Sonic Generations; Possibly the only Sonic game you'll ever need to play.

**The following post is a review I did on another blog I had that I have since shut down, which might explain to why it feels dated or different. I simply decided that it wasn't much worth throwing away.

Following the one thing those dudes from that one Game Review site we all love to hate had said (TL;DR version, IGN has a YouTube segment, a couple guys started talking about the 25th Anniversary party and the tease for Project 2017 and Mania, and then one of the blokes uttered, and this is not verbatim, "Sonic was never good.") I feel like I should probably bring up the one (of the few times, including Colors which IGN rated 8.5/10 so kinda dropped the ball there gents) that a Sonic game was just really, undeniably, unnervingly good.

So, in 2011 it was Sonic's 20th anniversary, and considering how his 15th Anniversary game went, you'd be justifiably skeptical about Sonic's future. At the time, the fantastic albeit just unfortunately Wii exclusive Sonic Colors had been released just one year before, and the surprisingly not terrible Sonic Unleashed (also known as King of the Framerate dips) had graced the world with their existence. The potential was there but would Sonic Team pull it off?

Yes.

In spectacular fashion. I cannot praise this game enough. It has rocketed me towards death more times than I can count, the final boss fight was subpar and underwhelming at best and honestly the game has the originality of a Twilight joke in 2016 (a little like this review actually). But to list all the great things about the game would take ages. But I think I'll talk about the game from a different perspective rather than the usual Gameplay/Graphics/Story/Soundscape format. It's boring, you can go find it anywhere and if you need a recommendation on whether or not to pick up the title I can simply give you a "fuck yes, be on your merry way and enjoy the adventure you little rascal."

But if you're still here with me, let me dive into the meat of it all here.

I wanna talk about Game Feel first. A kind of meh term to be honest but I can't really come up with a better one and far be it for me to try and sway the nomenclature of the world. But the question I want to ask is how exactly does it feel to play Sonic Generations?

Fantastically.

Let me first address the classic gameplay segments. There's a recurring problem I have with all the classic Sonic games, including the untouchable and ever fault-less Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It's the amount of weight Sonic had. I mean, he was a little tubbier back then but Imagine if you pressed on the accelerator of a car hard enough to feel the pedal touch the mat. Now imagine that whether or not that pedal was floored or only slightly touched, you'd still only accelerate at the same, painfully slow rate. That's what it felt like playing classic Sonic games. The issue is that Sonic felt like he never has any urgency, he starts at 0 and then slowly climbs his way to top speed, which is hella fast, don't get me wrong, but classic Sonic was always more about keeping momentum than quick reactions. In Generations however, this isn't the case. Sonic feels lighter, more carefree, and much faster. The camera is zoomed way out so you have plenty of room to see what's ahead. While it isn't perfectly up to scratch and you find yourself in Crisis City experiencing the worst of it due to this wind mechanic that honestly makes me see flames and curse the existence of Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 even more, but for the vast majority of the game, it feels fucking fantastic to zoom through stages, trying your hardest to get a good run and reacting as well as you can to the spikes and pits and enemies. In addition to remaking classic stages in a way that not only feels fresh but stylizing them to look absolutely gorgeous whilst allowing the player to witness the spectacle of it all, the modern stages are given the same treatment, putting them in 2.5D and Seaside Hill is the one that feels just the best. There's a point where you will end up on a certain lane if you lay a certain way but you can still see the other in the background and this kind of horizontality would have been impossible in the classic games, and the use of the z axis just goes such a long way into making the levels feel like a real place. Another fantastic improvement and I would be extremely poor to exclude is the choppers. In the original Green Hill Zone and in all subsequent games, the choppers are all dangerous hazards from the moment the appear on screen. However, in generations, they're safe for the first few frames where they jump up behind the bridge and only become a danger after reaching the fullcrum point of their jump and then dive down onto Sonic. It's small but it makes such a huge difference. Finding all five rings in Planet Wisp let's you unlock a homing attack for Classic Sonic but I never felt it was necessary. I never felt like at his most basic, he felt like he needed something more. And I think it goes to show how timeless the classic Sonic formula is.

And now that we've gotten the boring fluff out of the way, let's talk about the real star of the show. Modern Sonic. Sonic as he is today. One issue that I am so glad didn't carry over from Unleashed is the problem unleashed had with lanes. Quick stepping with Sonic in Generations is always perfect and I am baffled at just how tight the controls are every time I play. But onto the feel.

