#stevenm1988

[blazehedgehog]

Seeing Mario and Sonic fans beef over social media arguing what Mario's "Sonic 06" was || Isn't it great that we've gone from 06 being a standout "coming in hot, IP is irrevocably torched in the eyes of consumers" game in the mid-00s, a thing that had next to no competition in terms of how slipshod a product it was, to the mid-2020s where we have a minimum of one Sonic 06 a year if not three or four

I mean there's a lot you can say about Sonic 06 and the state of games now as a whole. Sonic 06 was also a culmination of a lot of middleware being used by people who didn't entirely grasp it (or also have time to debug it).

Like Sonic 06 doesn't just credit Havok Physics, it uses something called Kynogon for NPC pathfinding, they hired third parties to handle their motion capture and choreography... it was undoubtedly a new and different experience than Sonic Team was used to, where I'm pretty sure they did a lot more things in-house. Not only were they not used to outsourcing like that, they didn't have a lot of time for quality control.

And with as expensive and as complex as games have gotten, that's now everywhere. Everyone went barreling down the mountain so quickly their feet came out from under them and that's how we get games like Mass Effect Andromeda and MindsEye and whatever else.

Its an extension of the fact that for a company like EA or Ubisoft or Activision, only big games exist now. Every game has to make a hundred million dollars because it will fund the next game that is going to cost 150 million dollars to create. You have to take every shortcut you can get, pinch every penny available to you, and if you so much as flinch then the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

People can blame or explain what they want for why games fail, but it comes down to the fact that you can't make mistakes anymore, and when a mistake happens, it causes a cascading disaster that tears entire companies down with it.

The stakes are too high and the rewards are too small. But some people won't believe that until there's nothing left but ashes.

[blazehedgehog]

I guess what interests me is that Sonic Frontiers apparently didn't warrant a mention

The Frontiers story is really weird, though. I'm not sure much happens in it. We get more lore about the chaos emeralds (they came from space -- where in space? still unknown), we get lore about the origin of Chaos (and the chao), we get Eggman forming a connection with Sage, but like...

I dunno, the threat with The End doesn't feel super clear until the end of the game. So the core of the game then is Sonic bearing the weight of saving his friends. Which is nice, I guess. It's a new angle to see Sonic hiding this sickness from his friends for the sake of protecting them, until he can't hide it anymore and it sort of kills him.

But I also feel like that doesn't go anywhere? Was it ever in question that Sonic doesn't care about his friends? He's a free spirit, sure, but this doesn't feel like a character growth moment. Does it have to be? I guess I don't know.

But I guess I don't think back on Sonic Frontiers as a "good story." I don't really think about Forces that way either, but like a lot of things in Frontiers, I feel like the story is just kind of "there" and cobbled together from scraps of something else they might have been planning. The original idea was Sonic having amnesia and the fact we still collect "memory tokens" seems to link up with that.

It was fine for what it was but I do not look back on Frontiers as one of the big standout Sonic game stories. It's just okay.

[blazehedgehog]

It's an interesting thought exercise to take a character like Eggman and create context or justification for why he's the way he is. Sonic Team did just that through the character and game's development, painting a person strongly convinced of their own justice in transforming the world, him and Sonic being the same in the way that they have their own etc etc. I find that conviction, delusion, warped perspective (?) more interesting than 'bad family = bad' but it's mostly an oversaturation bias towards a writing trope that I feel is done on autopilot more often than not; a trope made to pigeonhole people and rob them of initiative, rob them of the capacity to take lessons from elsewhere in life, or just make choices regardless of/in spite of what life and family bring along.

And to some degree I'm just also partial to my version, where the Robotnik family is paid hush money over the accident at the ARK and Gerald's subsequent execution, which leads a young Ivo Robotnik into becoming a spoiled, entitled brat who refuses to take "No" for an answer.

Like, part of what that "His History Revealed" video ignores is it never mentions that anyone knew Gerald was missing. Eggman finds Maria's name in the declassified document, but it kind of sweeps Gerald's disappearance and execution under the rug. If Eggman truly idolized Gerald, why wasn't that a bigger deal? Why is it Maria's death that seems to be a bigger force driving him towards radicalization? Was I just not paying close enough attention and missed something?

And like... a lot of people like to make Eggman into this big scary monster. But he's more bumbling than that. And more willing to be a good guy when circumstances call for it.

It's like... The Joker, right. Everybody wants to make The Joker into this mastermind serial killer because he has to be able to keep up with Batman, who is painted to be a human being at peak performance. Batman is the smartest man to ever live, with the most resources, AND he's a super ripped body builder that could punch a hole through your chest. So he needs a rival that can match him on a lot of that, otherwise it's "too easy" for Batman.

But being a scary mastermind serial killer takes a lot of the fun out of a guy historically named The Joker.

