More wallpapers after the jump!
Bonus! I made this Pirate TV wallpaper ages ago and never got around to uploading it so here you go. This one is actually at 1600 X 1200 so I have no excuse for the above ones being smaller. Oh well.
Here's a scanned example of one of the pages, which not only contains all that lovely felt-tip pen colored art from Sonic 1, but also talks of the characters' "charming and saucy nature". Hmm. No doubt the PAL Sonic 1 box art was nicer, though. More scans after the jump.
Some art scanned from one of the Sonic 2 pages, showing Tails back when he was generally cute and not an annoying little idiot. "Look at all them Eggman's robots" indeed.
The creepy furries may get a kick out of this one. Features some artwork of the badniks from the Game Gear version of Sonic 2, which I can't say I've seen before getting this book before (for all I know they were probably in the Japanese manual)..
Ever wanted large artwork of Streets of Rage? Well here you go! Sadly I couldn't get perfect scans of these what with the page bends though, so a lot of these will have squashed shadowed sides. Still, click on this and you can see all that unnecessary muscle detail closer than if you placed the Mega Drive case against your nose.
This one of Monster lair wasn't going too far into the page dip so I got this one almost just right. Illustrated by , of who's artwork should be familiar to anyone that ever owned a Master System, as the art could be found on many a white gridded box (when they did very rarely put any effort into the art on them that is). This one might even work as a widescreen wallpaper.
This is one of my favorite pieces from the entire book, a real piece of art that's wasted on a tiny Game Gear box but would look great hung up on a wall.
This Phantasy Star II art is also very arty. Has the look of a Moebius illustration, sort of. Now a Panzer Dragoon art book, THAT would be nice.
Outrun artwork by Akira Watanabe (the same guy who did the Sonic 1 and 2 cover art, amongst other Sega art). This wouldn't look out of place framed in a 1980's diner complete with a girl flying around on Rollerblades chewing bubblegum. This image could be all you need on Wikipedia for the word "Sega". Amazing. 
And if that wasn't enough airbrushed Outrun goodness for you, here's a poor attempt at a scan of the two page spread of Turbo Outrun. This American dream of driving like an arsehole to show off to your brain dead girlfriend is illustrated so perfectly here.
Now, video game art books are by no means a rare thing in Japan, but Sega ones seem to be few and far between. However, I manged to find this one on Ebay some time ago and won it for about £12. The book contains a variety of artwork from many Mega Drive and Game Gear games, starring the main front cover art as full page spends and littered with character art from the lovely full colour manuals they got over there. More after the jump.
The book splits the games into genres: Role playing, Action, Shooting, Driving & Sports, Simulation and Others. Each game has info about the game as well as comments about the art by the artists themselves. better yet, the book is in Japanese and English. It even tells you what art tools were used to produce each piece.
The first bunch of pages in the book present Segas lineup of RPG's. This is a must buy for fans of Phantasy Star and especially the Shining series, which gets 12 pages dedicated to it's various Mega Drive and Game Gear releases at the time, including full page cover images and tons of character art. Other games shown off include Vermilion, Landstalker and Rent a Hero.
In the action section, the longest in the book, Sonic gets a nice six pages dedicated to him, showing off art from Sonic 1 and 2 and well as art for the Game Gear Sonic 2. Did you know the names of all those different animals you could save when you bopped open a badnik? Well look above and now you'll know. I can't say I've ever seen artwork of Beckie the bear before, and take note how she has a white collar thing a lot like Knuckles' one.
There's also 12 pages dedicated to all the Golden Axe games, 5 for Bare Knuckle (Streets of Rage), 5 for Wonder Boy and 6 for Shinobi. No Revenge of Shinobi/Shinobi III art though, it's all from Shadow Dancer and the Game Gear games. Oh well, they're still nice.
Everyone should recognize this Altered Beast artwork, as it was also featured on the western box for what was the first Mega Drive pack-in title. What you may not have seen before the in the left half of the artwork, which was cut off in our boxes but shown in full on the Japanese box.
Alex Kidd also gets a short 2 page look in, although there's none of that classic Master System art, justthe Mega Drive game which in Japan has a crude but cute cover. The less said about any of our Alex Kidd "art" the better.
The Shooting section is pretty small but contains some memorable art from Super Thunder Blade, Space harrier, Gain Ground and Arrow Flash as seen above. This was back in the day when anything remotely anime-looking would be swiftly replaced with serious, realistic characters, but even in Japan it seems anime style art is not too common in the era of Sega games featured. This book was published in 1994, although there doesn't appaer to be any games in here any later than 1992.