The game does so many things to get the feel of Sonic right it's just hard not to put the controller down, take a second to just marvel at what you just saw, pick the controller back up and jump in for more. Let's start with the boost mechanic. It's a simple matter of variable x + Sonic's current velocity. However, the sound effect, that satisfying little boom that plays along with the sound of the air gushing past your face and the ripple that flashes across the screen as it happens, the gorgeous effect around Sonic, and something people don't often notice but Sonic normally runs really loosely, with his hands trailing behind his body and his head kind of bobbing with each step. But when you boost, he clenches his fists and leans in just a bit and Sonic just looks like he's enjoying the act of raeching his top speed. I really have to commend the animators on their work here because it's just so freaking stellar. The transitions between 3D and 2.5D is also just so seamless and you begin to understand why Sonic Team took away manual camera control. And the spectacle? Man, it's just ramped up. Jumping away from the Mega Chopper trying to nom you as an afternoon snack is just one of my favourite moments in the game and  the best part is how you can perform tricks, practically taunting it as you get away. The game is a power fantasy combined with the experience of an adventure through this brightly coloured world.  It's wonderful. Unbelievably wonderful. Sonic's moveset is just a joy to work with, combining the stomp with the boost and air dash to perform complex and timing based manuevers to beat a record in the best time possible, that's where it's at. The grading system at the end also only encourages one thing; speed. Beat the level as fast as you can. It's not unbearably difficult to get an S-Rank and you'll find yourself playing the game over, and over, and over until you finally perfectly beat that one stage. I found myself, even after getting an S-Rank, clearing all the challenge missions and finding all the Red Medals just replaying Green Hill Zone act 2, to get the best time, learn the secrets of the stage, and just unwind at the end of a long day blasting through a fun stage that's so superbly designed that based on the minute and a half it takes to complete it alone, I'd give this game a perfect numeric score.

And you want to know what else provokes those positive emotions? A full orchestral soundtrack remaking classic chiptune songs into massively scaled musical pieces that just brings the game together so nicely.

It kind of shocks me how easily people forget this game when saying things like "Sonic was never good." I mean, the game's story is extremely simple and doesn't overstay it's welcome. The few times you sit through the cutscenes you'll find yourself marveling at just how well the engine runs them. They aren't prerenders, and I think that says the most about them. But Sonic Generations is not just a good Sonic game, it's just a great videogame. I can just recommend it to anyone. I can just smile and say, play this game. Just pick it up and see what it's about and give it a bit of love and Sonic Generations will love you back. It'll be your friend when you're down and your rival when you need to prove yourself. This game is a lot of things, In this world, there exists no such thing as perfection, but Sonic Generations comes so close I'm willing to give it a mulligan.

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Letter to Myself; subtitled 2016

"So if you got a flame that's blazing hot within, take a deep breath and feed it oxygen."
~ Watsky, Never Let It Die

Every year I write a letter to myself to reflect my own progress as a person and to sort of have an army of past versions of myself egging me on to continue with life and not walk into oncoming traffic and to tell me that even though it was tough I made it this far so  I can make it through the next year, and I usually end it off with some stupid tagline like "Thanks for not killing off the main character of your story" which is dumb and cliche but when you're  crying so hard it feels like the veins in your forehead are going to burst and that the only thing you can, have and will ever be able to feel is sadness then stupid sentiments from past me to me help. This year I decided to post mine online as kind of a thing to say, hey, this is something you can do, even if it's dumb and cliche. There aren't really any rules and you can tell your future self anything you want, but I don't recommend writing when you're super sad. Write it when you can say something meaningful to yourself.

So anyway, here goes.

Dear Matthew

This year's been a tough one. It seemed like for every step forward, I took two steps back. Sometimes it seemed like there were more bills than money, sometimes our money seemed to disappear just as it came in. Sometimes things went right, but for the most part, they just went really wrong. Sometimes bad things happened, and they were unavoidable, and so often I got to that breaking point where I sabotaged myself out of poor self-esteem and emotional and physical exhaustion. More vividly than ever, I was reminded that willpower is an exhaustible resource but self-depreciation isn't.

Life will very often take away your belief in yourself that you can survive the harshest storms and overcome the tallest obstacles.

Life will often leave you with deadlines too close to make and fear too strong to conquer and too little direction to even start plotting a course to somewhere.

