The big question has been answered, sort of: "How has Sonic Adventure evolved since its Japanese release?" According to Sega reps, twelve members of Sonic Team have been here in the US since the day SA was released in Japan, working on the English language version. There's the obvious issues of text translation and voice dubbing, but they're also cleaning up some of the programming glitches which plagued the Japanese version. Apparently, the first issues to be resolved are the fruity camera problems and clipping. If there's time left over, slowdown and pop-on may be fixed up a bit as well.

Actually, that's somewhat disturbing news. They've had five months to work on ironing out the problems, and they're still trying to resolve the camera and clipping issues? Less than four months remain now, but most who saw the US version running claim it has been significantly improved from the Japanese version, with a slightly (but noticably) improved camera and fogging effects to hide pop-on in certain places.

On the downside, the voice dubbing apparently isn't coming along as sweetly. According to one source, Sonic's voice is girly, and Tails and Amy's trip the line from cute to irritating. This is only one person's opinion, however, and there were no comments on the voices of Knuckles, Big, E-102g, or Robotnik (or the actual quality of the acting, for that matter).

On the bright side, here's a very juicy tidbit you probably haven't read about anywhere else. According to Hasan Ali Almaci (or just "Ali" for short), an acquaintance of mine and good friend of Zero's, he was able to meet the big man himself on the show floor: Yuji Naka. Naka-san admitted that he was currently "working on two projects", but that was all he could say. Assuming one of those projects is the localization of SA, what could the second be? If you'll recall, in an interview early this year, Naka-san mentioned something about a "Sonic Christmas download" to be ready for December. I wonder if that could be it? Or is it indeed a totally new game, or two totally new games? Or a totally new game and the "Sonic Christmas download"? The mind boggles...