Hi! This is mainly an ask blog, but I usually update it with one post per day. Feel free to ask me about nearly anything, though most of my posts tend to be about video games in particular. Don't worry if I don't answer you right away, it could take a week (or two!) before your question comes up in the queue.
Since Tumblr is moving away from custom themed pages it's easier to just have a pin.
Hi! My name is Ryan, but everybody on the internet calls me "Blaze", as in BlazeHedgehog. I've had that internet username since at least 1998 or even 1997, where I picked it for myself as a high school freshman in the computer science lab. I was trying to fit in with other Sonic fans, you see. I just never felt like changing it (and now it's sort of like "my brand.")
I'm the founder of SAGE (The Sonic Amateur Games Expo), though I haven't had an active role in the event in a good while now. I still occasionally dabble in making games, and depending on who you ask, one of those games changed the face of an entire community.
Since then, I've been growing a slightly popular Youtube channel, and I occasionally stream on Twitch. I've been doing both of those a long time -- my Youtube channel dates back to 2006, and I've been livestreaming games since before Twitch even existed (Who here remembers a service called "Mogulus"?) I even used to run multiple Shoutcast radio stations back in the day!
In terms of this blog, it is largely an ask blog. I try to make sure at least one post goes up every day. Most people ask me questions about Sonic games, but feel free to ask me just about anything as long as it's not rude or too personal. Just be aware it might take a week or two for the answer to get posted, depending on volume and interest.
I wrote a big long intro post for the now defunct Cohost. If you'd like to know even more about me, that follows under the "keep reading" tag:
I still care a lot about fangames, and people's right to make fangames. SAGE was founded on the ideal of normalizing the fangaming scene in the eyes of the mainstream. Back when I first started, fangames were often considered another form of piracy. I wanted them re-categorized to be in the same realm as fanart or fanfiction. Whether or not SAGE accomplished that is anyone's guess, but the world is a lot more accepting of fangames these days regardless. A lot of cool people have featured their games at SAGE over the years, including the developers of Sonic Mania, Spark the Electric Jester, and Freedom Planet. SAGE is genuinely one of the things I am most proud of starting in my life, even if I haven't had a managerial role in over ten years.
I have been interviewed about SAGE and how it relates to the fangaming community. Both times I've been interviewed, I was granted permission to post my (very, very wordy) interview in full, if you'd like to read them:
Cultured Vultures: The Weird and Wonderful History of Sonic Fangames
Le Monde: When There’s No Good Sonic Games, Fans Develop Their Own
I was known for a few fangames in my time. I have a Youtube playlist where I've commentated over some of those games.
I've tried to transition to making original games, the most recent one being OverBite in 2016. OverBite was a game I created for a game jam, with the intent on making it a bigger, more robust thing to sell later on down the line. The game jam version you can download today is a little basic and boring. It was created over the course of 33 days and I did nearly everything alone -- coding, art, level design, all of it. I custom-built the physics engine, I custom-built the AI, almost none of it was using prefabs or existing example code. The only outside help I received was music, which was provided by my old friend Malcolm Brown (who really needs a better online presence for links like this).
Circumstances got weird (it's a long story, and this post is long enough) but the short of it is OverBite is permanently on the backburner until further notice. I'd love to go back and flesh it out some day, and really make it something special (I have a giant design doc for it!), but I have to focus my attention elsewhere.
I registered a Youtube channel in 2006, back in the early days before they were owned by Google. Around 2009, I did my first formal video review, for Sonic Unleashed. I was inspired by the style of Gametrailers (now Easy Allies) at the time. From there, I started taking my channel a little more seriously, and recently I have had the impetus to take it very seriously.
I have been livestreaming since at least 2009, as well. For reference, that's before Twitch.tv existed, back when the site was called Justin.tv, and was pitched more as people livestreaming their bedrooms with a webcam (what is now called "Just Chatting" on Twitch). I jumped around between sites like Mogulus.com, Livestream.com, and uStream. In 2012, I teamed up with a friend, Imran Khan, to stream Sonic 06 for charity. The 18 hour marathon raised more than $1000 for relief after the Japanese tsunami disaster of the same year. When I stream nowadays, I do it on Twitch, here. Archives of past streams can be found here and here.
