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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

Fantastically.

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

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

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

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

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

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A Rumination on Sonic Heroes; It's Kind of Underrated.

Not often does a game come by that makes you stop, pause and think, “Huh, you know what, that’s actually a pretty clever.”

And Sonic Heroes is somehow, against all the odds, one of those games.

Sonic Heroes is a 2003 PS2, Dreamcast and Gamecube game (with a lost Australian PC port that is very hard to get one's hands one, believe me) that sold reasonably well and was on release received very well, but as it aged more and more people started just hating the game, roasting it as if it were a 12 year old beauty vlogger posting her first video and utterly failing on camera.

Now it's not hard to spot that the game hasn't aged very well and truthfully it's a little unfair on the completionists (and may Segata Sanshiro have mercy on whichever poor fool attempts a 100% on a Sonic The Hedgehog game) but I haven't played the game since I was a wide eyed child and it wasn't until recently that I picked up a copy of the game that I could truly see it for what it was;

A rough around the edges masterpiece that deserves more love then we give it.

I will admit to my own bias here. I'm in love with the idea behind the game more than the game itself. On paper, this is the most well designed, conceptually brilliant action-platformer I have ever had the pleasure of just swirling about in my brain. And if it weren't for this game solidifying Sonic The Hedgehog as the cornerstone of my childhood gaming experiences, I'd probably be a very different person today. But if you'll allow me to gush for just a second, I promise, I do eventually get to talking about the great game design in Sonic Heroes.

Trying to articulate the plethora of thoughts I have about it is almost impossible. Every time I try, a new idea pops into my head. While the final product may barely be worth an IGN approved 7/10, teetering dangerously close to 6 or maybe even a 5, and while Railway Canyon munched through my lives faster than any of the teams could blast through with Sonic speed, I have put this game down, picked it up, put it down, sat up thinking about it at night and picked it up again in a vicious cycle.

As a kid, this was only the second or third Sonic game I actually played. I remember being wholly nonplussed by having to play as Sonic’s shitty friends and kinda just wanted, well, a Sonic game. And whilst I didn’t hate the game, when I received the PC port of Sonic Adventure DX, I had a much better time with Adventure, owing much to the fact that I never bothered finishing anyone’s campaign other than Sonic’s in Adventure and thereby preserving the mirror polished sheen of nostalgia I have for the game. I finished Team Rose, 70% finished Team Sonic, 40% finished Team Dark and barely touched Team Chaotix. I’d never really had much of a drive to return to Sonic Heroes but once my PS2 died and I had gotten better at playing videogames and learnt more about game design, I thought that I definitely owed it to myself to revisit it. But I still delayed playing it. I don’t really understand why but I wanted something new. And it wasn’t until I had picked up and dropped Sonic Unleashed, purchased Sonic Adventure 2 off the PSN and gotten the Sonic Humble Bundle and finished Sonic CD that I thought, now is the time.

So a funny thing happened when I booted it up. I’d always had a gigantic soft spot for Sonic Heroes’ theme song. It’s cheesy, wasn’t very well mixed and definitely dated, often called straight up garbage by many fans but somehow, I knew all the lyrics to that fucking song. All of them. And is the intro cinematic played out I screamed them along.

Okay, so maybe I liked the game more than I thought. But I mean, this game just aged poorly, it's definitely not as great as I remember it being as a kid. Hell, I didn't even like it that much as a kid, I liked Shadow The Hedgehog more because I was an edgelord shucklefuck with bad opinions.

But then I went into Seaside Hill WHICH IS STILL ONE OF THE BEST DESIGNED SONIC LEVELS OF ALL MOTHERFUCKING TIME HOW IN THE HELL CAN ANYONE EVEN HATE THIS GAME (more on this in just a moment).

And then Ocean Palace came, and still. Sure, some control and physics issues popped up but nothing game breaking. The water looked gorgeous and the world was vibrant and all these bright colours were on the screen and Sonic Heroes was hitting all the right notes in a scarily tight rhythm.

And that's when it hit me.

