More interesting discoveries for young readers. Kirkus Reviews described The Hedgehog of Oz by Cory Leonardo as “The Wizard of Oz meets The Wind in the Willows“. The publisher describes it like this: “Marcel the hedgehog used to live with his beloved owner Dorothy, but since getting hopelessly lost, he’s tried to forget the happy home he left behind. Now, Marcel lives a quiet life in the abandoned balcony of The Emerald City Theater where he subsists on dropped popcorn and the Saturday showings of The Wizard of Oz. But when he’s discovered, Marcel is taken far away from everything he knows and ends up lost once more. His quest to return to The Emerald City Theater leads him to Mousekinland, where he meets Scamp, a tiny mouse armed with enormous spirit (and a trusty sling-shooter). Before long, they’re joined by an old gray squirrel, Ingot, who suffers from bad memories and a broken heart, and Tuffy, a baby raccoon lost and afraid in the forest. And the travelers attract the attention of an owl named Wickedwing, who stalks them as they search for the old theater. From field to forest, glittering theater to the gutter, the animals’ road home is a dark and winding journey. But sometimes you need to get a little lost before you can be found.” The book is available now in hardcover from Simon & Schuster.

Three years ago, Nintendo announced Super Smash Bros. for the 3DS, the latest in Nintendo's series of fighting games featuring various Nintendo characters. As the game's Japanese version launched this Saturday, the full roster for the game is now known (though it had actually been leaked back in August). The starting roster can be found here. The furry part of the complete roster will be covered after the break, so don't click on Read More if you're worried about spoilers.

The game will be hitting stores everywhere else October 3, with the exception of Germany, which gets it a day early due to a national holiday. Lucky them.

Once again, I owe thanks to Lex Nakashima for ordering this from France and loaning it to me to write this review for Flayrah.

Joann Sfar is probably best-known in the furry community as the author of Le Chat du Rabbin/The Rabbi’s Cat (art by Antoine Delesvaux); the 2003-2006 five-album bandes dessinés, and especially the 2011 animated feature which he directed, released in the U.S. in 2013, featuring a talking cat in Algiers in the 1920s.

Sfar has written other unusual anthropomorphic comics drawn by other artists, such as the 2003-2009 three-volume Socrates the Half-Dog/Socrate le Demi-Chien with art by Christophe Blain, about Héraclès’ semi-divine dog in mythological ancient Greece. In Jeangot, Sfar has begun a new, all-funny-animal cartoon-art series, drawn by Clément Oubrerie, that carries “bizarreness” to a new extreme.

Paris, Éditions Gallimard, November 2012, hardcover €14.50 (54 pages).

Jerry Beck’s Animation Scoop has a first look at SEGA’s and OuiDO! Productions’ Sonic Boom CGI TV series, coming to the Cartoon Network (also French TV) later this year.

Sonic the Hedgehog is best-known as a SEGA computer game series, but this announcement – with a 2’50” trailer – shows what Sonic, Tails, and Dr. Eggman look like as fully animated CG characters.

Josh Armstrong, on the Animation Scoop website, has advance news and an image of the Pixar TV Hallowe’en special, “Toy Story of Terror”. While the Toy Story crowd is technically anthropomorphic anyway, “Toy Story of Terror” includes an especially Furry plush hedgehog, Mr. Pricklepants.

“Toy Story of Terror” was broadcast on ABC-TV on October 16 at 8/7 (Central) p.m. Here are two favorable reviews of it. The first, by Shaun Thompson & Craig Williams on the DIS Blog, is especially informative, and includes scheduled showings on Disney's channels. It looks worth watching on the inevitable reruns and DVD release, if you missed it the first time around.

A fan game review? That’s not something you see every day. It’s not something I write every day, either. Let’s face it, our society likes canon. There isn’t much money in derivative fan-works; and since they’re free, there’s little need for good reviewers. Besides, fan games are typically hit and miss— well, okay, mostly miss.

Only a completely hard-up fan with nothing better to do will constantly look for fan content to play. When they do, they’re mostly disappointed. As a result, more moderate fans may miss some really cool content; some of which proves far superior to its inspiration.

To say Sonic AtS is one such superior work would be one of the greatest understatements one could possible utter. As a youth who was more fond of the hedgehog than the plumber, this work did something no recent official Sonic title has been able to do: surprise me.

This hefty, de luxe, full-color book is a translation from the French. L’histoire de Sonic The Hedgehog was published in May 2012. Les Éditions Pix’n Love are the corporate author; Marc Petronille and William Audureau are the editorial coordinators. Pix’n Love, founded in 2007 in Cergy, France, advertises themselves as “the world's leading publisher of books relating to the burgeoning and fascinating subject of the History of Video Games.”

The Sonic The Hedgehog video game was introduced by SEGA Entertainment in 1991. The feisty blue hedgehog was designed to be SEGA’s corporate mascot, and his popularity quickly justified that. This book was produced to celebrate his 20th anniversary (more or less).

UDON Entertainment Corp., January 2013, hardcover $49.99 (297 [+ 3] pages).

It's been a long time since Sonic has had a console game that wasn't bogged down by experiments gone awry, usually withholding polish on what should have been core gameplay.

The Sonic fan-base has debated the exact point at which this downhill spiral began – whether it’s the over-fifteen years since Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, or the ten since Sonic Adventure 2. However, both classic and modern Sonic fans tended to agree that the games were not improving.

Sonic Colors could be seen as the comeback for those who played it, but I was not one who did. A Sonic fan in my youth, after Unleashed I was done. After playing the last werehog level just to get to the next Sonic one and spending fifteen minutes on clunky platforming – the longest level I ever played in the franchise – I’d had enough. I don’t get paid to put myself through such torture; I certainly shouldn’t have to pay for it with time or money.

So why did I play Generations? Valve offered me a free copy of Sonic 3 and Knuckles (and Sonic 3D Blast, lest we think the ’90s had no bad console games) if I pre-ordered it for $30.

Replaying the levels of the "free" old games, I wondered pessimistically whether these gifts would symbolize the game itself: a solid, flowing platformer (Sonic 3 and Knuckles) with injections of clunky, awkward and nearly game-killing 3D elements (Sonic 3D Blast).

Thankfully, this was not the case.

On February 13, Alton Towers, working with Sega Europe, unveiled a Sonic the Hedgehog-themed roller coaster ride, and a hotel room to match. Which might just be the closest thing to being inside a Sonic game.

The room features a colorful wallpaper that resemble opening stages of Sonic games — a tropical forest on a backdrop of blue sky and sea, complete with checkerboard platforms. The lamps are modeled after Emeralds and plushies of characters can be found in the bathroom. It also has a PS3, XBox 360 and Wii, complete with several Sonic games.

Alfie may be handsome, but his pale coat of off-white quills was causing him to slowly freeze to death. A rare genetic varient on the normal brown hedgehog, the blonde hedgehog is vulnerable to attacks from predators due to their conspicuous colour. Alfie had beat those odds only to find that his light coat couldn't keep in the heat he needed to hibernate. The hedgehog is doing well after being found by a 12 year old girl, and will most likely retire to an animal sanctuary where he'll have a long, and warm, life.