Disclaimer: I just watched Egoraptor rage awesomely about megaman and megaman X so my language will probably be a little vulgar (read : very ) but informative. If you can, I suggest using his voice to narrate this in your head.
Okay so this is the first Sonic game that I've probably enjoyed since the good old days of when Sega made consoles. All I have to say is this game is well worth the $30 it is on steam (it's slightly more for Xbox360 and PS3).
The good: If you like 2d Sonic, this game is awesome. If you like 3d Sonic, this game is still awesome. If you like both Sonics, well shit, this is going to be a party.
This game takes an interesting way to design its levels that in most cases, they feel very similar and very distinctly different at the same time. Each zone has 2 levels, one with Old 2d Sonic, and one with newer slicker 3d Sonic. The great part of both of these is that although they mainly stay in their own little corner of the world, they will seamlessly incorporate bits and pieces of the level design that makes the other awesome so you can still enjoy the style you like less.
One awesome amazing thing I want to give Sega a pat on the back for is their choices for the differences in the stages.
1) Old Sonic uses OLD PHYSICS, OLD SOUNDS, AND OLD MUSIC! Feel like Sega Genesis all over again. But this time Sonic is made from polygons not pixels. Hell you even run upside down if you do some flippy shit. Spin dash is still awesome. The stages have very straight forward alternate paths that you can see very obviously as you pass them by. It's very much the twitchy 2d speed mario you know and love.
2) New Sonic uses more predictable modern physics, less subtle level design, and good references to other well received 3d Sonic games. If you played Sonic Adventures 2 the nostalgia might blow your mind. (License plate: GUN) 3D Sonic is more complex and requires less twitchy reactions and much more prior planning to explore all possibilities in a level. The 3D levels have short periods of side scrolling platforming to keep the game interesting but they are less pixel perfect than the 2d stuff so it feels like less of a drag if you don't like that sort of stuff. The special character stages in this are much more creative (this is part of the ugly too)
3) Music choices are phenomenal, there is a ton of stuff to collect. EACH STAGE CAN SELECT CUSTOM MUSIC. YOU DONT HAVE TO PLAY THE SAME LEVEL OVER 50 TIMES WITH THE SAME EAR WRENCHING MUSIC YOU HATE! Why nobody else that I can remember has done this, blows my fucking mind.
4) The art style is amazing. It's true to its sonic colors but my god the pallets are great. There isn't a shades of brown/gray feeling that you get with, for example, gears of war. The colors are vibrant, the stages are very clean and crisp, nothing but praise here. Without revealing too much of the story, the stages have very subtle other art aspects that make them cool. Green hill zone still looks like green hill zone but its awesomified.
5) The mini bosses are lots of fun. No spoilers unless you want:
Metal Sonic and Shadow are atleast 2 of them, I won't spoil anymore =]
6) The actual real bosses are pretty boss too.
7) Any stage specific stuff is implemented the same in both 2d and 3d versions and does the exact same thing so you don't spend another life learning how the fuck this bumpery things work again. It's very smart level design.
THE BAD: 1) To advance the story and consequently unlock more levels, you're forced to do a ton of usually shitty sonic mini games. Most of them are really bad. Like, I'd rather spoon my eyes out than do them. But to be honest, some are pretty good too. There is a big choice of what you can complete so it's not terribly bad, but the fact that completionists need to do boring mindless stuff for probably not very spectacular rewards annoys me.
2) There is a sonic upgrade system, it's like a really watered down talent system and it doesn't really feel at home in the sonic universe. Now granted there are some nice and interesting abilities, they are not all available to you at the beginning of the game and the game does a really crappy job of telling you how to unlock more. Only one of the 6 I've unlocked so far actually told me that the mission I was doing was going to unlock it ahead of time.
3) 3D Sonic's homing attack and 2D Sonic's super spin dash are extremely finicky. My roommate has trouble 90% of the time trying to mash X to get super spin dash and the amount of times I've fallen off a level because of a shitty homing attack is probably 70%+ of my deaths. I can't see why this wasn't made better.
4) Keyboard controls for this game are terrible. I would highly recommend investing ~$15-20 on ebay and buying a wired XBox360 controller for this game. The keybindings for most of the stuff in this game is actually about on par with the level of Brood War's (aka fucking bad).
5) The scoring system for getting ranking is surprisingly and disappointingly low. I was able to get S rank in the first 3 2d missions on the first try. That shouldn't happen without atleast a little refinement. The other crappy thing is to get an S rank you must no have died at all. If you die then the maximum you can get is A rank. Now the nice thing they added is you can restart the level, but if you do that you lose a life, and it technically counts you as dying. So if you fuck up you really can't restart, you have to exit the level and reload it because the grading system is dumb.
THE UGLY:
1) They still call him god damn fucking Dr Eggman. What the hell Sega! Why can't we go back to calling him robotnik and stop pretending like Russia will get offended or something.