It's not just my nostalgia.

I've gone back to games before and hated them, even if I loved them as a kid. I've gone back and recognized my own biases many times before and still loved games that I knew were utter filth (looking at you, Sonic Adventure DX). But this, this wasn't bad. This was great. This was amazing. This was, dare I say it... Perfect. Of course I did have to face reality when I managed to remove the nostalgia facehugger impregnating me with sparkling eyes and an inability to notice genuine flaws, and it wasn't perfect, and of course, I eventually did manage to get an less biased and better thought out view of the game, but the first three levels is just honestly fantastic. I can't gush enough. But anyway, I'm going to move away from the nostalgia boner hardening in my pants as I write this because Seaside Hill, and maybe Seaside Hill alone, subverts the Sonic level design formula in such a brilliant way that it still blows my mind to this day and I need to meet Yuji Naka and hug the man for his wonderful contribution to the world.

So for those of you who don't know, the rule for any given Sonic game is high path is best path and low path is death path. You're encouraged to stay on the higher, faster path and rewarded for the skill you display by managing to stay on it, but punished for bad play in the slower, much more "platformy" lower path. The bottom of the stage usually has the most spikes, pitfalls, long stretches of slow and tedious platforming, water, enemies. While I do appreciate the nuance of the logic, where you're forced to get better at the game by having to do more challenging sections in the bottom of the level that teach you more about the game's mechanics and intricacies of controlling a meth addict blue hedgehog, it's almost a guaranteed trap for newbies. You will fall into the bottom, and because it's so easy to fall to the bottom, it feels like the game is subtly corralling you towards the lower path but in truth the game is trying to challenge you to stay high, the route which guarantees the fastest clear time and most secrets.

Sonic Heroes takes that formula and says fuck you, here's how we do it.

So Sonic has always had a very natural difficulty select built in. Tails is easy mode because flight let's you get back to the top. Knuckles is intermediate mode, because he glides and can climb walls, so he's how you get to know the levels the best and explore without being burdened by tail's flight limit. Sonic is 'hard' mode, since he takes the most skill to use, is the fastest, but he offers the most rewarding gameplay. 

Sonic Heroes then took that concept and threw it right into the very level design of the game. 

So you control Sonic, Tails and Knuckles all at the same time, or rather you control one of the three at any given time and the other two are delegated to being two AI nincompoops who for the most part stay out of your way and sometimes even help you get shit done faster, and you switch out who is the "leader" aka, the character you control. Each character comes with their own unique team formation. When Sonic leads, everyone gather behind him in a straight line and runs in his slipstream. This is the fastest way to get around and is dubbed Speed Formation. When Tails is the leader, the team forms in a totem pole formation to make it easier for Tails to take off at a moments notice. This is called Flight Formation. When Knuckles is the leader, he literally uses his best friends as either fucking boxing gloves to pound everything from the environment to enemies, or he curls them up into balls and hurtles them as hard as he goddamn can into the ground. This is Power Formation. You can also glide in Power Formation, by performing a "Triangle Dive", but unfortunately you can't climb.

Got all that?

Now the whole level is designed to modulate the difficulty, pace and aesthetic of play to which formation you end up playing in most.

Like speed running and fast paced platforming challenges? Play in Speed Formation and you'll get taken through super hazardous super fast routes with loops and twists like the rollercoaster a Sonic game should be. Need to take it slow and explore the level? Play in flight formation and you'll do more platforming but it's slower and easier to navigate. Like brawling? Play in power formation and you'll have plenty of enemies and destructables to abuse like Michael Jackson's dad abused his kids. 

So instead of High Paths and Low Paths, you have Speed, Flight and Power paths. You can easily change from one to the other and you can play as any formation on any path, and often certain sections demand a quick change in order to progress. The greatest thing about this fluidity is that it asks the player to use the game's mechanic's creatively to find the optimal route through the stage. There's a whole lot of replay value because your runs don't ever look the same as you take different turns and change to different formations. The mechanic of formations create a fluid dynamic of path finding and platforming challenges but create three entirely different aesthetics. I think I jizzed in my pants a little writing that sentence. 