This is not weakness.

This is life.

Life throws curve balls. 

Strength of person comes from laughing at the absurd odds you beat. Strength of person comes from knowing how unfair life is, taking the blows in your strides, and getting back up after you fall. After all, it's not about how hard you can punch, it's about how many you can take and keep on fighting. And it'd take way too much time to remind you that you can take a whole lot of blows. In short, I will simply say, you survived 2016.

To the end of self betterment, I would like to ask that in 2017, we wait for the second marshmallow. Because I am nothing if not self-aggrandizing, I just mean that life is a little like the Marshmallow test. We can either eat the one in front of us, or wait a little while and have two marshmallows. I suppose that's my round about way of asking that in 2017 (and hopefully every consecutive year until the day I die) we decide to save money for a better day instead of buying a tub of ice cream and eating our feelings. In 2017, instead of discounting time spent studying now as time wasted for a test we might fail, we study now and reap the benefits of having to do less work in the future.

It's hard to feel it but fear and hyperbolic discounting control everything we do. 2017 is a year I hope isn't about that.

All in all, thank you for staying true to yourself. Thank you for making it this far, thank you for trying to go farther. Dad always says that you can only lead as far as you've gone, and you can only go as far as you work to get to.

It's been a tough year.

But so was 2015. And we made it through both. Maybe 2017 will be awful, and we all know, in trilogies, the third is the worst. But life always regresses to the mean. It might not always be good, but that also means it won't always be bad. And when it's bad, there are always friends to nag to, a blog to give your unsolicited views on the world to, and the knowledge that it won't be that way forever. Life is a series of tough years each varying in levels of toughness. Every year since the doctor delivered you and slapped your butt and gave you screaming to your mamma is a tough year.

Life throws curveballs.

Dust yourself off, get back on your feet and yell real loud, "Is that all you got?"

There's a flame inside you that can never be snuffed. There's a sparkle in your eye that can never be dimmed. There's a song in your heart that never stops playing. There's a wit in your voice that will never start fading. There's a universe in your mind that's always expanding. There's a story you're writing that just hasn't ended. There's that instinct to survive so sharp, it'll never dull. You always talk about the day you'll walk into traffic, but live like it'll never come. There have been better men, but a whole lot of them never made it to where you are. There are plenty of worse men, and they've made it really far. There's that part of you that you can trust to be right when everything else says you're wrong. There's a swagger in your step that never truly goes away, waiting for the right song to come on.

You're a writer, and artist, a genius, a madman, a singer, a guitarist, a pixel artist, a programmer, a loving member of a loving family and a man with a whole lot of good friends you can count on, a survivor, a fighter, a visionary who sees a whole different future, just a man with a couple dreams, a man with wounds to suture, a conquerer, a strategist and a straight up panicker.

But for all that, remember that everything and anything can change in a single moment.

Life throws curveballs.

And I know it sounds a little like I'm saying everyone experiences it, so you don't have to be sad. I know it can be hard, and it's okay to cry until the tears reach your nose and the snot reaches your eyes and it's okay because you will feel insufferable sadness for a little while but it all ends and you'll see the sunny days again. You walk through dark trenches and you you fight as an atheist in a foxhole.

Life throws curve balls.

But you catch a few of them.

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Being Bisexual; Sex, Depression, and figuring out which chopstick is the fork

"So like, when you, you know, do it with boys, which one of you is the girl?"

The other day someone asked me one of those questions that comes up in every "Things you should never ask gay men" video which I'd assume is common knowledge about basic social interactions. As I bisexual, I have the privileged of being able to "act straight" in most company, so the questions I get about my sex life are usually of a mostly hetero-normative variety. People tend to perceive me as being more "straight" and I am a E2-E3 on the Purple-Red Scale which I believe far better describes my sexual orientation than just simply stating "bisexual" or 3 on the Kinsey Scale. As a side note, no one has really developed a system for non-binary gender attractions, which is very unfortunate since I don't think I could state mine any more eloquently than "As long as they got da booty".  For the most part, I'm not a very flamboyant or eccentric person(or maybe to a lot of people I am, but I like to think myself at least a little bit grounded), my usual demeanor is usually either cynical or exhausted, unless you allow me to go off on a tirade about something I'd display socially unacceptable levels of affection for. Another fun complication this brings about is that the gay-dar doesn't really go off around me and no one really gets any signal from the bi-wi-fi either, which makes dating boys a lot harder than it should be. When my queerness does come up it seems to be this sensational piece of gossip that isn't usually talked about, and while I strive to live in my full truth, I gotta say yet again for the people in the back;

(credit; inhumanshieldsketches)

So I'd like to ask everyone in the world to really read this next sentence over, read it a couple times, even if you've taken this advice to heart and you're the strongest, most active LGBTQ ally out there and especially if you don't know a lot of queer folk;

Our sex lives are as personal as yours is, so unless we're really close, don't ask us anything that would be too forward to ask a stranger on the bus.

