2006-11-21 14:26:10

Well, I dunno how much you want it to be good, but initially it does seem disappointing. It's off to a hugely uninspired start, but once you get to White Acropolis it starts making sense.

Also, the story kicks into gear mostly with Silver, and the story is actually rather good.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-21 14:28:29

does it have gay german rock (david hastlehoff style) ???? that is usually the biggest off put to any sonic for me.

---
My comments on this game/machine been good or bad does not mean i like/hate the machine i am not a fan nor a hater, just i have a opinion and wish to share it.

2006-11-21 14:30:48

I actually quite like it, it's not a brilliant game, the loading times are teedious as hell, and the start is quite dull, but once you get further into the game it becomes quite fun all be it in an annoying "i fell off again" kind of way.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-21 14:39:58

It's so damn inconsistent aswell. There are times when you're all "no wait, this IS a great game" when you sort of.. time the taking out of 8 baddies in one big swoop without landing.. and then you get to an incredibly tedious inbetween bit in the forest that looks like someone draped Rise of The Triad in green cloth, and you're provoked again.

I swear, if they just cleaned up the slight popup, the loading times and the inconsistent presentation it'd be an officially good game. I think even the city stages would be less abominable if the loading times didn't make accepting missions such a damn hassle.

When you're in the action, most of all on a stage where there's little chance of falling off something.. like White Acropolis.. I think it's one of the more fun games I've played in quite a while.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-21 14:45:22

Well the snowboarding bit drove me loopy, especially when the camera switches from behind to infront and your controls reverse without any transition and you end up doing a 180 and start heading back the way you came (normally into a gaint snowball), or you try to turn around and suddenly the controls become unresponsive and you can't do nothing, and it takes 2 minutes to face the right direction.

Same goes for the boarding bit in crysis city.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-21 16:55:15

Yeah definitely. And there's a similar bit in Shadow's episode (though his vehicles are mostly quite managable) where you're on foot and running through a tunnel. There's just no way of telling what the game wants you to do as the perspective shifts and has you pressing left to go forward (!?).

Sonic Stadium has the complete soundtrack recorded off the game here:

ftp://evozero.w00ty.com/SONIC%20the%20Hedgehog%20-...

I dunno how happy they are about the linkage, but with the no doubt limited amount of people even looking in this thread I suppose it's fine. I'm especially keen on the White Acropolis music myself, but it's all there for your consumption.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-21 19:11:46

The music is quite good, which is suprising. Though it was one of the things that roped me into buying it. When i heard that a remix of Sweet Sweet Sweet was the main theme of the game, I was instantly hooked.

The first two levels in this game are completely write offs. Wave Ocean and White Acropolis are totally and completely botched. With Wave Ocean, everything feels pretty good, until the game starts wrenching the camera out of your hands, which wouldn't be a problem if the controls were locked. But they aren't, so if you're not expecting it, you'll end up dead. Then once you get past these parts and you start to get the hang of it, they slow down the pace of the gameplay by making you play as Tails who is slower than he's ever been.

Then you have the sand boss. Let me say this right now. There are no good bosses in this game. Silver is literally the only boss that will actively attack you. The egg cerberus will charge at you, pass you, charge at you again, pass you again, then run in circles endlessly, never actually attacking. You just have to beat the crap out of it in the pre-ordained fashion. The bosses in Sonic Heroes are better than this, which says a lot.

Then you have the levels where you're carrying Elise around. These levels are generally 1/4th the size of a normal level and make you wonder if they were included in order to take away how much shorter the levels seem when you're going at the normal sonic pace rather then when you're playing as silver or shadow. They're ultimately filed with nothing but pit traps which you have to use Elise's power to cross. Though if you manage to find 2 of the 3 shortcuts in the stage, you can skip past 90% of the level anyway, so it makes you wonder why they bothered designing the rest of this rescue level in the first place.

Then we come to white acropolis and Crisis City. Crisis City is the first good level, but it shows how poorly this game was truly done. The first section of White Acropolis is a snowboarding level. Every 3d sonic game has had a snowboarding level of some sort, this is old hat. But somehow, they manage to completely botch it. If you make a turn that's more than 5 degrees to the level or right, you stop. Completely. Furthermore, the emphesis of these level is to use the ramps to make it to the shortcuts, but the jump button rarely works if ever. The controls are so sloppy and muddy that you will play through these sections once and figure out how to get an S rank further down in the level.

That being said, the first section of Crisis City is a snowboarding level, and the controls actually work! Which makes you wonder why the issues in White acropolis existed in the first place.

I don't understand how the gameplay mechanics in Sonic games get progressively worse as time goes on. I don't want another one if this is what we have to look forward to.

2006-11-21 20:04:33

Well we completely differ when it comes to controls. I think this is easily the best controlling 3D Sonic yet, and I think everyone needs to have a sit down with SA1 and 2 again if there's somehow some illusion going on that they were better.

I agree that snowboarding sections are awkward though, but they're helped by figuring out that unlike in the past, they actually want you to hold forward now. You're not just supposed to adjust where you're going by pressing left and right.