And I'd argue it's even worse with Sonic, because some people grew up with an evil scary dictator version of Robotnik. I like that version, I wish they could bring him back some how, but even as a kid I always internalized that as a different version of the character. The guy in the games was not the same guy from the TV show. It's the old Robotnik vs. Eggman argument again.

I like an Eggman that is more selfish than he is evil. Maybe that selfishness leads him to do things others perceive as evil, and maybe if the dominoes fall in the wrong direction, the fallout could be construed as an evil act, but Eggman's desires themselves are not evil. He wants to defeat Sonic because Sonic frustrates him. He wants the Chaos Emeralds to help him establish control over the world, because he feels like he knows better than everyone else on the planet and the powers that be tried to stop him from going too far. Except Eggman refuses to acknowledge anything he could do would ever be "too far." He believes, foolishly or otherwise, that everything he does will go perfectly.

Or, to put it another way, I always envision Sonic as someone who is so fast he knows it makes him invincible. There is no problem he cannot run circles around.

I think Eggman is the same way, except Eggman is so smart he knows thinks it makes him invincible. He believes that if there is any kind of unexpected problem he will instantly devise the solution and that there is nothing he can't build, invent, or reason his way around. He is the smartest man on earth, armed with infinite resources, and a production pipeline that can build anything he wants. "No" is not a word that exists in his vocabulary. Anyone that tells him no is an obstacle to be removed.

But taking Eggman and making him into this free love burnout with Vietnam PTSD and generational trauma... making his dad into this heartless abuser... I'm not against giving Eggman depth, but it feels like so much.

[blazehedgehog]

some people really did not like how long it took Sonic to accelerate and especially how hard it was to make him turn around and go the opposite direction || I don't know if it's a subconscious bias (it might be, similar to classic Mega Man and MM8 having similar physics but MM8 'feels' slower), but while I don't have an issue with Genesis/Mania Sonic's acceleration, I really don't like Generations/Colours/Forces Sonic's acceleration. It turns something as simple as 'jump from one platform onto another, moving platform' into an overcorrection I can never settle into. Level design that would be the early-midpoint in a Mario or Mega Man suddenly has to be absolute final-level material for the hedgehog

I mean you're describing the heart of why a lot of Sonic fans aren't happy with Sonic Team's attempts to replicate Classic Sonic's "feel", and its because they never get it right. He feels too stiff, too heavy, too something and it spoils the whole thing. There was a really magical balance being struck by the Genesis games, and only Sonic Mania seemed to understand that (and Sonic Superstars, because under the hood it's just running Retro Engine for player physics).

In Colors, Sonic feels both heavy and sticky when they force you to do 2D platforming segments. He feels too light in Sonic Generations. You don't have enough air control in Sonic Forces, on top of being stiff and heavy. In a number of these games, they expect you to compensate a lot with the double jump (Colors, Lost World, Frontiers).

It sucks, and they have struggled so much to find the sweet spot.

[blazehedgehog]

Shadow: You had Maria murdered in cold blood, and now I'm going to make all of humanity pay!

GUN Commander: [turns to camera] Did I do that? [audience laughs, roll credits]

Knowing how this movie franchise does pop-culture references, they'd actually do something like that.

[blazehedgehog]

People like to simultaneously dog on 3D Land and compare it unfavourably to 3D World, the two seem inseparable in the conversation. Which makes sense. But I respect 3D Land a lot more as a system launch title (paring down the Galaxy level design and mechanics), versus 3D World being The Big 3D Mario for the Wii U, where it feels like all its fans and shooters to this day are still just marvelling at how avant-garde the emperor's clothes are.

This touches on the weird thing simmering under the whole conversation in that Super Mario 3D Land is called "3D Land" because it's on the 3DS, and a non-trivial portion of that game was improved by viewing it with the stereoscopic slider cranked up. Certain whole entire puzzles hinged on being able to accurately judge depth in an optical illusion.

Super Mario 3D World is just a a regular video game. The "3D" moniker means nothing outside of the fact Nintendo was build some momentum on the Wii U and wanted to pick up where 3D Land left off. Like a lot of what Nintendo did with the Wii U, it was a poorly chosen name and concept. And I'm even a Wii U defender! I loved my Wii U! I think games like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker lose a lot without having a dedicated gamepad touch screen! I bought Mario Maker 2 for myself around New Years 2020 and I have tried several times to like that game and I just cannot do it. I even bought special styluses just to use in the Switch's handheld mode and it's no good.

But the Wii U was a great system with unrealized potential that Nintendo just fumbled over and over and over again, from breaking deals with third party developers, not utilizing their own hardware correctly, thinking the sluggish dashboard was a good idea, and marketing the system very poorly. But, man, I miss the Miiverse.

Again: Super Mario 3D World is not a bad game. But in some ways it is a pale imitation of Super Mario 3D Land.

[blazehedgehog]

This feels like if you told the guy behind Mr Birchum to make Sonic the Hedgehog designs

I had to google Mr. Birchum

Sorry, I don't play Hello Neighbor