Film Review: Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone

Sometimes you just want to be kid again.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone is the first of eight Harry Potter films adapted from the book of the same name released in 2001. It's about an orphan boy and his first year at a magic school where he learns to be a wizard, plays a made-up wizard sport and then he handshakes the primary villain into the sequel.

There's a lot to like about the first film. It's really the most magical one, really feeling like you, the viewer, are stepping into a world as Harry serves as kind of an audience surrogate. To this day I still have fantasies of getting my first wand, choosing which owl I'll have, thinking about my Hogwarts House, walking the castle and its rotating staircases.

I think The Philosopher's Stone really does sell that fantasy and make good on that promise.

The film's weakest aspect is its CG, while some effects, such as the talking snake and disappearing glass in the opening scene are really good for the time, any render of a human being makes the eyes sad about having the gift of sight. There are also small hiccups in the plot, such as not learning the name of the eponymous Philosopher until almost 75% of the way into the film and practically in passing, Harry's final confrontation with his professor is entirely underwhelming and the film seems to drag until the very end where it sprints, going as far to reduce Ron's chess game to a montage of statues exploding.

Still, I ended up genuinely having fun with The Philosopher's Stone. I feel like these days we're so surrounded by discourse and discourse and discourse that it's easy to forget that going back to these films can be a good time and that is not helped by the author of the books slowly losing her mind and finding fresh new ways to disappoint her entire audience, from underwhelming sequels to her garbage ideology.

I still like these movies, I'm still going to rewatch my copies from time to time and while it is up to you, dear reader, to decide if you can navigate the complex waters of the ethicacy of their consumption, if this was a world where these films were given out for free and the author of the books never saw a penny, I would heartily recommend giving them a watch.

The rest you'll have to figure out for yourself.

Fuck terfs, by the way.

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Review: Crash Bandicoot (Playstation 1)

I was a playstation kid through and through but the PS1 just barely missed me. What can I say, the PS2 was my era. It's only later in life that I even got to play the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy and now the N. Sane Trilogy has basically made those games obsulete. But I think knowing what came before is important to improve what comes after. And to that end, I think it's about time I dug into Crash Bandicoot and analyze for myself its merits and its flaws.

So for the uninitiated, Crash Bandicoot is 3D platformer on the original playstation which served as playstation's unofficial mascot at the time. The story does its job, Crash is an escaped science experiment gone wrong and Dr Neo Cortex is experimenting further on his female friend, so Crash sets out to rescue her and stop Cortex's nefarious plans. Enough context to get you going and put you into the gameplay and that's where the Bandicoot shines.

Most platformers sink or swim based on their level design and this game surprised me with a bunch of really solid levels. The hallway level design works as an adaptation of linear 2D obstacle courses in the third dimension and the crates are a thing of beauty. It's a solid core gameplay loop, run down corridors, jump over pits, break boxes, spin into or jump onto enemies, repeat until done. The visuals also look great for the time, and you can see 3D models and animation starting to mature greatly on the Playstation. Musically it isn't my favourite Crash Bandicoot soundtrack, I'm very partial to Twinsanity's acapella tunes, but it's iconic Crash music. The game can be difficult, there have definitely been areas that have eaten upwards of 15 lives and sometimes the checkpoint placement could be a bit sparse but I found myself enjoying the challenge more often than not.

What I'm not so hot on is the lack of analogue control support. This is more the fault of Sony than Crash, considering the Dualshock 1 wasn't the first controller for the playstation, despite the N64 launching with a controller that had an analogue stick. Without that analogue control, the left stick can be used for movement but it simulates the d-pad, and it does not feel good to use. I ended up ignoring the left stick and played exclusively with the D-pad, but man, if that didn't end up hurting me. I'm not much of a completionist but the tedium of getting 100% put me off even trying on most levels, some I'd get 3 or 4 boxes shy of earning a gem but honestly, I wasn't going to go back. The save system is something that's also pretty unforgiving, we'd had perfectly functional save systems by that point and hiding the save points in bonus levels is pretty infuriating. Worse still, save points only save your progress towards the final level and gems, and not your lives tally, and booting the game up only to go from 26 lives to 4 was almost as big a disappointment as I am to my parents. Sometimes the hitboxes can trip you up, and there are some enemies which will murder you by entering your air space. A lot of the enemy design in general is kind of lackluster, not in the simplicity but the pure lack of imagination. The skunks that walk into the screen and then immediately die come to mind. And while videogame reviews stend to stay away from politics, the depiction of native island in the game can charitably be described as a bad look. The first boss, Papu Papu is like, just a fat islander trying to murder Crash for seemingly no reason. Also some of the level names are just like, woof. There had to be a better name than Native Fortress. And this might be a nitpick, but levels can start without any fanfare. Choose a level, hard cut to a loading screen, hard cut to the start of the level.

The overall experience could be frustrating at times and while there are a lot of missteps or missed opportunities, I'd generally recommend playing at least some of Crash Bandicoot on the playstation if you ever get the chance to. It's not the best platformer on the system, it might even be the worst game in the original trilogy but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have a good time.

Just take some of the quirks with a pinch of salt and you'll probably get through just fine.

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Making Sense Of My Feelings For Kingdom Hearts 2

"My summer vacation... Is over..."

Those words have kind of stuck with me over the years. Kingdom Hearts 2 was the first game in the series I played.  I saw it on the shelf at a game store and I had some notion that sequels were usually better than their predecessors so I decided to try the second one first.

I didn't come in with any preconceived notions of what Kingdom Hearts 2 was supposed to be. To me, the opening prequel was just something I had to figure out. Piece it together.

And I think, experiencing Roxas's summer the way he did, with no memory of who he was before, is what made it strike such a chord with me. If I played Chain Of Memories or 358/2 days before playing Kingdom Hearts 2 I might have felt a lot different.

The bittersweet emotion, feeling the weight of what Roxas sacrificed, a life he had on borrowed time, with friends who were fabrications in a town that didn't really exist, watching it all come to an end, just so someone else's adventure could start.

It hit me hard.

I think that's really the defining moment for Kingdom Hearts 2. I know a lot of people who remember the poignancy of this moment and I'd probably say that this is the best-written part of the entire King Hearts franchise.

And the rest we kind of blocked out.

I've played Kingdom Hearts 2 a lot over the years but I hadn't completed it again since I was a kid. And a part of me knows exactly why;

This game is filled with so much bullshit.

I probably don't need to tell you about the convoluted storylines or the poor pace or the weird XP requirements for abilities that shouldn't be optional, but here we are. It's tough really describing the cognitive dissonance of this experience.

Powerful moments along with beautiful scores and moments of gameplay that genuinely teeters on being some of the best not only of its generation but of the next two generations of consoles. Juxtaposed with clunky controls and strange upgrade trees and filler content so sub-par that you'll be begging for a reprieve from the asinine story.

How do you make sense of those feelings?

Well, first you remember just how fun and sweet it is hanging out with Winnie The Pooh as he gets his tubby head stuck in honey jars and the genuine sadness of Pooh not remembering Piglet and you remind yourself that despite it all, Kingdom Hearts has some good moments, dammit.

Then you take a deep breath, grit your teeth and play through Atlantica again.

Then when it's all said and done, you sit back and think about it for a few days, really reflecting on the experience.

Then you decide to play something better until you feel enough nostalgia to go back again.

I'm not going to lie and say I like Kingdom Hearts for a lot of respectable reasons. Divorced from my childhood hours in Twilight Town there really are a lot of good parts but I think we've moved on as people, moved on as gamers. So much of the experience is archaic now and despite two re-releases on two separate HD collections there are still a lot of problems KH2 hasn't addressed over the years that future games have. When I picked up Birth By Sleep and you could just dodge roll, from the start, and this PSP game had a better sense of flow in its first five minutes than the big numbered entry of the franchise has in its first 8 hours, yeah, it's hard not to feel the nostalgia goggles crack.

I still think it's at least worth playing through once in your life.

After all is said and done it's still a game I have a lot of fun with and first impressions are everything. A lot of people are going to come away with this with a sense of awe their first time around.

And after that, you too can hate Kingdom Hearts the way only a Kingdom Hearts fan can.

Also KH1 is better than KH2 chaaaaaange my miiiiiiiiind.

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Review: The Last Jedi

Rounding it off, here's my thoughts on The Last Jedi;

It's bloated, it tries something new but I ultimately find it has too many rough edges for me to really enjoy it.

The Last Jedi has some genuinely stellar setpieces going for it, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Luke this go around. Mark Hamill is older and much more matured as an actor so you can really tell how much better he's become at his deliveries since Return Of The Jedi. Carrie is great and I really found myself wishing for more of Leia and Holdo on screen, it just seems like The Last Jedi needed a little more time in the oven.

It's one of those scripts where all the conflict comes from people who don't talk to each other. I'm one of maybe three people who think the Kantobite scenes are the most necessary to the film but the third act is where The Last Jedi really grinds its own gears, where you can feel the script going through the motions.

It's a divisive film to be sure and while I wish I had more to say on it, the fact is, I think I enjoyed it less than any of the prequels. Rather than having some huge flaw, the problems with The Last Jedi are mundane, and as a result its just a less memorable film. Flawed in execution but in not a lot of big and obvious ways.

That said, I still respect the film for what it tried to do and there are still large parts of it that I did enjoy. I do think there's a way to cut it to get the tight pacing of the last film in there as well while also keeping the more subversive elements.

Guess sometimes, less really is just more.

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Review: The Force Awakens

I love this movie.

I'd forgotten what a shot of adrenaline The Force Awakens was. Finn's character, his bromance with Poe, Adam Driver's ironically wonderful performance of Kylo Ren...

The Force Awakens might just be my favorite Star Wars film.

I actually struggle to find things to say about it, other than to sing its praises. The score is great, the writing is great, the effects are great, the characters are great, the sets are great, the action scenes are great... The Force Awakens is, to me, the platonic ideal of what a Star Wars film should be.

What's really left is to talk about all the ways it improves on things. Practical and digital effects are blended together much better here, Han Solo's characterization is much better, and inf fact he's so much more likable that the death blow really does feel like a character cut down before his time.

It's not perfect. I mean, the flaws are so petty and small in comparison to how much about this film that works that it's hard to even ask what flaws. Maz Katana is kind of a handwave on Luke's lightsaber, there's at least one character at the beginning of the film played by a notable actor who seems like he'll be important only to die almost immediately, there's a will they won't they romantic subtext to Finn and Rey's relationship that's not going anywhere any time soon but... It's just so hard to care. The Force Awakens is funny and clever and interesting and the production value is sky-high. It feels like such an effortless slam dunk that you kind of forget all the crap that it's plastering over from sequel creep.

I love this movie.

I'd go as far as to say that if you only ever watch one Star Wars film, this one should be it.

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Review: Revenge Of The Sith

Sad to end the prequel trilogy on this note but Revenge Of The Sith was frankly the least enjoyable film I watched of the bunch.

Unlike other films, which pleasantly surprised me with their level of quality, Revenge Of The Sith simply had beats I was looking forward to and a lot of dead air in between.

I think part of it is that even the cast was feeling fatigued at this point. Coming out in 2005 with Phantom Menace premiering in '99, I'd wager at least six years of their lives were dedicated to films they had less and less investment in. Natalie Portman seems like she's phoning in all but one scene and I can't blame her because a previously kick-ass Padme is turned into kind of a background damsel in this film.