The racing & Sports section almost entirely consists of baseball games. There is seven pages of baseball, all very similar to each other. Those Japanese sure love their baseball, but this is a waste of a good few pages. Also featured is the Super Monaco Grand Prix artwork you may remember, and some fantastic Outrun art that I'm going going to attempt to scan in.
Finally the 'Simulation & Other' section features an assortment of games that we mostly didn't get over here, including this Game Gear version of Pengo. The art above is by the same guy that illustrated the Sonic cover art as well as some Outrun art also in the book. As fantastic as it looks is there any particular reason why the penguin in his art looks more like a duck? Mind you, Pengo is also green and red, so what do I know.
I have no idea what this game is. It's the only Mega CD game featured in the book and has this bonkers artwork that even the artist doesn't like.
Over all the book is rather ace and well worth the money I spent on it. The quality of the artwork featured is a mixed bag as was box art from Sega games at the time in general, but the artists notes and fantastic full page spreads for some truly classic games made up for it. You should especially purchase it if you are a fan of Sega's RPG heritage. I'm going to have a go at scanning some pages tomorrow so they can be turned into wallpapers and the like.
Ok, so that's maybe a exaggeration but it's still rather classy. I remember dad owning this back in the day, and on one day of sorting out from a pile of ties what to sell, my child self made sure he didn't get rid of this one. In all honestly for the last few years I had forgotten I even still had this lying around somewhere, but recently in a sort out of my wardrobe I found it tucked away in the corner where I evidentially never look, next to a pair of Sonic caps I also left down there to be forgotten about. More stuff after the jump.
I don't think the photos really do it justice, but as I already said: this tie is rather classy. The artwork appears to be that from one of those choose-your-Adventure books I used to read a lot, as if involving Sonic in every other form of entertainment I could find wasn't enough. In the original art the flash at the bottom was a bright orange, suggesting an explosion, but now it's a dark blue so looks more like a water splash. Either way the tie is a nice deep blue and very slick.
Out of all the Sonic ties I've seen about online (not many, actually) this is probably one of the most tasteful. The colours especially are very nice; Tails' fur is like a perfect inbetween of the orange from the games and the brown fur in SATAM. It has a very nice textured feel as well, and it glistens in the light. Hell, I may even wear it out one of these days, if I ever find the reason to wear a tie. Maybe not for going to the funeral of someone who drowned, mind.
Oh, and here's the back, if you're all that interested. Even the Sonic logo stitched into the little Tie Rack tag is very nicely done. I can actually imagine this was quite expensive when it came out, and most likely came from Marks & Sparks like a lot of that old Sonic clothing did.
Finally, here's the two caps that were hiding alongside the tie. The first one matches that big red Coca Cola jacket I've got, with the same artwork stitched on and in bright red. Much like the actual jacket I can't remember how or where I got this.
This other cap is a bit odd because it's all fluffy like, a very odd texture for a cap to have, and it has no size adjusting buttons on the back, it just stretches onto your head and generally feel quite horrible. Safe to say I've never worn this even as a kid as it was so irritable. Still, it has not one, not two, but three Sonic's stitched onto it in various places, all based on stock art. It also has a little Sonic logo tag thing stitched into it.
So compared to that tie this is kind of tacky, but I believe this also came from M&S if I remember rightly. They did a whole range of Sonic clothing and if I recall it never particularly cheap and only around for a short while.
Sometimes at boot sales you just get lucky. This horde of Mega Drive games here is one of those times. A bloke had a huge huge box full of about 50 Mega Drive games, many very good ones. In the end I picked out 19 of the, leaving the Sonic and sport games that show up all the time. He was selling them a pound each but let me have this lot for £16. Fantastic.
There's a good few games in here I haven't come across often, or at all, outside of Ebay. I had never even heard of Sub Terrania before but picked it up based on the sticker attached that quotes from a magazine: "Most polished gameplay since Gunstar Heroes" or something to that effect. Clayfighter would have been nice to own but sadly I could not get it to work at all. The highlight of the lot is probably Flink, as it's a very hard to find platformer by good old Psygnosis, before they were gobbled up by Sony. Another game of theirs, Puggsy, is also amongst this lot. Other highlights include Ranger-X, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Battletoads and MERCS. Most were mint but a odd game, including Flink, were unfortunately missing their manuals. Oh well.
