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.
what are your thoughts on the reload animations in the Modern Warfare reboot? Do you think Hyper made some banger reloads or do you think that they're too shaky and "tacticool" and that it's a bad thing that other games (ex. RE8) are starting to adopt that style of reloading
I own several Call of Duty games
I have still yet to actually play more than ten minutes of the original PC version of Call of Duty 1.
What are your thoughts on the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far?
Even considering this was written in 2021, two years after Endgame, I feel like I was souring on it then and I'm really souring on it now.
The run up to Avengers Endgame was like a once in a lifetime event and since then Disney has done nothing but put out a baseline of mediocre stuff. They shy away from the big swings the MCU needs to keep taking while trying way too hard to keep the ball in the air and the money printer running. They just keep making the safest, clumsiest decisions.
Just about every post-Avengers thing I've seen has the stink of executives and business suits in it. Even the good stuff, like Wandavision or Multiverse of Madness has this tinge of somebody wringing their hands with evil intent just off set.
I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in Avengers Doomsday. The total desperation wafting off of that one is too powerful to ignore. "Look! We're sorry! We brought all your faves back! Even the directors!"
And they are going to have to prove they've cleaned house for a lot more than just one movie one time. Because what I hear instead is "Wait, come back, you still have so much money to give us!"
As someone not super invested in the MCU (I only just watched the three Captain America movies for the first time last year) I am not going crazy at the leaks or anything like that. People losing their minds over incorporating the FOX X-Men don't make any sense to me given at the very least Deadpool 3 felt like a charming (if messy) send-off to that universe.
Do you think the concept of internet "fandom" communities will die out? It seems to me that in recent years, largely due to increasing toxicity of online discourse and centralization onto social media conglomerates, that most fandoms have much less creative output than they used to have and are now more about absent-mindedly consuming things and screaming into the void on twitter.
For me, I don't really see people making an effort to create communities and focus on fan creation or more in depth discussion like I did during the era of forums. Everything is siloed away into discord chats where nobody really makes connections or works on long-term projects together.
No way dog, not in any shape or form will that ever happen. Just because you don't personally see them doesn't mean they aren't collecting somewhere. They are in the comments sections of Fandom Wikia articles, they are in Discords, they are on Tumblr Communities, they are on freakin' Github repos.
This stuff has existed since before there even was an internet at all. Back then you had in-person clubs people would meet at after school or after work to discuss their favorite TV shows or comic books. They shared Zines on paper using mimeographs (the precursor to photocopiers!)
People don't need "internet forums" for this kind of stuff. They never did. They didn't need Discord, either. Fandom and conventions and people sharing their feelings or creations have existed long before you or I were even born, in formats and mediums now forgotten or obsolete.
As long as there are people, there are going to be fandoms.
And I would argue Discord has only bolstered connections and coming together on long-term projects. In the early days of SFGHQ, my era of things, everyone was working on their own solo projects completely alone. Now you look at something like Project 06 and yeah, that's ChaosX's baby, but there's a growing list of contributors that have helped him with assets or animations or whatever. I feel like every big fangame that gets over the finish line is the product of at least 2 or 3 or even 5+ people.
Being able to find someone, hop on a voice call, or even screen capture for a video chat, and transfer files right there in the chat app (as long as they are small enough) is a pretty important tool for this kind of stuff. I mean, whole entire businesses run remotely through Slack, and Slack is basically just "Discord But For Work."
(Or, if you want to be pedantic, Discord is "Slack But For Leisure", since Slack came first)
But fans are forever. Fandoms are forever. The only thing I can maybe see happening is that corporations back down on cashing in on fandom so much, but I also don't see that happening either. You may not see where they are, but they are always going to be out there, somewhere. Some kid on a Roblox Obby dedicated to Super Mario Odyssey is going to have 10 regular visitors who just show up and chat about Nintendo games and that's their fandom community.
It's never going away. It just might be harder to find, just like everything else is these days.
It's been a busy month! Unfortunately quite a lot of it wasn't on the computer. I actually talked to one of the agencies that's supposed to be helping me find a job a couple weeks ago, and after telling them everything that was going on with me right now, they were like "yeah maybe you should hold off on looking for a job until things normalize for you."