The core of the film, Obi-Wan and Anakin's fallout, is perhaps the strongest part and the scenes on Mustafar are genuinely where the film hits its strides but it was surprising how tempted I was to just... Skip to the good bit. From Anakin's actual turn to that climactic conversation requires almost an hour of long investigation and betrayal and logistics that I'd actually yelled out "Go cut that man's legs off already!" at my screen.

And it is a lengthy experience, a 2-hour 20-minute film which feels like 3. It's not the longest Star Wars film, The Last Jedi is 2 hours and 32 minutes and Attack of the Clones is actually a longer film at 2 hours 22 minutes but this is the one which I felt could be tightened up the most. Personally, I think below 130 minutes is the best length for a Star Wars film but your mileage may vary.

It's not unwatchable but if anything, I'd say skim the progress bar on this one. It's kind of predictable and it really feels like it's just going through the motions, so rather than sit through minutes of fluff, it's best to be your own director here.

And that concludes it. Six films, two trilogies, and it's not like I came out with some grand revelation. I actually don't really feel more or less love for the series at the end, and while there were some pleasant surprises the most poignant thing I can say about Star Wars is that it consistently plays out like commercial genre fiction, and for what it is... That's fine. I think we keep trying to attach this grand narrative to Star Wars when in truth, it probably has more in common with contemporaries than people would like to admit. Influence might make for a legacy and intrigue but when you get down to brass tacks, what you're left with is a set of above-average fantasy films that use the aesthetics of science fiction to tell a straight-up heroes tale.

And I think that because of that, we shouldn't take it too seriously.

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Review: Attack Of The Clones

Well. Shit.

I think I really liked this one.

I can't really say what it was about Attack Of The Clones that I enjoyed more than... Well, the rest of the films but part of me thinks it's just because of how much this film crams in. The over-the-top sequence on Geonosis, every scene Dooku is in, the special effects, Jango Fett, it's the first time we get to see Yoda fight...

There is just so much to like.

You know, if I think about it, I can't really say I remember a lot of discourse about Attack Of The Clones. It's pretty influential, it decided the end of a trilogy and spawned two separate Clone Wars cartoons so... It's just a little weird that it's not more beloved.

I've heard some critics call it an overcorrection from The Phantom Menace which I can confidently say might be for the best. It has its problems, it's overly long, Anakin and Padme have as much chemistry as tap water, Dooku shows up 75% into the film and that's a supreme waste of Sir Christopher Lee, Hayden Christensen tries and fails to deliver anything close to a film carrying performance, but considering the god-awful lines he gets you can't really blame him and the film is long, it's so long...

But that all seems kind of trivial.

Do I think it's the best film? I don't know. I'd genuinely say though that it ranks higher than most. It might even be the highlight of the prequel trilogy.

But for now, that's really all I have to say on that. I encourage you to give the film a second look if you haven't in a while. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Next up is Revenge Of The Sith and I'm excited. I think I might even be sad to say goodbye to the prequel trilogy but I'm happy to just be into Star Wars again. We'll see how long that lasts.

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Review: Return Of The Jedi

Return Of The Jedi was the film I feared rewatching the most, it's the one I've built up a fair amount of animosity towards over the years.

But despite all that I think I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

It's still plagued by the same problem as all the original trilogy films, being overlong with flat characters and the Ewoks still test me and the first act is only marginally connected to the core crux of the film as it resolves plot points from the previous movie. Boba Fett goes out kind of like a chump despite how much he's hyped up and there is all kinds of grossness involved with Leia.

But despite all that I really did end up having a good time with it.

I think the speeder scene on the moon of Endor really does still hold up, I love the battle between Luke and Vader and how the film's resolution doesn't rest on simply that might is right but that these two beings driven into conflict have to look deep inside themselves and question their base assumptions about the world.

I was surprised at how hard that beat hits.

This might end up being the most positive review I'm going to do of the series and I'm glad there were still a couple surprises left for me at the end of it all.

Now there are only the prequels, sequels and spin-offs left and for the first time in a while... It feels good to watch Star Wars again.

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Review: Empire Strikes Back

Empire is the awkward middle child of the Original Trilogy and it shows.

My biggest takeaway ended up being how much I started waiting for things to happen. Waiting for Luke's training to be over, waiting for Han and Leia to get to Cloud City, waiting for Boba to finally chase after them...

I think there was supposed to be a more quiet, meditative quality to Empire but I think it's just filled with a lot of dead air.

What I did end up liking was the battle against the walkers on Hoth, I still think it's the best part of the film and once we're in Cloud City, Lando's inclusion is genuinely welcome. I like his character a lot, an old gambler and outlaw who started an operation that might be extra-legal but it put pressure on him to grow and become dependable. That's neat. That's a neat character arc.

Overall I think I found Empire easier to get through, I think less bloat in the narrative compared to A New Hope makes it an easier watch.

More of Han and Leia's garbage romance does mean that I seriously start questioning whether or not the straights are okay but I'm not here for epic romance. Star Wars is bad at romance. To this day the only people who have genuine chemistry in this whole franchise are Obi and Ventress so take that for what it's worth.

I think one of the weaker points of the film is that when you already know the Luke and Vader reveal, it's robbed of a lot of cinematic intrigue. A lot of the beats don't land because they're undercooked and while the actors are trying their best to sell these performances, it's in the service of material that doesn't do them justice. The Original Trilogy seems far better at grand ideas and special effects than it is at quieter character moments.

I did like old as fuck Yoda who is a little loopy. I actually forgot how the prequels and clone wars made him look all wise and serious when Yoda's actually more of a goofy grandfather muppet type. Things that were lost, I guess.

I'm going to wrap it up here, there are more films to go through and I don't want to spend too much time dissecting them. I'm going to restate what I said about A New Hope that there just isn't as much in the original trilogy that sticks out in my mind. The flaws might actually make the prequels more memorable and I think I end up enjoying them more because of that.

Not looking forward to Return of the Jedi though. Never really liked Ewoks. Ugly little toothy dog-bears that they are.

Jawas don't get enough love.

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Review: A New Hope

A New Hope is one of those films I have very little to say about.

It's well made, a classic and it earns its place in the pantheon of must-watch films but if I go purely by my enjoyment of my time with it, I can sincerely say it wasn't as fun or interesting as I'd hoped it to be.

This isn't my first rodeo, I watched A New Hope back as a child and over the years it's been kept fresh in my memory through cultural osmosis but I'd lie if I said it was something I was aching to go back to.

Whereas I'm surprised at how much I ended up enjoying The Phantom Menace upon repeat viewing, A New Hope I was startlingly apathetic towards.

I think a part of it is how some beats just don't connect with me. My particular standout is Luke finding the corpses of his aunt and uncle, a clearly traumatic and life-changing moment... But it's never mentioned save for one moment after it happens. Luke losing the only parental figures he's ever known is treated like getting begrudged permission to leave home. The lightsaber duel between Ben and Vader felt more flaccid and limp than ever. Han Solo's once-charming mischief comes off as boarish and the casual sexism that goes unchallenged kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

Other problems also crop up, but I'll get to those in a bit. If I had to describe my experience in microcosm it's that partway through I'd just.. Walked away. Seriously, I walked away to go to the bathroom and for 45 minutes just forgot to come back. Perhaps in '78 it was a breath of fresh air for genre films but with my current taste and having lived out two decades of watching sci-fi, it just doesn't feel as monumental as some make it out to be.

Still, I didn't hate the film. It was perfectly watchable. Not a revelatory film experience, actually, the mundanity of it all kind of seeped in and it just felt like I was watching a decent pilot episode for a TV show I had a passing interest in.

The flaws of A New Hope are mundane. They're... Barely worth talking about.

One thing the prequel trilogy does have is flaws worth talking about and I think both as a critic and an audience member I'd prefer a film that has a couple noteworthy flaws than a film that's decently good, perhaps even great but has just very little to leave behind when the credits roll.

Still, I welcome the rest of the films as a chance to re-examine this pop culture giant.

Perhaps I'll rediscover what it is that attracted me to these films in the first place.

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Review: The Phantom Menace

Episode 1 of Star Wars is kind of the holy grail of bad Star Wars movies. Between Jar Jar Binks and overly explained Mido-Chlorians, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone disagreeing that it's bad.

So uh, here's a lukewarm defense of it.

I'm not going to say it isn't flawed or that there aren't major problems. Anakin kind of fails upwards, and despite the majority of the plot hinging on Padme she ends up taking a back seat for most of the film. There are 55 separate wipe transitions, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are clearly the people who matter here but they have to constantly share screen time with unlikeable CGI monstrosities and well... You know. The accents.

There are reasons to dislike this film.

But I was surprised at how much I didn't end up hating it on rewatch. I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought. The stuff that holds up still does. Pod Racing is great, Obi and QG versus Darth Maul is great, in fact any time Obi and QG are on screen together it's a pretty fun ride.

Coming back to anything after a long hiatus is kind of a tough feat and no one really knows what the best way to go about it is. I think The Force Awakens had more success than The Phantom Menace in that regard but it's clear just how many kinks the original trilogy left to iron out, and while The Phantom Menace is definitely not the answer, I do think it was at least a great shot in the arm for the franchise.

It's a little hard to quantify where I'd put it now. It's not a great film but I also don't think it's an unsaveably bad one. A couple edits here and there could easily put The Phantom Menace as one of the best Star Wars films of all time, but personally, the less George Lucas touches Star Wars, the better at this point.

If you haven't seen it, I'd still recommend it, if you haven't seen it in a while, I think you'll be surprised at how much holds up but either way, don't expect it to blow your mind. It's the phantom fucking menace, so, you know.

Prepare for all that entails.

55 wipes, man. Someone needs to bat Lucas's hand from the keyboard.

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Review: Netflix's You

The first thing I thought at the end of the first episode of Netflix's You was, Oh no, I really like Joe.

And that's awful, but also the point.

Netflix's You is a psychological thriller that will make you forget that it isn't a 2009 Rom Com film right up until it has a big twist to hit you with. Everything is there, the meet-cute the quirky love interest, the whirlwind romance.

Except of course that Joe is human garbage and he deserves nothing less than to fail at every opportunity.

And that's kind of great. Joe is objectively the bad guy but you can't help but root for him. He deserves to fail, he deserves to get hurt, he deserves all the bad things that happen to him but you want him to succeed, you want him to get the girl and that is terrifying.

It's a unique type of horror, it's grounded in the likeability and charm that real-life stalkers often have. Joe seems like a charming, nice, safe guy on the surface. He reads, he's articulate, he's smart, and super cute. But he will also murder in your name.

Just when you think there's no territory for the show to explore, it often pulls out a surprisingly profound aspect of dating, things like falling out of love with a partner. This show about the worst relationship surprisingly has more insightful things to say about a healthy relationship than most shows about relatively healthy couples. It's meditative on the complexities of intertwining your life with another person, while also making you fear very deeply that the person you're with might be a stalker and murderer.

It's subversive, in a strange way. Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti have done a wonderful job of bringing the central premise of the book to life, while using all the techniques that makes the medium of television so different.

It's not without its flaws though. The gimmick can lean a little too much on Joe's side and there's a fair bit of plot contrivance to tie together some of the story beats. And for as likeable as Joe is, Beck can kind of be the worst. The finale will either work for you or it won't and it does take eleven episodes for Beck to get a clue.

But despite some hiccups, Netflix's You is compelling, gripping, thrilling and terrifying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go watch something with Penn Badgeley where I don't feel guilty about thirsting over him.

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Review; Ratchet And Clank (2002)

The original Ratchet and Clank is the perfect midpoint between 3D platformer and third person shooter.

And that's not the greatest thing.

