Early Access: It's Not Easy Being Blue
Added 2016-08-02 01:15:12 +0000 UTCHey team! This is a small and, in all honesty, kinda silly video in which I get weirdly poignant about Sonic the Hedgehog. It was written over the course of a couple days to blow off steam during the very long edit of The Artist is Absent, and I'm happy with how quickly I put this edit together! It'll go public on Wednesday morning, probably. For now, enjoy, and do let me know what you think!
Cheers,
-I
Comments
I'm increasingly starting to feel like the best mould for a 3D Sonic game might actually be Prince of Persia 2008. Semi-open world traversal that's basically just a bunch of thinly-veiled QTE sequences could let you experience high speed in a cinematic way without dealing with a constantly-moving camera. You've even got Tails to follow you around and do the Elika stuff. Replace the motes of Light with rings and you're basically done. About the only thing it wouldn't handle (in a way that's immediately obvious at least) would be combat in a way that feeds into the traversal; having to grind to a halt to fight enemies in semi-contained battle arenas works when you're a dude who's pulled out a sword, but when your main attack - spinning around really fast - is also one of your primary modes of propulsion then it gets complicated. The homing attacks in Sonic Adventure (my only first-hand experience with 3D Sonic) were an attempt to keep momentum while defeating enemies, but even those had a brief second of downtime that gave combat a stop-start problem. But it might feel like a bit of a cop-out to just have "kill enemy" as just another QTE press as you move around. PoP '08 had you entirely swap control styles between traversal and combat, in a way that wouldn't feel as organic with Sonic, where keeping up the momentum is the primary goal and the main place, in my opinion, where Sonic games have failed in the past.
Paul Cosgrove
2016-08-03 14:46:43 +0000 UTC"Sonic the Hedgehog 4" was what I thought Generations was. I don't doubt it. I still expect the core-enthusiasts, fan communities, are furry central.
Michael
2016-08-02 17:55:39 +0000 UTCSure, but Unleashed did almost 3 million and Colors did just shy of 2. The Advance series did exceptionally well on handheld also. These games, for whatever bizarro reason, still often ship in the millions.
Ian Danskin
2016-08-02 17:51:37 +0000 UTC@Ian Wasn't Sonic Generations a promise to a throwback though?
Michael
2016-08-02 17:48:42 +0000 UTCHeh. Sonic Generations shipped over 4 million copies. I doubt they were all furs.
Ian Danskin
2016-08-02 17:48:08 +0000 UTCSonic's real problem is it's never really worked as advertised. The best entry is still the original Master System/Megadrive, and when it's at its best, moving at a Sonic-clip, the problem is, it's rote memorization, of an obstacle course that only exists in your head; and that's because to really play Sonic, the old tube would have to be about 4 to 8 tubes wide--and tall. It doesn't even work with widescreen, and in my experience working with "game design," what people call "immersion" is really a kind of hypnosis, and it seems to only work if your eye is fixated. If the screen is so big that the eye has to roam, this spell is instantly broken. Killscreen posts a "weekend reading" thing on the weekends, that last week I think included a breakdown of Sonic 2006. I hadn't paid much attention to it at the time, there was consensus that Sonic was a lost cause. I honestly didn't pay much attention to this "breakdown" either (it was quite lengthy) but I did look at videos of 2006 on YouTube. My feeling was that Sonic's core audience is exclusively the "Furry" subculture, and that it's marketeers get it. Sonic is furry ground zero. PS: Lately I've been lamenting the inaccessibility of Sega's catalogue. I've always wanted to explore the Panzer Dragoon series more for instance. And since there's been a long drought of what I consider serviceable product, I've been looking to scratch an itch. Sega hasn't done enough to bring its back catalogue over to the new (non-Sega) console generations. It could've been doing that some, why cranking out all of these Sonic hard-sells.
Michael
2016-08-02 17:44:59 +0000 UTCHahaha! Oh, this was joyful. I have newfound respect for all the shit that went into these games now, and the whole conversation about "Why don't they stop trying to reinvent Sonic every release" is better contextualised in this view. I do like the idea of silly videos as breaks from serious projects. Why not have fun on the channel every now and then, right?
boy_carmelina
2016-08-02 15:11:15 +0000 UTCAnother video already??? Also, for the record, I've enjoyed all of your videos, especially for their variety and diversity.
Jenny Wang
2016-08-02 03:08:29 +0000 UTCYou have this incredible ability to make me interested in topics I otherwise would have never examined. Your critical analysis using the Beginner's Guide (though I've never played it) didn't teach me anything new, but it put what I already knew into order. This on, on the other hand, might seem like Sonic 101 to a diehard fan, but might have the same clarifying effect on them. Your videos, even if they are split between three different topics, as you say, are versatile enough that I think they're worthwhile to both the experienced and the unaware alike.
casersatz
2016-08-02 01:31:50 +0000 UTC