Fortunately, that's going to be soon. I just got approval from my medicaid insurance for my partial denture. They don't want to pay for teeth cleaning, but I'm actually going to the dentist tomorrow (Saturday) so I'll ask them what's up about that. I, uh, don't think I can pay for it on my own right now
I saw a doctor about anxiety medication and was prescribed Effexor. I've been on it about a couple weeks now, which means I might be starting to feel some changes in my mood and disposition. I was told it usually takes 3-5 weeks for it to really start to be noticeable. I can't say I feel especially different, but I have been a little more social in ways I'm not normally. I meet back up with the doc on the 29th to check in and see how I'm feeling. The one downside is that I think it might be increasing my susceptibility to heartburn. Maybe she'll suggest something else.
The good news is it was my birthday this month, and family sent me some money. Rather than spend it on myself, I'm pooling it together with my other earnings, so that I'm not as behind on rent as I was last month. I still can't make the entire rent amount for August by myself right now, though, so if you're able to, I do actually really, really need the help still. Even small amounts still move the needle. Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll be done with the dentist for a while and can redouble my efforts on the job hunt instead of just picking at one or two listings here and there.
Become a supporter of BlazeHedgehog today!
That doesn't mean I'll instantly secure a job mind you, but I'll feel better about my chances after the last bits of dental stuff is complete and I can smile again without traumatizing children.
UPCOMING VIDEOS
As for the Shadow Generations video, it's coming along, bit by bit. Like I said last month, it's a long video. It might end up being the new longest video I've ever edited for this channel. Final run time will probably be in the range of an hour and 20 minutes, give or take. I've edited somewhere close to 35 minutes, so I'm around the halfway point (I previously told the discord I was halfway a couple weeks ago, but that's because I forgot just how long this video will end up being). It's a gigantic video and I'm trying to juggle taking care of my own health with actually getting the work done. I not only want to finish it, I NEED to finish it, because it's taking up most of my remaining HDD space and I can't do much else until I can clear out the 350gb+ of video capture. Really, I need more storage period, but now is not the time to talk about that.
But, needless to say, I don't really have any HDD space left to work on anything else right now! I can't start capturing footage for the next "Definitive Sonic Adventure 2" video, nor can I do anything like that for the NiGHTS documentary, either. I only have about 30gb free, and compared to what I need, that's basically nothing. And that's even after multiple rounds of cleaning up free space.
So really, that's about it then. Things are looking up, but I'm not out of the woods yet. I just keep my nose to the grindstone and wait until I'm in the clear.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Throwback Thursday: I Still Hate Twilight Princess (FREE) https://www.patreon.com/posts/161704838?collection=1952317
Throwback Thursday: Breath of the Wild Review (FREE) https://www.patreon.com/posts/161714882?collection=1952317
Shadow Generations Review, The First Five Minutes (Early Access Tier): https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxsyDcyVuUgO4wYErTlFSHk76jvc7Fc4cA / https://www.patreon.com/posts/160789216
If the Sonic Xtreme team decided early in development to make a 2D Sonic game with 3D graphics (like Kirby 64) and thus completed the game in time for the 1996 holiday: how would the public have responded? Would it been as underwhelming as a 2d sprite based game? in 96 would 3D graphics made it too hard to replicate the classic physics even in 2.5D?
I mean, nobody really responded to Clockwork Knight.
Now, in all honesty, Clockwork Knight is also just kind of a boring game. Of the trio of Sega hopefuls (Astal, Clockwork Knight, and Bug!), it's definitely the best in terms of raw playability but I've always found it to be kind of plain and uninteresting.
There's no guarantee your hypothetical Sonic game would also be plain and uninteresting, but I also feel like a lot of other 2.5D games from that era struggled to gain a foothold. Like, I love Klonoa, but I feel like in its era, Klonoa didn't really do super well. I've always thought Klonoa did not do as well as Namco would have liked.
And how many people these days remember game like Pandemonium? It had its moment in the spotlight around 1995 and 1996, but after Super Mario 64 came out nobody talked about it ever again.
And that's the thing about Sonic X-Treme, right. It was the Mario 64 era. It would not have been a 1995 game. Sega would have looked like they were behind the times, even if they put out a good game. And with Sega of America at the helm? That probably wasn't happening anyway. Go look at Sonic Spinball and tell me that era of Sega of America could pull off a new 2D Sonic game on par with even Sonic 1.
What do you think made Darth Vader such a cool and interesting villain? Was it the design? The character? Both? Something else?
Signature look, signature voice, signature gimmick (the labored, electronic breathing). He was ruthless, scary, and his costume was not over-designed, silly, or too alien looking.
Darth Vader is, basically, a space samurai. He wields a katana made out of lasers. That's already cool enough by itself. And when you combine that with the commanding voice of James Earl Jones, who at once could sound all-powerful and also extremely gentle, you have something unforgettable.