2) The voice acting is terrible. Like holy crap is it bad. I'd rather watch it with subtitles and muted. My favorite character however, is Old Sonic, because he doesn't have a voice and thus doesn't fucking say anything dumb. Like one of the lines is "It's like de ja vue all over again".... WHO TRANSLATED THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE!? GRAWWAAARr. If you're going to have voice overs translated from another language please do what Tales of Vesperia did and don't do direct translations. Please make some fucking sense when you make the voice actors speak.
3) Special Character levels suck a lot (most of the time). They get progressively worse as the characters get progressively less important (and unfortunately this increases as the game goes on). Tails, Amy, and Knuckles aren't terrible characters. Hell I even like Tails about as much as I like Batman's Robin. But holy crap the crocodile Vector has the most frustrating stupid mini game in the world. 45 minutes between two people, we couldn't beat a minigame that takes about 1:20.
4) unlocking some stuff requires you to beat a level, then ring a bell and chase a music note accross the world map. Totally unnecessary and confusing as shit when you get the note and it unlocks PICTURES NOT MUSIC. URRGGGHHHH
5) It doesnt support windowed mode on the pc.
(insert I am dissapoint face here)
Who does that these days? I want windowed mode so I can stream it
Here's some sample music so you can see why this game is so awesome:
in the 2D Green hill zone this song plays by default:
It's nice, its clean, sounds a lot like the 8bit, slightly modernified but definitely computer generated.
in the 3d Green Hill zone this song plays by default:
HOLY SHIT, SAME SONG BUT WITH REAL INSTRUMENTS. SOUNDS FUCKING AWESOME! It's like the made the music for 3d..... WAIT A SECOND!
And this song is unlockable just the way it plays here ( I wasnt able to find anyone having ripped it with the sonic generations tag)
DON'T LIKE NEW?! NO PROBLEM!
tl;dr
Buy the game, its awesome. Sega has almost fired all of the assholes that like making shitty sonic minigames and introducing shitty tertiary characters.
As I said before: is Sonic CD in there? Pretty much used to shit voice-acting, since Sonic Adventure Battle 2. Looking forward to playing this, keyboard though ):
On November 07 2011 18:24 Torte de Lini wrote: As I said before: is Sonic CD in there?
yes there are sonic cd references.
And honestly so many games support the Xbox360 controller on the pc (BECAUSE AN XBOX IS JUST A PC CONNECTED TO A TV) because the amount of work needed for it to support the controller with a pc port is almost nothing. A lot of games play much nicer when using a controller (bastion for instance)
On November 07 2011 18:19 Phrost wrote: 3) 3D Sonic's homing attack and 2D Sonic's super spin dash are extremely finicky. My roommate has trouble 90% of the time trying to mash X to get super spin dash and the amount of times I've fallen off a level because of a shitty homing attack is probably 70%+ of my deaths. I can't see why this wasn't made better.
I might be missing something, but why would you mash X instead of just holding it? Is a super spin dash different from a normal spin dash?
On November 07 2011 18:19 Phrost wrote: 3) 3D Sonic's homing attack and 2D Sonic's super spin dash are extremely finicky. My roommate has trouble 90% of the time trying to mash X to get super spin dash and the amount of times I've fallen off a level because of a shitty homing attack is probably 70%+ of my deaths. I can't see why this wasn't made better.
I might be missing something, but why would you mash X instead of just holding it? Is a super spin dash different from a normal spin dash?
Mashing X instead of holding makes you go faster, most of the time its needed for otherwise unreachable places.
Or like I use it, to skip half of the chemical factory level
On November 07 2011 18:19 Phrost wrote: 3) 3D Sonic's homing attack and 2D Sonic's super spin dash are extremely finicky. My roommate has trouble 90% of the time trying to mash X to get super spin dash and the amount of times I've fallen off a level because of a shitty homing attack is probably 70%+ of my deaths. I can't see why this wasn't made better.
I might be missing something, but why would you mash X instead of just holding it? Is a super spin dash different from a normal spin dash?
Mashing X instead of holding makes you go faster, most of the time its needed for otherwise unreachable places.
Or like I use it, to skip half of the chemical factory level
Huh, I tried it now and it didn't seem any faster -- just a whole lot harder to do. I might not be doing it right though. When you're holding, you're holding until there are sparks right?
On November 07 2011 18:19 Phrost wrote: 3) 3D Sonic's homing attack and 2D Sonic's super spin dash are extremely finicky. My roommate has trouble 90% of the time trying to mash X to get super spin dash and the amount of times I've fallen off a level because of a shitty homing attack is probably 70%+ of my deaths. I can't see why this wasn't made better.
I might be missing something, but why would you mash X instead of just holding it? Is a super spin dash different from a normal spin dash?
Mashing X instead of holding makes you go faster, most of the time its needed for otherwise unreachable places.
