E3 Sonic Next-Gen trailer on XBOX Live Marketplace

Recent happenings of pertinence to Sonic fans.
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Wooduck51
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Post by Wooduck51 »

One Classy Bloke wrote: Everyone at Sega hates that game with a passion.
It's their own DAMN FAULT. two more months in development and it would have at least passed as decent.

And the fiscal report for march 2006 says that Shadow sold 1.45 million units overseas (anyplace that is not japan from the looks of the document.)

If you don't trust me look here.
http://www.segasammy.co.jp/english/ir/p ... pendix.pdf

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Post by One Classy Bloke »

Wooduck51 wrote:
One Classy Bloke wrote: Everyone at Sega hates that game with a passion.
It's their own DAMN FAULT. two more months in development and it would have at least passed as decent.
You have no idea how hard those people worked on that game. Every single person on that project put in insane hours. For example, the QA lead had to do double shifts for six weeks straight, including weekends. Ever done a 105 hours a week job for 6 weeks? I thought not.

Two more months would have left you with the same game as the developers just didn't care. And we wouldn't have gotten more time even if we asked. We can't walk up to the CEO and ask "dude, this game sucks, delays plz". All they care about is the game getting out there and making some fun profits. Quality (outside of fancy towels and gourmet burgers) is lost on these people. To really make a good game, you need a boss who is interested in what their company is making, or you need a project leader who can defend the project well enough to ensure it becomes a good game.

The "Fundustry" is a very limited section of the games industry.

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Post by Wooduck51 »

One Classy Bloke wrote:
Wooduck51 wrote:
One Classy Bloke wrote: Everyone at Sega hates that game with a passion.
It's their own DAMN FAULT. two more months in development and it would have at least passed as decent.
You have no idea how hard those people worked on that game. Every single person on that project put in insane hours. For example, the QA lead had to do double shifts for six weeks straight, including weekends. Ever done a 105 hours a week job for 6 weeks? I thought not.

Two more months would have left you with the same game as the developers just didn't care. And we wouldn't have gotten more time even if we asked. We can't walk up to the CEO and ask "dude, this game sucks, delays plz". All they care about is the game getting out there and making some fun profits. Quality (outside of fancy towels and gourmet burgers) is lost on these people. To really make a good game, you need a boss who is interested in what their company is making, or you need a project leader who can defend the project well enough to ensure it becomes a good game.

The "Fundustry" is a very limited section of the games industry.
Woah, well I apologize to anyone who worked on that game. I had no Idea. It must be a bummer to work on something so hard but for the laziness of your CEO have it come out underachieving, at least you know it isn't your fault. Did you do any work on it by chance?

And this may tick someone off, but what do you think would happen if Nintendo got the chance to develop a Sonic game? heck, they have delayed their newest Zelda game three times so far to make sure it is up to snuff.

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Post by Ritz »

Actually, that's a pretty intriguing question. How would that turn out? If the guys who worked on the more recent Mario titles took the reigns, the environments would probably look significantly more colorful, and the stages would be a lot more spacious, with a greater emphasis on platforming.

I'd really love to see a collaboration of sorts now.

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Post by BlazeHedgehog »

One Classy Bloke wrote:
Wooduck51 wrote:
One Classy Bloke wrote: Everyone at Sega hates that game with a passion.
It's their own DAMN FAULT. two more months in development and it would have at least passed as decent.
You have no idea how hard those people worked on that game. Every single person on that project put in insane hours. For example, the QA lead had to do double shifts for six weeks straight, including weekends. Ever done a 105 hours a week job for 6 weeks? I thought not.

Two more months would have left you with the same game as the developers just didn't care. And we wouldn't have gotten more time even if we asked. We can't walk up to the CEO and ask "dude, this game sucks, delays plz". All they care about is the game getting out there and making some fun profits. Quality (outside of fancy towels and gourmet burgers) is lost on these people. To really make a good game, you need a boss who is interested in what their company is making, or you need a project leader who can defend the project well enough to ensure it becomes a good game.

