PPR Presents Limelight: Knuckles' Chaotix-26th Anniversary

wenty-six years ago this week in Japan, the Edgy Echidna in red who won the hearts of SEGA fans across the world decided to push his luck with the crowd even further with a brand new solo outing, Knuckles’ Chaotix, the flagship title for the new SEGA Genesis add-on console, the SEGA 32X.

As ambitious as it was, the 32-bit spinoff was a commercial flop, a flop that hasn’t seen a re-release since the ill-fated GameTap subscription service. Anyone who’s listened to the show the last twelve years knows just how much I love this damn game. For as obscure as it is, it’s legacy has carried on through the years with its colorful cast, and influences across a number of games, including the recent masterpiece that is Sonic Mania Plus. While the odds of getting an HD Re-release are as likely as SEGA announcing the Dreamcast 2,  I thought it would be nice to show this quirky little game some High-Definition love with an impromptu stream later tonight! Join me Saturday night, 04/24/2021, 5:45 PM Pacific Standard Time on our Twitch as I try to play through ith the best ending, and open that faithful door into Summer.

25 years of the Sega Saturn: Part 1-The Doomed Singularity

ut of all the rituals that you’d expect a seven-year-old to have in the early nineties, feverishly running to the supermarket newsstand for the latest video game magazine isn’t one that I’d imagine topping a Family Feud chart anytime soon. Yet there I was, a twinkle-eyed sap who cared for nothing more than to drool over the latest news and gossip of the one brand that ruled my kid life: SEGA.

The year 1994 was a particularly lucid period, because of the gaming hype for releases like Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and Sonic & Knuckles, nothing was more exciting to me than Sega’s 32-bit project, the Sega Saturn. I couldn’t tell you how many times I read the August issue that year of Electronic Gaming Monthly, and the preview coverage they gave to the specifications of the system, and games that were going to be able to run on it like Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter, and Virtua Cop.

May 11th, 2020 marked the 25th anniversary of the polarizing console—even to this day, the same fevered school ground arguments over the Saturn have transcended into keyboard wars across online forums and social networks because unlike anything else like in the medium. The Sega Saturn is a complex story that peels back like an onion; so I figured what better way to way to reminisce on my favorite game machine than with an editorial series on it.

In this chapter, we’re going back to where it all began, as the system’s origin is one that’s born through a gradual divorce between the East and West divisions of SEGA, with the Saturn being the child that was caught in the middle of it all.

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