READ HERE : http://forum.darkspyro.net/spyro/viewposts.php?topic=40207 Unfortunately , there are no news about it.
That seems extremely shady to me. Hacking into computers to steal a game from a company that went out of business so why would they still have computers online with such an old game. If it's true or not, it just seems wrong and shady.
Exactly, if the company closed then why are servers still online containing their assets? It's always a shame when people invade privacy and steal to get what they want.
Poster says "（Ｃ）２００１ユニバーサルインタラクティブスタジオの年", so something like "(C) 2001 Year of Universal Interactive Studios" I believe, not to mention "砂糖とロケッツ" for the Japanese company's name. Well, I guess that's a perfectly valid translation of "Sugar and Rockets"... it's just too bad their name was rendered in katakana as シュガーアンドロケッツ. May I call BS on this, considering they failed even basic cross-checking of information regarding the company name?
What server he accessed doesn't matter when the whole thing's made up anyway. Also, if he had broken into Insomniac's servers and they had a prototype build of the Japanese version of Spyro 3 just sitting there, you'd think he would have found many more goodies along with it--early versions of the other Spyro games or unreleased concept art, for instance. Seems to me that the guy was just looking for attention. Japanese versions of the early Spyro games are prized by the Spyro community due to their significant differences from their North American and European counterparts. According to TCRF, the first game has an entirely different camera system in Japan, Spyro can jump higher, and he's got more voice clips for actions like jumping and taking damage (much like Super Mario 64, where several of Mario's voice clips were only added after the original Japanese release.) Similar story for the second game, except in this case they changed every character's eyes to look more "anime" in an attempt to appeal to Japanese audiences. Obviously this didn't work too well as the third title went unreleased in Japan due to a lack of popularity. xdaniel's pretty well debunked this whole thing, but there's more we could look at. The "poster" is quite poorly done, with the game's logo being an obvious blow-up of the thumbnail-sized one. Not only is it poorly scaled, but whoever edited it didn't quite get rid of all the white pixels around the logo when he cut it out--here's the small version he provided blown up 400%. You can quite clearly see the white pixels around the top left and along the bottom of the logo. There's also some telltale clues left behind that reveal how he edited the original version of this picture to remove the English logo and text. For reference, here's the source image, which was given out as a wallpaper by Insomniac. First, you'll notice that he's cropped in on the image to hide the English copyright information and the Insomniac logo, which inadvertently took out the bottom of the Universal Studios logo. Realistically, as the original developers of the game, Insomniac's logo should should still be on there even if Sugar & Rockets was in charge of localising the game. The Japanese versions of the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto games are a good example of this--in Japan, they were localized and published by Square Enix and Capcom, respectively. The cover art was modified to include the new publisher's logos, but retained those of the original developers. Here's the upper section of both images with the brightness and contrast adjusted to make any discrepancies stick out. Look for an obvious pink spot on the moon in the supposed Japanese version, as well as a large miscoloured section in the sky to the right of the logo--looks like he used the paintbrush tool to cover up the original logo, rather than the clone stamp. You can be sure that the localization team would have had full access to the original assets--no need for them to crudely Photoshop out the original logo and copyright information. There's some issues with the whole supposed timeline of events, as well. Spyro 3 was released on September 25, 2000 in North America and on November 8, 2000 in Europe. Sugar & Rockets shut down in August of 2000 (a month before the game first launched), and were consolidated into Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., which released S&R's last two titles (adaptations of the Blood: The Last Vampire anime) in December of 2000. A look at the packaging for these games shows that they made no use of the studio's original name. Keep in mind that there was a significant delay between the NA/EU releases of the first two Spyro games and the Japanese versions--Spyro 1 was released in September of 1998 in North America and in April of 1999 in Japan, Spyro 2 was released in November of 1999 in North America and March of 2000 in Japan. That's a delay of 5-7 months, meaning that the bulk of the localization work was done after the initial launch of the game. So, it should be quite clear how little Sugar & Rockets could have accomplished, having shut down before the game was even released in North America. Additionally, Sugar & Rockets wasn't a localization team, they were a second-party developer for Sony. Even if they did dabble in localizing games, they were hard at work on a number of early PS2 titles (Scandal, Blood: First Volume and Blood: Final Volume) around the time that they were supposedly working on Spyro. Also, the first two Spyro games were localized in-house by SCEI, of which Sugar & Rockets was not yet a part of. Simply put, none of it adds up.
I just checked the EXIF data of the supposed logo, apparently it was created or at least edited using Paint.NET v3.5.8, which was released in 2011, same year as the original post.