Especially anything phrased as awfully as which one of you is the girl. I like what someone said about gay sex, and to butcher the quote, gay sex is literally one of the manliest things you could do because there's literally only men involved, so why do we keep asking questions like "Who's the 'girl'?"

There is no girl. That's literally the point of homo pro boning. Which chopstick is the fork?

But the actual meaning veiled behind some sincerely disturbing ideas about masculinity is even more perplexing. Who wears the strap on when you and your husband do anal, Deborah? Who is topping and who is bottoming isn't really anyone's fucking business. Some guys are also versatile and do both, just like some guys like fucking girls and boys because why deny yourself half the world's pleasures? Also, and I cannot repeat this enough, anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.

Once more, in bold this time, anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.

Sex is a conversation covering so many broad topics and some of the best sex you might ever have could involve no penetration whatsoever. Sex isn't just hump hump hump cum roll out of bed and go back to hating yourself. Sex is intimacy. Sex is fun. Sex is beautiful and wonderful and whatever you and the person you should be unashamedly fucking decide it is. Sex can be sloppy or romantic or a drunken flurry of limbs or missionary while staring unblinkingly into each other's eyes or mutual masturbation or three hours of 69 but as long as it's consensual and fun and you and your partner communicate that's all that matters.

But those are just some of the most recent things I've had to deal with. The other thing is that, for one, coming out kinda throws your identity out of whack. For the longest time I ignored or disregarded all of my same sex attractions because I knew I was into girls and that definitely without a doubt made me straight because if I wasn't straight then I wouldn't be into girls. I had a lot of toxic thought processes like that and once I overcame those thoughts it also threw everything else I knew into a different perspective. And now, I look back and I'm finding my tastes are also changing because I'm allowing myself to like things that I thought I couldn't like because I liked other directly conflicting things, for example, I found myself unashamedly enjoying Kanye's Power and 2013 me would have slapped my shit broken for doing something the muggles would do. I'm still finding new hardcore and metalcore bands every day and Stray From The Path's new single brought a tear to my eye with how unbefuckinglievably dope it was. And that's great. I used to be the kind of elitist fuck that wrote all of hip hop off as garbage made by garbage musicians. Which is an incredibly naive thing to think because if I heard Watsky's x Infinity or All You Can Do three years ago I would have spun on a fucking dime. Or maybe not, I mean, three years of personal growth is nothing to discount. But things I really used to like I'm finding a little awful now. Some of my favourite anime seems super awful and unbearable. Most anime actually. I used to be able to identify with it because of how much of an outsider I used to feel like and a lot of shounen is written specifically to help people relate to and overcome that feeling. But everything I watch nowadays simply just misses the mark with me. I find myself much more of a snob about animation quality for one, but as soon as I see some awful homophobic or misogynistic trope dancing around the screen for a cheap laugh, it gives me that feeling in my stomach I got in highschool when my friends kept saying "that's so gay!" when they really meant "that's so shitty!".

This transition of character has kept me up at night honestly wondering if I have any idea who I am, or who I want to be any more. Life keeps handing me curve balls and every time I think I know something with absolute certainty, I get punched in the gut and told, lol nope.

But oh well. Such is life.

The takeaway from this is that people change. And that shouldn't depress you. It depresses me sometimes but it's ultimately for the best. We all have to be deconstructed in a cocoon of formative years before we can emerge as nihilistic but ultimately content with our general place in the universe butterflies. So just to reiterate;

-Our sex lives are as personal as yours is, so unless we're really close, don't ask us anything that would be too forward to ask a stranger on the bus.
-There is no girl, it's the literal point of homo pro boning. neither chopstick is the fork
-Anal is not the only form of sex gay/queer men can have.
-People change, you're going to change, but that shouldn't depress you.

But like, seriously, ever notice how hard Kanye goes in Power?

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