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"Sonic, your future's gonna be awesome!"
Ohhh, you poor thing. I see. You didn't have the heart to tell him about Sonic Shuffle, did you?
More seriously, I'm actually enjoying Sonic Generations though I notice I enjoyed it significantly less once we got to games I hadn't played. Also, the omission of Sonic CD was odd to me, especially since it would have made more sense to save Amy Rose there than from a level from Sonic 2.
Also it reminds me that even in the Sonic games I didn't like, the music was always a cheesy kind of rad.
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You know, I have often wondered why Sonic games didn't just keep on doing their early-Gamecube-era schtick which was pretty fun.
Also, the music was a cheesy kind of rad. To me, Sonic will always be a part of that awkward 80s-90s transition period in the best way possible. I mean, as long as the games are sincere about producing high-speed obstacle courses with a shitload of acrobatics.
As far as I'm concerned, anything not directly to do with that kind of thing can be cut. I don't really give a damn about Shadow or, hell, any side character. Give me Sonic, Robotnik, dangerous speeds and cheesy metal. That is how I Sonic.
There's relatively little genuinely bad music in Sonic games. Most of it is either corny-awesome or just plain awesome.
Generations (and for that matter, Unleashed Day) was basically about taking what worked and making it beautiful. They succeeded brilliantly.
The only thing I didn't love about Generations was the very last boss. Felt like it could've done with a good deal more development time on the mechanics instead of just the graphics. I mean while the other Super bosses felt like awesome kamikaze charges at the angry eldritch beast, this one was just "I'm holding the damn button, why the fuck is he still far away?"
Oh, and they did do Sonic CD. The Metal Sonic boss was Stardust Speedway.
^^ Keep Tails, Knuckles, and Amy though
Tails provides a good second player for multiplayer races, both Tails and Knuckles have unique skills and came first, and Amy... I like hitting things with a hammer, ok?
Beyond that, what's the point? They start becoming rehashes afterwards
I don't even mind the "friends" when they're actually useful, important, not annoying, and don't interrupt the flow of the game. Shadow's stages in SA2 were as fun as Sonic's. Sonic Battle was genuinely well-written. Sonic Heroes...well, it's problems were more in the specifics than the aim.
Really, most of the problem with them is that up until the last couple years the main writers on the team were shit.
I still defend Tails, Metal Sonic, and Knuckles, with the defense that they premiered when the games were still good and I was admittedly kind of sad that Tails didn't follow you around. Maybe it's because I've been cursed with the malady known as a younger sibling but I always had definite ideas about Sonic's attitude towards Tails before they got voices.
Speaking of younger siblings, my sister offers an odd perspective on the series for me. Her first game was Sonic Adventure 2. For her, Cream, Shadow, Rouge, and the others are key parts of the Sonic mythos and getting rid of them would be a crime. She even complained about that in Sonic Colors.
In a lot of ways Sonic is like Star Wars to me. After a series of installments that blue me away there were some future installments that left me prickly. After awhile I gave it up while still holding an attachment to the originals, but it's fascinating to see that a new generation has latched onto the character. While the games are missing, I do think Sega struck some real gold with the character of Sonic as a mascot and cult of personality.
So far, the general reaction (from what I've seen) to the game seems to be "Classic Sonic, yay. Modern Sonic, FUCK YEAH!" Kind of interesting considering prior to this most of the advice was to go back to classic.
^^How miserable for them, then, that it really only got underway after they dropped out of the console battles.
The way you phrase things, Malk, it must be kind of fascinating to have a sibling that significantly younger than yourself. My younger brother is five and a half years my junior, and we aren't that different in perspective. In fact, he's pretty much got my opinions sans five and a half years of development in critical thinking and industry frustration.
I think SA2 actually had pretty solid 3-D Sonic designing (though I haven't played it in a little less than a decade) and City Escape is still a fond memory for me. The problem was ancilliary bullshit added on.
Which is the problem with a lot of the games. Heroes tries to refocus but it was such an inexact and poorly executed game that they decided to go back to gimmicky nonsense.
I think the success of Colors and Generations was a combination of the classic sensibilities in speed and set-pieces and keeping what actually worked. (Homing attacks, grinding)
Old Sonic had a lot of gameplay issues people don't like to remember -- mostly visibility compared to how fast you could move and how far you could jump, which made the game basically blind unless you had some 20 big sprawling multi-pathed levels completely memorized. I mean play the Genesis collection and count how many times you run into a big spiky dude you had maybe a tenth of a second to react to.
