Internet adventures!
Started November 8, 2024
Hey, what's up? Doing part 2 of internet adventures now! Since the last time, a lot's happened, Archive.org is back up again! I'm really glad they're doing better now and that they're safe. If you're not aware, last month, their website got attacked and they had to shut down everything for a while, all their data is safe though and they're doing better now!
I found a couple more sites just looking around and I'm going to get back into the ones in my bookmarks folder! New ones too! Just want to say like before, you should check out these websites for yourself too, so you have your own experience!
And.... let's just start!
Sonic the Hedgehog Rocks!
I found this site from looking around on GifCities like before! Bunch of random Sonic pictures and gifs floating around, GREEN BACKGROUND! I like this picture with Sonic on a board, could be in City Escape? With a purple background? Don't know where it's from? I just looked online but I can't find that exact picture anywhere, strange? But I like it though!
I don't know why this guy's talking to Tails like that, anyways, there's a comment from them at the bottom you can see in the picture!
I really don't know if their email is still around but I might try sending them an email later! I really don't like doing emails too much but for this, when I look at random old websites, I think about how who made it is doing to this day, I think it's something new to try!
I went on my old computer and it showed an error for a plugin at the top of the page? But I tried enabling it and it plays music! (First video on internet adventures, I might record sometimes!)
There's another page called TIKALTHEECHINDA all in caps letters at the bottom but I'll look at it later! Even though this website's small and doesn't have so much on it, there's something to it and I really like it!
Knuckles Domain
I was trying to find this website I found a while back where the person who made the site went by Knuckles, but this is a different one! There's so many gifs of Knuckles running AAAAAAAAAAA
Thing about this website though that's kind of amazing, there's this picture with Sonic and Knuckles here from the Adventure games, I heard it was in magazines back then when they were selling the game and the Dreamcast!
It was archived and you can download it here!
There's a better quality picture of that one with Sonic and Knuckles on it! This screenshot's from my one of my friends, me and him were talking about it too, thinking about talking about this whole disc and the art on Adventure Zone when I finish the website! Some of those pictures on there and this one were in Photoshop files and have layers!
The funny thing though is that he sent me this EXACT low quality jpg of this picture before and just the other day when I came to this site, was saying to myself that wait..... I'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE! I was thinking to myself that, is this the same exact picture he sent me? And it IS! I got no idea how we came to the same website, I told him that it's like we crossed paths!
I like how the name is just "3d_cool_knuckles_pic" 3D COOL KNUCKLES PIC
Anyways, let's check out more of this page!
So this archive is from around September 2002, this is the first archive! There's "CHARICTOR" PAGES and a place to get help for raising chao! Really sad is that the pages for both Sonic and Knuckles aren't even archived? And the website is about Knuckles!! Sad to me that his own page isn't archived. My dude Tails' page is up though! Same with Shadow and Amy
They calling him "Miles Prowler", I know that this guy could've spelt it wrong but I've heard the name Prowler before? Kinda confuses me, how this page looks and the whole website gives me really good memories, I can't explain it. They got that wallpaper of Tails! They got that same art of him at the bottom that looks like an old picture scan? One picture from Sonic Advance, one of them I think is from the Original Video Animation? The Sonic the Hedgehog movie from 1996?
There's a page for Shadow! Letting you know, this has screenshots from the end of Sonic Adventure 2! To anyone who hasn't fully played this game yet, you can skip past this if you don't want to see the rest of the story!
I really appreciate this page, they knew Shadow well and not how most people think of him. The guy who made this website I feel like was really young, it reminds me of how I was a long time ago and it makes me happy. Not meaning to criticize their spelling at all, I do find it kinda funny with how random things are spelt in a way but who made this website put a lot of effort into it! Back to this page, it talks about the end of the game where Sonic and Shadow both stop the Eclipse Cannon from firing and hitting earth together. They really felt like Shadow sacrificed himself at the time with the screenshot here. And there's some art by someone called "Lisa Echidna" they put on their website! The way the colors of this picture are really show the time it's from, it looks like one of those early Deviantart pictures but this one is really well done, the lyrics to Live and Learn in the background behind Sonic and Shadow shows meaning behind it
And.... you remember that gif of that CUBE of Shadow spinning at the beginning of the first part of Internet Adventures? It's from THIS SITE!
Anyway, especially that this guy who made this page was younger, they knew who Shadow really was, it makes me really appreciate it. Looking more at random places at the time of this game, Shadow was a mysterious character to everyone, especially when this game was first being revealed and at the time it came out
Here's that page dedicated to getting help with Chao, a lot of the pictures weren't archived but at the top of this page, looking through the HTML, there's supposed to be a normal, a dark chao and a hero one. Also CHAO PALACE, one minute, we're in the Chao Office and now it transformed into a palace somehow!