I lie awake in bed at night thinking to myself "Fuck me, who ever designed Sonic Heroes is just really fucking brilliant." The complex dynamics the mechanics form, the nuanced gameplay, the variety, the creativity, I just swirl it around my mind and wonder how anyone can so easily write this game off.

And I think now would be the best time to talk about my criticisms of Sonic Heroes, or rather, everyones criticisms. Because these are huge errors, and it says so much that I can honestly call this game a rough around the edges masterpiece knowing full and well how bad some of these are;

The physics is garbage.

For one, Sonic moves just a little too fucking fast. Or rather, he accelerates too quickly, you shove the analogue in any direction and he goes and rockets off without consent, blasting through with Sonic speed when a brisk walk would have done just fine. The problem is as much with the acceleration as it is with the deceleration. You have to run in a tiny little circle once you've asked permission from the board to stop and filed the proper paperwork because there's no real way to stop yourself dead in your tracks. But at least Sonic will stop when he reaches the edge and do a little edge pose.

Power characters will slide right the fuck off.

Ground combat is also for the most part worthless, considering that you could slide right off the edge midway though a combo and if you don't like a power character (I'm fucking glaring at you, Big the obnoxiously voiced Cat) too fucking bad. You need him. Every member of your team is vital because some obstacles can only be overcome by certain members. Since only the power characters can glide, they're the only ones who can use the fans to rise to higher platforms. 

Other than that, the major criticism and missed opportunity I must bring up is that you can't change formation mid air.

I dream of the day where my team all homing attacks in unison onto an enemy, we change mid-air so that tails can fly us up, and from as high as we can, we use the triangle dive to reach a far off platform safely.

I understand that the scope of the levels would be changed and the size of some of these levels are already fucking huge, some taking well over ten minutes to finish.

But damn if it isn't a nice dream.

Sonic Heroes isn't just a great game, it's a proof of concept, a show that unlike his contemporaries, Sonic doesn't only work well in a team, that's where he works best. The team formations create interesting platforming scenarios and if we just had better spaces to play in and slightly better physics, I honestly think Sonic Heroes could have been one of the greatest games of all time, it might even have put Sega back into a place where they were a dominating force in the gaming industry.

But alas, it is not so, and Sega hasn't voiced any plans to make a sequel or a reboot of the the game, which is a crying shame. 

All in all, the soundtrack is phenomenal, it's a Sonic game, that's a given at this point, the levels are well designed even if they get more linear as the game goes on and while I miss hubworlds and the chao garden from Sonic Adventure, they aren't necessary.

All in all, I do find it tough to recommend just because it is a Sonic game, but if you can stand the roughness, honestly, it's a great fucking game.

But play it in sessions.

Because they shitty physics will kill you dead, and even I rage quit no less than six times.

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Saints Row, and how to properly manage spectacle creep

"It was too crazy for Saint's Row."

As I neared the completion of the Enter The Dominatrix DLC, after having my mind fucked sideways in a dirty alley without a condom, I had an odd thought; Somehow, for four (and a half) games, Saints Row has managed to constantly churn out these batshit crazy third person open world GTA parodies that somehow are actually really good.

On paper, I'm pretty sure the design document of any Saints Row game simply states;
"Make it like Grand Theft Auto, but throw in the craziest scenarios you can think of, toss in huge set pieces and then tie it together with ridiculous character creation. Add a dash of whatever seems to be popular this year."

Saints Row 2 had that Need For Speed; Underground visual aesthetic. Saints Row The Third threw in a bit of Just Cause with some Left 4 Dead, Saints Row IV threw in Prototype. Gat Out Of Hell threw in a dash of mediocrity (honestly should have just been DLC man). But the spectacle of it all never wears out. It's like one of those carnival freakshows, you keep coming back just to see if it has anything else that's so unimaginably weird that you just stare agape and wonder how much cocaine was involved. But let me get to the point.