That, combined with just... the look of Star Wars. Not every movie in 1977 looked like Star Wars. I don't mean just special effects. I mean shot composition. Cinematography. Camera positions.
Go watch Flash Gordon from 1980 and compare it to Star Wars. Go watch The Black Hole. Go watch Richard Donner's 1978 Superman. There's something about Star Wars that looks and sounds like almost nothing of that era. The art direction, the audio design, the way it was shot and put together...
There was only one Star Wars, only one Darth Vader, and it's hard to pinpoint anything beyond that without knowing intricately the film history leading up to that point. It was just a total paradigm shift.
Between Castlevania and Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, which flavour of spooky/horror do you prefer between them?
Castlevania, especially towards the end of IGA's run, started veering too much into actual horror. I guess maybe that's where the classic games were at. They were, for the era, as close to horror as most people got on the NES.
But I'll be real with you: Even though I love Castlevania dearly, I've always appreciated sillier horror more. I talked about this on Bluesky a little bit, because Somecallmejohnny covered the 7th Guest remake on his channel and the VR version happened to be on discount. A friend gifted me a hand-me-down Quest 2 last year and a bunch of store credit, so I bought it.
And it's very much Disney's The Haunted Mansion, but as a VR game. Corny and hammy but in a very enjoyable way. I need to go back to it. I like more traditional horror, don't get me wrong, but I'm very nostalgic for this kind of lighter tone because it reminds me of Halloween when I was a kid.
Ghouls 'n' Ghosts always struck me as closer to that. It's got scary elements to it, but they're always presented in this cartoony, somewhat exaggerated way.
It never really struck me as something you're particularly meant to be afraid of.
Unfortunately, the comedically high difficulty of your typical GnG is a huge turn off for me. The only way I see anything in these games past, say, the second or third level is by watching someone else do it. I owned the NES version of the first game, and while that's a notoriously bad port, actual GnG games aren't much easier in practice.
I wanted to like GnG games so much that I silently poured one out for that new one Capcom put out a couple years ago, and the way people raked it over the coals for looking ugly. I still think it looks fine, maybe even good, but I'm too afraid of the difficulty to go near it.
What are your thoughts on Jason Schreier and Gene Park? I've really come to enjoyed their games commentary as of late.
I kind of like Jason Schreier. He can be a little too dry and business but I think there's plenty of room for that in game journalism. Maybe not enough people report to Jason's standards. He strikes me as one of the most professional people in that business, and if you watch his recently-launched Youtube channel, he demonstrates a depth of knowledge few have.
Gene Park... man, I dunno. I've heard things about that dude. Admittedly, I haven't had tons of personal experience with him or even reading his work, and what I heard was years ago. But I heard he's really wishy washy about certain issues and is kind of a clout chaser. And I don't mean I heard this from redditors or randos on the internet, I heard it from people I trust that go to the same industry events he does. There was something he did a couple years ago, I'm blanking on it now, but he was on the very wrong side of an issue and it really turned me off of the guy.
I realize that's really non-specific and anecdotal. I'm not exactly indicting the guy or telling anyone to stop following him. I just remember there was something that made me wonder about him. Call it a gut feeling now if you want, but there was something I heard once that made me go "uhhhhh".
There's been a big debate regarding poptimism in music criticism, and I'm wondering if the same trends apply with other mediums? Like are some games more likely to get a "critical pass" just because they are popular? Are reviewers just generally less negative than they were before?
I mean it generally depends on who you're listening to these days. I find Jeff Gerstmann to retain his edge.
I think -- and this is a problem I'm noticing with Jeff now in particular, is that the concept of a "review" is kind of fallen by the wayside. Jeff has written reviews of games on his Patreon, but there is no place where he's collected his written reviews. Instead, his patreon is an endless firehose of stream vods and podcasts. You really have to sit down and listen to many hours of his stuff to really get a sense of what he thinks of a specific thing.
Like, do you want to know what Jeff thinks of the Steam Machine? Here's a two and a half hour podcast where he probably dedicates 45 minutes to it somewhere in first half.
It took him mentioning it, but Patreon did not immediately surface his written article on the Steam Machine for me. It really felt like you needed to sift through this giant podcast in order to understand his view.
And to Jeff's point, this is the way games journalism is now. Establishments like Gamespot and IGN are old and busted and increasingly people are turning to individual "influencers" for news and reviews, delivered via video and word-of-mouth. And maybe he's right, I dunno. He's been in this business longer than most. Certainly, if his 10,000 patreon subscribers are all paying the $5 minimum, his money is where his mouth is.
