Joy

probably the most fun I've ever had with a Sonic game but only once I'd memorised the layouts.

I'm doing Sunshine seperate from the other two because I feel the other two would just throw me off of my groove. I want to 100% Sunshine for the sake of it, and I imagine the more mechanically sound games would sour me.

Just for the novelty of it, I'm jumping between them - doing 5 stars on each every session (with the exception of when I unlock a Bowser stage - I always do those immediately and will just get 1 less star on my next session if it means I get a 6th one on this play session).  Also to sort of artifically reproduce that "first play" experience where as a kid I would jump between courses whenever I got stuck on one, I'm using a random number generator to choose which star to get next.

It's a little cumbersome as it causes a lot of extra time running back and forth across the hubs, but enjoying the variety otherwise, considering I normally play these games pretty straightforward as an adult.

I did Sunshine 100% > Galaxy 100% > 64 100%. Finished 64 this afternoon. Good times. 

I did Sunshine first because nostalgia, then Galaxy since I've played 64 so many times already. 

Not playing All-Stars specifically but I've been jumping around 64's PC port and Sunshine and Galaxy via Dolphin, the latter using my old save file in a Luigi playthrough.

I got the game yesterday, and I'm already at more than 60 stars (shines) in Sunshine. In the past I played it like 2 or 3 times in total, regardless I still remember most of the blue coins locations.

I only started 64 and got the chomp star in Bob-omb Battlefield, while in Galaxy I got the first story-driven star and stopped for now.

I love Sunshine a lot, they made the controls much worse compared to the original but I can get over it, I'm used to play games with bad controls, in my gamer life I played many of them.

They're played out in real-time and in-engine. They can't be swapped out. There are a small handful of pre-rendered ones, but in some cases they have live in-game assets rendered on top (e.g. scenes where characters escape from the crashing Egg Carrier) so if you replace those files you'll still see the characters on top of it. I don't know if any work has been done reverse engineer the cutscene format so that they can be reprogrammed or redirected to other video files.

Pretty good, actually. Adds in a lot of stuff such as acquiring certain Chao that would only be obtainable through hacking, different colors, different faces and personalities, and even stuff that was left the cutting room floor.

There's little quirks that are added to the Chao that gives the Chao garden new life, such as Chao with happy eyes randomly giggling, clumsy Chao wobbling around after they trip, or even one Chao walking up to another one and starting a conversation in gibberish. It's really charming. Dark Chao may also walk up to other Chao and punch them, but it's an optional feature.

Overall, I'd recommend it.

Sure, a lot of content and you can usually get it fairly cheap now.

It's a fun racer. Just don't spend any extra money on it.

There’s a lot of content but it’s in a fortnite esque rotation cycle, so if you can deal with that and the Microtransactions and output of coins in game, it’s alright. If you can find it cheap, I’d say go for it. Personally I was turned off by all the aforementioned bs, but a lot of people still enjoy it 

Yeah, what KHCast said about the microtransactions is really true. Some people claim that the in-game payout of coins is balanced and is more than enough for you to unlock everything, but unless you're winning online races left, right and centre, the I really don't find that to be the case at all. Moreover, the very fact that they're even present in the game is a big red flag to me. 

Yes a small birthday post later this week.

Could look into this. It's pretty affordable at 66 bucks, and if it can run PSP, N64, and Dreamcast games as well as that video would lead you to believe, then it's worth that price.

I don't own any myself, but am considering picking this one up if I get any at all. I just sank a hundred into a Pi4 build though so, not for a while.

Edit: Will say I'm not a fan of the shoulder buttons being laid out the way they are, but it's an improvement over similar handhelds that lack L2 and R2's entirely. If they had designed it with grips and organized those buttons the way they should be laid out then that'd be ideal.

Totally disagree. Whilst it's nice that the game outlines how to get each rank, making it based solely on time and nothing else is pretty boring. And then tying ranks into the progression system is bollocks.

"So you beat all the levels up to this point, eh? Oh but you didn't beat them will enough so you'll have to go and beat them them more to progress." 

Rush Adventure had virtually the same problem. I'm not going to defend the mandatory hunting of Sun and Moon Medals in Unleashed HD to progress (especially in the daytime stages where they're so counter intuitive), but I'll take exploration over the demand that I "play better" any day of the week.

To be fair, it never prevents progress for the main campaign and you can get a reasonable amount of the side missions before having to break a sweat on the likes of Eggmanland to get more medals with better ranks. 

For the boost gameplay I prefer it being based on time since speed is prioritised over everything else anyway. The werehog has a three way split between time, rings, and Dark Gia force collected which suits that style more, although some sort of point system based on combos would've made sense too. 

 

i still think it's got one of the most interesting lives systems in any sonic game. one of the few times when i felt a game actually justified having lives, even if they're still not super important to the experience.