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Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 12:50 pm
To make a long story short, the demo of the upcoming 360/PS3 Sonic is astoundingly bad. That comes as no great surprise to anybody. What is surprising is Sega's new methodology. While we were all busy looking out for droves of unnecessary ally characters and blazing plastic toy aesthetics and stock firearms with murkily-textured alien invaders, Sega quite cleverly snuck up on our blind side and bitch slapped us with the one mechanical pitfall we would never have dreamed could still happen in a commercial game of modest budget: Sonic controls like ass. Granted, this is a complaint that has been levelled at the series since time immemorial, and the 3D games in particular have been at the receiving end of inordinate quantities of such flak, but it's always been a gross exaggeration. Until now.
Maneuvering Sonic feels less like controlling a speedy platform character and more like driving a car through stages designed for a speedy platform character. I'm talking Pitfall 3D bad. A control setup so phenomenally awful that only Bubsy Bobcat would aspire to it. Even the likes of Sonic Heroes had a certain pick-up-and-play solidity in its mechanics that at least made the game feel like a functional piece of programming. But alas, now we are robbed of even that small comfort. It is no longer possible, for example, to have Sonic glide smoothly to the left to pick up oncoming Rings: tilt the control stick even a smidgen and he will veer to the left and fly headlong off the side of the course or into some ill-placed crate or boulder that fudges up the camera so you end up falling to your doom before you have a chance to distinguish one texture map from the next. You literally can't even jump anymore without the camera performing cartwheels. I found I was continually blasted with fire from enemies that I never had a chance to see. The game doesn't feel fast at all, just clumsy and out-of-control. Our poor ravaged hero feels positively disconnected from his environment in ways even the most poorly conceived installments of the series have thus far managed to surmount.
And then there's the title. Obviously, Sega has opted to strip away the subtitles and revert simply to "Sonic the Hedgehog", insinuating that some miraculous new technology has allowed the original vision to be recreated with such flair and accuracy that the cornerstone game may be jettisoned from all recollection except as a historical artifact - indeed, Sega has evidently diverted most of the game's development budget to the overworked marketing department in order to propagate this fallacy. But it's not even just "Sonic the Hedgehog"... it's "Sonic The Hedgehog", with a capital T. In the first place, that isn't even grammatically correct. Granted, proper grammar is a negotiable point with certain poetic license, but poetic license is only a valid excuse when it works, and I don't think Sega knows what poetry is.
The catch-all ray of hope in this situation, of course, is that the finished version of the game might address these critical flaws. If such a thing were to happen, we would be left with something very similar to a Sonic Adventure 1.5, a stylistic middle ground between Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Even that would not be an ideal scenario and would still fall massively short of Sega's brouhaha, but it would at least leave us with nothing worse than another slice of passable mediocrity. Unfortunately, I've been playing games long enough to know better than that. Nothing's going to change and the finished version of the game will be as broken as the demo, only longer.
Vie la c'est, and all that. At least Lacey Chabert is hot.
Moving along closer to home: The Carnival Night logo graphic seems to have gone over astonishingly well, which has made me utterly terrified of attempting another one. Just as a disclaimer, the next one I do won't be as elaborate or as clever, so please don't look forward to it. Museum-wise, I've updated every single page up to Sonic Labyrinth, including the Sonic Team history page. I'm being particularly ardent about fixing errors just now, so if you catch any misinformation, do alert me. The Sonic the Fighters page is well underway and would be finished except that I've become bogged down transcribing the rather extensive command lists. It'll probably be up within the next couple of weeks. Also, at Pep's coercion, the Encyclopedia (which has been a backburner project for a while) should soon be reborn as a wiki, with a number of happy GHZers contributing articles. It'll be a while longer before it's ready to be opened up for viewing, but at least it's getting somewhere again.
Maneuvering Sonic feels less like controlling a speedy platform character and more like driving a car through stages designed for a speedy platform character. I'm talking Pitfall 3D bad. A control setup so phenomenally awful that only Bubsy Bobcat would aspire to it. Even the likes of Sonic Heroes had a certain pick-up-and-play solidity in its mechanics that at least made the game feel like a functional piece of programming. But alas, now we are robbed of even that small comfort. It is no longer possible, for example, to have Sonic glide smoothly to the left to pick up oncoming Rings: tilt the control stick even a smidgen and he will veer to the left and fly headlong off the side of the course or into some ill-placed crate or boulder that fudges up the camera so you end up falling to your doom before you have a chance to distinguish one texture map from the next. You literally can't even jump anymore without the camera performing cartwheels. I found I was continually blasted with fire from enemies that I never had a chance to see. The game doesn't feel fast at all, just clumsy and out-of-control. Our poor ravaged hero feels positively disconnected from his environment in ways even the most poorly conceived installments of the series have thus far managed to surmount.
And then there's the title. Obviously, Sega has opted to strip away the subtitles and revert simply to "Sonic the Hedgehog", insinuating that some miraculous new technology has allowed the original vision to be recreated with such flair and accuracy that the cornerstone game may be jettisoned from all recollection except as a historical artifact - indeed, Sega has evidently diverted most of the game's development budget to the overworked marketing department in order to propagate this fallacy. But it's not even just "Sonic the Hedgehog"... it's "Sonic The Hedgehog", with a capital T. In the first place, that isn't even grammatically correct. Granted, proper grammar is a negotiable point with certain poetic license, but poetic license is only a valid excuse when it works, and I don't think Sega knows what poetry is.
The catch-all ray of hope in this situation, of course, is that the finished version of the game might address these critical flaws. If such a thing were to happen, we would be left with something very similar to a Sonic Adventure 1.5, a stylistic middle ground between Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Even that would not be an ideal scenario and would still fall massively short of Sega's brouhaha, but it would at least leave us with nothing worse than another slice of passable mediocrity. Unfortunately, I've been playing games long enough to know better than that. Nothing's going to change and the finished version of the game will be as broken as the demo, only longer.
Vie la c'est, and all that. At least Lacey Chabert is hot.
Moving along closer to home: The Carnival Night logo graphic seems to have gone over astonishingly well, which has made me utterly terrified of attempting another one. Just as a disclaimer, the next one I do won't be as elaborate or as clever, so please don't look forward to it. Museum-wise, I've updated every single page up to Sonic Labyrinth, including the Sonic Team history page. I'm being particularly ardent about fixing errors just now, so if you catch any misinformation, do alert me. The Sonic the Fighters page is well underway and would be finished except that I've become bogged down transcribing the rather extensive command lists. It'll probably be up within the next couple of weeks. Also, at Pep's coercion, the Encyclopedia (which has been a backburner project for a while) should soon be reborn as a wiki, with a number of happy GHZers contributing articles. It'll be a while longer before it's ready to be opened up for viewing, but at least it's getting somewhere again.