While sequels would refine how to better blend fast paced shooting with clever platforming, this first installment manages to execute on the platforming well enough but drops the ball in the shooter mechanics, with a serious aversion to adopting a twin stick layout. That's not to say all shooter games would benefit from a twin stick layout but Ratchet and Clank 2002 definitely would.

It's hard for me to recommend anyone play the game to completion. There's a stealth section near the end that unceremoniously marks the point where the game stops being fun. Going back to Veldin for the endgame is especially more of a chore than a victory lap. And while the weapon selection is too large to fit inside your quick select, there's very little flow and synergy between Ratchet's arsenal. Your tactical options are severely limited and it leaves you wanting for even the basics of any respectable shooter's weapon selection. If nothing else, just one sniper weapon. Just one.

You'll also find that the bolt requirements will suddenly skyrocket in the mid to end game and you'll go from comfortably growing your arsenal to feeling like you have far too much money for just ammo and far too little to buy anything meaningful, with the best solution being the treasure hunter gadget you can acquire. It left me wishing for some sort of combat arena or a series of platforming gauntlets to play for money, and I'd even accept the asinine Quark minigames from the third game.

And no, hoverboard racing does not count. You make nearly nothing from it.

While the story is actually kind of a highlight and there are gags that are genuinely funny, it's perfectly okay to give this one a miss. Overall it's perhaps the worst of the PS2 games and I'd recommend any game that comes after just before it, but there's still fun to be had if you can grit your teeth through a frustrating end game.

If you must, I would recommend playing it at least for long enough to acquire the employee discount and most of the weapons, sans the more expensive ones.

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Review: Shadow The Hedgehog (2005)

Remember when you were a kid and you had a lot of angst and you went through this edgy period that you now cringe at as an adult?

Shadow The Hedgehog is the ill-conceived pseudo sequel to Sonic Heroes and Adventure 2, as well as one of the last games Yuji Naka worked on before leaving Sonic Team and Sega.

Before we go any further, I’d like to posit that by ill-conceived I don’t mean that it was a bad idea to make the game, just that the concept was under-developed, much like Shadow’s character. A spin-off game based off a then-popular character could have been a booster shot that sparked new life and interest in the franchise. And Shadow was the ideal candidate. But alas, instead, we now live in the timeline where Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic ’06 were released just one year apart.

To start at the top, progression through the narrative of the game is needlessly complex for how simple it really is. Shadow, who still doesn’t have his memories back, sees an invasion attempt happening and from there he goes on a quest to learn about his own past. After some soul searching, Shadow comes to a conclusion about who he is and what he feels his role in the world is.

And to the game’s credit, I actually like the mechanical structuring of morality. Rather than being a text prompt, you have to actively help people to be good, serve Black Doom in order to be evil or kind of just run past everything. The actual act of being good or bad usually boils down to annoying quests where you have to collect or destroy X amount of things for Y character, but I like the idea more than the implementation.

And yeah, you are going to have the most fun running past everything because the core issue that lies in the heart of Shadow The Hedgehog is that it’s kind of just a mediocre Sonic game with little pieces of Devil May Cry combat attached. Shadow has the Venom problem where he exists not as a character foil to the hero, but as a shadow-self, a dark doppelganger, a personified version of the path not taken. In gameplay, that amounts to Shadow being a texture swap with a bad attitude. Whereas a game based on Tails might include more flight based platforming puzzles and a game based on Knuckles would deal more with gliding, Shadow kind of boils down to being more of an aesthetic choice. But unlike in Adventure 2, Shadow’s moveset here is so weak. Hand to hand combat is so tacked on that if you tug on it too hard, it will fall off. The spindash is an actual joke. The homing attack at least works alright, but it’s not quite the powerhouse that some weapons are.

Shadow’s chaos powers are woefully under-utilized. Filling either the hero or dark bar gives you the ability to either use Chaos Control or Chaos Blast, but neither are more useful than just the passive bonus of having unlimited ammo with your currently equipped weapon. Furthermore, Chaos Control, which you build up doing “heroic” things actually fundamentally clashes with the collectathon structure of Hero missions, as you whiz by all of the objectives. Chaos Blast is kind of just a screen nuke, but it doesn’t do as much damage as the flashy visuals would suggest. Like, Sonic Heroes managed to make the ability halfway useful, here it just feels like a gimped version of the team attack.

The music is… Actually enjoyable, in a cheesy Nu Metal kind of way. Almost Dead is actually a banger, in a way that only try-hard 2000s Rob Zombie sound-alikes can be. The music probably gets closer to that Devil May Cry aesthetic the game is trying to chase.

And what’s kind of baffling is that there already is a version of this game that works; It’s called Ratchet and Clank. And although Ratchet and Clank is a lot slower, it executes the hybrid of third person shooting and platforming much more eloquently. This was the game Shadow The Hedgehog should probably have tried to imitate.

Final thoughts; this is not a game one plays with a completionist mindset, unless you really like Westopolis, because getting all the endings means playing Westopolis 10 times. The game is also trying way too hard, I mean, just listen to these menu sound effects. I remember having some fun with the multiplayer, but it’s entirely skippable.

And my last point is this; The middle of the road ending which you get from going off and doing your own thing while the plot happens at you is perhaps the only ending that has any real narrative stakes to it. You get to the end and Shadow concludes that he is an android, built to replace the Shadow that died in Adventure 2. He doesn’t remember anything because he physically never experienced those things. And this would have been kind of a great move to pull and I kind of wish this was the canon ending. See, as an Android, there’s a lot more room for Shadow and Omega to do some buddy cop stuff if they were both Eggman’s creations who kind of hate their creator. There’d be room for Shadow to have a narrative arc in future games where he tries to find his place in the world as the lookalike of the martyred Shadow in Adventure 2. Shadow would actually have a reason to explore intense rage as a being not really programmed with a lot of empathy, while trying to live up to the legacy of the original Shadow could be a motivation for Shadow to actually develop that empathy. And the on and off again rivalry between Shadow and Sonic would have extra dramatic stakes as Shadow now not only wants to prove that he’s better than Sonic, but it’s also a battle to prove that he isn’t just a shadow of Shadow the hedgehog.

The canon ending has Shadow discover he’s part alien and re-learning the lessons he already learned in Heroes and Adventure 2, and if that part alien thing comes out of left field and seems tacked on and pointless, don’t worry, because Sega all but forgets it ever happened.

All Hail Shadow, indeed.

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As It Turns Out, DC's Titans Is Pretty Good

I was not rooting for this show. DC's Titans is the kind of ill-conceived premise that you'd think would leave a show dead-on-arrival. The marketing for this thing promised a surreal, overly gritty and superficially mature show with all the trappings that come with it.

Except DC's Titans is actually kind of good?

Trust me, I was the last person to expect something like that to happen. I saw the trailers, the same as you did and when Robin dropped the f-bomb and put some disrespect on Batman's name I was ready to hate-watch this thing as it turned into a glorious edgelord nightmare.

Turns out that I got a pretty great version of the Doom Patrol in the sneakiest backdoor pilot I've seen in a while, along with some pretty cathartic confrontations between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. Hawk and Dove also turned out to be characters I unironically love and oh, man Wonder Girl? Even Wonder Girl was lovable. And I thought I was going to hate Starfire but Anna Diop was kind of acting circles around the rest of the cast and doing it while wearing actual fashion crimes.

It's not all good.

The effects can look cheap, poor Anna Diop's costuming suffers, the show dips into some adorable levels of edginess, Raven's character is kind of incoherent and there are as many gorgeous shots as there are moments of colour palette drab.

But that's as much as I can say. As it turns out, DC's Titans might not be the most faithful to the source material and it sure doesn't have a lot of respect for convention but maybe that's the best part about it. In a lot of ways, it is the superficially mature show that the marketing promised but in a lot of others, it's a clever new spin on a gritty group of characters dealing with a violent world while wearing superhero masks. For all its faults, DC's Titans is actually one of the better versions of the Teen Titans. It's not gonna compete with your nostalgia for the 2003 show but you'd be surprised how well the Teen Titans work when filtered through the lens of Watchmen.

Hard recommend. It might not be for everyone but you'll probably be surprised at how much this is probably for you.

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Taking Twilight Seriously: Twilight Saga (2008)

Stephanie Meyer's Twilight has always been the source of derision among critical discourse. Her books sparked an international trend that went viral like only massive properties like Pokemon have achieved, and the books directly spawned 50 Shades of Grey through Erica Mitchell.

But to say they've been hated and berated would be unbelievably understated.

I remember watching The Vampire Diaries for the first time and the experience of watching a scene where one of the principal characters in the adaptation of a series of Young Adult novels reading and talking down to another similar brand of a Young Adult novel was shocking. It was like a Coke vs Pepsi ad, but played like Pepsi was winning the game of "Who Comes Off As Higher Brow Fiction".

Now to be fair, The Vampire Diaries as a show does outclass the Twilight Saga by a fair margin but you'd think there would be more honour among hated Vampire Fiction Franchises.

But it's been lingering in the back of my mind since, and now that I'm a fair bit older and I'm over the irrational hatred of this schpiel, I wanna examine it. I wanna examine it in good faith. I wanna dissect and understand this series of films in particular.

So to that end, I will be taking Twilight seriously. Starting with the 2008 film, Twilight.

The film starts off with a monologue where Bella says "I'd never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a pretty good way to go. The deer is then hunted in a highly edited sequence by a vampire, likely one of the Cullens.

Underneath this opening statement,  there's the imagery of a deer drinking water at a pond, and it's clear this is supposed to represent the death of innocence, the deer representing Bella's innocence and the death taking the form of Bella having to choose her mother's happiness over her own. It's not a bad leg to start the film on, a lot of vampire literature does. The stakes are set, and I actually don't hate this shot, so the film at least starts on a strong note. The editing obfuscates a lot of the action and while I'm not a huge fan of the jumpiness and shaky cam, which was prevalent in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I can still enjoy the tension of the scene.

It cuts to Bella waxing lyrical about how she'll miss Phoenix and her mother. "So I can't bring myself to regret the decision to leave home" is a weird sentiment to follow up that first statement with. The implication here is that Bella sees moving in with her father as the end of one life, but she "dies" in place of her mother who wants to travel with her new boyfriend. This sets up Bella as kind of a martyr figure and honestly makes her mother kind of a bad parent. But Bella is making the adult decision to leave her old life in Phoenix for a new one with her father, and that's actually one of the few endearing qualities she has as a protagonist.

Cue travel montage, indie folk song, helicopter shot and title card.

So, Forks Washington.

Phoenix Arizona is sunny and hot, Forks, Washington is cloudy and miserable. Contrast. Allegorical for Bella's view of her new life.

Also, that shot where the truck oddly has no driver comes in. Always weirds me out.

Bella's back in her estranged Dad's house and Charlie is trying to make a connection in his estranged dad way, and can I just say that Billy Burke as an awkward moustache dad is my favourite part of this whole production. Charlie comes off as very human and likeable. Bella also refers to her dad by his first name. Unsure if this is supposed to add to his estrangement, but I know a lot of kids from divorced parents and even the most estranged still call their biological parents Dad or Mom. There's nothing to really indicate that Bella and her father have any lingering animosity, it just seems mostly like two people who fail to connect.

Enter Jacob and Billie Black. I'll give props to Taylor Lautner for making the scene that extra bit awkward with an attempt at a handshake with him then retracting it because... They've already met. No really, they used to play together as kids so this is oddly endearing, although it makes Jacob into more of an ass knowing what's to come. But right here, about five minutes into the film, it's not nearly as offensive as I remember it on first viewing. Also, Billy Burke as an awkward moustache dad pretend-fighting in the background still makes me laugh. Can we have more of him, please? He's like a grown Michael Cera.