I used to be a paid, professional games media writer for the niche site tssznews.com, but that site imploded after I worked there for 12 years. It ran out of money, the head didn't want to run it anymore, and after an embarrassing social media gaffe, permanently closed its doors basically overnight without warning anyone else. While at TSSZ, I helped break a lot of their biggest stories. A slowly increasing amount of my TSSZ work has been archived at Last Minute Continue, and you can always use the Wayback Machine. I also have plans to archive my "professional" writing on my own site, bltn.net, eventually. Some day.
(Since writing this, I have also uploaded a large chunk of archived TSSZ articles to The Internet Archive.)
I'm also an artist, or I was. Most of my other creative outlets eventually took precedent, but I still try and retain some artistic skill. There's a very dusty DeviantArt profile out there, and an art tag on my tumblr blog you can check out. Carpal tunnel has made drawing a little frustrating these days, however.
Is that it? I guess that's it. There are even more links to things that aren't necessarily worth a paragraph on the Linktree, and not to hustle you after reading all of that, but boy it would be great if more people supported me on Patreon so I can use all this stuff to help pay my bills and get me to a more comfortable place in life. Twitch subs and Patreon donors get early access to my Discord and yadda yadda yadda...
Oh yeah, and I even turned on Youtube Memberships recently.
I did not watch SGF. I learned my lesson after The Game Awards. Instead, I hit up youtube.com/gametrailers, used it to make a playlist called "E3 2026," and sat down and watched an hour and a half of game trailers without Geoff or anyone from Microsoft talking between things.
And. Um. Doing that was exhausting.
You get so numb, so quickly, and eventually I even started to get angry at how many trailers open with cinematics that have nothing to do with gameplay. Or how many trailers are just entirely cinematic with no gameplay in them at all. It turned my brain to mush.
Into the Unwell makes me think of Whiplash for the Xbox, but with the rubber hose aesthetic of something like Cuphead.
I saw a lot of people buzzing about Tenebris Sombra and I don't get it. It kind of just looks like what Faith was already doing, but higher budget. You need to sell me on more than just "We spent more money than they did." But I suppose I'm being mean. Practical effects horror should be celebrated in all forms.
Shark Dentist looked insanely cynical to me. It's already kind of a strange concept, but then they so transparently jam "lore" into the mix that it just feels like bait. The epitome of "what if we did a game like..."
The back to back entries of N00b's Guide and Doomsday Diner just left me scratching my head because I'm not entirely sure what those games even are. Broadly speaking I get it, but I dunno. They feel like trailers that just washed over me and did a poor job making a case for themselves.
I thought I was still in the indie game section when I got to Exodus, which seems to be trying really hard to shake the fact it's trying to carry the Mass Effect 2 torch. It seems interesting but it mainly made me realize I've never put meaningful time into any of the original Mass Effect trilogy and I should some day.
A Star Trek horror game is an interesting twist but I'm still gun shy seeing the name Bloober Team. And again, a purely cinematic trailer. The "Halloween" singleplayer trailer has too much of the Rob Zombie version in it for my tastes, and their Loomis impersonator isn't great. But it's funny that they can get away not showing Michael's face because it's all third person.
I went out of my way to avoid including trailers for so-called "friend slop" and Cordura made me mad by sneaking in anyway. I was hoping Forever Ago had something more than just "you play as an old man" but it doesn't seem like it does. Gate Guard also kind of made me frown for how much it's just "a comedic version of Papers Please made for 100x more powerful hardware for some reason."
The opening line to Dog Pile said "roguelike deckbuilder" and I immediately hit the skip button. Sorry dude.