The "Fundustry" is a very limited section of the games industry.
This has always been something I assumed happened, and it's nice to actually see it confirmed that nobody in Sega at a high enough position really seems to care what the company does as long as it makes them money.

How unfortunate.

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Post by Delphine »

BlazeHedgehog wrote:nobody in Sega at a high enough position really seems to care what the company does as long as it makes them money.
Every business that gets big ends up like this, if it doesn't start out that way.

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Post by Light Speed »

I'd argue that Nintendo isn't all about the money. Money drives their business, just like all business, but you never really see Nintendo just doing something for a cheap buck, except for the billion GBA ports. They haven't really sold out.

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Post by Ngangbius »

What about the Mario Party games? Okay so it is not as bad as Shadow the Hedgehog, but they still endorse Hudson to keep making 'em and they appearently sell.

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Post by Zarathustra »

Hey, this' pretty simple; some games are born merely to collect bucks and some others for a more trascending purpose.
This happens for every possible franchise out of every possible company, within the economical alliances limits, that's it.
You have fantastic Mario games, commercial Mario games, half-experimental Mario games, etc., and the same can be applied to Sonic (well, to a different degree of success).

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Post by Light Speed »

Wow, I actually kind of agree with you on that. I'd say Nintendo tries more to make their main franchise canon games better and try to get to that next level with each game. Sega seems to just ship things with Sonic plastered on it knowing it'll make money. Either that or they could just be really trying in games like Heroes, and just missing the mark by a bit. You definately have to give them credit for bringing something different to each Sonic game. It never seems to be a good thing though.

(...)toolazytologin

Post by (...)toolazytologin »

You have no idea how hard those people worked on that game. Every single person on that project put in insane hours.
Why? I mean let's face it. Shadow was built on top of the Sonic Heroes engine, which was built on top of Renderware. Most of the assets, code etc were blatantly re-used from the last game. Barring the new graphical effects (bloom, screenwarp etc), was there really anything put into ShTH that a developer would have to crunch to implement?
And we wouldn't have gotten more time even if we asked. We can't walk up to the CEO and ask "dude, this game sucks, delays plz". All they care about is the game getting out there and making some fun profits. Quality (outside of fancy towels and gourmet burgers) is lost on these people. To really make a good game, you need a boss who is interested in what their company is making, or you need a project leader who can defend the project well enough to ensure it becomes a good game.
Wow, that's really unfair, and also ignorant. It's not as though the higher-ups at Sega sit around counting their money and to hell with their franchises. They can't really afford to think that way because shitty games = less profits. This is what happened with Shadow (1.54 million units overseas apparently. This would just about cover the development/marketing costs).
Fact of the matter is you can't just arbitrarily choose to push your release date back because the developers need more time. Doing so is a HUGE deal. It has a knock-on effect on budgets, yearly forecasts etc, the kind of stuff that can put companies out of business.

Lemme put it this way. They could have shelved ShTH, and lost millions in development costs. Or they could have spent more time on it, missed their release window for the quarter when it was supposed to come out, and again, lose millions. Either way, it's not so much about "fun profits" as it is about keeping the company afloat.

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Post by Light Speed »

Yet games great games get delayed all the time, pretty much every really big game. Lots of companies are willing to wait until the game is perfect. Shadow sounds like it was never even alloted a decent amount of time to begin with and was just a game designed to make a quick buck.

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Post by Zarathustra »

(...)toolazytologin wrote:shitty games = less profits.
Provided they're not EA ones. (*COF*FIFA*COF*)

(...)stilltoolazytologin

Post by (...)stilltoolazytologin »

Yet games great games get delayed all the time, pretty much every really big game.
Quite right, though "pretty much every really big game" is a bit of an exaggeration. I can think of about four. In any case, f-ing around with the release date is still a gamble. A lot of games come in at a loss because of delays (do you really think the likes of Fable, Getaway, and HL2 could have made their money back after so many years in development?). Now in some cases, making a good game late can put you in a good place for sequels. Alternatively, if you're rich, you can absorb the loss and make people wait. Otherwise, you'll pretty much go out of business. That happens A LOT in the games industry.

