Various, The Official Sonic the Hedgehog Yearbooks
**
More excitable guff for the nostalgic British Sonicmania time capsule, along with the comic, the newspaper strips and the Ladybird books and similarly high quality. The unnecessary closed-caption translations of cool dude expressions was the best part.
2001 / Ecomic / 64 pages / USA/Mexico
***
An anthology of generic shorts dedicated to most of the character classes, with enough monster cameos and other references to satiate fans, if not particularly enthral them. The mini production gallery at the end was the best part, mind.
2009 / Ebook / 116 pages / Japan
***
Disappointingly only covering the early games that I never played, the lack of any text commentary for these doodles means I never knew what I was looking at, but it was still pretty nice.
2015 / Ebook / 168 pages / USA
***
With only 90 seconds' worth of original music to cover, historical context makes up much of the necessary padding before bending our ears down for a closer listen than any other book in the series.
2016 / Ebook / 284 pages / USA
***
I found the deckbuilding card game's sci-fi theme more amusingly generic than inspired, but at least one author felt compelled to set a suitably bogstandard space espionage thriller there. I'd still get a tingle when a familiar ship class or base was name-dropped, it's pathetic.