Next is Bella going to school I think there's also a relatable feeling here, being the new kid coming halfway through the semester in a shitty second-hand car, that, while well meant, kind of makes you stand out as the outsider.

Eric, the eyes and ears of this place, is immediately kind of an ass. He comes off way too strong and you gotta really feel for Bella, five minutes at this place and someone's already given her shit for the car her dad bought her and her childhood friend painstakingly fixed up, then this douchenozzle is asking her on a date after knowing her only from the myspace account he probably stalked her on. And also makes her front page news. Which means this school must have the absolutely slowest news days. Like, even my small town school paper had like, people winning awards, or regional snakes, or something on the front page. "New Girl Transfers To School" is the opposite of news. 

Bella's remarkable unatheleticism is also hilarious to me. Like, they're not doing anything super involved, this is a casual game of volleyball and her face is magnetically attracting the ball.

Mike Newton, the jock dude, is the second person she's met and he's already trying to hit on her, which makes the attitude of boys at this school alarming. Yo, give them woman like a minute to breathe before you hit on her.

And here comes Anna Kendrick as Jessica to try adorkable the scene up a little. Also, Jessica, you can't just ask people from Arizona why they're not tan, come on, get it together.

Okay, lunch room, and then the dude who gave Bella shit about her car then kisses her on the cheek, which is like, dude, you need to learn a thing or two about consent before you Kevin Spacey yourself out of a career.

If you're wondering why I'm spending so much time on Bella's friends, it's because the film spends an inordinate amount of time introducing these characters who are ancillary at best. They're props in the background and The film would probably have been better if this was made more concise. Also, Bella's friends are all kind of shitty people.

Anyway so onto the introduction of the Cullens.

So allow me a weird tangent; This whole set up is really awkward.

Like, I get it, they're supposed to be hundred-year-old beings trapped in the unaging bodies of adolescents but it still baffles me as to why anyone would want to return to highschool. Also, the "foster kids" story they cooked up is unnecessarily convoluted. I mean, a boarding house run by eccentric rich folk would have worked just fine.  

Jasper played by Jackson Rathbone was also in The Last Airbender as Sokka. That's a reminder I did not want to sit with alone.

So just, as a human who once was a teenage boy, the scene where Edward sees Bella and gets a whiff of her scent is... Hilarious.

What's supposed to be happening is that Bella's scent sends Edward into a lustful state where he wants to feed on her so bad his fangs pop out, but the implication here, was he looks at Bella, leans awkwardly in his seat and the pulls this face like he's seconds away from puking his lungs out because he smelled her hair.

And that's unintentionally hilarious. Why was this shot this way? Why was this written this way? Why was this edited this way? It's so tonally dissonant from the meet-cute that I'm expecting to happen that Twilight almost neuters all of the romantic intrigue in this one scene.

via GIPHY

Also, there's the angel symbolism which is a little weird. Like, thematically, Edward Cullen supposedly saves Bella from the humdrum of her boring life with her father. Within the narrative, he's lined up in front of angel wings in a shot where he can't contain his vampire boner and Bella thinks he wants to puke because her hair has a dank stank. I cannot reiterate enough how tonally confused this scene is.

After that, we're in the diner with her dad and there are two parts of this I wanna draw attention to. The waitress mentions that her dad has the berry cobbler once a week, her favourite dessert on the menu when she was a child. This happens to be the second time where we're told about how much her dad misses her, but the next shot, Charlie reaching for the ketchup as to hand it to Bella at the same time she does? That actually worked. I like how it shows that Charlie still does on some level know his daughter, even though it's awkward and he struggles to close that gap. Honestly, I think Twilight inadvertently began a much better story of a girl and her dad reconnecting after a long period of estrangement but instead opted to start this fantasy romance which is, unfortunately, not as strong. 

Bella's mom calls, Edward doesn't show up to school for a couple days, nothing super interesting happening here.

Cut to the shaky cam of the antagonists of the film claiming their first victim, a factory worker. Already said my piece on how I am not a fan of the way this was shot, but the pacing of the scene is decently quick, almost making it seem like an action movie for a second. While their introduction is necessary to forward the plot, they're going to have one more scene where they kill another ancillary character from the diner and then won't be mentioned again until the last 40 minutes of the film. And these three vampires are going to attempt to fill out the drama of a lot of Twilight's ongoing narrative, despite being kind of an afterthought.

Bella's dad replaces her tires and can I yet again just say that Billy Burke tries his hardest to carry this film, bless him.

Cut back to Bella's friends being the literal worst and now the actual plot of this movie starts. We're about 20 minutes in and this is what we've been setting up for, girl has met boy, boy has met girl, and now the inciting incident happens where our protagonists speak.

The first thing that happens is this whole scene is interrupted by the science professor promising a Golden Onion to the first partners who can separate and label the cells into the phases of mitosis correctly.

Also, Edward keeps awkward pushing shit along the desk towards her which serves very little narrative purpose and honestly, Robert, not one of your best performances.

So Bella and Edward make a connection, and while I hate the way Kristen Stewart just doesn't finish half her sentences in this scene, there's almost the glimmer of some chemistry here. Guy has been weird around girl, girl is stand-offish, guy asks about the weather, girl is nonplussed but answers anyway, girl lets something personal slip and guy asks about it.

Formulaic but it does get our protagonists where they need to be. Some decent J-cuts to keep the conversation going.

Edward shows some emotional intelligence by honing in on the fact that moving for the sake of her mother's happiness has made Bella unhappy, and that observation is surprisingly keen for the guy who had a vampire boner just a couple scenes ago. Edward's flip-flopping between charming highschooler and near sociopathic behaviour is a running theme and it muddies the character of Edward Cullen a lot. I'd personally have leaned more into his charm, and Robert Pattinson can do charming really well. Edward exits the scene in a huff when Bella notices his eyes changed colour, which is honestly such a narrative footnote that it's barely worth mentioning.

via GIPHY

Next, the black van nearly hits Bella, Edward stops it, Bella ends up fine but in the hospital Doctor Carlisle Cullen is there and can I just say that vampire doctor is basically an oxymoron. 

Carlisle, Edward and Esme have it out because of Edward's recklessness, but Bella overhears. After some back and forth about the accident, Edward tries to gaslight Bella and that's always the sign of a healthy and emotionally stable person to enter a romantic relationship with. And for the next bit, we have Edward just... Just being the worst.

More flip-flopping between being stand-offish and the film really doesn't know how to portray Edward's inner struggle with wanting Bella but also not wanting to hurt her. There's some good drama in there somewhere but the script doesn't carry it, Pattinson can't sell the little he has to work with and it all falls flat in the worst way.

So the gang goes to the beach, Bella invites Edward, he says no, Jacob spins Bella a story that makes her curious. Bella's friends invite her to go prom dress shopping, and then after a trip to the book store, Bella finds a group of rapists ready to rape as they get their rapey friends and alcohol for the raping. I mean, you can watch this scene for yourself and decide how problematic it is, but the overbearing threat of sexual violence is so lazily inserted that this would knock an entire point off my final rating were I to review this film.

Edward comes and stuntmans in his fucking Volvo and then is like, "I should have ripped their heads off" and Bella still somehow doesn't see Edward as the twelve red flags in a trenchcoat that he is.

After that, they end up at a restaurant, where Edward switches from murderous maniac to cool suave guy, and this date is almost charming, despite the lazy attempt at infusing tension in the previous scene. This could also have been made more concise by just having Edward and Bella meet in the book store, and there could be some intrigue with Edward knowing his way around the store and charming Bella with his book knowledge, but no, Edward Cullen, Volvo Stuntman. So unnecessary but it got a good laugh out of me.

Inside Edwards acts cute for a second but then turns the stalker to like, 11. Edward talks about his mind-reading powers for a bit but then accidentally makes it out to be that Bella is vapid, then mocks Bella for thinking he insinuated that she's vapid. Classy.

Of course, there's the scene. You know.

The scene.


via GIPHY

The scene.

This is the point where there is some decent albeit cheesy romantic dialogue thrown in, but Pattinson botches the delivery so badly that what would have been an endearing line just comes off as terrifying.

I'm going to jump ahead of time to Edward and Bella finally getting over the initial barrier to their relationship. There's a scene where Edward comes to pick Bella up and her narration here is probably indicative of how unbelievably out of place it is. Bella's entire character could probably have been improved by cutting out most of her voice over, save for the opening lines, and the ones where the vampire James pretends to kidnap her mother. But I'll get to that in a moment.

Eventually, Bella's mom calls, and we have the return of the thematic throughline; The room is brightly lit, and Bella admits for the first time that she likes living in Forks Washington, albeit only because Edward also lives in Forks. Edward interrupts and the two have a scene where they stay up late talking. Notably in this montage, Bella falls asleep, and Edward gently strokes her cheek. Bella then cuddles up closer to Edward. Moments like these are ones that the film needed more of, just to really sell Edward and Bella's relationship.

After that, Vampire Baseball.


via GIPHY


It's goofy and silly and it might be the one time everyone on screen is having any actual fun. There's some sloppy wirework and you can physically see the actors gear up to jump on a trampoline. But, it's still fun, despite the relatively low production quality of the scene.

That's cut short by the arrival of James, Victoria, and Laurent. For what are essentially our main antagonists, they've all been extremely uninvolved in the plot. Sure, they committed two on-screen murders, but they were of characters we didn't really know or care about. And that's the biggest downfall of these characters. The Cullens don't know anything about them, they've really only been making Charlie's job hard, and their reasons for wanting mess with Bella is... Contrived. Actually, only one of them actually wants to mess with Bella.

They start and Edward gets super protective over Bella, but as they're about to leave, James ends up down wind of Bella's dank stank, which makes the man go full-on hunter mode. Which makes him get the most characterization out of the three. It's also notable that Laurent is the third black character, and I think he might be the only named one in the film, which is emblematic of other problems in the film, but at least there's some representation of Native American characters. Notable that this isn't only a problem with Twilight, it's also a huge problem with shows like Buffy, and the Underworld movies.

Anyway, James begins to hunt Bella and she decides that in order to keep Charlie safe she has to come up with an excuse to leave. Bella interprets this as an opportunity to then repeat the same hurtful sentiments her mother used all those years back. It's notable that this is the kind of reckless thing a misguided teenager might do, but watching Charlie try his best to hold onto his daughter who, by all accounts, thinks martyring herself for the benefit of others is still the correct thing to do.

James, being a smart person, listens in on the conversation, and figures out Bella is going to her mother's or is at least pretending to. He then uses a recording of her mother from a videotape from her childhood to trick Bella into thinking he has her mother, and she must now abandon the safety of the Cullens and confront him.

So the thesis of the film is then fully met as Bella goes to meet James, now narratively coming to a head as Bella chooses once again to die in place of her mother, although the death is now literal rather than allegorical. She's also chosen to try to protect her father from James, which has brought her further unhappiness.

To me it seems that the logical conclusion here would be to have Bella learn a lesson about how martyrdom doesn't pay off, and that she has to focus on her own safety and happiness, instead of trying to keep others from sharing the burden with her.

Instead, Edward comes in and saves her, she nearly dies, then the movie ends with her at the prom. Also, Jacob shows up to remind us that he's still in this story.