But it is annoying, in the sense that it creates a sense of you-had-to-be-there. Jeff's opinions are ephemeral. Maybe they should be? Opinions change all the time. Should this stuff be so set in stone? I do like to look backwards in time, and the increasing rate at which everybody is creating something makes that a difficult job to reliably archive.
Anyway, that's a big digression. My point is: critics still exist, but they're harder to find because the way the public finds opinions is changing.
I also generally think a lot of games are just sort of a bare minimum of quality. We hear about the really bad ones, like Mass Effect Andromeda or MindsEye. But I think the nature of video games as an industry has reached a point where corporations are spending such gigantic, ridiculous amounts of money that they are largely producing a lot of stuff that is just "good enough." Not bad, but not really outstanding home run smashes, either.
Like, Star Wars Outlaws, right. Ubisoft made that. I played the demo. The first PS5 game I remember playing that felt like a PS5 game to me. Didn't seem so bad. But it wasn't so good I was rushing to throw it on my wishlist, either. And I think that's true of... a lot of games now, from Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, you name it. Nobody wants failures, but very few want to risk truly big swings, either. So we get a lot of B+ games.
I also think it's just harder to find games than ever. The floodgates have been open for years now and any given day 20-50 (even up to 100, if you know where to look) games get released every single day. That probably goes for music, too. We are in the era of anyone being able to release anything and it can be a success, but that means every creative industry is crowded with wannabes.
And the big names, your Taylor Swifts, your Ubisofts, they aren't just making music for one market or even one region anymore. Everyone is on the global stage, everyone is spending the big bucks, everyone wants a return on investment. You do that by being safe, and I think there are a lot of smaller creators who try and follow that example to their detriment.
Cutting edge art still exists, but you gotta go looking in darker corners for it. You gotta get away from the light pollution of the mainstream, in more ways than one. In that way, maybe Jeff was right.
I realize Metroid and Halo have very little connective tissue beyond power-armored main characters, but still. Given what you know about their abilities, in a fight between Samus Aran and Master Chief, who are you putting your money on?
I mean Samus all the way. It's not that Master Chief isn't strong or skilled, he is. The man jumps out of space ships and survives re-entry.
But Samus has so much more gear. Missiles. Super Missiles. Wave Beam. Ice Beam. Hyper Beam. Power Bombs. Shine Spark. Screw Attack. The Gravity Suit. And even if Nintendo seems confused about what they are, she is still technically a bounty hunter, and I think that gives her a degree of street smarts Chief undoubtedly lacks.
Chief has a lot of raw strength, a good eye for tactical advantages, but I feel like Samus is absolutely faster than he is. She freezes him one time and it's over. The Ice Beam seems to freeze nearly anything. And if it stacks with the Wave Beam, cover isn't going to do much for Chief.
I think I found a compromise to your how to fix sonic video's driving control ideas. My idea is adding an automatic strafing feature. When you hold a trigger down Sonic strafe, but while your running and have momentum the trigger will act like driving game controls. Sonic will continue moving forward and when you stop holding the trigger down he will go back to an Adventure styled control scheme. What do you think? I believe it's the best of both worlds.
So this ask got buried who knows how deep. It's from 2021 and I don't remember seeing it until now.
I'm not sure what this means, though. Strafing is side to side movement. Like let's say I am looking at you, right. I'm pointed in your direction. When I take one step to the left, I am strafing to the left.
What you have described is my idea but you haven't mentioned what auto-strafing is meant to solve. And I realize that's now five years out of date, you probably don't even read this blog anymore, but I'm trying to wrap my head around it, because technically, Sonic can already strafe. That's what the quickstep is.
I'm not trying to blow you up or nothin' I just don't get it.
I feel like Knuckles would alternate between being extremely boring (he's set in his ways, doesn't want to be bothered) and extremely frustrating (he angers easily). I'm sure he has a big heart and is very protective though. If you can find room to fit into his lifestyle I'm sure it'd be very nice, but I don't know if I could.
Tails feels like he'd be kind of normal. I mean technically he's still a kid so there's no telling how his personality will shake out later in life, but outside of being a little too attached to Sonic sometimes he seems like he's got a good, rational head on his shoulders. He's smart and dedicated and can fix (or even improve) basically anything you'll ever have.
Tails just feels like there would be more stability and well-being. Sorry, Knuckles.
It's an oddly worded question so I apologize, but do you think some games are remembered more fondly for their impact when they were released, as opposed to how 'good' they actually are? Sonic Adventure 2 is an example that comes to mind for me.