Or like I use it, to skip half of the chemical factory level
Huh, I tried it now and it didn't seem any faster -- just a whole lot harder to do. I might not be doing it right though. When you're holding, you're holding until there are sparks right?
in sonic generations is has a very different sound associated with it. if you're getting the same sound its probably not super'd
nice review I grew up on the sonic games... played all the genesis ones, a couple of game gear ones, and a 32x knuckles game. I was also a huge fan out SA and SA2, but then sonic heroes released and it went downhill from there
I'll probably pick this up on xbox when I get home.. i can just imagine the horrors of using a keyboard D:
gonna paste my review/rant about this game that i wrote after playing through it all in 1 sitting last thursday night
WHAT I DIDNT LIKE To be honest this is most of the game. For one thing it was REALLY short (which is why I finished it in a few hours). I mean really sega how can you only put 9 zones in the game and ONLY FOUR BOSSES (no excuse for 4 bosses that's just awful). There's also NO STAGE FROM SONIC 3 (nice one sega). The only thing they do to drag the game out longer than it actually is is force you to do one "challenge" from each zone before you can unlock the boss for that section. And with the challenges and unlocks I felt like 90% of the stuff I was unlocking was artwork. NOBODY CARES ABOUT ART JUST LET ME UNLOCK THE MUSIC. Seriously inflating the unlockables with like 100+ art unlocks is just terrible. The modern sonic stages weren't fun to play through at all, mostly because the controls were absolutely terrible. Turning left and right was really frustrating at the segments when you were running really fast around corners. Most of the time it'd just stop instead of turn. Then there were the boss battles. As expected they were all ridiculously easy, with the only way to die was to either be a complete moron or fall victim to once again the absolutely terrible modern sonic controls and not be able to go forward and die. It was especially awful in the falling sequence of one boss where trying to move made me really angry it was so hard to do. Aside from that they were ridiculously easy and when you finished one all you could really say to yourself was "that's it?" Then there's the final boss. LET ME TAKE A MOMENT TO TALK ABOUT THE FINAL BOSS. The final boss was literally the worst final boss I've ever seen in a Sonic game. It's both Sonics with all the emeralds flying through space where once again controlling them feels next to impossible. And the talking idiot friend tips that was THE VERY FIRST THING I DISABLED AS I STARTED UP THE GAME return and they're impossible to turn off. Every single time the boss attacks I had to listen to really squeaky voice telling me to watch out for a homing attack THANKS A LOT FOR THAT. You get this attack thing where one Sonic throws the other and it took me forever to realize that it was actually completely useless and all you have to do is run into him and once you realize that its yet another ridiculously easy boss. Obviously the story is a complete joke but in this game it's so much of a joke that it's laughable.
ALL OF THAT BEING SAID THIS IS WHAT I LIKED Even though I should be saying this game is absolutely terrible (because it is) the 2D levels were SO MUCH FUN that I absolutely loved playing this game. I didn't care about the awful modern levels or the braindead bosses running through the 2D levels just made me so incredibly happy. The old levels redone were just as much fun as the modern levels brought into 2D. It was platforming just like I remembered it being from many years ago. It was challenging and at the same time fun and varied. Just playing through these parts themselves made the game absolutely worth it and I'll probably do all the Classic Sonic challenges just because of how much fun it was to play those stages. Being able to substitute nearly any song from any Sonic game (after you unlock it) into anything is also fantastic. When I went to the skill customization shop (another really dumb thing by the way) it played the music from the Sonic 2 options menu which made me SO HAPPY.
So yeah as much as I hated out of this game I still loved playing it and will definitely play it some more.
so yeah dude how did you actually like the bosses they were literally the worst part of the game
I thought the bosses were a ton of fun and were well designed. It's a big step up from pixel jumping in one screen trying to hit the sweet spot of a boss.
Now granted they were super easy, but that doesn't mean they were badly designed. The difficulty level of this game is fairly low to begin with.
I actually liked the story because they made fun of older (bad) sonic games in it very subtlely.
On November 08 2011 02:13 Phrost wrote: I thought the bosses were a ton of fun and were well designed. It's a big step up from pixel jumping in one screen trying to hit the sweet spot of a boss.
Now granted they were super easy, but that doesn't mean they were badly designed. The difficulty level of this game is fairly low to begin with.
I actually liked the story because they made fun of older (bad) sonic games in it very subtlely.
the chaos fight was 300x better in the original game
On November 08 2011 02:13 Phrost wrote: I thought the bosses were a ton of fun and were well designed. It's a big step up from pixel jumping in one screen trying to hit the sweet spot of a boss.
Now granted they were super easy, but that doesn't mean they were badly designed. The difficulty level of this game is fairly low to begin with.
I actually liked the story because they made fun of older (bad) sonic games in it very subtlely.
the chaos fight was 300x better in the original game
I found that one to be significantly less fun than the others but as a whole they were enjoyable.
EPT
I might not be doing it right though. When you're holding, you're holding until there are sparks right? 