To be fair, Bella kinda does get put through hell for deciding to martyr herself once again, but Bella never really learns from her mistakes. James humiliates her, threatens her, breaks her leg, tosses her around, bites her and thereby injects her with a venom that puts her through excruciating pain, but all of this builds up to a moment for Edward, in which he learns to find the willpower to exercise restraint. Which, honestly, kind of sucks as a climax.

It's clear that this isn't Edward's story, it's Bella's. The filmmakers have essentially robbed Bella of her great revelation moment. And she didn't learn to find happiness on her own terms, the closest thing she finds is the desire to die and end her human life in order to find happiness in a life with Edward.

This discovery within Bella isn't one of character growth, it's the same mistake in a different flavour. I think this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the themes the filmmakers brought up.

If I had to rewrite this ending, I would have had Charlie be the one to burst in and save Bella, and the two of them together then find a way to beat James. Edward could then be too late to save Bella, and the ultimate lesson here for Edward could be that he can't keep pushing Bella away as a means to protect her.

Bella would then make a meaningful connection with her father, tell her mother that she'd like to remain in Forks, and the death of her innocence could be capped off with a shot of like, a baby deer learning to stand by itself and become an adult, that from the death of innocence there can be the birth of adulthood.

But the planting of themes that the filmmakers never follow through on is kind of the gist of Twilight. It's not thematically driven, and it's trying to be character driven but the only character that's even remotely worth watching the film for is Charlie.

The first twenty minutes of the film actually does set up a strong premise, but within the three acts the film meanders too much in a premise it doesn't follow through on, which is Bella coming to terms with and finding happiness in Forks, and when the supernatural elements pick up, it's like the end point of a 40 minute pilot episode rather than the midpoint of a two hour film. The romance between Edward and Bella is almost believable but Edward's damage comes off so strong that his relationship with Bella is just toxic, with very little admittance of how toxic the relationship really is.

But there exists a good film in there somewhere. If you remove the supernatural elements, there's a strong narrative about reconnecting with an estranged parent and not taking the happiness of others as your responsibility. And if you cut out more of the creepy scenes with Edward, with a couple changes there is the germ of a fun teen romance hidden in there.

I will say that there's a lot of newfound appreciation that I have for Twilight in a lot of regards. There are things I like, this isn't a total garbage fire of a script and plot, there's something in there that in the hands of the right director and scriptwriter, could be a good film. There's probably a way to still marry the supernatural elements and small-town drama.

Maybe in a couple years, there'll be a worthwhile reboot.

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Review: Sonic Forces

So I finally got my hands on Sonic Forces and I've been trying to reconcile my love for the boost formula with the eventual end quality of the product in my hands.

And the end quality isn't unplayable but there's a lot of the soul of Sonic missing here.

Classic Sonic was a mistake. There's no two ways about it, this team might be capable of a semi-passable recreation of the physics but there's a fundamental lack of understanding of the flow behind a Sonic level here and it shows. The approximation of the physics also stands out due in no small part to Sonic Team having already done this branch correctly in a 3D space in Sonic Generations.

Classic Sonic is not the only character where the physics and responsiveness feel off. I always felt like I was overshooting platforms or that a homing attack wasn't coming out when I needed it to. Also, guys, come on, d-pad controls. Yes, I know I can remap them in the options menu but the slog of remapping it every time I finish a Classic Sonic stage is just sloppy design.

There was however a lot of joy to be found in the character customization aspect of the game. While the options may seems scarce at the start, the customization ends up having a broad variety of options with a few free DLC packs to round off the collection. I do wish that the ability to change species was unlocked from the start so that there was more room for experimentation and freedom but I found myself still enjoying the acquisition of new little bits and bobs to dress my character in. If there's anything to sell the game on, it's the satisfaction of the childhood need to insert yourself alongside the hero and stand as their equal, and Sonic Forces definitely is more of a game about rising up alongside Sonic than being Sonic and having to rise above adversity.

Negatives come back in when I think about the difficulty. Sonic Forces ranges from insulting to cheap. Certain sections don't even have a failure state while having windows for input so generous you could make a sandwich before you miss your opportunity and others where you're put into unfair cycles that are impossible to predict or just showcase the imperfect physics in the most frustrating way. There's a particularly obnoxious area in Death Egg involving a moving platform and two guns with limited move to maneuver that nearly made me snap my controller in half. However, I'll give an appreciative nod to the fact that lives are no longer a factor to concern myself with, even if it takes away some of the functionality of the rings.

From a narrative perspective, I found a lot of the writing to be cheesy and some lines are just badly written end of story. But it's a Sonic game, I'm not coming here for the intricate structure of the plot and subtle but insightful allegory, although it's not hard to ask at least one person on staff to try, is it? The best thing I can say is that the voice cast does a lot with a little here, Liam O'Brien is carrying a lot with his performance. But there were a couple familiar faces I found myself enjoying seeing, even Charmy, as crazy as he drove me in Heroes.

The music direction in the game was for the most part enjoyable. While some tracks suffer from grating synths, mainly the Classic Sonic stage themes, there's a lot of Drum And Bass tracks which play well with Sonic's brand as well as give stages an appropriate sense of excitement.

The recurring theme of the game is that Sonic Team has already demonstrated that they're capable of producing a quality product of this nature but either the new engine or hardware showcased that they've regressed a generation. A lot of fans, including myself, wanted to like Sonic Forces. And I don't hate it but to say I was more often frustrated than immersed is an understatement.

A soft recommendation for the custom character gameplay and one or two stand-out Modern Sonic levels but you should rather be playing Sonic Generations.

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Review: Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is often touted as the best game in the Sonic Franchise. While I can respect the opinions of other people and I know taste is subjective, I can’t say this is my favourite. Actually, for the longest time I kind of hated this game.

But I guess after playing it again and again over the years, I’ve warmed up to it. So being the masochist I am, I’ve decided to do a deep dive, and really see what makes this game tick.

Disclaimer, I’m not going to throw around the phrase “speed, platforming and exploration”. I think people need to remember that Shaymay is one guy who has one interpretation and I take issue with calling it the core elements of Sonic. Sonic was actually born from the experience Yuji Naka had speedrunning world 1-1 in Super Mario as he had to get to the warp pipes as fast as possible in order to catch up to the last place he progressed. If I had to break that down into a set of buzzwords, I could say the core elements are flow, multi-layered staging and tight mechanics that are conducive to finding the fastest route from start to end.

But it’s reductionist to boil the design of an entire game to three vague interlinking concepts. And whether you agree more with my interpretation or Shaymay’s comes down to personal choice and what you look out for in a Sonic game. I’m always looking for a fun level to try get a better time in. Which is why the classic trilogy doesn’t always appeal to my sensibilities. But don’t take this as me badmouthing Shaymay or anything, I actually think he’s done one of the best and most in-depth analyses on Sonic to date, and his Sonic Spitball series is an important landmark for the discussion of all things Sonic.

I just think he’s a little biased, is all.

Anyway, while I respect playing a game faithful to its release state, I’m also not a masochist. I’ll be using the Sonic 3 Complete Edition hack to illustrate most of my points, and I’ll be playing it through Fusion; Unfortunately Sega’s Unity Launcher causes immense slow-down and the simple launcher doesn’t accommodate for workshop content.

Onto the critique.

For those who aren’t in the know, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a physics based action platformer which rewards skilful play with a higher score and a faster completion time. Gather the  game’s seven collectables and you unlock a super form which can shave even more time off a run, although only after collecting 50 rings. There are three characters to play as, each with their own abilities which can make traversal or enemy encounters easier. Levels are  grouped into stages, which are divided by acts. Mini-bosses occur at the end of each act whilst boss encounters with the antagonist occur at the end of each stage.

It’s a solid game. However, here are the mechanics which, in my opinion, hold it back.

When you reach 9:59, you get a time over, which immediately subtracts a life. While this isn’t any real inconvenience in most stages, a lot of the later ones are designed to waste your time. A time over is a frustrating punishment for careful play, which is a crucial process for new players or players unfamiliar with the design of any given level. The game is basically saying, sorry, not fast enough, fuck you, try again, while also making stages so large and winding that they can genuinely take a full ten minutes to traverse. It’s archaic artificial difficulty. The timer also counts upwards instead of down, so unless you already know about the 9:59 rule, it’s going to hit you out of nowhere when it happens. Later games would remove this entirely, and I’m thankful. This brings me to the lack of conveyance to the player of certain game mechanics. The rules of blue sphere come to mind, but there’s also the old ceiling run that’s a beginner’s trap; To go right when Sonic is running on the ceiling, you must hold left. Which might sound obvious to you watching footage now, but it’s super unintuitive. This probably won’t bother you since you instinctively keep holding the direction you were pressing if you’re running up a slope, it does mean in those rare moments where you don’t hold any direction or hold the  wrong direction, you might not know why you’re losing speed.

The window between when Sonic can collect rings after taking a hit can really mess you up. For about half of Sonic’s invincibility frames, he’s actually not allowed to collect any rings. This is to prevent you from instantly recovering rings by falling into them, but often it’s just led to me standing around waiting for the game to decide, okay, cool, you’re allowed to get hitpoints back. Some places, the rings won’t even collide with the floor. The final boss is one case where your one ring will just fall into the abyss. I wish the rules for this were kept more consistent.

Finally, the insta-shield. For the longest time I didn’t even know what it did, but for the sake of thoroughness, the insta-shield is a mid-air ability for Sonic that extends the radius of his spinjump, gives him a frame or two of invincibility, however, the ability to bounce small projectiles away from him was only added in the rom hack, which is why I could never get as much use out of it before. Why the insta shield couldn’t reflect projectiles in the the original release is beyond me. Without that ability, it is objectively worse than flight or gliding. It’s not that I don’t like the Insta-Shield, I just never got the same mileage as I did with the ability to fly or glide. I’d trade it in for a Drop Dash in a heartbeat. I also appreciate the inclusion of the Super Peel Out in the hack, but considering it uses the same control scheme as the combination for flying with Sonic and Tails, I can understand why it was excluded. Still, if I’m playing as Sonic by himself, there’s no reason to not have the Super Peel Out, and it’s not like it’s any harder to program than a Spindash.

Angel Island Zone;

With all that out of the way, I’ll start at the start. Angel Island Zone.

Angel Island Zone is a pretty little stage, but overall it’s not even close to my favourite opening level. The main gimmicks here are the crumbling floors, the zip lines, the water hazards and there’s this tree Sonic runs up about a third of the way through that looks really awkward since the facing part of the tree is made transparent. It looks more like he’s caught in a whirlwind than as if he’s scaling the tree .

Aesthetically it has a lot of bright greens, cool blues, and earthy browns, and then the level changes into sickly yellows and aggressive oranges. The parallax scrolling has a ton of layers which makes the stage feel really alive.

The music is a fun little island jam that makes liberal use of marimbas and flutes, with a bouncy bass line on top of a Caribbean beat. Seriously, I just want to round up my friends and form a drum circle on the beach while this song plays. There’s a little bit of tonal dissonance when everything is on fire and there’s this lively jam playing but I’ll forgive it because this song is so, freaking, good.

As for the layout, the stage is mostly here to give you a quick tutorial on how to use elemental shields. Angel Island pretty tough as far as openers go, and while it’s not exactly controller snapping difficulty, Angel Island certainly won’t baby you. Maybe Green Hill or Emerald Hill would be more lenient but Angel Island isn’t going to fuck around, there’s water, there’s spikes, there’s spike ball shooting flowers, there’s rhino shaped goombas, spiked logs, platforms crumble and there’s a mini-boss after the first act. Luckily there aren’t any bottomless pits but the bar is set, and it only gets tougher from here. The big rings aren’t hidden too obscurely and with the barest amount of exploration you’re likely to nab at least one.

