Tracker_TD

http://www.segadriven.com/2019/05/sega-ages-wonder-boy-in-monster-land-releases-may-30th-in-japan/ Wonder Boy is out this week! Has the Vintage Collection trial modes, maps alchemy to a button, and has an extra 'money-hungry' difficulty.

I suppose this counts, from Sonic Jam.

Sweet Jesus, this game's matchmaking might just be the worst in any game I've ever played. Out of 10 attempts I got two solid games, one of which ended with an endless post-race screen that I had to force quit out of. The rest have been 3 different varieties of error, including one point where the game couldn't detect an internet connection... when I'm on a stable ethernet link. It's torturous, and annoying because when I do get a game, it's actually quite fun.

I'm just gonna copy-paste from my Twitter here. TSR is by no means a bad game, but I've found myself really underwhelmed, even when I knew what I was getting myself into. The Story Mode is a slog, with the paltry track and mission variety really hurting it. The Grand Prixs were constant and tedious. And my online experience so far, as my stream showed, is perhaps the worst I've ever seen - I was lucky to get into a few games after seven attempts, including one that crashed the game, but it was still largely populated by AIs. And this is on Day One, when it should be most active! There's also like, a 5 minute wait between races on PC which makes it a whole lot more boring than it should be. The PC version is also pretty weird right now. Animations appear to move at 30fps, even with the game running at 60 - so like, Sonic dancing in his car for instance looks like it's running at half the FPS of the rest of the game. There's also a weird lighting bug in Sand Road. You know what I think the best part was? The story itself! I genuinely enjoyed the writing, and after a short adjusting period I found the new voices worked alright. Still not a fan of Zavok but I've warmed up to Papenbrook as Silver and Lindbeck as Blaze is perfect. The writing is genuinely funny, and this is the kind of thing I like to see. The jokes land far more than they have done in any of the Pontac/Graff games, and to me it's proof that lightheartedness isn't the issue people perceive with Sonic writing. At any rate, I'll keep trying with the online now I suppose - but on the whole this is probably something you wait to get on sale. I know nobody expected something as good as Transformed, me included, but it's just not what it could've been, even then.

Is it? I mean DKR sure, but that game barely had writing. CTR's writing was pretty good, I found. Particularly the epilogue, I found that entertaining. Even so though, there still wasn't a lot of it to be better than. I can't speak to TSR's quality much yet because well, I haven't played it. But given the reviews are trashing its writing across the board I'm not particularly bracing for something good.

...no? From a personal standpoint I'm rarely ever arsed about Sonic writing, I was just pointing out why the "Sonic's friends" complaint could actually hold water here. "I want good writing" doesn't mean "I want the best writing ever and will accept nothing less". Get a grip.

The difference here is the friends are very much integrated into the game, with plenty of apparently shoddy writing (and now even shoddy voice acting) on show. And given no matter how you slice it this game is a de-facto sequel to ASRT, it's not surprising plenty of people are bummed out by the shift to Sonic only.

I still don't think it'd have the same variety. Much more variety than what we've got, sure - and I think they'd go easier on in it in that case - but not the variety that having all those different SEGA worlds afforded.

Well... no. In how it’s panned out, it’s given us considerably less roster and (more importantly) track variety than the previous title. I think it’s a fair criticism.

Yeah, don’t look into the mascot thing. That mascot suit has seen surprisngly regular use at events for years - it was used at a Japan Relief Fund event of some kind a couple years back and more recently last year at a SEGA sponsored sports game or something (alongside SEGA’s sports mascots who look like Ristar gone way of Uekawa)

Damn. This is pretty impressive from where I'm standing.