I think you're just describing the natural phenomenon of everything. Who we are today is not who we might have been yesterday. Everything we feel is a product of our current expectations and where we are mentally.
Standards change. Perspectives shift.
And the thing is, for some people they hold on to their perspective forever. I tend to do that with games I never disconnect from. I replay Donkey Kong Country a lot, or Yoshi's Island, or whatever, and it's hard for me to look at them from any other perspective than the one I saw them in 30 years ago, because they kind of get crystalized in a moment that never lets go.
And sometimes nostalgia does that, too. People want to chase the exact experience they had when they were 10 years old, completely unchanged, and that means refusing to look at things with the objectivity of adulthood. The simplicity of that moment is a comfort to them. Remembering how they felt when something excited them.
But also like. Things that do actually have impact are remembered for that impact. Citizen Kane was a big deal that it's still this broadly known "thing" even now, because it ushered in the modern era of film making.
Unfortunately I don't know if you could really say Sonic Adventure 2 had that kind of impact. Not many things do. I think it's mostly just people wanting to recapture how they felt the first time they played it.
Re: your Yoshi series opinion. I think it goes back to Yoshi's Island originally being a Mario game, by the (partial) Mario team. Once that was done, the Mario team goes back to high-selling Mario games, which is only for Mario, not Yoshi. Instead Yoshi can be babbiez 1st platforma. 👼
In other words: if you have to save up your money for a high-quality platformer, it should be Mario. Nintendo does not want their customer base having to "pick" sides when they never reasonably discount, which is why I speculate cynically that they refuse to let Yoshi's Island SNES happen again including picking Arzest who seems to aim for "good enough". I dunno!
There used to be a time where Nintendo had lots of different platformers, though.
Now, Wario, I'd believe Wario was in danger of "eating Mario's lunch." Wario Land and Wario Land VB are basically just Mario games with an edge to them. And Wario Land 2 and 3 tried to reinvent those games as being more puzzly.
But to that end, I think Yoshi's Island had a good enough hook (protecting Baby Mario, throwing eggs) that it set it apart, sort of like Kirby. There were no fire flowers, no raccoon tails, no power mushrooms. Not even any toads. You'd be hard pressed to even know it was called "Super Mario World 2" at all.
Unlike, say, Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, 3 and even DK64, which took the Mario formula and just added more to it. More animals to ride on, bigger levels to explore, deeper secrets to discover.
And maybe I said this originally, but what gets me is that Yoshi's Island, despite the big marker crosshatching backgrounds and the playskool music, is actually not an easy game. I struggle with Yoshi's Island a lot more than I do, say, Donkey Kong Country, an apparently notoriously difficult game.
Especially if you're 100%ing Yoshi's Island. If you're going for every flower and red coin in Yoshi's Island you basically have to use a guide because they go out of their way to hide those things in the most obscure, difficult-to-find areas you can imagine.
I decided to try doing a Yoshi's Island 100% run a couple years ago and I barely made it past world 2 before giving up. I hit one level where I spent over an hour looking for the last red coin and it turned out it only appears one time earlier in the level and if you don't see it before it disappears it never comes back and the game never communicates that to you.
And there's lots of moments like that, where they hide a collectible in this place you'll probably completely miss. Like there are secret areas you can only get to by hitting an off-screen item multiple times. So it's not just "I think something is here and I jump once to check." You have to jump two or three or four times before it triggers.
To go from that to "this game has no hard objectives and is made for very young children to mess around in" is a wild pivot.
Not to "um, actually" you but, genuine question for clarification. Re: Sonic timelines, would Knuckles' Chaotix place in that first one because Metal Sonic is present and Sonic and Tails show up in the good ending? Or is that still not important enough in your opinion?
This is an old ask (2022) but honestly I'd wonder if Knuckles Chaotix even happened at this point, or what it looked like.
I guess they've been slowly referencing it more and more, but with Sonic Heroes they were pretty clear that the new Chaotix we got were not the same characters from the 32X game.
But that was also like, two lore rewrites ago, and now supposedly everything is canonical, so I don't even know how I'd consider it, honestly.
I keep thinking it'd be fun if they did a special series of graphic novels that retold the Genesis games. There are certain things that could be expanded or straightened out. They could give them super lavish art like Archie's "Mega Drive" series or the Anniversary comics they put out.
But really, I'm just trying to capture the magic of reading The Sonic Ideal when I was a teenager. Still, it would help sort out things like where Knuckles Chaotix fits into all of this without actually having to touch the game itself.