House Flipper 2: Pets is a contender for the worst trailer of the show. Shows absolutely nothing about what pets add to the game. Obviously you're going to be cleaning up pet messes, but is there more to it than that? There needs to be more to it than that. I watched your trailer hoping to see if there was more to it than that. Instead I got a cartoon that tells me nothing.
D-Topia wins the actual worst trailer though. The trailer has encoding errors and what can be seen of the game looks pretty boring.
Modern Warfare 4 had me scratching my head and wondering, "Didn't they do a MW4 already?" They have not. I don't play Call of Duty. This is for their extraction shooter mode, which I doubly do not care about. It looks so tightly scripted it makes me doubt it was even live gameplay. It looks like something somebody animated in Blender.
Clockwork Revolution was a surprise for me. I was ready to write it off, but the more I watched the trailer, the more charmed by it I became. A steampunk clockwork time travel shooter is an interesting concept and I get vibes of the good parts of Bioshock.
Gears of War: E-Day was maybe my favorite thing here. I'm glad to see Gears of War "back" and looking cool as hell. Microsoft knows it, too, because they're locking it down as their console exclusive. Probably the strongest thing they got. Unfortunately for them I'm not buying an Xbox for that game.
The Fable reboot looks too serious. I laughed that the Plague Tale spinoff (sequel?) is just a generic action game and there aren't even any rats. Sea of Thieves also seems like it's trying to become a Roblox. Ho-hum.
I really hated the Halo "new missions" teaser. It says a lot that Gears is an Xbox console exclusive but Microsoft is showing this thing around on a Playstation 5. This is the death knell for this franchise and it kind of spits in the face of Halo's entire identity. 343 was kind of awful at maintaining the Halo "feel" and this is them giving up entirely and going full Call of Duty or Doom 2016. And like I said on Bluesky, all the cutscenes have that plastic-y instagram filtered look like they were either AI generated or at least "AI enhanced." Foul. No thank you.
By this point in the playlist my burnout was becoming real and I started skipping big chunks of it because I was feeling the garbage overload, especially after Halo.
Stage Tour looks great. Indie Guitar Hero is exactly where this genre needs to go, and their roguelike campaign mode where you're on a road trip collecting power-ups and picking songs sounds awesome. I never connected with Guitar Hero as much as I wanted, so I'm glad to see it still getting some love.
There Are No Ghosts At The Grand looks pretty fun. Sort of a house flipper style game but as you renovate rooms you uncover clues to a wider mystery. Good concept, at least.
Exo Rally is very funny to me. It's like if they made a Mass Effect spinoff about doing checkpoint races in the Mako. That's not a complaint. I like off-kilter racing games.
Every time I see Company of Heroes I have PTSD flashbacks to the days before Steam, where my cousin bought me a retail disc of Company of Heroes and in order to play it with him online, I had to install 25+ patches in sequence, one at a time, on a 1mbps connection. It took more than a week. And we ultimately never even played it together.
Serious Sam: Shatterverse continues my hot-and-cold, on-and-off affair with Serious Sam. I've never liked it when this franchise gets too deliberately wacky, so I'm skeptical of this.
Thief Remastered is good to see. I do worry NightDive is spreading themselves too thin these days, though.
Ending on Duskers 2.0 was fitting given it is another mostly-cinematic trailer. I wasn't even aware there was a Duskers 1. Interesting concept, I guess.
I liked the dynamic Sonic and Sally had in SatAM. Sally wanted to plan everything slowly and carefully, Sonic wanted to rush in and deal with whatever came his way head-first. They completed each other.
That is not who Sega Sonic is. Sega Sonic is a guy who believes everyone deserves to be free. He seems like the kind of guy who cannot be tied down by anyone. Cannot be changed by anyone.
Sega Sonic is not a guy who has a girlfriend. Not Princess Sally, not even Amy Rose. Sega Sonic goes where the wind takes him. Chasing the horizon looking for something new. He's always on the move and nobody can keep up with him. Everybody knows of Sonic, but not many people know the real Sonic the Hedgehog, you know what I mean?
