’s a Zippy. YouTube is going to go ballistic over this. We may end up getting headhunted by a major US network.
17 seconds of SEGA Race TV, most of those wasted filming a man’s ridiculous jacket. Sorry.
SEGA now makes those games where you hit a thing with a stick :(
Wii version in 2009? :(
10 DOES IT SAY “SEGA” ON IT? 20 IF TEN = “YES” TAKE PHOTO
No idea why this was photographed. Was probably going to despair about how “the kids” go to arcades to win rubbish American merchandise nowadays, rather than to actually
play decent games.
The end (full-size original here for personal/educational/research use only).
We got this from Kotaku. It’s some news about a British company that have made some Outrun T-Shirts but for some reason have forgotten to tell US that they’ve made them and even more strangely, have neglected to even send us some for free in return for publicising the fact they’ve produced some Outrun T-Shirts.
Their T-Shirt has Yu Suzuki’s name on it and the arcade board number, which we knew, obviously, it’s the sort of thing we recite in our sleep. Anyway, we’re sure this minor oversight will be corrected immediately and we’ll be wearing our new Outrun T-Shirt to work by wednesday morning at the latest.
Oh. No….sorry, Dreamcats is back. It’s just that Sega game for the DS. They had us going there for a minute. At least they’ve managed to release it before Nintendo got round to doing Nintencats. We couldn’t care less about the game as it’s bound to be rubbish but they have some sort of cute/funny cat competition on the website. Round 1 was bizarrely won by a cat with three oranges and two apples on it’s back. This probably has some sort of significance or comedy value to Japanese people.
So, can someone who understands Japanese please enter the Cat in a Sonic hat picture for us? Thanks.
Here’s a load of videos and photos we took at this week’s ATEI show. The videos are all a bit short. And the photos aren’t that good. But there are some of WOMEN and some of a few vaguely interesting SEGA things, so it could be argued that, for once, our heart was in the right place.
It’s not exactly AM2 at the peak of its powers back in 1995, but the Silent Hill shooter looked pretty good and SEGA Race TV, even though it has a “Boost” button, is definitely slightly above average.
This is the Silent Hill shooter. It’s House of the Dead in concept, with a spooky Silent Hill plot about missing ships, dead grandfathers, little girls and walls that turn from normal walls into WALLS DRIPPING WITH BLOOD when you’re not looking.
Here’s a tiny video of it. For a game that’s basically you hammering a trigger endlessly, it was pretty nice. Sorry about the video being rubbish. Sorry about ALL of these videos being rubbish.
The Galaxy Rider. It goes up slowly! It comes down slowly! It is A WHITE KNUCKLE THRILL RIDE. See how it goes up very slowly while rotating then comes down again very slowly without even rotating at all. You can tell the occupants were sad that nothing sudden or exciting happened.
Uh-oh! Can you see what we can see?
There it is!
There’s only one reason why we came here!
Oh yes! Freeplay OutRun2SP DX, here we come!
We’re literally almost nearly there!
Here we are going up the escalator to the SEGA area! What lies in wait? Hopefully, 1995 lies in wait and it’s a room full of Daytonas.
This is one of the things that awaited! It’s called “UFO Stomper” or something like that. It’s a big TV you stand on and have fun. It’s for families. And children. And people who can actually still have fun.
These ladies manned the alien game. In return for them letting me take their photo, they insisted I had a go on it. Awkwardly, someone had just walked off halfway through a game and there was 48 seconds of their game time still left. So I had to stand there talking to the one in the glasses for 48 seconds. She asked what games I had liked the most. I said “SEGA Race TV”. Then there was some silence. Then she explained how the game worked. And even after all that the timer still said there was 19 seconds to go (full-size original here for personal/educational/research use only).
YES! A really big SEGA logo! This is exactly what we had hoped to see!
Not only that, but there were a few RARE ALTERNATE SEGA logos, too.
SEGA hardware! SEGA HARDWARE! It might be something cool and new! Or something staggering boring like a SCSI controller for a ROM drive.
Special secret industry information about setting up SEGA arcade franchises. Ordinary people like us are not supposed to see stuff like this.
Wow!
Wow!
Meanwhile, in the depressing downstairs gambling bit, Deal or No Deal was everywhere. DoND gambling, card games, poker, fruit machines – Noel must be raking it in.
Someone really going for it on BoxClub. His second go is not as good as his first, so don’t bother watching it all the way through if you’re strapped for time.
A business man playing what looks like a very dull game. Mustn’t laugh, though – he’s probably the MD of somewhere and has a few million quid of buying budget at his disposal.
God only knows who approved the idea of making a four-player link-up arcade version of Blazing Angels. There’s hardly even four people who own the console games.
Someone trying and failing to win a big bar of chocolate. To be fair, he did know he was being filmed so the nerves no doubt got to him.
“Pop it for Gold”. Looked at it. Filmed it. Walked away, head spinning with potential joke ideas (none of which came to fruition).
Men, frantically playing Ghost Squad Evolution, as if their lives depend upon it, while paying no regard whatsoever to keeping their suits uncrumpled.
This was taken at the stand of a company that only sells buttons to go in fruit machines. They were quite surprised that someone was taking photos of their goods. They no doubt thought we were working for a serious industry trade magazine, instead of just looking for things we could take the piss out of on the internet. Although… that would make a very pretty desktop image.
Some men playing a basketball game. Hopefully they won’t ever find this, track us down and kick the shit out of us for putting this on the internet.
Football Fever. You kick a ball. Didn’t want to try it, as the last time I tried kicking a football my shoe came off and some children saw.
Some dinosaurs. Animatronics are yet to really look convincing, especially at the budget end of the spectrum.
More dinosaurs – some men murdering a brontosaurus with shotguns in SEGA’s Primeval Hunt.
Hope you haven’t lost interest yet, as here’s something from SEGA – PlaytimePuppies! They look like sausage rolls, or very large uncut and misshapen penises.
Part Two of this exciting multimedia EXPLOSION is coming on Monday, and will include TWO other photos we took of promotional ladies.
While we wait for all the videos we took at ATEI 2008 yesterday to upload for the ATEI MEGA UPDATE that’s coming later, why not shake your head in disappointment at a few of the “gems” we have generated for elsewhere this week?
This thing in which we usher in a new era of honesty in online journalism by admitting to not having a clue about the significance of the Australian market.
This thing which is just a list of old YouTube videos, but it did let us introduce our Carol Vorderman fetish to a newer and wider audience. If just one extra man imagines his wife is Carol Vorderman during sex tonight because of this, it’ll all have been worth it.
This thing about suing Microsoft. Includes hi-res photo of thumb.
This thing which was a “high concept” joke about plagiarism, in which we plagiarised an article about plagiarism. We had to explain this to company management when uploading it, just in case we were actually accused of genuine plagiarism as a result.
This thing about shopping trolley lifestyle photography, because you can’t not use pictures like this when they come along:
Amused ourselves while simultaneously bewildering and frightening others. This week’s batch therefore gets an avant-garde and new-wave 8/10.
ELSEWHERE ON THE NETWORK, BY OTHER PEOPLE, LAST WEEK Stuart did this thing about portable wanking machines. Stuart also used to work on Dreamcast magazine. If we die, hopefully Stuart will be able to take over here, as he seems more than qualified.
We’ve had about 20 emails in the last month saying “Hey! There’s an advert on the underground in which some men are using Mega Drive controllers!” – only no one actually provided photographic evidence.
UNTIL, that is, NOW:
It’s an advert for a dating site. And yes, they are using Mega Drive controllers for some unknown but no doubt deeply ironic and clever reason.
