The GHZ Forum

Yes, there is a long tradition to rush Sonic games out the door early to make deadline, isn't there? All the way back to Sonic 3.

I always wonder if Iizuka gets too much credit or not enough. Producers are important, but these games do also have actual directors (Iizuka hasn't directed a console Sonic title since Shadow), and we never really hear what those directors think or what level of design autonomy they have when planni...

Well, that's the right attitude for artists and developers to have! lol

The vast majority of gaming journalism is enthusiast press, not criticism. That's not a dig, just an observation. Most game reviews are written by general gaming-specific reporters -- writers and bloggers who cover daily gaming industry news, attend and report on corporate press conferences, playtes...

I think the issue is more about player expectations than it is about player error. They're not playing the game wrong; they feel like they've been given the wrong game entirely. I dunno if Lost World is any good -- it seems pretty unlikely at this point -- but review-wise, I'm not entirely sure it w...

There's a little bonus round thing where you launch Tails out of a canon to pop balloons and collect rings, which I guess counts as playable Tails? He goes into a little spinning ball with his Tails impossibly trailing behind, just like in the old games. That's actually one of the only spoilers I ca...

I'm pretty sure that was all Oshima. Or at least, the drawings we have Madonna and the band look like his work! (Although I suppose it's possible he was drawing the characters based on someone else's designs.) His drawings have a pretty distinct style to them. I've been trying to figure out who drew...

Haha, yeah! In their interviews for that History of Sonic book, both Naka and Oshima separately express disappointment about SEGA of America putting the kibosh on their original Sonic story proposal... the loss of Madona and the band and whatever else was intended as a part of it before SEGA pushed ...

I liked the boss battles, final two excluded. Almost all of them were better than their original versions, including Metal Sonic and Perfect Chaos. (Definitely not Death Egg Robot, though.)

In the end, I was happy with the level selection. The environments I was least interested in revisiting -- City Escape, Spagonia, Seaside Hill and Crisis City -- wound up housing some of my favourite stage designs. So even though they didn't always pick the stages I would have, I was pretty impresse...

I liked Generations. I thought both the classic and modern segments of the game featured some interesting and (at times) ambitious stage design, and I really enjoyed going back and finding all the different hidden nooks and crannies. It and Colours were the first Sonic games I played thoroughly sinc...

Pop!



Scans of all the pages of this internal booklet of old model art are kindly hosted over at Retro: http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_He ... Collection

it is, down to it's very core, the absolute worst kind of indefensible excruciating self-important brain-dead angst-ridden pseudo-mature nonsensical fanfic-written-by-a-12-year-old-who-claims-to-be-a-16-year-old anime-bullshit imaginable. I think Sonic Team emulated the Final Fantasy formula quite ...

'06 was an ambitious game, and extra time, effort, money, and skill may have made it nicer to look at and fun to play. But nothing, nothing could have saved that story. The problems do not stop at the execution... it is, down to it's very core, the absolute worst kind of indefensible excruciating se...

I love how Megaman looks, personally.

Smash always puts its particular spin on each character; even core cast members like Mario and Link. Their design takes may not be everyone's bag, but they certainly aren't lazy. They reek of effort. (In the case of Sonic's fingernails, maybe too much effort.)

I don't think we'll see another "main" Sonic series title until 2015. A two-year gap is the standard, and there's not much point rushing to get a ps4 or xbone Sonic title out early in their lifecycles, where they are primarily purchased by older enthusiasts over families with children. (I think this...

'06 unnerved me almost right from the beginning, but I think I am just personally predisposed to prefer Sonic in more stylized and less realistic settings. That's probably why Heroes' look initially made me excited, even though in retrospect it was executed terribly. I think '06 and Heroes kind of c...

It's kind of sad that the most implausible sounding parts are "playable Silver" and "the Chao garden returns", but I think it'll be a cold day in hell before we see either of those things in a regular Sonic title again.

A lot of modern hdtvs will have a "game mode" that prioritizes reducing latency. On mine (a Samsung), the setting is in the SETUP submenu. Even if Generations is lagging more than other games, changing this setting might reduce it to the point where it is not noticible. I didn't encounter any lag wi...

Yeah! I actually wonder if what we're seeing here is a preview at an upcoming franchise-wide redesign. (Or at least a spin on said redesign.) After all, the show doesn't air until late 2014... who knows what Sonic games are getting released after that! There have been rumours about SEGA playing arou...

I'm not really talking about visual cliches per se, I'm just talking about using visual design variation of any kind to convey character. Stuff like the Sailor Scouts and the Power Rangers, or, like, the Care Bears and My Little Pony, use tweaks on a single design because they are prioritizing conve...

Making Knuckles larger and more distinctly muscular is something that feels perfectly logical to my inner character designer, yet completely sacrilegious and wrong to my inner Sonic nerd. If you were developing an original show with an ensemble cast consisting of a fast guy, a strong guy, a kid side...

I like the OVA! It has a great setting. Flying continents, connected loosely by ribbons of glaciers, hovering over the ruins of a post-apocalyptic earth. It's so... pointlessly evocative.

Snivley is his nephew, isn't he? (Or is that only in the comic?) I guess family is one reason to tolerate someone. And of course, in the show, Snivley was the only other human, which could explain the special treatment. I think I remember reading somewhere that the show's main writer imagined that t...

I like the IDEA of Orbot and Cubot. Their biggest problem in Colours was that they had they had the most dud jokes of anyone in the cast. But you can't write an interesting villain with giving them other characters with personalities to interact with. (And I don't really want them to give characters...