Actually, the only problems with controls in the entire game that time and adjustment doesn't fix (unlike SA1 and 2 where there are bits that just remain glitchy and twitchy, no matter what) are the Knuckles/Rouge hopping off a wall you're climbing thing. There's just no logic attached to it whatsoever, and you end up just smashing every direction and the jump button until they finally - if you're lucky - let the fuck go.

The things that work by far the best is combat though. Regardless of whether you play Sonic, Shadow or Silver, the core game that you keep coming back to is genuinely good. It's like they took the excellent combat out of Billy Hatcher, crossed it with the brilliant-er combat in Shinobi/Nightshade and made it accessible. Unlike you, Meso, this game gives me hope that one day they get all the rest right aswell, because to me they've clearly started to really get the core game.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-21 20:12:13

Actually, the combat seems to be the worst part of Silver's game.

I'm currently playing through the jungle level with Silver. So this is what usually happens. I use Telekensis, pick up 6 boxes, end having to cancel telekensis because you can't control more than 3 without the boxes smashing against each other, reenabling telekenesis, fire a box at a robot, watch that box explode on the ground 1 foot away from the robot, rinse repeat. The inability to mark who your targeting or fire projectiles up or down makes his combat relatively useless. If there are no boxes around or no enemies that fire missles, you're screwed, because the machine gunners will simply continue to chip away at your health until you find out where you're supposed to actually go. And the level design in this area is so bad, that can take quite a long time.

I mean honestly, every time I try to like something about this game, Sega shows me that they had absolutely no idea what the hell they were thinking. It's steadily getting to the point where I just don't want to play this piece of crap anymore.

2006-11-21 20:37:10

I have to admit it doesn't hold my attention for long, it's the kind of game i have to play 1 level per sitting otherwise it just gets me annoyed.

The part where you have to do the 3 trials, the 2nd trial you have to kill all the enemies with no rings, die once and it takes 50 seconds to reload the level again, why the hell could they not just have a checkpoint at the start of the level.

Another thing which is unnecessary is when you run out of lives why can you not just select continue and it plonk you back at the start of that level, Instead you have to go back to the character select screen, load it up, trudge through the city and start the level again.

As much as i find the gamplay annoying there is something, which continues to pull me back to it. (Much like 2D sonic used to)

And the story seems to be pretty good as well.

This game gives me the feeling that Sega started out with the best of intentions, but got bored along the way and just threw the rest of it together.

It's not really a game i would recommend someone to buy, worth renting though.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-21 23:31:42

Simply pressing in the direction of the thing you're trying to hit does the job, and if you're combating flying enemies, just jump and do the same. Don't hover, he'll drop the boxes then. Oh and the only time you wanna carry more than one object is when you intend to fire them all at once by holding down X. Later on you gain the ability to stun opponents and pick them up, so then you'll be using them against eachother instead. If you wanna hit something specific though, you'll want to only pick up one thing to throw.yeah, either that or they were extremely rushed, for some unfathomable reason. Presumably PS3 launch, really. In any case I agree wholeheartedly with this, and at the risk of repeating what I've said previously, it's like they have this core gameplay that works really well, and stuff around that is varying degrees of sloppily put together, with levels for the most part being decent enough but even then totally uninspired art wise.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-23 23:12:19

Just a thought about the loadings.
I may be sounding like a ps3 fanboy anyway....
Are these like that because data has to be decompresed and is so much that it takes all that time?
If this is true and the PS3 version doesn't suffer so much of this problem, then is it posible that the PS3 may be the native devolpment enviroment for the game and the Xbox version is a port?

2006-11-23 23:51:26

With the fanboy ratio here, you'll have to be sounding a lot more like a fanboy than that to get any attention for it. :D

Anyway, what you're saying is all reasonably possible, but nobody knows for certain at this point. The PS3 version has been pushed back, supposedly because "Sega want to make some adjustments to how it handles downloadable content", so we won't know for sure until it comes out.

IF the game supports the HDD pre-load stuff, then the loading will definitely be shorter, but whether they'll be removed all together is anybody's guess.

Either way, the 360 itself is not to blame for the loading issues, it's about mind bogglingy poor judgement at the design stage. I can't think of a good reason why they'd put it together this awkwardly, but my guess would probably be that the game didn't have the whole missions thing until very late in its development cycle. Whether it's significant or not I'm not sure, but the Kingdom Valley level featured in the demo ended with a glowing ring, whereas the level in the game continues from there by having a bird fly you off to - yep - a loading screen. Maybe at one point the levels were divided into acts, classic Sonic style? I dunno, this is just guesswork. Whatever reason - it's unfortunate, because as I've been saying over and over.. there's a pretty decent game in there.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-23 23:56:11 In reply to emogrumpyuke (2006-11-23 23:12:19)

Um no, compression is many times faster than loading uncompressed data, Blu-Ray has a slower loading speed than DVD 12x so it would require more compression to maintain the same loading speed.

Don't be fooled that Blu-ray because of it's superior storage space would be any better off, it benefits compression more so than the DVD drive in the 360.