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Post by Zeta »

Zarathustra wrote:Hey, this' pretty simple; some games are born merely to collect bucks and some others for a more trascending purpose.
This happens for every possible franchise out of every possible company, within the economical alliances limits, that's it.
You have fantastic Mario games, commercial Mario games, half-experimental Mario games, etc., and the same can be applied to Sonic (well, to a different degree of success).
Except we don't get fantastic Sonic games. Just half-experimental and commercial.

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Post by BlazeHedgehog »

Delphine wrote:
BlazeHedgehog wrote:nobody in Sega at a high enough position really seems to care what the company does as long as it makes them money.
Every business that gets big ends up like this, if it doesn't start out that way.
I dunno about that. While I won't deny that some businesses end up this way, I'd like to think that not all businesses start this way or even end up this way. With a company like EA, it's obvious that they've become this soul-less behemoth that kind of drains the soul of everything it touches. But what about Konami? Capcom? Yes, Capcom exploits Megaman to hell and back, but there's still a creative spark in some of their games. Same goes for Konami - we might be on like, Castlevania 12 by now, but the games still feel like they were crafted with love and care, and Konami and Capcom have been around since the NES era.

But Sega... you can feel it. Ever since Sonic Adventure 2, something has been missing. The snarky and sarcastic will quickly blurt out, "Good Gameplay" with a smug grin on their faces, I'm talking something deeper. Something that created the bad gameplay. There's just no love for the character or the franchise anymore. This has been especially evident in Shadow the Hedgehog and the recent TeamXbox interview for Sonic 2k6. "Oh, well, we were doing a new Sonic game anyways, we just decided to put a bit more effort into it because it's his 15th anniversary."

And now, OCB basically just kind of confirms what I've suspected. Nobody at Sega cares about Sonic. Nobody there actually wants to make a good game, they want to make a profitable game; quality be damned. It's no longer a case of saying, "Sonicteam needs to learn..." - now it's "Sonicteam doesn't want to learn, because learning isn't cost-effective."

When you consider that, it's a miracle Sonic Rush was as well recieved as it was.
(...)toolazytologin wrote:Why? I mean let's face it. Shadow was built on top of the Sonic Heroes engine, which was built on top of Renderware. Most of the assets, code etc were blatantly re-used from the last game. Barring the new graphical effects (bloom, screenwarp etc), was there really anything put into ShTH that a developer would have to crunch to implement?
According to reports, Shadow the Hedgehog was supposedly a brand-new engine, completely seperate from Sonic Heroes.

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Post by Ngangbius »

Oh, there is still some very creative and talented people within Sega. They are just not the ones making Sonic games. XD

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Post by BlazeHedgehog »

Ngangbius wrote:Oh, there is still some very creative and talented people within Sega. They are just not the ones making Sonic games. XD
I dunno... Monkey Ball Adventure? Full Auto? Charlotte's Web? I don't see a single game on the Sega.com upcoming release list that, outside of Sonic, I can give a shit about, except maybe Yakuza, but I'm only interested in that because it reminds me of Shenmue, but more adult oriented.

Very few games out of Sega nowadays really seem to reflect what they used to be.

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Post by Double-S- »

Monkey Ball Adventure: Traveller's Tales
Full Auto: Pseudo Interactive
Charlotte's Web: BackBone Entertainment

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Post by BlazeHedgehog »

Double-S- wrote:Monkey Ball Adventure: Traveller's Tales
Full Auto: Pseudo Interactive
Charlotte's Web: BackBone Entertainment
Still Sega games, though. And what about the games that ARE actually, in-house, Sega developed games?

Outrun 2? PSU? Chromehounds? VF5?

Don't care about any of'em.

