Tornado

That'd be the OP of your thread, where you say that no, Amy didn't ever get that bad because she was fine in the games before she got that bad; and diverting attention from the things about her that actually actively annoyed people to talk about some other thing that wasn't the sticking point in the first place; and your later posts that dismiss people talking about the games that she did get that bad as a matter of how "people don't care to understand." What do you think was there that was so complicated to understand about Amy as she appeared in the middle of the 2000s? People didn't hate how Amy was written in the mid-2000s because she was a damsel in distress in fucking 1993. People weren't annoyed with how Amy was captured again in the first Adventure when she beat the shit out the thing chasing her in the end. You're talking about shit that's 22 years old as evidence for why the changes to her character in the recent games was unnecessary, when the game from nearly 22 years ago isn't one of the ones that people were always complaining about in the first place regardless of if the changes were necessary. Either you're being deliberately obtuse because you wanted to make a thread to defend something that people actively disliked and took offense to people disagreeing, or you made a thread defending Amy's characterization in the games where she was disliked without actually knowing what games those were or why she was disliked in the first place. People hated how Amy was written because she became a shrill one-note character whose existence in the series started and ended with chasing Sonic around, to the extent of attacking characters who got in her way over it. That was a specific aspect of her that was disliked, and it was most prevalent in a specific era of the franchise history. Talking about other aspects of her character or other games outside of that era where she was fine is irrelevant to your own thread. That you've accounted for that in your posts, and then dismiss it out of hand anyway as if the games where she did it was simply "played as a running gag" and it was the fault of the "people [who] treated it like a serious plot point" to take it that way just makes me wonder about why you made the thread to begin with. It was a gag in X because she did other things with other characters and had storylines that didn't have much to do with Sonic at all and generally came off as a very polite and respectful girl, so it stood out when she went from 0-100 immediately and started beating the shit out of things and other characters went running. It wasn't a gag in Battle. She was awful in Battle, just as bad as Shadow was in his own game; and that aspect of her character wasn't treated as a joke to her, other characters didn't respond to it as if it was one, and her storyline of creating an internal narrative that Sonic would love her if she raised Emerl as her child (and the later fallout where she becomes so deluded that she imagines Sonic was fighting by her side to protect their child from Rouge and has a mental collapse when that reality is broken) was the entirety of her contribution to what was overall a dramatic narrative chronicling Emerl's character arc. No amount of jumping up and down and saying "well, look at this other game where she was fine" changes what she was in the games where people hated her role in the story. No amount of insisting people just don't get it changes what she was in the games where people hated her role in the story lol. Just making shit up now, then? They didn't get a pass; and they weren't all made as much of a mess as Amy was to begin with. Knuckles was made an honorary member of the Special Olympics, Shadow spent several years of Ow the Free Edge, Sonic spent a decade being the most incorruptibly purely pure shonen hero that there ever was. Remember when Shadow got such a pass for being a try-hard douchebag written for 12 year olds when he came back for Heroes that his titular game was immediately the biggest fucking joke on the internet from the day it was announced; which has followed him to this day even when that character arc was wrapped up over a decade ago? Remember when Knuckles got such a pass for having a permanent consolation prize as a brain in Sonic X that Sega even hinting that they were going back to that well again for Sonic Boom caused people to write off the entire sub-series immediately and loudly? Charming. Are you planning on keeping up this persecution complex forever, or is this just something you're going to keep to this thread with until people acquiesce to the bias you're trying to force into it?

lol Sony is so DMCA abusing that they filed one against their own twitter account.

My memory is hazy since I haven't played it in probably a decade, but in addition to her being a violent sociopath in Heroes and Rush, I recall in Battle her entire story was based on her creating an elaborate internalized reality where Emerl was her actual child that she needed to raise properly to show Sonic that she is a responsible mother and thus worthy of his hand in marriage; up to and including imagining Sonic was fighting alongside her in a battle to defend Emerl that she has an episode over and collapses upon losing. In a thread about whether she was ever really that bad, it should be noted that that's the kind of thing done in real life by fucking crazy people; and in the midst of a story that was otherwise pretty decently done, with understandable character motivations (if a bit forced at times to pad out the game length and justify fights) and interactions amongst each other, it stands out all the more when it doesn't so much in Heroes. The only Sonic Team-related thing in this time period where she actually had a personality (as opposed to a collection of traits pulled from Yandere Simulator) was Sonic X, of all things. Which is funny in itself, because she was even more broken in Battle than she was in Chronicles. Makes the whole thing come off as a World of Cardboard speech instead.