This guy all over this part of the site pretends to be the Chao characters like the Professor Chao or the Doctor Chao, they have twists on who they really are or whatever. Looking it up the Principal IS THE DOCTOR... SOMEHOW, man I'm getting reminded of Dunkey's livestream where he and someone else played this game and that this happened in it loll, he was confused as hell by the Chao Kindergarten so much
Yeah, this is that part! I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS OF THIS PLACE IN THE GAME TOO
I was laughing way too much the first time I watched this, I STILL AM! Wow, I'm getting so caught up in this videoAnyways, I like how this guy pretended to be characters on this website, you'll see that really soon! There's this page talking about how to turn your Chao into a Sonic and a Shadow Chao? They're also talking about a Knuckles chao and made a whole page dedicated to it!
They talked about a picture of a Chao they saw on this official site and this page was about Sonic Team having a festival at a place called GameJam2? There's supposed to be that picture of the Knuckles Chao at the top of the page but it wasn't archived, but it's on the site for GameJam2, I put it right next to here though!
I think it's super stretched on this guy's website but because it's not archived, I can't see it..... BUT.... you know, with the power of HTML, I'll try something!
Yep, super STRETCHED JPEG! Had to use Chrome instead of Firefox for some reason, the picture didn't even update using the inspect element.... I don't know how a picture this small didn't even get archived and that the page did just confuses me, this happens sometimes looking at these old websites!
Anyway, this guy talked about seeing this back then. The page is from Japan, so he couldn't read it and really said what he thought without being able to understand what the page was really about. There's translators nowadays but back then, I don't think you can translate languages with computers yet. But this guy was dedicated, even that he didn't know what the page said, he tried to make the most out of it!
He was thinking that this Knuckles Chao was one you could unlock somehow, he said that Running Chao's have the green orb above their head, comparing it with the Sonic chao and that got him really confused if there's something you had to do differently to turn your Chao into a Knuckles one, quoting from him
"from what we know now is : the color of the ball on its head signifys a running chao but normall running leads to sonic chao /hero running leads to a chao with a long spik on its head and dark running chao leads to a shadow chao.... so how is it that you get this knuckles chao?????? we can also tell that this chao is probably a chails and is in the nutral chao garden...?????"
The guy who made this site was definitely younger at the time, maybe he's not spelling the best but he's putting the words together great!
Really, really interesting thing he's talking about though, it makes me think about Knuckles and not just the Chao of Knuckles in general but he compares the curve on the Dark Chao with Knuckles, that they have the same kind of thing on their body! He was talking about that the Knuckles Chao could be connected to the Dark Chao in some way because of that curve on them? Think it could just be their design but interesting thought though!
Quoting from Sonic Team's website though
"In the "Game Boy Advance Corner", in the Rare Chao Download corner, you can download the rare Chao [Knuckles Chao] that is only available at the venue!" "☆If you own Sonic Advance, you can download and save Knuckles Chao to the "Mini Chao Garden" in Sonic Advance. If you have already raised Chao in the "Mini Chao Garden", please leave it in the "Chao Garden" in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle before coming." "☆For those who do not own Sonic Advance Download Knuckles Chao and the "Mini Chao Garden" directly to your Game Boy Advance. If the Game Boy Advance battery runs out, the data will be lost, so please get a new battery. And if you have a GBA cable to connect your Game Cube and Game Boy Advance, you can take out Knuckles Chao and save it in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle."
You would get the Knuckles Chao through this Gamejam event back then and you could download it at one of the stations there to your Game Boy Advance and then you could copy it to your Chao garden at home! It's just interesting to me to think about that this guy thought it was unlockable, he couldn't read the page back then and that made him think it was part of the game
Here's a newer archive of the homepage from 2004!
The guy was going to add pictures of Sonic X and news about it on his site!
Also, new KNUCKLES PICTURE!
And it's called "knuckles_cool.gif", lol this guy keeps adding cool in the names of his pictures like the one earlier!
Here's a newer archive of the homepage from 2004!
They added a page for the DX version of Sonic Adventure! But it wasn't archived....
Looking up the release date for Sonic Adventure DX again, it's from 2003, the archives go from 2002 to 2004? This could've been updated in 2003. But this was around when the DX-DELUXE-DIRECTORS_CUT...that name is TOO LONG!... version came out
It wasn't archived, but I'm thinking that he was excited but got disappointed when it came out, because this is the worst version of Sonic Adventure
It's got good in it, don't get me wrong but it's got way too many problems compared to the original game
This website didn't have an index page and one of the archives is just a listing of the files on the site, kinda interesting to look through and see what time this picture was added to the site and the html pages on there
Link!
Knuckles Power!
Okay, this is the website I was talking about earlier that's about Knuckles!
I didn't look at it too much before, so this is my first time seeing it!
Alright, way too much to talk about!
This is the homepage!
Why I'm wanting to come to this website so much is because of this gif at the bottom with Knuckles asking you to e-mail him!
But it also looks kinda weird to me and I want to recreate it sometime! There might be an update here eventually!
So this website is actually still up to this day on a Geocities archive! Here!
A bit of the images are gone because they're from Geocities and other sites that don't exist anymore, but you can see them on Archive.org
There's this page that's a battle with Sonic and Knuckles fighting! There's this message at the bottom that's ridiculous to me saying to vote or Sonic will lose.... OR DIE! And it sounds like something I'd make up and say when I was younger. So there was a whole vote going on in this page and you can actually still view it!