Modern Sonic kind of feels like what it should have been the whole time, and Generations really polished it to a sheen -- it really does feel better than the old days. Another thing that helps is that the game basically built itself for speedrunning individual stages. Being able to learn bite-sized chunks instead of having to memorize the whole game at a time helps considerably.
^ Very much so. Another thing that helped is that they refined homing targets to include and prioritize things like grind rails and zip-handles so you don't get boned by a wonky collision. Crazy Gadget and Final Rush from SA2 were mostly only hard because you had to land on sketchy hitboxes at awkward angles for half the level.
I dunno man. I have Sonic 3 & Knuckles on my X-box 360 and if somebody were to ask me one of those 'trapped on a desert island and only five of each piece of media' questions, It'd definitely make the list. Granted there are some flaws that newer games have put something of a polish on, but I don't think the newer games are automatically better because they solved a couple of flaws of the older games, especially when they replace them with bigger flaws.
Sonic Adventure and SA2 definitely have some great moments but they're let down by trying to be too much. Exploration, rail-shooter, fucking fishing, and as a result I don't really remember those two games fondly so much as I remember moments from them fondly.
No disagreement there. By Sonic 3&K they had it down about as well as the engine would've allowed.
Coincidence: Sonic 3 had almost no bottomless pits, and Sonic & Knuckles had about two acts where they were actually a particular threat (one of which was almost the end of the game -- and even then they did a pretty good job of sequestering the danger areas and having some kind of speedbump before you hit them instead of blindsiding you with it like the first game). As such, there were very few places where gathering speed would result in instant death.
Oh, and this, because it's funny.
Really, I like the modern games as well as the old ones. But there are core characters they should never do away with
And then there's Silver, who it would be impossible to do away with quickly enough.
I must admit beating the shit out of him in Generations was immensely satisfying though.
Man, I know absolutely nothing about Silver other than what he looks like and I want him wiped from the multiverse with extreme prejudice.
Silver is exactly what he looks like. Like, imagine every generic whiny Sonictard OC Mary Sue you've seen on Deviantart, and that's actually him.
Or you could watch Pokecapn's Lets Play of 2006, because that was funny enough that you might as well get the whole story.
Here you go.
I knew upon seeing her throw down a full sized emerald despite it being on her ring at a DIFFERENT SIZE AND SHAPE that this game is going to be horrible
This will be a great LP to watch
You might have just found one of the least malignantly silly things about that game's plot.
For instance, every time you hear "We have to hurry!" after the time travel stuff kicks in, take a shot.
Like, shoot yourself in the kneecaps. It takes the edge off the stupid.
The fact that they had to start the WHOLE GAME AGAIN because they lost all their lives is plenty of stupid
Along with the poor controls and holy crap whoever did the programming must have hated Sonic with a burning passion
The programming gets a bit of a pass (at least in most places -- no real excuse for State Machine Soleanna even being prototyped out that way) because it was rushed out the door for the 15th anniversary. The game is for all practical purposes a late beta; it needed another several months of tuning to at least be a playable abortion of storytelling.
The biggest issue is the ungodly loading, yeah. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be shot
Who ever thinks they deliberately want to put in loading?
You sure it didn't have to do with the fact that they had to meet a deadline and couldn't postpone?
I wonder who were the people who told Sega their deadline was coming up? The game was barely finished, let alone a complete game.
Hopefully for the 25th anniversary they learn their lesson and take their time/start a year early
They wanted to ship for Christmas, so when the playtesters they hired told them it wasn't ready to go gold yet, Sega fired them. That's why it's so glitchy.
Of course, Sonic Team is still responsible for many of the problems, like the terrible boss battles and idiotic story.
Marketing, yo. Thankfully it backfired as spectacularly as it gets and they learned their lesson. I gotta say their 20th was a good deal more satisfying.
As for loading, the problem appears to be twofold. Typically, games will use leftover processing time between frames to do a certain amount of tentative preloading (mostly object assets and textures) in the background when you start going near open transition areas. They could have cut down the between-level loading time by a fair amount this way, but it takes a fair amount of delicate coding to pull off stably, so it'd be understandable if that got cut when it got rushed.
The main cause of long loading times though is that instead of just loading the level once and shuffling the assets when you reload it or shift to a different state of the city, it seems like they destruct the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch every single time. Which is unbelievably stupid. I mean, most development tools will keep you from doing that by default and you actually have to override that to do it.