Sonic City.

You love it and so do our Japanese friends - notice how Sonic Channel’s wallpapers are using the English text descriptions from City? Yes, SONICTEAM and SOJ like City too, which as you might expect means a lot to it’s guardian, yours truly.

However, as you know since Sonic City, er, keeled over backwards bellowing hysterically for mercy at the end of A Race To Name from the traffic its been conspicuously absent from general items. You will also be aware if you keep track of my fansite doings and of course here on the Blognik (you ARE paying attention, yes?) that I’ve been in the process of getting things down on paper for a new iteration of the site.

So the latest: I can tell you while there’ll be some visual changes there won’t be much by way of any major graphical changes. Boo hiss.

But it now seems pretty set that the site will be vastly expanded upon - though this won’t be obvious at first exactly and it will also thankfully, for me at least, be MUCH easier to update with new items. Much as others may like slaving over a hot, crazily complex nest of xml files, er, I don’t. Sorry.

Another annoyance of the old Sonic City was various sections were somewhat destined to hit a dead-end anyway. The characters section for instance was such, as we would require Sonic Channel-style artwork for any new entrant. Considering Channel (City’s Japanese counterpart) has stopped doing that style you can see the problem.

I won’t even start on how many problems the Games Archive gave us with those timeframe sections: 1991-1994, etc.

The aim of course is to incorporate as much as possible to tie in with the Content Management System (CMS) operating on the new SEGA West site. Now Sonic City is going to require a lot of reconfiguration in this regard and I and the SOE online design team sat through a meeting the other day where we thrashed out various details and argued various cases for this that and the other.

One of the things I’m realllly high on is that we get the Downloads section sorted for you guys; this would hold things like the you’d see on Channel but a little bit of a different style. When I’ve had a spare second I’ve been putting together some designs for things which I hope you’ll like; I’ve always found that the Sonic fanbase have been of a “We don’t CARE what it is - Gimme gimme!” persuasion when it comes to media. Heh. But I know you’re appreciative of truly cool stuff, so hopefully you’ll dig what I’m considering.

So, lots of work to do. There’s a change eh?

Sonic City is looking to go up in phases - which I still have to time naturally - but hopefully we’ll be going back live with the first of these near the end of July. This date is obviously not set in stone, but like Big the Cat it’s not going to be shifted easily.

I’m going to be keeping you up to speed (where I can) on our progress with the site, mainly because I’d have thought you’d be interested to know.

“Let the speed mend it!”
AAUK