And as much as I like how active the platforming is, it’s kind of a shame the level never really has a  moment to take you for a ride. As overused as Green Hill is, it nails having this super fun tunnel that launches you into the air into a mess of rings, which culminates in this mini-challenge to stay in the air by bouncing off badniks. There’s really no equivalent in Angel Island because of how methodic it is about getting you from point A to B. You can’t underestimate the value of spectacle in a Sonic game, after all, part of why Sonic is so damn cool is because he doesn’t just run and jump, he’s running faster and jumping higher than any of his contemporaries.

Act 2 ends on a running segment where you gotta hold right to not die, and for all the shit people give Sonic Adventure, it surprises me that no one ever calls out this moment in Sonic 3. So this is me, calling it out. At least it’s brief but it definitely lacks the spectacle of later automated sections. After that we enter a bossfight bookended by two bottomless pits that is pretty much a waiting game if you don’t have the fire or lightning shield. And there’s going to be a reccuring theme of bosses who turn into a real pain when you don’t have the corresponding elemental shield. But Pop, bam, done, and with that we’re off to Hydrocity.

Hydrocity:

Hydrocity is a fan favourite level that I like the music and aesthetics of, but because of Sonic’s particular brand of underwater physics, this level always ends up being more of a nightmare than it has any right to be.

The background is layered with dark and foreboding blues that pan downwards into these gigantic pillars, but travel further up and you’ll see the purple brickwork of a coliseum. You know, I’ve never really figured out like what Hydrocity is supposed to be. Like, is it a flooded ancient city? A water treatment plant? An aqueduct? I don’t know but I like it. The music here is also all about the funk. The bass line is dominant, grabbing your attention with slaps and pops. The  keys open with an in your face slide before chiming in with a secondary line. The drums sound like they come right off a mid 90s MC Hammer track. I like to imagine a bustling night out in the city to Hydrocity’s theme, and were it set to a casino themed level, the song actually wouldn’t sound out of place. But the playful and trepidatious  tune fits the stage and bringing just the right amount of levity to what is otherwise a fucking nightmare for a hedgehog who can’t swim and is very easily impaled on spikes.

The layout is of made up of a top layer filled generously with loops and ramps. There are genuinely fun moments where Sonic reaches the speed necessary to run on water.  Contrasting that, the bottom half is water logged and just much slower. And, oh boy, do I mean much slower. Sonic feels like he’s walking through tar underwater, and his jump becomes floatier but with no extra gain in height. As far as water levels  go, Hydrocity is actually one of the better ones, and luckily the water sections don’t last too long if you know what you’re doing.

Still, the drowning alarm gives me nightmares. Those few repeating notes trigger a deep anxiety within my soul.

Act 1 houses most of the water segments but is generous enough with bubble shield capsules to make you feel like you aren’t in too much of a jam. The further you go, the more you’re funnelled to the top, until you’re dropped back down for an easy mini-boss. The Insta-shield is pretty useful for a lot of bosses designed with these projectile barriers but man, if they don’t get stale fast. Like, there are a lot of bosses that boil down to some metal thing with projectiles floating around in a circle. Is… Is that what you like? Is that what you want? Is this what makes Sonic 3 & Knuckles the gift from the gods on high?

Act 2 starts underwater and then gives you a precarious climb as a wall ominously closes in. This section gave me a lot of trouble as a kid, and if you have the original Sonic 3 layout, the level designer wanted to give you  an extra special “fuck you” in the form of this inconveniently placed spring. This section involves a lot of stopping and starting and I’m sad there isn’t an equivalent in Mania, because climbing this tower with the Drop Dash would probably make this section a helluva lot more fun.

After that it’s fans, spinny barrels and water slides. It’s a fun time, no doubt. While Angel Island isn’t my favourite opener, Hydrocity might just be my favourite sophomore level. It doesn’t have pipes of chemical plant nor does it have too many instances of bullshit crushing deaths.

The act 2 boss is Eggman dropping bombs and using a whirlpool to turn you into Sonic niblits, although the bombs might just induct you into the NASA space program first. You can stand on the  column of water for a platform, which is some videogame logic if I’ve ever seen it.

But with that, we’re at Marble Garden.

Marble Garden Zone:

Marble Garden Zone is a particular brand of fresh hell. Sharp slopes, spikes, enemies that are disguised as spikes, fuck-off big spike balls on chains, more fucking spikes, the most inconsequential mini-boss of all time. Also crushing blocks.

The background is a multi-layered landscape of purple mountains, blue skies and fresh green trees. Look closely and you can also see a couple pillars poking from the trees. The Aztec ruins vibe this stage gives of is really fun, but that’s about the most fun thing about it. The foreground houses what I assume are peach trees, and the patchy brickwork of pale grey, earthy orange and muted purple really drive home that South American feel the level has.

The music sounds little like the theme of every 90s sitcom ever, and but the keys eventually devolve into what sounds like a harmonic minor scale, bringing an interesting little twist. Although the keys also get a little cheeky with this descending slide that’s the musical equivalent of a wink. The bass line is what’s driving the song here though, and I kind of just wanna loiter on some street corner with a backwards cap and a boom box.

Act 1 is mostly consists of sharp slopes, the spinning windmill platforms that usually hover atop mud, spikes, crumbling floors and the introduction to the spin top. I actually don’t mind this little guy but I do wish changing direction felt a bit more natural. It’s fun to land it and let the level just take you for a ride and I appreciate that you don’t lose any rings when you’re hit while using it. Also I hope you don’t get sick of this tower section because it’s repeated like four times. You end on the first form of this little drill bot and I honestly forget about him until Lava Reef Zone. Poor guy just wants to impress Eggman Senpai.

Act 2 is more of the same but now with these grasshopper enemies that can show up out of nowhere. They aren’t much of a threat unless you’re going super slow but they’re there. You also raise platforms by revving up these… Uh… Blue cranky things? Like, what are these? They’re just sort of laying around, like, who besides Sonic is raising platforms like this? Either way, they’re fun and if you stand on top of one and spin dash it launches you up into the air. There’s also these face status which spit arrows at you, and in true Zelda fashion, if you smash their glowing weak point the game  lets you progress. The end is a race against the sinking ceilings and pillars, and then Tails assists you in shoving your spiny ass right into Eggman’s cockpit.

In all honesty I don’t actually think it’s that awful a stage but Marble Garden Zone is definitely one of the less enjoyable ones. Maybe it’s just the curse of a stage made of Marble. There are also a few instances of less than subtle signposting but hey, I didn’t get lost so they had one job, and they did it.

What good little boys.

Carnival Night Zone:

But ugh. Carnival Night Zone. Man, how bare bones is this carnival music? Sure, it has a sample from Michael Jackson’s Jam, but other than that piece of trivia, Carnival Night Zone is the least interesting stage in the game, and it’s not helped by some annoying stage gimmicks. Luckily I live in a post-dial-up world so I know how to deal with the barrels. Sorry, 80s babies, I guess I can’t sympathise with the frustration this stage must have brought you, but I can hate it for other reasons, right?

Carnival Night Zone is the obligatory “fun” zone of the game. Each Sonic Game has one, and while the quality of these levels don’t say much about their respective games, Carnival Night Zone just sucks when compared to its contemporaries. Springyard Zone might not have conveyed the pinball and slots fusion as well as Casino Night Zone, but the music in both are much more interesting. Carnival Night Zone has one of those songs that try really, really to hide how much they’re just another iteration of Entry of the Gladiators by Czech composer Julius Fucik. Also Madagascar has now got me saying Afro Circus every time this song plays and which makes me loath this stage just that extra bit. There’s a monotonous wub of a baseline repeating the same note ad naseum, and the song sounds like it’s always starting a music phrase but never relieving the tension. It’s like talking to someone who never finishes a sentence but always starts a new but anyway the music is really I don’t  enjoy it.

The backdrop is a neon pastel city beneath a dark and looming mountain range. In the foreground we have all the carnival staples, from red and white circus tent stripes to flags and neon lights, framed with a healthy amount of mustard yellow. Overall I actually don’t hate the visual design of the stage. It’s bright, it’s colourful, and the lights turning off does a lot to make the stage look more treacherous.

However, the stage layout has a couple fun gimmicks. I like the balloons. Maybe it’s just the love I have for rooftop run with the confetti and the balloons and the festivities but I freaking love these balloons that pop and give you some height mid-air. It’s so fun to just pop them like if this was all the stage was about, I wouldn’t give it so much shit. But because it’s the “fun” stage, we got bumpers. 

So, so many bumpers.

So Act 1 has you navigating Barrels bumpers, balloons and spikes. There’s the introduction of the candy cane tube as well as a throwback to Sonic 1’s final stage in these wheels. Otherwise we also have canons, and yellow platforms that cause you to float and these floating platforms that you fill with air by standing on which then ascend when you jump off, making them the world’s most unnecessary elevators. As for enemies you have these bats that couldn’t pose less of a threat if they tried and these clam enemies that double up as bounce pads. It ends with a miniboss that’s almost interesting due to the fact that you can’t hurt it and you have to expose its weak point to this spike platform thing, but that’s about all the praise I can give it.

Act 2 adds water but shows off the fun auxiliary function of balloons, which produce air when popped. I think there would have been so much more fun to be had in a stage where you pop balloons for air bubbles , but instead it’s bumpers, barrels and bullshit. Knuckles shows up halfway through and for some reason there’s an invisible wall that prevents you from cleaning his clock then and there. You know, people praise these little transition cutscenes but they have the weird effect of making Sonic look like a dopey idiot who just takes Knuckles’ bullshit. I mean, how much conflict here would be resolved if I just bopped this jackass on the head now and saved myself the trouble of doing it later? Anyway, Knuckles turns off the power which changes fuckall about the stage mechanically, and after just a minute you turn it back on so I never really got the point. Next up is a worthless Eggman bossfight, but I suppose I’d have timed over were it any longer.

But with that, we’re at the end of the zone, and off to Ice Cap.

Ice Cap Zone:

Ice cap starts off with Sonic snowboarding down a mountainside with what was originally meant to be a piece of metal ripped from Flying Battery Zone. And while the order doesn’t really matter much, for all the shit people give Adventure, Adventure 2 and ’06, those games at least let you control the snowboarding section.

The music here is a weird one. It shares a lot musical assets with Hard Times by the Jetzons, which I believe is on account of Brad Buxer producing both, although Hard Times went unreleased until 2008 so it was likely that Buxer just didn’t want to let anything go to waste. The key difference between the songs being the melody, which carried by the vocals in Hard Times is replaced by this whiny synth which I think is supposed to mimic an organ. The way the bassline gallops as this snare drum clacks every so often, combined with the constant pounding of a kick drum creates a lot of forward momentum in the song. There’s marimbas that chime in for the chorus which fill up the sound space considerably, making the verses actually feel kind of empty.

As for layout, you snowboard into Act 1, then you have to use your momentum to swing up the level. The only enemies are are penguins and orbinauts, but considering the crushing pillars and spikes, the level is already a dangerous time. Around the halfway point is your first taste of the vertical loop, and it always surprised me how seamless these are. The springs here are out to get you though, and are a real pain to navigate. Eventually you emerge from the ice caves to a mini-boss using ice shields but a bit of patience goes a long way here.

