So, full disclosure here: I originally had a very snarky post written out, lambasting SEGA for their strange choices regarding Sonic. Honestly, for every step forward they take, it seems that they are determined to take two steps back. For example, take a gander at the trailer for Sonic Colors, the newly announced Wii and DS title. It’s bright, it’s colorful, and it’s definitely targeted towards casual gamers. On the other hand, it does look like everything we want from a Sonic game: daytime levels and blistering speed. Apparently, Sonic can use the help of his alien buddies from the trailer to take new paths through the levels, like using the yellow guy to drill through the ground, and darn if that doesn’t sound cool.
Sounds neat, but I might pass depending on how Sonic 4 turns out. What do you guys think? Good or bad on SEGA’s part? Is this of any interest to you?
Interesting, though the video doesn’t exactly show that much. This looks like it will be in line with previous Nintendo exclusive Sonic titles like Secret Rings and Black Knight, a game that puts Sonic in an unfamiliar environment and introduces new play mechanics. I know “hardcore” gamers don’t like these sort of games, but kids seem to love them and they sell pretty good so nobody should be surprised that they’re doing more of them.
I read an interview with one of the Sonic 4 developers and he said that part of the difficulty with the Sonic franchise is that the market has fragmented. Sonic Unleashed is the perfect example of this: Kids loved the werehog levels and were less enthused by the running levels while older gamers hated the werehog and loved the running (which, by the way, is incredibly awesome; just go download the demo and see for yourselves).
So I think this is Sega’s answer; we’re going to get downloadable games like Sonic 4 aimed at older gamers and retail games like Sonic Colors aimed at younger gamers. As a long suffering Sega fan, that’s fine with me so long as the former keep coming.
I hate it when a kid purchases these games from me, it leaves me depressed lol.
Yeah i’ll probbably pass on this as well…
Im actually not looking forward to sonic 4, unless they make it 16 bit it just wont be the same.
Hey, SK Beans, don’t forget that you were a kid once.
I don’t know about you, but most of the people I know played some spectacularly mediocre stuff when they were kids and thought it was great because they didn’t know any better.
I think that I may be one of the only people on this forum that liked the Sonic Adventure series.
[Add] I was actually extremely depressed when Shadow seemed to have died at the end of Sonic Adventure 2. Sonic could have become a more mature game, but Shadow The Hedgehog having content that made it M rated was a bit much. Also, the gameplay slowed down way too much, and the different types of gameplay (Tales/Eggman mech shooting wasn’t horrible, but the Knuckles treasure hunting was a bit annoying, however it did make sense with the rest of the 2d game themes) weren’t good enough to warrant their long play times. Most Sonic games after Adventure sans handheld games weren’t great, exception being Sonic Heroes for some people. As much as I liked the 2D sidescrolling gameplay of Sonic, I doubt that gamers who experienced the original Sonic will really be fascinated with a new 2D side scroller for long. It’s something that we may want now, but I doubt that it’s something we’ll care about after a certain amount of time.
Someone may mention this. Shadow the Hedgehog wasn’t M.
The bestiality kiss between Sonic and whatever that girls name was in Sonic The Hedgehog (XBOX360) was one of the lowest points in Sonic Maturity History.
Sonic Adventure 2 was the reason I bought a Dreamcast, so you’re not the only person who has a lot of love for that series.
And I’m not sure that the Sonic games need to be “mature.” They started to get into trouble when they had to give the games a story beyond “save the animals from Robotnik/Eggman and collect the chaos emeralds.” I’m not really sure who plays a Sonic game for the story. Nintendo has the right idea with the Mario games. Every story is pretty much the same, you’re just defeating Bowser in a different place every time.
At least the gameplay in the Sonic Adventure games (at least the Sonic/Shadow levels; the other character levels were just okay) was good enough to make you forget the crappy story. Later games? Not so much.
The story wasn’t that crappy.
A mad scientist breaking into a secret military facility to steal a biogenerated being with strange abilities to control time and matter, who looks very similar to the hero of the story, so much so that the citizens believe that the being is the hero and attempt to arrest/kill the hero. The biogenerated being can’t remember who he is other than the fact that someone shot and killed his only friend in life right in front of him for no reason and he wants revenge. Mad scientist and biogenerated being try to destroy the world, hero ends up stopping them (of course), turns out it doesn’t matter because the base they’re on has been programmed by the grandfather of the murdered girl to crash into earth to get revenge for the senseless killing of himself and his daughter, and his scientific experiments attempt to kill both heroes and villians a like. Villianous biogenerated being still can’t remember who he is other than the fact that instead of his only friend in life wanting him to get revenge, she wanted him to forgive, which he learned from seeing how fiercely the heroes fought for survival and friendship, and he ends up killing the scientific experiments with the hero and using all his power to stop the base from crashing into earth and destroying humanity, only to have no power left to save himself, plummeting into the earth, supposedly sacrificing himself for the people who destroyed his life.
Of course, all of that was a bit weird when you considered that they were all hedgehogs, bats, foxes, and mice (or whatever the hell Amy is).
I agree with you for the most part though. The story was ok in my opinion, sans the fact that most of them were animals, but the Sonic/Shadow levels were the only exceptionally fun parts of the game. And if the game didn’t have the story, I would have still had fun with the Sonic/Shadow levels. If the story had continued in a way that didn’t make the characters so over the top of themselves (Shadow the Hedgehog) and if the gameplay hadn’t been fuddled with so much (again, Shadow The Hedgehog), or, if Sonic didn’t die, the series could have had some background story for people really interested and still have been just as fun, however, I would say that not all of the games could have or should have had stories. In fact, the only games that should have continued to have stories were the Sonic Adventure series. Anything else should have been simply about the speed.