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Post by FlashTHD »

BlazeHedgehog wrote:There's just no love for the character or the franchise anymore. This has been especially evident in Shadow the Hedgehog and the recent TeamXbox interview for Sonic 2k6. "Oh, well, we were doing a new Sonic game anyways, we just decided to put a bit more effort into it because it's his 15th anniversary."
From that I get the impression that you never went back to read that quote and think about it. It's like you're desperate or something to find any excuse to not be optimistic about anything you see. Let me remind you of the truth:
Sonic Team: Initially, when they first started on the game, there was no real intention to bring it to next gen; they started thinking about it for current gen. But then they realized that, “oh, wait…this is going to be the fifteenth anniversary,” so there was a feeling [to] try to return to Sonic’s roots, and really try to think about what it is that makes Sonic so popular. Why is he still around and going so strong after 15 years? That was the starting point for it.
They had started work on a Sonic game for the current consoles. What kind of game, and how much of what we're seeing now was in that game to being with, we may never know. There's no telling how much it changed when they decided to use it to celebrate 15 years of Sonic. See, this could be interpreted both ways.
And now, OCB basically just kind of confirms what I've suspected. Nobody at Sega cares about Sonic. Nobody there actually wants to make a good game, they want to make a profitable game; quality be damned. It's no longer a case of saying, "Sonicteam needs to learn..." - now it's "Sonicteam doesn't want to learn, because learning isn't cost-effective."
What? The only people who care that lowly of the series are the PR kooks paid to write the corny press releases for these games and market them. (Can't speak for all of them, but you get the idea, and PR guys generally have bullseyes on their backsides.) We're talking about Sonic Team here, a studio that has only made five Sonic games in their 15 year run on their own: Sonic 1, CD, Jam, Adventure, and this. Only two of which were directed by Iizuka (Jam was a compilation, and Adventure wasn't necessarily a bad game). Everything else has been either done by another party, with or without limited involvment/supervision/both on the team's part. My point is that the few Sonic games they have made happen to have been crafted with care in some manner. They have an excellent track record to uphold and have shown no sure signs of losing their step yet, so it's downright outlandish to assume they, in particular, have stopped caring.

Sonic Next is the product of a mostly new japanese Sonic Team, with Naka and most all the other familiar faces gone to set about on other things. It remains to be seen if that's going to hurt or help the quality of those few games for the series they put out. Think of it like Mario - Miyamoto doesn't craft a landmark Mario game that often, but he typically does a kick ass job of it when he does.

In short, know who to hold grudges against (Dimps, Backbone, Takashi Iizuka, those sort of imcompetentcies) before making wild accusations and conspiracy theories about corporate greed running rampant across the board. Oh, and "basically just kind of confirms what I've suspected"? Are you even sure what hell you're getting at?
Last edited by FlashTHD on Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Ngangbius »

BlazeHedgehog wrote:
Ngangbius wrote:Oh, there is still some very creative and talented people within Sega. They are just not the ones making Sonic games. XD
I dunno... Monkey Ball Adventure? Full Auto? Charlotte's Web? I don't see a single game on the Sega.com upcoming release list that, outside of Sonic, I can give a shit about, except maybe Yakuza, but I'm only interested in that because it reminds me of Shenmue, but more adult oriented.

Very few games out of Sega nowadays really seem to reflect what they used to be.
Virtua Fighter 5? Virtua Tennis? Sega Rally Revo? Monkey Ball:Banana Blast? PSU?

Also, Sega needs to bring After Burner Climax to the home consoles. That looks hot!

EDIT(because I did not post quick enough):
BlazeHedgehog wrote:
Outrun 2? PSU? Chromehounds? VF5?

Don't care about any of'em.
Well, now I see the problem. You seem to mostly equivilate Sega to just Sonic. It sounds like you are judging the quality of a large company such as Sega because of the questionable quality of only one of their more popular franchise. =P It seems quite silly to dismiss the whole company as talentless hacks just because your favorite franchise isn't up to par with the others within that company.