And Sega Sonic is not necessarily impulsive in the way SatAM Sonic was. If anything, the way he handled Perfect Chaos shows he's willing to look before he leaps and make calculated decisions. He does not "shoot first and ask questions later."
I can't see Sega Sonic getting along with Princess Sally. I'm sure they'd still be allies, friends even, but they wouldn't have chemistry like they did in SatAM. They wouldn't "complete each other." They would simply be two capable members of the resistance.
I do, however, miss the SatAM vibe. I still miss late-era Archie Sonic. I miss when the comics got to be this complex tapestry of weird stuff and were allowed to have more creative license. I miss when they got to have Breezie running a casino staffed by Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts as her bodyguards. I miss when Honey the Cat was this pop-star idol that Amy adored. I miss Professor Pickle and Uncle Chuck being buddies. I miss Bunnie Rabbot, Antoine, Rotor, and Nicole. I miss Knothole. I miss The Void. I miss Wendy Witchcart inexplicably being the sister of Ixis Naugus. I miss Snively. And, yes, deep down, I even miss The Dark Legion, even though they are connected to he who shall not be named.
I miss all of that a lot more than just Sally by herself. I miss what Sally was a part of. Even if it was a soap opera (a lot of comics are soap operas!)
IDW is getting better, though. I know there are IDW haters out there who are going to see a post like this and think I'm on their side. IDW had a rough patch around the release of Sonic Frontiers, I wasn't quiet about that, but that's because some of their A-List talent was working with Sega on the game. IDW seems to have diversified their pool of writers and there's not as much draw on the writing talent from Sega's end right now anyway. I loved the extreme gear tournament arc. I think what they're doing with Surge is really interesting. I'm totally hooked on who this big villain reveal is going to be (it's totally Franken-Starline).
Not a fan! And the Sega Discord also apparently uses AI artwork in their header image too. I'm sure some of these things will get corrected eventually, Sega's just late to the party here in how the tide is turning harshly against AI, but it's still a bummer.
The Crazy Taxi World Tour trailer was bad, too. Paced very poorly. Felt like they shoved the Offspring song in there at the last minute and that things were paced around a different song instead. Very awkward.
It it a hot take to say shadow and sonic could have fallen in love with each other if circumstances had played out differently? I feel like they are only ones who could really see each other as equals and come to understand each other and exist comfortably together. I find it difficult to imagine either of them in a functional relationship with anyone else. Sally can for sonic but she isn't present in current or adventure continuity
Is it a hot take to suggest Sonic could handle Biolizard's final form solo? I fully acknowledge this was born of my own character bias, but considering how quickly it's possible to reach a weak spot (no, it's not easy, but it can be done) and that Sonic frequently does the impossible, it may challenge him but I still say he'd come out on top.
I dunno. Sonic Adventure 2's plot is weird now. I'm still convinced the point of the story was that Gerald recreated synthetic versions of Super Sonic and Perfect Chaos from Echidna prophecy, and that the whole point is that Shadow would eventually realize he's lesser than Sonic. His death was meant to be this moment of defying Gerald's deathwish, honoring Maria's promise, and proving that even a copy could still do something right.
If you keep that in mind, yes, Sonic could almost assuredly solo Biolizard. All throughout The Finalhazard, Sonic is talking about how Shadow doesn't look so good and his Super power is starting to fade. And if you consider that the prototype textures for Super Shadow were Silver and not Gold, I think that's also tying into all this. That Super Shadow just wasn't supposed to be as powerful as Super Sonic.
Now the question is: let's say things play out exactly the same with Sonic soloing The Finalhazard. Can he generate a big enough Chaos Control on his own? I guess I question that. It's a good dramatic moment that Sonic and Shadow work together.
And I sort of get this picture in my head of the end of Dragon Ball Z, right. Spoilers for one of the most popular Anime of all time and an episode that aired 20+ years ago: Where Goku unites the entire planet in the biggest Spirit Bomb he's ever conjured and it's still not enough to kill Buu, so he has to give it one last little push to finish the job.