Add to that the fact the PS3 has less dedicated video memory the levels probably had to be chopped up into sections, if the game had been for 360 alone it may have been possible to have the whole level fit into memory.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-24 13:19:05

I'm gonna take my next-to-no tech knowledge and say I sincerely doubt that.

The game wouldn't HAVE to be chopped up, nor would it HAVE to have these disgusting loading screens pop up ever so often. More than anything it's sloppy programming or design or whatever, because there are streaming options that could make this a far smoother experience without "having" to resort to anything.

The game is - for whatever reason - broken, and it could be a much more seamless experience in more capable programming hands, on PS3 or otherwise.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-24 19:49:46

Though doing so would sabatoge any x360 sales whatsoever and only prove that the game was rushed out the door, hurting SegaSammy's stocks dramatically.

The end of the world is one of the most fustrating levels ever.

2006-11-24 21:39:00

You think they could possibly hurt sales more than they are by the ABYSMAL reviews it's getting? The way I see it they could sort the PS3 version for a significant increase in average or good review verdicts, thus making the game a viable retail product again in the eyes of the core gamers.

Personally, I'd happily buy a PS3 version if the loading times were shortened or removed alltogether.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-24 21:44:48

You would buy the game just for better loading times, that's crazy. :P

I will be quite pissed off to be honest if the PS3 version is much better than the 360 version, i'm getting fed up with the 360 getting the lazy developer/ported crap all the time. (and the finger always points towards Japan)

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-24 22:08:19

I've bought games for far, far worse reasons I assure you. :)

I have bought Mortal Kombat Gold at least three times, and I'm prolly upwards three with Sonic Heroes too. You'd think I'd catch on to the whole I-sold-it-because-I-fucking-hate-it concept, but I repeatedly ask Sonic and his Heroes to slap me around again.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-26 15:55:52

http://blazemp3.sepwich.com/sonic2k6/rip/

More rips here, including themes for characters. Silver's is great! :)

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-26 17:17:16

I'm really enjoying this game dispite the problems with. Have found it alot easier to get on with then SA1DC which left you wondering about forever trying to find where you were going.

I'm also looking forward to the Wii offering, which really is looking like it's back to basics with a new twist.

I'm just hoping that the bad press this is getting doesn't kill Sonic off

2006-11-26 18:18:00 In reply to Moz (2006-11-26 17:17:16)

Glad to hear, man. I think it'll sell well, because bad press didn't stop Heroes or Shadow either. Sonic has a following that'll keep buying the games he stars in, pretty much regardless. As long as it sells, there'll be new Sonic games.

I have confidence that a sequel to this will be good, because like you point out, the core stuff here really works. Now we just need a better presentation to wrap it in, and I'm sure they'll work to provide that the next time.

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-26 19:17:30

My confidence for Sega is all but dead.

I been waiting years for Shenmue and they are still playing cat and mouse with their fan's.

Sega is pretty much the Japanese Electronic Arts.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!

2006-11-26 20:09:17

They WISH they were the japanese EA, that's sort of their whole thing right now, being a huge force in publishing. And really, their publishing efforts have been really successful, regardless of what individual taste says about the titles they've been great strategic choices for sales.

Shenmue would've been nice on the Xbox when it was still relevant, now it'd just drown. Its brand of borderline cheesy storytelling was something that survived in the climate provided by Sega's own consoles, but next to other hollywood like productions with competent voice actors and scripts that are good > cute, it wouldn't survive. Economically it'd be a right disaster.

Sega haven't really developed a whole lot of things with any serious investment for a while besides the obvious - and brilliant - arcade titles. Sonic have pretty much sold themselves on the name, using what's essentially the same template for gameplay as Sonic Adventure. Other efforts have been good, but in that inaccessible Sega way people knew how to approach on their own consoles, confident that the games WERE good if you just figured out how to play them. Shinobi/Nightshade, Gunvalkyrie, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Blood Will Tell were all seriously good. Seriously.

So yeah, I don't think they ever stopped making good games, to be quite honest, but focus has definitely shifted towards arcade and publishing, which is quite disappointing. :(

---
http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2006-11-26 20:28:06

As much as i am a Sonic fan (and i have had some fun out of the 360 version), I haven't played a real Sonic game since SA1 on the Dreamcast.

Sonic is Sega's cash cow much like Madden is EA's cash cow.

Like you said above "Sonic has a following that'll keep buying the games he stars in".

Sega never listen to their fan base and always make stupid mistakes, which cost them money, perhaps if they actually listened to their fans (A Nights sequel for example) then perhaps they wouldn't be always looking at failed games. (yet we get Golden Axe, WTF ?)

I would sooner buy Shenmue 3 than Blue Dragon (and that's the truth), you say Shenmue 3 wouldn't survive in the nextgen climate, you may be right, but i think Sega/Yu Suzuki owes it to their fans to finish the damn story.

Yet Yakuza is almost a carbon copy of Shenmue and has spawned a sequel, so i don't agree with that.

You know what it is though, Sammy are holding Sega's creativity back, if you look at Namco since they hooked up with bandai or Square since they merged with Enix all 3 companies have slowly gone down hill.

---
I want Blue Dragon more than Optimus .... mwah ha ha ha ha ha..

Marumaro for the WIN !!