And that Ladies and Gentlemen was Summer Of Sonic 2010. Over, done with and out. What I’m going to suggest to everyone in terms of the main staff is that they when they have the chance write down an overview of the event from their own perspective. I’ve a few things to address, many of you are probably wondering “FOR THE LOVE OF TIKAL AAUK, wtf are you doing even up right now?” All I can say is I actually got up at 8am – I have things to do. Perhaps we can say that my biggest achievement at SOS 10 was to actually make it home, make myself a drink, sit down and watch TV for a good half hour before taking myself to bed. Not having Echo Hawk having to physically drag me in a state of delerium up a flight of stairs like last year.

Discoponies just collared me on msn funnily enough about this.

“I’m glad this year u seemed to think about ur own well being too. U seemed less prone to a stroke.”
“You missed some s***.”
“Oh god.”

Firstly thanks to all the staff, too many to name here, for their hard work and their dedication to the cause. Whether you enjoyed the heck out of Summer of Sonic 2010 (the majority) or thought it was really boring and run by “nerds with egos” (Christ, what else do we have to put on to make you lot not “bored”?!?) the team worked like Trojans under some very difficult circumstances which I’ll get into in a sec. Anyone who thinks “oh its been organised really poorly” doesn’t know the whole story.

We actually had an absolute nightmare with the setup, as all of us arrived Friday to find that the venue had very kindly not yet been cleared out of all the other furniture which rather prevented us from doing much for many hours. Amazingly we did actually manage to get everything up and working, the net was a bit fragile but working, we had all the audio and video ready and set up, the furniture was in place, C40 had done their mini-rehersal and we left late on Friday night with myself, Blake, Echo and bmn being the last to go, ready to finalise making things pretty in the morning due to the lack of time for it with the clean out leaving venue staff to finalise the tidying.

When we came back in the morning… our tech kit was gone. The laptops, and HD camera which were left in the “secured” venue and belonging to Rory/Roareye had vanished without a trace. You can imagine how we felt at this point; Rory despite being devastated insisted the most important thing was we somehow got everything set up again. And it’s that kind of attitude that shows you what a cool guy he is – caring more about the greater good of the con. So how Ian/bmn, Jay/Discoponies (who created all the snazzy video idents and things) and a couple of others somehow managed to get things set up again with a borrowed computer that was frankly rubbish in the time we had I have no idea. Because of all this we didn’t have the opportunity to make the venue as pretty as we’d've liked. I had some awesome ASR wall banners that never saw the light of day and a bunch of posters that should’ve been out and around.

Speaking of The Pavilion itself…don’t get me started on air-con situation and trust me we were just as hot.

Regarding Sonic 4 and Colours – unfortunately those were all the machines we could get, S4 and Colours Wii were on special machines and those were all that were available, the fact that the sync button on the Wii apparently was broken facilitating an emergency Gamecube controller backup didn’t help matters but the vast majority of people I think that played it really enjoyed the experience.

So perhaps we can say that SOS was a triumph in the face of some extreme advercity? For Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode I there was certainly a BIG reaction to it, and hey that was the E3 build so didn’t have the tweaks done to it. People were really enjoying Colours, the shop did a very steady turn over – and if you think I see a penny of that boy are you wrong! The art corner was VERY busy as before, lots of the more serious artists were very interested indeed in Nigel Dobbyn’s clinics. The cosplay was off the hook this year, how many people did we have in the end? 20-ish? Who’d've thought Shadow would be the most cosplayed character?! And can people now drop last years “you don’t know who Purge is” nonsense on the basis I twigged Sketch Turner and Roadkill before you. Incidentally there was an additional prize to that which I shall have to get to the devious Dr. Eggman.

I think I won the battle of the t-shirts this year, though only because no one saw Jay’s sparkly Tails sprite t-shirt until the end.

The Tails Doll made a spectacular return of course (YouTube of that later), Vger/Wentos was surprised with his forfeit, the Buzzbombers quiz proved very entertaining: if proving that T-Bird and Dreadknux are dirty liars and that Johnny Gioeli doesn’t know as much about Jun Senoue as he should. The Wrecks Factor Live had some rather rousing performances, including Mini-T surprising everybody with a heck of a performance of the Sonic Underground theme. An All-Stars Racing World Champion was crowned and people enjoyed playing 8 player networked games, Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic Heroes, Sonic Unleashed and just generally interacting with other Sonic fans.

Okay, so the hermit crabs went up the spout. Yeah, considering how much effort it took to actually get hold of those my heartfelt thanks to you all for promptly nicking them all.

Oh yes, and HELLO – we had CRUSH FRIGGIN’ 40? Jun and Johnny had a superb Q&A hosted by T-Bird, which was actually very revealing. Jun treated everyone to some “Afternoon Tea”, a 20 minute individual set with the surprise addition of Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Japan Trip competition entrants Freya and The Divas singing Escape From The City before C40 TORE DOWN THE HOUSE with their set. Gotta say, as being partly responsible for writing that set it sounded great. I say sounded as I never got to see it. *Sob* Hey, someone had to start de-rigging everything. So where’s the YouTube videos guys? Some of us want to see.

