"Don't step in the leadership"
Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2006 8:49 pm
I can almost understand how the tie-wearing executives in Sega's upper echelon might not realize that the new Sonic game they've propagated is unplayable. These are people, after all, who spend their six hours of free time a week listening to Il Divo and reading James Lee Burke novels. The last time any of them was likely to have physically played a game was during the Carter administration. By all accounts, Sonic 360 looks and sounds good, and it would be easy for even a seasoned player to mistake it for a quality title upon first blush. HOWEVER. Even a deaf and blind old woman who has never played a videogame in her long life, lying in a puddle of her own excrement upon her death bed, would have the senses to discern, after roughly 30 seconds of playtime, that Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis is bullshit. It's one thing to fail at constructing from the ground up a new piece of software, but it takes some special effort to start with a functional game that has withstood the test of time and ruin it. I understand that the GBA's CPU is insufficient for accurate Mega Drive emulation, but this feels like somebody smashed the mechanics with a hammer then glued them back together the wrong way. Poor old Oguchi and Tsurumi can hardly be blamed for failing to grasp the Sonic 360 conundrum, but even a bourgeois white mind corrupted with senility and Il Divo could discern that Sonic Genesis is a fourth rate hack job. Yet even knowing this, they let the game go to market, so their exact motive remains a mystery. My own personal hypothesis is that Tsurumi's grandson reprogrammed Sonic onto the GBA as a school project, and said homework was rushed to market perhaps out of misguided grandfather love. (Fortunately, as I understand it, the emulation in the PSP Genesis Collection is of good quality, so players desiring to squint over a handheld rendition of the cornerstone block in the franchise aren't totally without recourse.)
And now for something completely... the same. Big Smile, after weeks of stalking and coercion of loved ones, has managed to corner Sonic Rivals producer Taylor Miller for a little tete-a-tete. Since this is the first time the GHZ has ever had anything as relevant as a developer interview, the article has a temporary home in the forum until I can whip up a permanent nook on the main site: <a href="/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1872">viewtopic.php?t=1872</a>. Miller makes a couple of interesting comments about the game's evolution, most notably regarding the involvement of our old friend Br'er Iizuka. Pass a glance at Smile's handiwork and become enlightened.
The <a href="/sonic/stf/stf.html">Sonic the Fighters</a>, <a href="/sonic/3d/son3d.html">Flickies' Island</a>, <a href="/sonic/g_sonic/g_sonic.html">G Sonic</a>, and <a href="/sonic/school/school.html">Sonic's Schoolhouse</a> pages have been updated. Note that my only recourse for translating the kanji-rich StF command lists was brother Breen's fabulous WWWJDIC, which is not quite fabulous enough to interpret context, so the exact romanizations should be taken with a grain of salt. Aid from a more skilled speaker would be welcome, as though I thought I wasn't the only soul on this green earth who cares about having an accurate translation of a decade old and largely forgotten fighting game. ANYWAY. Now that Saturn emulation is approaching a point of playability, I was able to get some good new screenshots for the Flickies' Island and Sonic Jam pages (the latter hasn't yet been updated as of this writing), but it seems that the valiant SSF still chokes up on the demanding Sonic R. As usual, some of the other pages have been tweaked and brushed up and I've fortified the <a href="/museum/1990.html">museum timeline</a> with greater detail and a more uniform layout. Please feel free to browse and give my life meaning.
And now for something completely... the same. Big Smile, after weeks of stalking and coercion of loved ones, has managed to corner Sonic Rivals producer Taylor Miller for a little tete-a-tete. Since this is the first time the GHZ has ever had anything as relevant as a developer interview, the article has a temporary home in the forum until I can whip up a permanent nook on the main site: <a href="/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1872">viewtopic.php?t=1872</a>. Miller makes a couple of interesting comments about the game's evolution, most notably regarding the involvement of our old friend Br'er Iizuka. Pass a glance at Smile's handiwork and become enlightened.
The <a href="/sonic/stf/stf.html">Sonic the Fighters</a>, <a href="/sonic/3d/son3d.html">Flickies' Island</a>, <a href="/sonic/g_sonic/g_sonic.html">G Sonic</a>, and <a href="/sonic/school/school.html">Sonic's Schoolhouse</a> pages have been updated. Note that my only recourse for translating the kanji-rich StF command lists was brother Breen's fabulous WWWJDIC, which is not quite fabulous enough to interpret context, so the exact romanizations should be taken with a grain of salt. Aid from a more skilled speaker would be welcome, as though I thought I wasn't the only soul on this green earth who cares about having an accurate translation of a decade old and largely forgotten fighting game. ANYWAY. Now that Saturn emulation is approaching a point of playability, I was able to get some good new screenshots for the Flickies' Island and Sonic Jam pages (the latter hasn't yet been updated as of this writing), but it seems that the valiant SSF still chokes up on the demanding Sonic R. As usual, some of the other pages have been tweaked and brushed up and I've fortified the <a href="/museum/1990.html">museum timeline</a> with greater detail and a more uniform layout. Please feel free to browse and give my life meaning.