Dreadknux

Finally! Nintendo has announced when it will be sharing news of the mobile version of Animal Crossing. There'll be a Nintendo Direct livestream set for 25th October at around midday Japan time (which is 4am UK time, or in the US it'll be 24 October at 8pm Pacific / 11pm Eastern). Apparently Nintendo UK will be sharing a second livestream at 7am the same day; it's likely that Nintendo UK has just decided to hold its own identical version of the stream a few hours later, when people have actually woken up here. I am unreasonably excited about this. In lieu of a Switch Animal Crossing game, I reckon this will get played so much on my phone. Can't wait to see what this will entail.

Yeah, most of the train wrecks you can see coming a mile off (06, Black Knight, etc), but Lost World was the one that gutted me in particular. I was totally prepared for it to be good. It had a really novel design concept (I remember watching a Japanese TV show where they interviewed Sonic Team about Lost World and they were showing off paper roll and dome concept dioramas; there was clearly some creative thinking behind it) and I liked the idea of the parkour moves, but playing it felt incredibly bland and inconsequential. I actually benched it post-World 2 for about a year and a half before going back and finishing the whole thing. It just didn’t feel right, man. :/ ——— I’ll throw my hat into the ‘if it’s a good game I’ll support it’ group, but it maybe wouldn’t be so difficult for Modern Sonic in particular if Sonic Team didn’t keep trying to reinvent the wheel every single time. Sonic Adventure was great back in the day; totally janky now, but had a good base that was sort of built upon in SA2 (at the expense of more expansive level design; definitely got more narrow). But then you had Heroes, which was like Lost World an admirable idea that fell flat on its face, then 06 (which added cheesy edginess, pointless overworlds, princesses and ideas from canned FPS projects), onto Unleashed (which again, great concept but ultimately unplayable unless you like memorising button presses like a crude Simon Says). Colours and Generations seemed to be the modern series really finding some consistency in design and building on it to make it better (even if they added Wisps to Colours - another gimmick, although that one was a rare case of a gimmick being both a great idea and working fantastically well). But then you have Sonic Team mixing things up again with Forces. If Forces doesn’t hit the mark, there’s a strong chance that Sonic Team will just try to rewrite the book again and think of some new thing to jazz up the next title. When what they really need to be doing is finding a groundwork that... works, and sticking with it.

Someone called Forces a ‘cinematic platformer’. A game with a story as deep as Another World or a similar adventure game. I was clearly being hyperbolic and humourous about it, but my point was that story and plot was never the key driving force behind Sonic the Hedgehog, and to say the story behind ANY of the games in the series even touches the level of depth of an adventure game like Another World is pretty laughable. I didn’t bring up the story, actually. Cinematic = plot, story. I’m saying no Sonic game has ever really earned ‘cinematic’ status, and Forces certainly won’t be the first either. The whole ‘cinematic’ argument is just a transparent attempt to explain away why the game looks terrible. “Who needs gameplay anyway, there’s a cutscene!” ‘The only part that makes sense in your argument is your core point.’ Okay. People thought Sonic 06’s story was going to be good, too. Then it came out. Point is, whenever SEGA and Sonic Team try to do this big apocalyptic story in the vein of 06, Shadow (and Forces seems to follow the trend) it always backfires. It comes across as the story equivalent of three kids standing on their shoulders in a suit pretending to be an adult. Edit: To be clear I’m not saying that Sonic should never have an ‘epic’ storyline. I’m saying it should act its age with it (see: Advance series, Sonic Mania, Sonic 3&K) and not give the corny presentation of a third-rate anime. ————— Anyway this has been derailed long enough, let’s get back on track - the gameplay video And, honestly I have to say that the Avatar gameplay seen here doesn’t seem vastly improved on what I played at Gamescom a few months back. Maybe it will play better in person, but I’m really not enjoying watching the player stop every five seconds to seemingly perform an action.

The story, at its very core: Classic Sonic teams up with Modern Sonic to stop (two?) Dr Eggman(s?) from destroying the world. That “literally” DOES sound like something like Gens. Don’t get distracted by side characters and extra fluff. It’s still Malibu Stacy with a new hat. I also don’t know why it’s worth arguing about the story/plot in a Sonic game at all, really. It’s like arguing about the canon in a Super Mario game.

You know what, I can’t say I’m very excited about the game but conceptually I think it’s bold (in a good way) that Sonic Team introduced the Avatar concept. It speaks to a large part of the fan base that enjoys the idea that there is a world of furry characters that live alongside Sonic, and I think it’s cool that this side of things was explored. From what I played as well, I have to say there’s a weird satisfaction in using Wispons to travel through literally millions of rings. It’s pretty brainless, but it does feel somewhat cathartic, especially with hearing that ring sound chime through over and over and over.

I don’t really understand this whole ‘cinematic’ and ‘story’ conversation. Sonic Forces’ story doesn’t seem to be all that great. It looks like a re-run of Sonic Generations with a Mephiles thrown in. I don’t think the inclusion of Avatar makes the plot feel any more or less interesting, if I’m being honest. Sonic Adventure 2 had a cinematic story, and that: A. Made sense, even if it was following a million and one Hollywood movie tropes B. Didn’t come at the expense of the game’s overall level design quality and action itself (regardless of what you think of Knuckles and Rouge’s bunk treasure hunting stages; quality was there but the basic idea was just a misfire) C. Wasn’t a cinematic platformer. Sonic Forces is not a cinematic platformer, it’s a Sonic the Hedgehog game, and it has been marketed no differently from any other Sonic game so there is no reason to think that this is intended to be designed as some kind of weird spin-off. It’s also a huge reach to suggest that this game is being designed for people who are into adventure games like Another World. There is no suggestion that SEGA or Sonic Team is building a game for an audience that sits outside of its core base like that. I think we’re all falling into the trap of trying to find excuses for this game, whether we like the look of it or not, in an attempt to avoid hurting the feelings of people who might be excited about it. That was lowkey what the Sonic Cycle was really about; not the bickering per se, but the people trying to meet in the middle, making reasons why sub-par projects (ie. Sonic 06, Black Knight) might actually be good in some way (but still distancing themselves away from the game on a personal level). It creates a false sense of balance that sets up half the fan base for disappointment when a bad game finally releases, and sets up the other half of the fan base to gloat about it. I’m not suggesting we should rail on the guys who are genuinely excited about this game - to each their own - but to go after those who aren’t impressed with it does nobody any favours.

Uekawa’s Infinite looks pretty cool here. I like the understated use of colour as well, it’s nice. Not been much of a fan of the character, honestly, maybe it’s just the way his design translated into 3D... seems to be the way for a lot of Sonic characters, for me.

Just caught up with this overnight, the events unfolding over there has been crazy. I had no idea about the previous incidents in 2012 and the child porn stuff, just goes to show how well that was all covered up. :/ It’s a shame because, ironically, I always thought it had a pretty decent community that had collectively had good, progressive values - how ironic that those values were diametrically opposed to that of the site owner. This whole #metoo stuff, following the Weinstein allegations, is blowing up absolutely everywhere - movie industry, game industry, press, and now even video game forums. It’s eye-opening, and as a bloke who by default never really sees this going on as often as is being described it’s really humbling, too. I can only hope that this encourages more people to talk about this as it seems like this is a conversation that has been suppressed for far too long and needs to be had. *eyes roll out the back of my head* yawwwwn