For some reason, if Super Sonic has to solo The Finalhazard, I feel like it's going to be the same sort of thing. He'll get close, but there will need to be an extra push from somewhere. That was Super Shadow. But if Super Shadow isn't with him, it has to come from something else.
Since Sonic Adventure 1 specifically shows the Chaos Emeralds completely depowered and the support of his friends (and the city) re-energizes them, maybe we get something similar. But instead of the people of Station Square cheering on Sonic the Hedgehog, we pan across all continents on earth (something we already see!) and everyone gives Sonic just a little more energy to push past the last 10% he needs.
I'm not really sure why we need a remake of Rayman Legends with CGI models instead of hand drawn art. Maybe the original game still sells well enough to justify a new edition but it feels super pointless to do this weird half step where they're adding another 20% to the game and completely redoing all the visuals.
And the new visuals are nice, they aren't as blasphemous as they could be, but I still dunno.
As I round the bend on what feels like the final encounters of Control, I am becoming very excited for Control Resonant. The first Control feels like Remedy throwing down their shackles and letting their freak flag fly in so many ways, and Resonant looks like a doubling down of that. I keep thinking of how they're sort of feeling like Hideo Kojima levels of weird without all the baggage of Hideo Kojima himself.
I want to see how far Remedy can push things.
Conceptually I like the idea of God of War Laufey. On Bluesky I compared it to Kill Six Billion Demons in the way it portrays the afterlife, and I say that favorably. In practice, the more I sit with what they showed of Laufey the less I like it. It's a very different tone for the series and the moment they introduced Phranque I completely checked out. The name sucks, all of his dialog is too quippy, it gives off the vibes of, almost like executive meddling, in a way?
Like somebody thought the audience needed a "normal" character to "ground things." Keeping in mind Phranque is a gelatinous cube, of course. "Cute" might be a better word. But there's something about him that feels very calculated and forced in a way that is a little yucky to me. There are other things that are rubbing me the wrong way, but I know they'll sound like nitpicking. For now I'm giving this game the side-eye. I'm suspicious.
Off the top of my head that's all I can remember from State of Play. I guess Wolverine was there? That looked exactly like I expected it would. Zero surprise there. I'm sure it'll be a very fun and polished game, but I could form a complete picture of what that game was going to look and play like in my head, and that's exactly what it is.
Who has the best rizz/sass between the Straw Hat pirates in the Netflix series
Why do I get anon asks wondering who I think is hot in different shows and other things? Who out there is delighted by my hot or not opinions?
To be honest I don't feel much about anyone in the Netflix series. It kind of weirds me out how much sexual tension there is between Sanji, Nami and Zoro. I know Nami eventually triples her cup size in the manga, so sex appeal is a thing in One Piece, but there's a few scenes where they lay it on thick with Emily Rudd stripping down to a wet bikini.
And, I dunno. I just don't like feeling pandered to. Emily Rudd is a pretty lady but you don't gotta have her do that to prove it.
At least it's universal, though. There's a shot on Drum Island where Zoro's inexplicably shirtless, and there's a scene later on where Luffy comes running out of a bath with nothing but a towel that made me think, like, "damn dude, Luffy's cut." It reminded me of that George of the Jungle movie with Brendan Frasier, where people talk about it being this "mom movie" because it's prime era Brendan Frasier oiled up running around in a loin cloth.
But sorry man. I don't even have anything funny to say.
So. Looks like ol' Naka really does got the awful reputation
You could have linked the actual Sega-16 post instead of the quote dunk:
This is an interview conducted by Ken Horowitz of Sega-16, in what are a long line of really great interviews. (Look up his other posts; not only does he translate old interviews he conducts lots of new ones with the old Sega guard. I recall a very juicy and hotly debated interview with Tom Kalinske, and a really fantastic one about Sony Imagesoft's role in creating the 32X)
But this particular interview is with Sega of America's old Product Manager, Mike Fischer, and it's just chock full of lots of really fun and interesting anecdotes. He has a lot of frankly very humble stories about his time at Sega of America handling products like the Game Gear and Pico, but it also leads to a lot of fly-on-the-wall moments where he talks about seeing the Sega America vs. Sega Japan divide from his perspective.
