G.Silver wrote:I'm kinda thinking that's more to do with stylistic choices than anything particularly bad about Sega games, if you can remember 1993 there was something pretty distinctive about the games on the Genesis that you didn't really get on the SNES and it wasn't just low color count. Whatever that distinctive thing was, Sega doesn't bother with it now, while Nintendo's hanging on to theirs. IF you're calling them out on it (I don't think Miyamoto is, although he fucking should, it would make my day).
But, uh, they specifically ask about Quality Control. Not visual style or anything of that sort, but quality control. In other words, how much polish and bug testing a game receives. Of which Sega games seem to receive very little of -
especially Sonic games.
I mean, when you think about it, in an era where there were not many "unlockables" in videogames, Sonic 3 & Knuckles gave us Super Sonic, Super Knuckles, Hyper Sonic, Hyper Knuckles, and Hyper Tails, for a total of 8 "different" endings. That was a game packed to the gills with secret and bonus content.
Nowadays, where games routinely parade out massively long lists of superfluous unlockables like bighead mode, all you get in a Sonic game is a cutscene viewer and a music player, basically. I suppose if you wanted to consider it "unlocking" to play as the rest of the cast you could, but those aren't really bonuses - that's more "the natural order of the gameplay disguised as a bonus".
And looking over
the big list of stuff cut from Sonic 2k6, one gets the impression somebody on Sonicteam wants to put in all this bonus extra stuff, but the time they are given for Quality Assurance is so damn low that even the non-bonus content isn't even properly finished.
Nintendo, on the other hand, is a company that is known for keeping a game in development if they are not happy with it (though there was a period on the Gamecube where they tried to pump games out faster rather than delay them for years and years - but that lead to turds like Mario Sunshine, so they've presumably stopped doing that).
Hell, Shigeru Miyamoto is attributed to the phrase "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever."
Translation: "Sega needs to stop rushing things out the door."