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Post by BlazeHedgehog »

We're talking about Sonic Team here, a studio that has only made five Sonic games in their 15 year run on their own: Sonic 1, CD, Jam, Adventure, and this.
Five? Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 might not have had the Sonicteam logo in there, but it certainly was Sonicteam at work. And, while you may not like to admit it, Sonic Team USA was part of Sonicteam as a whole (until they became SegaStudios USA). So that makes:

Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, S&K, Sonic CD, Sonic Jam, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog.

I know quite well who to hold a grudge against, and have.

If somebody over at Sega still gave a shit about Sonic, a game like Shadow could have been prevented. It was immediately evident that the game was total, utter shit from the moment everybody went, "Wait. This has to be a joke. No way they'd make a game this retarded looking." - it would've been easy to shoot down an idea like that before they had even spent a dime on marketing or development.

And even if somebody did care about Sonic, Sega themselves, the CEO, the marketing gurus - you know, the people that drive release dates - would still push the game out before it was ready because Sonic, to them, is a license to print money, and the faster and sooner you print the money, the better it is for business.
Well, now I see the problem. You seem to mostly equivilate Sega to just Sonic. It sounds like you are judging the quality of a large company such as Sega because of the questionable quality of only one of their more popular franchise. =P It seems quite silly to dismiss the whole company as talentless hacks just because your favorite franchise isn't up to par with the others within that company.
Technically, though, I should be interested in Outrun and PSU. I like driving games, and prior to PSOBB, I really liked PSO. Hell, maybe even Chromehounds, too - I've kind of wanted to get into the "mech genre".

But none of them at all look interesting or exciting to me.

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Post by FlashTHD »

BlazeHedgehog wrote:Five? Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 might not have had the Sonicteam logo in there, but it certainly was Sonicteam at work. And, while you may not like to admit it, Sonic Team USA was part of Sonicteam as a whole (until they became SegaStudios USA). So that makes:

Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, S&K, Sonic CD, Sonic Jam, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog.
I can't be arsed to cross-reference so many museum pages; how deep was Sonic Team's involvement with 3 and S&K? And by your logic, Shadow doesn't count.
If somebody over at Sega still gave a shit about Sonic, a game like Shadow could have been prevented. It was immediately evident that the game was total, utter shit from the moment everybody went, "Wait. This has to be a joke. No way they'd make a game this retarded looking." - it would've been easy to shoot down an idea like that before they had even spent a dime on marketing or development.
A game's fate is not automatically sealed if its' concept doesn't sound like it's a sensible idea from the get-go. (Unless we're talking yearly EA Sports sequels.) I didn't think it was that bad an idea to mix Sonic with shooting, and I still don't; too bad we had to see the hard way how bad Iizuka's become at level design. So the execs did perhaps put too much faith in Sega Studios, but it was also the responsibility of the developers from the point that the project was green-lighted onward to make a good game of it. Really, if it had a balance of decent-to-good levels as opposed to four of the worst 3D Sonic stages ever in one game, and the story weren't so badly thought out, Shadow would've been worlds better than it ended up being on those two improvements alone.
And even if somebody did care about Sonic, Sega themselves, the CEO, the marketing gurus - you know, the people that drive release dates - would still push the game out before it was ready because Sonic, to them, is a license to print money, and the faster and sooner you print the money, the better it is for business.
Shock and awe! A company that creates video games making money! (...) put it better than I could have:
Fact of the matter is you can't just arbitrarily choose to push your release date back because the developers need more time. Doing so is a HUGE deal. It has a knock-on effect on budgets, yearly forecasts etc, the kind of stuff that can put companies out of business.

Lemme put it this way. They could have shelved ShTH, and lost millions in development costs. Or they could have spent more time on it, missed their release window for the quarter when it was supposed to come out, and again, lose millions. Either way, it's not so much about "fun profits" as it is about keeping the company afloat.
This is where these "time constraints" that the ST commentaries from the Jam guide are coming from. Even the best games sometimes fall victim to the ever-dreaded ticking clock in some way.

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Post by Double-S- »

Outrun 2 is great. PSU looks fun. And if you don't care about Virtua Fighter, you either don't like fighters or are a heathen (aka Tekken lover).

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