Which is, generally, that Sega of Japan was just as busy fighting with each other as they were with fighting against America. I've long said that Sega is its own worst enemy, and that appears to be more true than I could have ever realized. SOJ consistently thought they knew the right way to do everything and refused to take advice from anyone about anything, including other employees at Sega, and especially from Americans.
One particular story stood out to me, and that's Mike mentioning seeing an early prototype of the Sega Saturn where they wanted to give it kind of an iridescent, sparkling, candy apple style finish (but black, not red). Mike apparently tried to offer advice that you can't really do that with plastic injection molding, because the plastic has flow points that will ruin the pattern. If I remember right, Mike had a background in toys and gadgets, so he knew what he was talking about. The guys in Japan basically told him to piss off... only to later find out he was right and trying to injection mold that kind of glittered plastic looked like garbage.
Notably, yes, he does talk about Yuji Naka more than a few times in this, and it's mostly to mention that dealing with Naka-san was always a nightmare. He tells one particular story of trying to convey that "mature" games like GTA were on the rise in America and maybe the teams in Japan could think about games to target that wave. Yuji Naka blew up at him about how Sega doesn't make "porno" games, only to get smug about it later on and suggest they rename Billy Hatcher to "Giant Cock" because it's a game featuring chickens.
There's easily two dozen stories like that in the article and it's a great read for Sega historians.
Since it's free and you said you dig it, thoughts on Gravity Circuit? Did you ever review it on Steam or anything?
I did in fact review Gravity Circuit on Steam, if anyone out there wants to lavish it with thumbs up. Here's the text:
There's a lot of indie games out there I would consider a spiritual successor to Mega Man, and a lot of them accomplish that goal with both varying degrees of success and polish.
Gravity Circuit deserves to stand among some of the best. From visuals to music to gameplay, this is a great game with enough variety to set itself apart from Capcom's legendary franchise.
Mainly, that's due to Gravity Circuit not being a shooter. Your primary method of attack here is your fists, your feet, and your grappling hook, putting it closer to something like the Mega Man Zero games on the Gameboy Advance. But again, without the reach of Zero's blade, Gravity Circuit still feels like a very different game.
How it handles power-ups is different, too. No longer do you get a limited-use special weapon upon defeating one of the game's eight end-level bosses. Now, you spend currency in a handful of different shops, picking and choosing between a wide range of different abilities and stat boosts to equip on your character. You may not get a gun, but do you want to punch with enough force that it generates a shockwave in front of you? You can do that.
And then there are the specials, a set of Smash-Bros.-style directional inputs where you can equip flying uppercuts, healing powers, and much, much more.
Wrapped around it is a story that makes sure never to take itself too seriously while still keeping the stakes real and the characters interesting. As the Gravity Circuit, you are tasked with hunting down your infected Circuit brothers while having to deal with their baggage along the way.
If you've been missing the Mega Man X and Zero games, you owe it to yourself to give this game a look.
The game is currently free to keep on Steam, given they just announced the sequel. Here's a gameplay video I captured after (I think?) I received it for Christmas. Or maybe I bought it for myself. I forget:
It's one of those games I'd actually been following on Tumblr for many, many years before it came out (@gravitycircuit, though I swear there was a lot more old developer posts there and not just promo stuff) and I'm glad it turned out to be such a banger.
I, uh. Actually still need to beat it. I think I'm down to one or two Circuits left. (In my defense: I did the exact same thing with Mega Man 11, where I got down to the last robot master and never went back to it)
You recently answered that Sega has only accepted Sonic fanworks within the past few years. I've often heard the exact opposite, arguing that Sega holds a more permissive position on fanworks than other Japanese companies, and or that the Sonic fandom holds a special place compared to the fandoms for its other franchises, arguments that I find to be pretty generalized/reductive to the complex and long-term relationship that the company has with the community.