But there was no archive of it at all....and that shocked me at first.... until I put the url not leading to Archive. The site is still up! It's not archived though..... so.....FIRST ARCHIVE of this random vote from a random Geocities websitee!
So Sonic really won the majority of the vote!
Man, as much as I like Knuckles... Look at this, you got someone strong and bigger, but then you got this guy that's maybe not the strongest in the world but he's faster than them and is the speediest thing in existance.....
You know what's going to happen
And that I think he's beat him before the first time they met, when Knuckles was badly influenced and bamboozled by ya know who
Anyways, there's a page with pictures too and my dude Tails! The page with Tails isn't even archived on Wayback Machine but you can find it on the Geocities page that's still up!
For some reason, whenever you right click on any of these pages, they think you're stealing?
My guess is that people would just save pictures from websites and claim them as their own and put them on their site
If it's for that reason, I really get it. This popup message sounds like something I'd be terrified of when I was younger.....wait I'm getting a memory of something right now
It reminds me of THIS! There's this video on Youtube called "Yoshi's Song" that's just the theme of Yoshi's Story with this picture of Yoshi singing. When annotations were still on Youtube, this is what was there. But you can actually get annotations back with an extension online and you can see this message again!
Even though these websites are from a long time ago and don't exist anymore, I've downloaded pictures from them before. Sometimes, there's pictures that don't even exist anymore that are only on these sites, some of these pictures are art of Sonic that are .gif files because that format was on websites a lot! Even if it wasn't animated. Even though these sites aren't up anymore, if I download anything, I still want to give credit and say where I downloaded these pictures from!
When I eventually get my links page up, I want to link websites like this that I like and ones I got gifs and pictures from!
Here's another poll from one of the pages I saw!
Kinda blurry image this time but these are the results!
So Sonic and Shadow were the ones super high up, no one liked Rouge though? My dude Tails got a lot of votes!
Someone on one of the archives was the 75th visitor!
Coming back to writing this after a while!
I'm looking through the pictures I took and I found this when I was on one of the pages? I don't know what this even is but it looks weird
Anyway, Knuckles Power even had a forum! This guy says that Sonic Adventure 2 rocks!
This post was from around 2002, I don't know why but it feels good to see someone from a long time ago around when this game first came out saying that it's way past cool like this!
There's also someone begging and asking for help trying to get a Knuckles chao like we were looking at before! Wish I could tell them now but back in the day, you could only get them at events or this disc!
It was the Nintendo GameCube Software e-Catalog from around Summer 2003!
This really good website
Chao Island documented a lot about it! But now you can get it through software, they're talking about a program called Fusions Chao Editor?
So "knux" from the Knuckles Power forum if you ever see this someday (probably definitely won't.... it's been years), this is how you get a Knuckles chao!
Anyways on the homepage, they said that they were going to make a newer Knuckles Power! Knuckles Power II... Reloaded?
This looks like an enter page, that blank image in the middle is supposed to be Tails from the message at the side saying "klick tails"... I don't know who spells "click" like that but you know, this was the 2000s. It doesn't take you to the website, it wasn't archived.... man
All these buttons/banners at the bottom talking about a "Sonic Top 50" means that they were wanting to put their website on a leaderboard? I guess people made leaderboards back then for Sonic websites and they had these buttons you'd put on your site, the graphics in them give me good memories from the past, they're super cool to look at
This site even had a chat that ran on some place called Spinchat?
Anyways from that forum post earlier, let's check out.....
Sonic~Clash
So, the only archive of their site is the homepage which is kinda sad, those multicolored buttons at the side and the pictures at the top, they're .gif files like the ones from Knuckles Power I was talking about earlier!
There's this SUPER inverted picture of Sonic at the bottom, I couldn't find it anywhere online, I think they made it themselves. Looks kinda weird? But I like it at the same time
And that Knuckles gif from Knuckles Power is at the bottom too! I don't know if someone else made it before Knuckles Power or this person just took it from their site?
The Tails Archive
Okay, now this website is way past cool!
A long time ago before I started Internet Adventures, I found this website from a links page and so many other websites related to Tails
Someone named XFox.... I kept spelling their name as "Xbox" because I forget how to write sometimes, it's so similar? I guess that's what their name's a take on. They started this archive back in 2002
The earliest archive is still up to this day before they moved to a new domain! If you look at it with a new browser, you won't see anything in the middle, I don't think it's Javascript? But it surprised me when I went on my old computer with Internet Explorer that I could see all the Tails'!
You got a looping background of Tails for some reason, I like that all the sections are in the style of Chaos Emeralds, the way this site is laid out reminds me of that time, this is just one of those sites that mean something to me again
And you got Tails running across the bottom of the page!
There's this downloads page where you can customize your Windows and add Tails to your startup and COMPUTER PROPERTIES SCREEN WOW!
This screenshot is from that guy's computer, "Kitsune Soft", my favorite company
2004 Website
Still writing!
Hey, this is just a note from Radical that I'm still writing here and not finished yet, you'll see more in a while so check back later if you want!