So when you're making the sequel to a film, book, game, play, whatever you can think of, you have to deal with the inevitable spectacle creep. "The stakes are heightened as they've not only Taken his daughter, but they've also Taken his wife." Every new iteration has to have bigger explosions, bigger bad guys, bigger blue sky holes, larger amounts of CGI alien soldiers to fight, epic battles in space... But there's a ceiling. You cannot keep rising.

So how have they managed? Well, I have to assume at least some cocaine is involved. Look, after driving into oncoming traffic with a tiger in the shotgun seat, fighting zombie clones of a giant russian man named Oleg, after riding velociraptors out of a computer simulation, after beating Santa Clawz with the actual fucking north pole, after jumping out of a plane and hijacking an airborn a tank while shooting hostile skydivers, after going to hell and shooting the ever living crap out of Satan whose daughter had fallen in love with you, after preventing nuclear war and becoming president, after fighting sentient toilets, beating up mexican wrestlers with sex dolls, after beating up prostitutes and gimps with gigantic weaponised dildos, even you'd question the sobriety of whoever the fuck even wrote this shit.

In all fairness, try spending an afternoon just coming up with insane scenarios. Try right now. Just start with Abe Licoln, a Batman cosplayer and a barrista who curses like a sailor but has a soft spot for fluffy kitties, and ask, what's the weirdest thing these three could get up to? Maybe fly to the moon and witness an alien orgy gone wrong. Or visiting the city of Atlantis but accidentally starting a civil war over whether are friends or food. They could get trapped in a computer except it's running Windows XP and every ninety minutes a different teenager comes to wack off to hardcore porn and they have to fight off the malware being downloaded onto the hard drive.

That's just off the top of my head.

Saints Row has embraced spectacle and made it a selling point. Saints Row may have started as "GTA, but batshit", but it's quickly become an acid trip monstrosity that is full of cheap thrills and just enough substance to lose hours to. And it has, for the most part, pretty tight gameplay. For all of the parts that make it a Grand Theft Auto clone, at least mechanically, those parts are always done really well. What also carries us through all the insanity is a somewhat revolving cast of genuinely likeable characters, from the ever cool Johnny Gat, to the chronically sarcastic hacker Kinsey Kenzington, to the adorkable Matt Miller and even Keith David, no connotation needed.

Saints Row is trying to sell insanity and Spectacle Creep is its ally, not its weakness. I'd wager the first order of the day in the writing room is to push the spectacle all the way to its ceiling and tone it back from there. Instead of aiming to go crazier than what came before, aim to go as crazy as possible and then compressing it all into a gang management sim slash Grand Theft Auto clone and suddenly you end up with a solid game with tons of replay value and a word of mouth marketing campaign that includes a bunch of people inadequately trying to describe how crazy Saints Row is. All the character customization and the vibrant city to explore and the cars and gang operations is the just the platform it's delivered on, and you see the progression of the game through its history there, in the dynamics, and not in the presentation.

The other thing you can do is also sell the same game every year with a fresh coat of paint and never try to innovate or push the ceiling or break the mold in fear of a fanbase that only worsens with its expectations as time goes on, but who am I to question the giant that is <Assassin's Creed/Fifa/PES/Call Of Duty/Gran Turismo/PGA Tour/NBA/Any EA sports game ever made>

I guess the take away from this is that more games should experiment just for the sake of experimenting, but we shouldn't get caught up in just delivering bigger and better. It's okay if you just deliver better. It's okay if you scale down the size of your city but tighten up the gameplay and sell the player off as a sex slave as cover for infiltrating an organized crime syndicate. Doing insane things every once in a while is what makes life worth living. But don't do insane things just to be the bigger better iteration of yesterday's game. Approaching the design of your sequel with this in mind is a pitfall many creators fall into, and it's how franchises end up at that point of uncertainty, where they no longer have an identity. Look at the scope of any trilogy of Marvel films. It just widens until you have to ask the question; "We've saved the world, where do we go from here? How do we increase the stakes?"

Saints Row is still asking the question "Is it too insane for Saints Row?".

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