So, how were things in the past? What changed between then and now? And what factors do you think played a role in those shifts?
How it used to be is that nobody knew.
Early internet was the wild west. Paramount and Fox were notorious in stomping out totally harmless fansites for things like Star Trek and The Simpsons in the early 90's, citing IP infringement. Infamously, one of the first Doom total conversions was Aliens Doom, based on the movie, and Fox tried to cease & desist it off the internet forever. It was such a big deal that claiming something "got FOXed" was short hand for getting a cease and desist.
Nintendo continued to carry that torch. What fan projects they'd shut down were (and still are) hit or miss. It's hard to tell what crosses the line and what doesn't. The same goes for lots of other developers like Capcom, Konami, and Square.
Square, for example, shut down a project called Chrono Resurrection. Chrono Resurrection was going to be a re-imagining of Chrono Trigger in 3D, but not the entire game. Just a handful of select scenes, to show the potential of what a Chrono Trigger remake could look like (PS2 era, keep in mind). They boasted professional talent, including CGI artists that worked on movies like The Matrix Reloaded.
Square didn't care. Shut the project down. It mostly exists as a soundtrack now. Fangames did not feel safe.
Sega seemed totally detached and ignorant of their fanbase. There was a sense that they just didn't know what the fans were doing, because they didn't seem to react to anything from the Sonic fandom, ever, good or bad.
I remember it going around in the early days where Funimation broke off from Saban to dub the rest of Dragon Ball Z. There were some growing pains there, where Funimation was trying to push around Dragon Ball fansites and "control the messaging" so to speak. I forget what site it was specifically, but I remember they complained at length that Funimation was exerting legal control over what they could and could not publish because Funi had the license and thus they dictated how it could be used.
And I remember that sending reverberations through the Sonic community, because at least for me, it made me realize how tenuous everything at SFGHQ could be. Sega could have very easily told us all where to stick it and we'd be powerless. It was their IP, they wrote the rules.
Did they? No. But they didn't encourage us, either. They just kind of did their own thing, and any feedback from the community about the state of Sonic games was often not just ignored, but defied.
But it felt like there were near-misses. Somebody working at Sega sent cease and desists to a few Shining Force fansites in like 2012 or so, and at the time people were left scratching their heads. They also swept through and randomly issued a takedown request to Streets of Rage Remake around this time as well, despite the creator claiming Sega even gave him implicit approval. There was a sense that Sonic's day might be coming.
What changed was a few different things. It basically comes down to the fact that Sega could no longer maintain plausible deniability about Sonic fan projects. Guys like Aaron Webber and Naoto Ohshima were guests at SAGE, who did Q&A sessions within the heart of the Sonic fangaming community. In 2017, when the final version of Green Hill Paradise released, the official Sonic account appeared in stream chat for the game's launch and basically gave everybody there a thumbs up and told them to keep doing good work.
That was also around the time that Sega was doing I think weekly community streams and they were constantly asking for and showcasing cool fanart and other things like that.
To me, that's when it felt like Sega explicitly approved. They said, "We know, and we think they're awesome. Don't stop." And 2017 is obviously the year we got Sonic Mania, in itself the culmination of a long process of bringing Sonic fans into the fold that started all the way back with the Sonic 4 disaster (Sega actually requested fan feedback for Sonic 4, which snowballed into becoming Sonic Mania).
Now, that Green Hill Paradise incident was 8 years ago, and plans could change. But I also feel like the cat's out of the bag and precedent has been established. Walking that back would be very damaging to the brand.
Especially when Sega is still bringing fans in for things like the Sonic Symphony concert or Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.