Act 2 has a lot more loops and ramps which makes the stage feel a lot more exciting than the toned down theme would suggest, and then you’re introduced to these trampolines, which are far more interesting than the usual springs if you ask me. It’s not all that long an act, but the boss here is just a pain. Blasts of cold ait come out in a random pattern and  on the seventh hit, the platform breaks off so Eggman can be an extra pain.

I don’t have much to say about the background here. It is snow, and ice. Once you’re inside there are at least these deep purple stalactites and glowing crystal balls but otherwise there’s not much more to say. The foreground  sometimes has these colourful diamonds but otherwise it’s more snow and ice. Kind of like that’s the level’s theme or something. Once you escape the cave you’re at least greeted with a body of water at night, and act 1 ends at the dawn of a new day. There are the eponymous ice caps now brightly lit and then that’s what we see all the way to Launch Base Zone.

Launch Base Zone:

Launch Base Zone is kind of meh. It’s got all these set-pieces where you aren’t in control along with some genuinely cheap enemy and spike placement. But you can grind infinite lives here, so I did just that. Oh, what’s the game gonna do, time over me and give me 98 lives instead? That’s sure gonna teach me. Many moments of exciting gameplay later, I actually started Launch Base Zone.

The music is this one minute loop of a sitcom intro bass line attached to bit-crushed samples of someone telling me to go, but not where, so you can take your patronising shit and find the door. There are elements of lounge and strings softly hum along in the background. A lot of that 90s radicality comes through and while that’s an artefact of its time, the charm has by this point worn out.

The stage has you race through a yellow brick base with the Death Egg looming in the distance. The background is a little static but it gets the message across so I’m not going to complain on about it.

Act 1  has these magnetic cylinder, boost… Things. Fire spitting chickens, alarms that spawn birds, snails, frogs and more orbinauts. I’m fucking sick of orbinauts by now man, don’t you have any new tricks up your sleeve? There are also these lasers that can go fuck themselves but they make the stage feel perilous so I won’t complain too much. There are a couple tubes that loop and redirect you and I think these are fun but otherwise I don’t really got much nice to say about this one. Another mini-boss circled by objects that eventually create an opening you exploit. I get the fun here is seeing how fast you can take them down but when there’s no penalty for just waiting a couple extra cycles then I gotta say, this is just uninteresting boss design. Like, this shit isn’t hard, it’s tedious.

Act 2 is the  same shit but now there’s water. Real original, hope that didn’t take too much time to come up with. The background at least moves a little now and there are these interesting mountains in the background, and they’re a bright and earthy orange. Otherwise this has to be the least innovative stage in the game.

Then the boss rush starts. I was worried it might get challenging but the moment I lost an elemental shield and had to use the insta-shield, the first boss went down like a chump. Knuckles shows up for a chuckle and he can go fuckle himself, and then we’re off to the last two bosses of the first half of the game. First up is Eggman having a giggle while he makes me wait for an opening and ineffectually scrolls up and down the screen. After that formality, it’s the main event, and oh boy.

Big Arms is a fucking awesome boss. 

The music is a jam, the fight is just challenging enough and I’m engaged again. It’s a shame this was cut from the final version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and I’m glad the Rom Hack adds it back in, although it means dying makes you refight the two worthless gits before Big Arms. Couldn’t there be a checkpoint in between?  Whatever, the power of save states kind of negate s the bullshit but I wanna have my cake and eat it too dammit.

And with that, we start the Sonic & Knuckles half of the game

Mushroom Hill Zone:

Mushroom Hill starts off with Knuckles all but grabbing you by the dick and dragging you to the Master Emerald, and then the stage actually starts.

And I can’t hate this stage. It’s mushroom hill, contender for best opening stage of all time. The music is a fun time, with the bass having this fat tone that I just associate with bouncing off mushrooms. The keys are playing the harmonies, and there’s this cheeky little climb before the chorus. What I’m interpreting as a sax here carries the melody and oh boy, is it a catchy one.

The stage actually undergoes three pallet swaps here and that’s just impressively dynamic. This was the opener of Sonic and Knuckles so it had to show you all the money shots, and it delivers. The background is also a densely layered forest of trees below a clear blue sky, the foreground is filled with spore particles and lush grass and this weird dirt and brick hybrid. It’s all good stuff, I have no complaints here.

Act 1 is really interactable, with bouncy mushrooms and loops and this swing set and these vines that grab you and these vines that unfurl for a platform and this pole that launches you up and down and springs and this climby thing and this weighted see-saw. Like this level is packed and wants you to play with it. Only four enemies here, these mostly inconsequential mosquitoes, these mushroom chucking dudes, the chickens and  these dragonflies who can only be destroyed from the top or bottom. It’s a good time, with an easy, bouncy mini-boss, and it’s a decent palette cleanser after Launch Base.

Act 2 starts with Knuckles being a cheeky chucklefuck but there’s more of the same, but now the music is a little more  in your face, and then we end on something I can’t remember being done before, a running bossfight. These definitely aren’t my favourite but credit where credit is due, it’s an impressive looking bossfight by Genesis standards, hell, it still looks good today. Pop the capsule and there we go, off to Flying Battery.

Flying Battery Zone:

The best thing about Flying Battery is the music. It’s bouncy, it’s bass-y, it’s a fun time. I could just listen to this music all goddamn day. I’d give more thoughts on it than that but then you might just be tricked into thinking I know what I’m talking about. Still, this is a jam.

Aesthetically though, ehh… It’s alright. It’s a good looking level with pale greens, dark blues, oranges and greys. It’s the inside of an airship and outside there’s a clear blue sky. The platforms all have interesting designs though, like these floating balls. Like, what are these even? The walls have furnaces but what do you need all these furnaces for man? There’s no way this isn’t a fire hazard so I hope you have insurance Eggman because you’re going to get sued for reckless endangerment.

Act 1 is inoffensive. We got monkey bars, flamethrowers, moving platforms, these mice dudes, wire tubes, speed boosters, moving circle platforms, poles, mines, rockets, these rhino fuckers,  spike balls and magnet platforms and spring capsules. It’s dangerous but if you’re patient then your biggest worries are the rhino projectiles and being crushed. There are several sections outside the ship that help in making the zone feel a little more like a real airship you’re storming. Then comes a miniboss who loses a game of “why are you hitting yourself” every time.

Act 2 changes up the music a bit but adds this high pitched screech that I pretty much hate. We’re  now introduced to slow descending crusher blocks and nothing gets my engine going like waiting in a Sonic Game. There’s this pole-arm that I like and I wish we got to see more of these but, hey, this game has nothing if not feature bloat. The act ends on this laser that Eggman accidentally blows his ship up with, and then we get an escape sequence. Then Eggman comes back in this armed mech that swings around the platform, although it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

Sandopolis Zone:

Sandopolis Zone is everything wrong with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Block pushing, crusher blocks, slow sand streams, slow abseiling, music so uninspired it makes Sonic Boom sound like a Grammy nominee and Act 2 is an extra pain in my ass but we’ll get there in a moment.

The background is a sandy landscape at sundown, with a Pyramid thrown in just in case you couldn’t figure out you were in Egypt. Tiles are made of brickwork with hieroglyphics and the whole stage is a bright yellow. I do like the warping effect everything has to simulate  heat waves but other than that, meh. This zone sucks.

Act 1 is the stage that will make you hate Sonic’s jumping sound effect, while asking you to wait. Just… Wait. Wait for blocks, wait to finish abseiling, wait for  the sand to finish carrying you, wait for these jerk-offs to get out of your way, hell, as cool as the double loop is, eventually it’s just waiting for Sonic to stop showing off and get on with the fucking stage. It ends on a boss where you wait for him to put himself back together so you can knock his ass into the sand behind him.

Act 2 is somehow worse. Now you have to deal with these ghost jerkoffs on top of waiting for more shit. And if you don’t hate the sand rising sound effect by the end then you’re more patient than me. The looping sand slides are a pain in my ass and you know what? This stage sucks. When people call Sonic 3 & Knuckles the best Sonic game of all time, I assume they mean some fictional version where this stage just does not exist. So here’s the three nice things I have to say about it; These scorpion enemies are an enjoyable challenge, I don’t hate the rising sand escape sequence and I like that the background changes from hieroglyphic bricks to  wooden support beams.

The end boss is… Familiar.  I actually don’t hate it, but that might be more because it’s the one part of Sonic Adventure 2 I don’t hate. And at least there’s an end to this nightmare and we’re back to having fun in Lava Reef Zone.

Lave Reef Zone:

Lava Reef Zone is this beautiful cave with green caverns and warm earthy rocks, with the eponymous lava giving you an occasionally scare. There are a lot of pipes that redirect the lava flow and the colour pallet here is just a soothing reprieve from the obnoxious yellow of Sandopolis.

The music is also good. Still carrying island themes, but sounding more like an 80s power ballad.

Act 1 is a fun little stage with switches to push and these exploding rock fellas who look so freaking pumped to blow up right in your face. There are the reefer pipes and look how chill they are man. We got these elevators you spindash on to ascend or descend. The miniboss foreshadows the final boss here, along with these film reel tentacles that are really less of a threat than they seem. Also unlike the final boss, you can’t just spindash in the corner here.

Act 2 sees the lava in the stage cooling down and crystalizing. I love this man, I think the theming here is just so on point. It’s too bad that this stage just has a couple unfortunate caveats. An auto-scroller in a Sonic game? I guess even the bad parts of Forces are sourced from somewhere. But you don’t get extra points for being shit first, so take the L, classic fanboys.

The act starts off with a hazard that will knock you on your ass if you aren’t paying attention, but once you adjust the stage actually doesn’t throw too much at you. I particularly like this spinning ladder that launches you, and these sin wave spike balls. I also love this ramp here, but the elevator about 25% through can go eat a dick. Knuckles also shows up to harass you one last time but knowing how much fun I’m going to have introducing your chin to the pavement, have your last laugh you red little chucklefuck. I like the death egg looming in the background here, it’s a fun touch. Like, you saw it crash in the midway cutscene/Sonic & Knuckles intro, now you’re there, where it crashed. After autoscrolling your way down, you finally  fight Eggman, and I use the word “fight” very loosely because you really just wait. Wait for him to stop pelting his own machine with spike balls. This is also one of those fights made an extra pain in the ass by not having the corresponding elemental shield.

And finally, revenge. Eat shit, Knuckles.

Sky Sanctuary Zone:

You know, it always weirded me out that they brought Sky Sanctuary back for Generations. Is this the stage you all remember from this game? I can bet there were some people who never even saw Sky Sanctuary. I thought Hydrocity was the fan favourite. Can’t complain since Generations did a fantastic job and the fact is that I do actually like Sky Sanctuary but hey, I have my nits I can pick. Anyway, Knuckles, now having some sense knocked into his thick fucking skull has a little lie down while the death egg ascends in the background. You really get a sense of how high up the stage is with all the layers of cloud behind you. Sky Sanctuary isn’t actually all that hard, but that might work in its favour. Metal Sonic greets us for a bit of a boss rush and the stage is finished after just one act. It’s a fun time and the music is pretty relaxed for a point in the game with so much stakes. Like, Eggman is throwing all he has left at you. The guy really, really wants you dead and like, here you are having a casual stroll through the clouds. So you tear Metal Sonic a new one after an actually impressive column scene we enter Death Egg Zone.

Death Egg Zone:

And fuck Death Egg zone. The music is this happy space park theme that invokes feel good sci-fi and adventure movies like Back To The Future but the stage is a goddamn nightmare. This playthrough also happens to be the first time I’ve managed to get through without a time over, but it’s not like the light bridges weren’t trying their best to waste my time. It’s a deceptively fun looking stage but between anti-gravity, tubes and these see-saw platforms I don’t think I can call this stage anything other than a miserable time. This stage actually came back in Sonic Advance 2 and I think I prefer that one, although the Advance series might get their own special episode.