More individual stories from the event to follow, including a video from Frobman we were not able to show due to the kit theft – we’ll let you know more on what happens with that. In the future I’ll also be asking you guys what you want for Summer of Sonic 2011 – yes, 2011. As if you missed myself and Svend’s last announcement its going to be held on the first Saturday after Sonic’s 20th Birthday on June 25th 2011! Have a think of what you might want, keep an eye out for the post then when we ask tell us what you’re after (besides the obvious… bigger, cooler, refreshments) that’ll go up Monday I think.

For now… I’m off to have a lie down and rest the laundry list of injuries I picked up.

Some remote control cars in the shape of Sonic’s Speed Star and Knuckles Land Breaker from All-Stars Racing is on it’s way to the US Toys ‘R’ Us and Sears Canada stores soon thanks to NKOK.

They have working headlights and go up to speeds of 7mph, they both also work on different frequencies so you can race against a friend.  They’ll be available this month for $24.99 (USD)

[Source: Sonic City Blognik]

Click above to go to the Depository

Also the Summer Of Sonic website has updated with details of crowning an SSR World Champion in a gaming tournament and also of a new freebie – an SSR lanyard.

I’ve just come back from the MCM Expo in London, and apart from vowing never to go again and getting a goody bag the size of a small house at least myself and Echo got to hang out with Bentley Jones as well as TRiPPY, Vger, Dan Dyer, Dreadknux, T-Bird, Nemain and Sonic Yoda. Umiyuri (I think) ran past us dressed in a pink something – completely ignoring us, cheers Kate – to tackleglomp Bentley. Heck I even bumped into my former SEGA Community cohort Martin, Turtlegirl from GirlGamers and even Alzari himself the irrepressible DC!

I won’t bore you to death over the cosplay details, we did see a Sonic, a small Shadow (who was later seen adorned with a Hollow mask from Bleach and a samurai sword in what must be the worst crossover idea in the history of forever) and Bayonetta and photos of her and Sonic will be going up on the SOE Blog next week courtesy of T-Bird.

But yes sadly the MCM Expo was a bit of a let down, ignoring the fact that the amount of people there was RIDICULOUS I’ve actually learnt a lot as to how NOT to do a convention. The “host” for the stage area bored everyone to death, delayed everything and people began to leave. Luckily this meant we worked our way to the front where we patiently waited through a couple of interview panels. It was coming up to the Guinness World Record attempt on DS play… which everyone needed to sign up for. Now myself and Echo had left our DS’s at home, so we were really pleased when we and anyone else who didn’t have a DS were essentially asked to GO AWAY.

Yup, we were actually asked to leave whilst they did this. We obliged, half way out in a throng of people the idiot got back on the mike to hurriedly tell people if they were waiting for Bentley then they could indeed stay, which I think was Dreadknux’s doing. Thankfully for the Expo Idiot he wasn’t looking directly at me because the look I shot him as I turned around WOULD have killed him, Svend WAS looking at me and flinched. In fact I did vocalise my desire to shove the lighting gantry up the chap’s rectum. Ahem.

Under The Gun rocking out with motion blurrrrrr

Eventually Bentley came onstage and it soon became apparent that whilst the guys on stage were rocking the stage set-up was rocky. In fact we felt a bit sorry for everyone concerned really, the set was monkeyed around with, whoever was working the levels really did a piss poor job, they were supposed to announce the tracks and they didn’t. The big thing was the levels though which were shot, with Under The Gun louder than Bentley was and the feedback was non-existent to the stage so they were essentially performing blind. Way to go MCM. In fact T-Bird, who is a close friend of Under The Gun actually went up to the guy half way through to ask him what the hell he was playing at and who apparently gave him a don’t-really-care like response. Awesome.

Performing “So Much More…”

Myself and my posse then went behind the scenes after the set to chat to Bentley and UTG which was awesome – Echo and Bentley had a proper chance to hang out and chat face-to-face which they sadly weren’t able to do at Summer of Sonic 2009 which was cool.

So what did we actually learn about WE R ANIMADE? Well we learnt that the sound is MUCH more rocky and heavier than previous, Nick Jennison and UTG appear to be much more involved following their appearance on “So Much More” – which featured in the set and got a surprisingly big reaction.  Some anime themes look like they’ll be featuring, a version of the Macross Plus theme was played in the set – and I know for a fact that a reinterpretation of another well known and popular anime series theme will likely be on it (mainly as I’ve had an early mix of the track for ages) but I won’t tell you want that is – its a surprise.  We know that fan involvement will play a part and we know that TRiPPY’s art is awesome. Bentley was actually wearing Studio Imagni badges on his stage gear in a really nice and classy touch. Bentley also styled his hair all anime-like for the performance. I don’t think its gonna stay that way somehow…

TRiPPY’s awesome outfit that I shall forever term “The Clockwork Bride”

Its a pity I can’t go back tomorrow to be honest as everything will be sorted and it ‘d be quite a performance but regardless of the organisational faux pas on the Expo’s front, what we gathered from the actual sound is that WE R ANIMADE is gonna be awesome. Its just a pity the Excel Centre wasn’t.

Do you remember when I went on the SSMB and suggested people draw a 1920′s All-Stars Racing cast in the style of Steamboat Willie? Well you never know I might’ve started a craze for Steamboat-style images as DeviantArtist TsukasaKazeryou has come up with this really cool image of “Steamboat Bentley”.