You genuinely have to play Paper Mario: Sticker Star to understand how bad it is. It’s genuinely the worst designed game I’ve ever seen and it says a lot considering some of the stuff I’ve played. It gets so many basics of game design completely wrong and it’s almost borderline a troll game.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that I probably don't need to play Sticker Star, though. I am not invested enough in the Paper Mario franchise to wade into one of the more hated entries "just because." :p
Am I wrong for not wanting to support third-party games on Nintendo Switch 2 because of Game-Key Cards?
Absolutely not! Lots of people seem to hate Game-Key Cards. It's the worst of all worlds; it's as bad as buying a download code in a game box combined with a waste of plastic.
Some devs have apparently been pushed away from considering Game-Key Cards because people hate them so much, and supposedly Nintendo was trying to reduce publishing costs so Game Key-Cards weren't so prevalent.
What is the essence of Coenn Brother’s style of filmmaking? Only seen two (NCFOM being one) but my impression is that it’s mainly character driven with barely any plot.
I wouldn't say "barely any plot." I would say characters that borderline on being over the top, but they ride the line just enough that they don't become cartoon characters.
At least in the Coen movies I've seen, they're very much operating in kind of an exaggerated version of reality. It's almost pulpy, in the comic book sense. Even in the more serious movies they do I think there's this almost artistic way they're directed, something I've described as almost lyrical.
Now, keep in mind, according to Letterboxd, I've only seen two Coen movies. Raising Arizona and Hudsucker Proxy. So I've never seen Fargo, I've never seen Barton Fink, I've never seen No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, or O Brother Where Art Thou.
But from what I know of some of those movies, I think that even applies to their dramas as much as their more comedy leaning work.
Like, let's take your claim of "barely any plot." Even though Letterboxd has their own summaries for movies I tend to include one in my review, because if you follow anyone on Letterboxd you're primarily looking at the feed instead of the individual movie pages, right. For Hudsucker, I really had to work to shorten things down, because it was becoming a very large run-on sentence.
But the first 15 minutes basically sets up that it's twilight of 1958, and the Hudsucker Corporation has just broken all of their sales records. The company is at its peak. So, Waring Hudsucker ("Hud" to his friends) gets up from his seat, climbs up on the long board room meeting desk, and takes a running leap out the window to his death. Suicide.
This leaves the board room with a dilemma: with Hud dead, all his shares in the company will default at the end of the fiscal year -- which is in four weeks. The general public will be able to buy stock in the Hudsucker Corporation. There's no way anyone else on the board can buy up Hud's shares, either, because the company has never been worth more than right here, right now. They are backed into a corner. This is the worst case scenario.
But one of them, Mr. Mussburger, has an idea: they hire some random moron off the street, the perfect idiot, and appoint him as the new president of Hudsucker. He'll tank the stock price, at which point the board can buy up all the shares for a discount, blame it all on the dope, kick him out, and restore the company.
Enter Norville Barnes, a sweet and simple country boy who just started working in the mail room earlier that day. He's already at the end of his rope when he's given a dreaded "blue letter", a special piece of mail that must be hand-delivered to a member of the board -- in this case, Mr. Mussburger, who is about to find his perfect idiot to take the fall.
That's all in the first 15 minutes.
What follows is a roller coaster ride of journalistic espionage, Barnes being smarter than he looks, endless corporate satire, and even a little bit of real actual genuine magic. Long live The Hud.
It's a long setup! There's a lot of plot threads wrapped around each other!
Like, I guess in my mind I don't understand the difference between being character driven and having lots of plot. Characters have motivations, motivations drive friction, friction creates plot. If you don't have characters you don't have plot. Right?
I guess the only exception to that is when you just have characters that aren't doing anything. Like the example that jumps to mind is The Life Aquatic. I only saw that movie once when it first came out on DVD, and it felt like nothing happened in it. It was just a bunch of random little vignettes stapled together but to me, at 21 years old, it felt like a movie where not a lot happened to drive the story. Maybe I'd like it more now that it's been so long but I would describe that as a movie with lots of characters but not a lot of plot.
But when characters have goals and do things to accomplish those goals? That's plot. And of the Coen movies I've seen, they have those qualities.