Act 1 actually isn’t too terrible. One or two parts where you just gotta wait for the  platforms to do their thing, but it’s mostly inoffensive. The only real time I had a lot of frustration was this bounce chamber that can just take so much time to get through. There’s a light bridge you can skip with a well-timed jump, but that means missing a checkpoint. The miniboss is also inoffensive, but there could be better telegraphing on when I can and can’t hit him.

Act 2 is when the bullshit cranks into overdrive. Reversing gravity isn’t a clever trick in a platformer; it just makes control less intuitive. Extra fuck you to the level designer for this elevator, and also for placing no rings by this checkpoint. I lost so many lives to this, although the solution ended up being deceptively simple. I do however love the view of earth from here. The miniboss is also deceptively easy. At first you might think you can only hurt the boss by flipping gravity, but in actuality you just need to roll into the little spike tanks when they’re upside down.

And then we have the final boss. First phase isn’t too bad, bop his fingers or spindash in the corner and you’re good to go. The Big Arms theme plays here too, which makes this extra awesome. After that, well, good luck. Second phase isn’t too bad, but there’s an element or two that make it artificially difficult. The  torso has no collision box when the emerald is covered, which means if you miss the window, you’re instantly dropped into a death pit. It’s also a running boss fight, and these always end up being a pain because of how they autoscroll. The bit where you beat Eggman can also be precarious because if you collide in just the wrong way, he can knock you into the death pit. But hey, you beat him and then credits roll.

I didn’t get all the chaos emeralds on this run because I wasn’t really looking out for them. Luckily you can repeatedly play Angel Island and Mushroom Hill for the chaos and super emeralds respectively. Although try this shit without beating the game and welp, you’re going to be disappointed. This does make me wish that the game had a dedicated pause menu. Constantly soft-resetting the console is such an inconvenience. So yeah, kids, don’t take that fancy pause menu that Mania has for granted. Hell, don’t take any of the quality of life changes Mania brings for granted.

I digress though. So then you get the chaos emeralds, you run through Death Egg Zone again just in case you were having fun and then the Final Doom Zone starts.

Final Doom Zone:

Here’s the long and short of it; Super Sonic boss fights are usually bad. You’re dropped into an arena with a brand new control scheme, and differing rules from the rest of the game. This could easily be remedied with one simple change; Take away Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It doesn’t add anything, you can’t fly in normal stages and  it usually means the boss fights have to be designed around Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It leads to a final boss that doesn’t test any of the skills you have developed over the course of the game. While it might hold value narratively or as a visual spectacle, I’d argue that it hurts the overall design of the game. Final Bosses seem to be a troubling point for Sonic games.

Final Doom Zone though, it’s not great. Nothing is telegraphed to you, I remember dying like sixteen times here as a kid before I figured out what the fuck it is I’m meant to do.

So you spend some time collecting rings and pro tip, hang back here. There’s not enough screen real estate for you to see the rings coming. After that, you catch up to Eggman and redirect missiles into his face. Then you bop his Egg mech a few more times and yay, you beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles, here’s your reward. Was that worth it? Do you feel good? Is that what you like?

So before I get to my final thoughts, let me spend a minute on the bonus and special stages.

Bonus Stages:

Bonus Stages are fun little distractions you can enter for extra rings and continues. They’re mostly skippable but I highly recommend trying these as best you can, because honestly, you might really end up needing the lives. At least until you can grind lives in Launch Base Zone. After that feel free to ignore them.

The gumball machine is the least interesting of the bunch, and weirdly enough, only shows up in the Sonic & Knuckles half. I’m not sure if this is because of my settings or because they were arbitrarily exclusive to the second half but it would have been nice to break up the amount of Glowing Sphere stages I got. Speaking of, I used to hate Glowing Sphere, but because Titanic Monarch in Sonic Mania explained these so well through the level design, these ended up becoming my favourite. The slot machine is just Sonic 1’s special stage with a slot machine in the middle, and the combination of the awfulness that is the rotating stage and my shit luck means these can just get off my dick.

Blue Sphere:

Blue sphere is actually one of the better special stages, although I’d never say they’re my favourite. An unfortunate consequence of digital gaming is that you don’t often get an instruction manual, which explains a lot of Blue Sphere’s mechanics. Some of it is intuitive but some of the lesser known ones, like how you can redirect yourself after hitting a bumper by pressing forward, or that the blue spheres don’t need to be in a square shape to be turned into rings are among the ones that could probably do with some more signposting. Otherwise, turn 90 Degrees, make blue spheres red, turn clusters into rings. It’s deceptively simple.

Sometimes it feels like the game eats my input but it’s forgivable since it’s not something that happens often and Blue Sphere is a pretty twitchy with a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. I think what also softens the blow of what might be a frustrating experience is that before Blue Sphere, we had the rotating special stages and the half-pipe. Those both suck, although Half Pipe sucks much less on iOS and Android. Blue Sphere is at least inoffensive. It might not be fully rendered 3D but it was as close as the base Genesis could get.

I’ve never really found any point to perfecting these stages, sure, you can earn extra lives and continues, but they’re not worth accidentally fucking up a chance at an emerald. I especially hate that even if you have all the emeralds, once you hit the & Knuckles point of the game, you’re not allowed to turn Super Sonic. Although you’re still given access to the final zone if you only have Super Sonic, which is welcome for sure. I have to admit, I welcome Angel Island placing the first big ring so close to the entrance, and the fact that the rom hack lets me skip the opening custscene is a true blessing.

Final Thoughts:

It’s a Sonic game, it feels pretty good. Sonic’s a bit too heavy for my liking, and I’ve always wished that Sonic started at a higher base speed, but otherwise I can’t complain.

I’ll admit that Tails and Knuckles still lack the polish that Sonic has, although Knuckles suffers the most. The baseball slide after gliding just feels awful, there’s no flow. He also drops like a rock when you release the jump button during a glide. While I find their moveset useful, I always feel like Knuckles and Tails both got shafted in the game feel department. Sonic is and always has been the most fun to control, and if Tails is along to give a hand on especially tricky sections, I’ve never felt the compulsion to fully complete a game as them. In fact, until Sonic Heroes I’ve always kind of been indifferent towards playing as them.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a great looking Genesis game. Colours pop, the full range of 16-bit colour depth is used and you can feel the emulated hardware just barely keeping up at times. Although I’d like each character to be a little brighter in colour, I have no complain with the overall graphical fidelity nor do I have any qualms with the overall visual aesthetic.

Character design, however, is different. I’ve never liked Sonic’s redesign in this game. Or at least, I like it less than his Sonic 2 design. Here, Sonic is really round and while he conveys his 90s attitude that American players might know him for, it looks surprisingly out of place next to the Japanese box art. Sonic just seems a lot more mature from the Japanese art, and you can only handle that 90s radicality for so long before it becomes insufferable. Tails and Knuckles are fine, even if Tails looks a little too brown for my liking.

Otherwise, the only thing that isn’t very well conveyed visually is when your invincibility is going to run out; As an experiment, turn the sound off next time you hit an invincibility monitor and then try gauge when your invincibility is going to run out. Granted, this isn’t as much an issue when you have sound on, but having the stars just become less numerous or fade to red or something would provide an adequate visual indication of when you’re going to run out of invincibility. The same for how long Sonic can hold his breath, however, this is made much less egregious by the five second count down to when you die.

The sound design in any Sonic game is never bad, badniks die with a satisfying pop, Sonic bloops when he jumps, rocks have that nice static crunch sound when the break, it’s all good stuff. I do wish the bloops could alternate in pitch, when jumping in rapid succession the same bloop starts sounding a little grating to the ears.

Nothing is quite as nerve wrecking as the drowning jingle. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Many buttholes have puckered when the anthem of death by water is played. It’s perfect. Although that’s more a compliment of Sonic 1’s sound design, I’m glad someone recognised that they didn’t need to fix what wasn’t broken.

Super Sonic playing the invincibility theme on a constant loop is hella annoying, though. Sonic games have some of the best music, and having the invincibility jingle play on loop when you turn super is so insanely annoying. I’m glad the rom hack instead changed it so the sped up version of the stage’s music for the speed shoes plays.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles does win in the replayability department, but the inherent nature of Sonic games just makes later playthroughs more fun than the first. Knowing the level design and having some skill at the game can greatly enhance the experience, so it’s never really fair to judge the game by the way you enjoyed it the first time because the first playthrough is almost never the best one. However, I complete these games every few years or so and Sonic 1 always remains the one I enjoy the most, even if I think it has the worst overall level design. Sonic 3 & Knuckles I enjoy more than Sonic 2, because I think it just has more solid levels and less entirely crap ones like Metropolis Zone. Fuck Metropolis Zone. The difficulty curve looks a little like a sin graph on account of how Sonic & Knuckles was technically released as a separate game, which means that once you get to Mushroom Hill, the game eases up considerably, but I think this actually ends up helping the game more than anything. It’s nice to have breathing room after a tough midway point.

The biggest hindrance is just the lack of a Retro Engine remake.

Do I like the game more now than I used to? I guess, but that’s a low bar since I used to hate this game. And every time I play it, I remember why. Sonic’s Weight combined with some truly awful zones along with that pudgy sprite makes this a game I guess I’d recommend playing, but it doesn’t end up in my top five. It’s a serviceable game. It’s alright. It has a lot of interesting trivia but maybe you just had to be there in 1994 with a Genesis and more tolerance for the games of the time. But I mean, I enjoy Sonic 1 & 2 even in their emulated versions so maybe it’s not even that, although I have a healthier dose of childhood nostalgia for those two. And I can’t say I wasn’t having fun at points because clearly I was. Which is what makes this so mixed. The best levels are still remarkably less quality than the best of previous titles but the worst are only slightly above Metropolis Zone. There’s just a fair amount of fucking me about involved here, and even my patience has its limits.

I mean, Generations has the sort of one and done fun I return to periodically just to blow off some steam, Mania might be stuffing all its holes with classic game dick but it also has a third arm hanging between its legs which means it has the definitive version of some of these levels, all with a shiny new coat of paint and a 60FPS lock. It’s the purity of classic Sonic without all the caveats.

I guess the person I recommend this to is the one still getting into Sonic and is still working their way through the classic games. I think you need to play this at least once to have any credibility as a Sonic fan. You’re going to be much better informed if you can understand what this game does right and what it doesn’t. But you don’t need to enjoy it. And for the love of God, don’t hold it up as some perfect specimen of a Sonic game.

And stop fucking parroting speed, platforming and exploration. Yeah, it’s a useful framework but it’s also a set of buzzwords some dude threw together in a three hour rant about a cartoon hedgehog. Reductionism is the tool of the lazy backseat designer, so to quote KingK, walk it down a peg.

But to beat a dead horse, here are other buzzword phrases that sound as important but are also as abstract and devoid of meaning divorced from the interpretation of any specific individual.

Cheese, wine and crackers. Snap, crackle and pop. Harder, better, stronger. Tom, Dick and Harry. Chris, Chris and Chris. Veni, Vidi, Vici. Strength, Courage and Wisdom. Earth, Wind and Fire. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. Hyue, Due and Louie. Sora, Donald and Goofy.Ed, Edd and Eddy.

And I don’t know about you, but I 100% want to play the Sonic game by the guy who prioritizes cheese, wine and crackers. That sounds like my kind of game.

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