As I sit here and look at a member on Era get banned for wondering aloud how the staff is going to handle people talking about favoring Joe Biden over Trump once election season actually starts and also keep consistent with their previous history of ripping anyone apart who even tries to defend anyone like Joe Biden, I have to also wonder aloud how such things will happen. Because election season hasn't really started yet, and most people have more important things on their plates right now, so everyone is generally just ignoring Joe Biden. How will the echo chambers, not just Era but places like Gizmodo too, correlate their desire to vote Trump out of office above all else with their longstanding fanatical desire to publicly destroy people who are even remotely like Joe Biden? How will these places keep from banning everyone who use the sites? The dumb motherfucker said real black people wouldn't even think of voting for anyone but him. He said that ON RECORDED VIDEO THIS MORNING.

Pages like this need to be taken with a grain of salt the size of Utah. They are well sourced at first glance to pass the Wikipedia standards, but if you actually follow the sources completely down the original rabbit hole that provided data you regularly see figures cited for their justification that are obviously and blatantly completely nonsense, or seemingly just purely imaginary. For example, take a look at the GTA series: For starters, there's a three year gap of data that the chart doesn't seem to acknowledge is missing, but ignore that for now and focus on just the company since GTA V released. It's further broken down as: And So you follow the first link, and it dumps you at the Take Two investors page. You look up the relevant fiscal year, and it says things like "Sales of Grand Theft Auto products generated approximately 11.3% of the Company’s net revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013." So you check for the net revenue total, and you find 1.214 billion dollars. 11.3% of that isn't 23 million dollars. It's 137 million dollars. So where the hell did 23 million come from? It came from the report saying that the GTA franchise had garnered that much more revenue than it had the year prior, and someone on Wikipedia just cited that number as the total revenue. So, okay. Not looking good so far. So let's check the other number's source. You see charts like this: Which is technically accurate in the sense that they came out on PS2 first (by virtue of being the console that outsold all of its competitors combined by 3:1), but that's like noting that Resident Evil 4 was "originally exclusive" to the Gamecube. Everyone knew it was getting a port before the original version actually came out, and it eventually was ported to fucking every game-adjacent machine made since. The context is completely stripped by presenting it as if being on the PS2 and not coming to the XBox/PC until a few months later hurt its ability to... become the best selling game on the overwhelmingly best selling console of the generation And you read statements like this: Let's assume that 90 million unit value is accurate from the website that seemingly thinks the tens of millions of copies GTA games sold on platforms other than PS2 don't count for some reason. That site is saying that Rockstar sold that $60 game for an average retail price of $66 a copy, and Microsoft and Sony and Valve didn't get any of it. And of course that's not true. So where the hell did $6 billion come from? Who knows! So in just two citations in one date range for one franchise, that Wikipedia page about highest revenue franchises misread one of their sources to the effect of under reporting revenue by 228 million dollars (since there doesn't seem to be a figure for 2011 on that page at all, and the 2012 figure listed is wrong) and citing a page that seemingly arrived at a revenue number by making it up.

Funny how it feels different when the shoe is on the other foot, isn't it?

Anyone who has also been here since the forum wipe I suspect would disagree. You're not as slick as you think you're being in this thread, or all the status updates you shit up this morning with your "um actually" clarifications to concerns people were having after it was announced. This act you've been doing in the past 6 months or so where you pull this devil's advocate card about series that people are very passionate about that you're seemingly indifferent to just so you can pick fights is wearing pretty thin; even if it wasn't being viewed in the context of your decade long history of borderline fanaticism about how a real Sonic games should be designed and how people who get more enjoyment from games that aren't that way are wrong and haven't seen the light yet. Full disclosure: I've only played the first Paper Mario game, and only watched a playthrough of the second. But I've absolutely played the Mario and Luigi games (except the remakes), even going so far as to get some to play when I didn't have the console they were on, and I absolutely watched how that series was run into the fucking ground by taking throwaway ideas and humor that were in the first game and exaggerating them until they were major self-aware parts of the game design because everything else was padded for shit and dumbed down. "Wow, remember when Luigi was kind of a loser and a coward in a couple scenes in Superstar Saga? People loved that, so let's make that the crux of every scene he's in!" It's not at all insane to worry about Nintendo doing the same god damned thing that they did with that series with the latest entry in this other similar series on an even worse skid; and rebutting people's concerns about things like whether the latest game is going to be meddled with and focus tested to hell like became a meme with Sticker Star and Color Splash with responses like "maybe those things you don't like the look of in this game so far are being done on purpose" doesn't make you look super clever for calling out people being too passionate about something they care about. It makes you look like an asshole.

The riveting defense I expect to be given the next time Sega releases a trial and error Boost2Win game.

When? I don't give a shit about Sega letting some anonymous iOS developer make a shitty gachapon or endless runner game that Sonic is in. Sega giving Dimps six months to reskin Sonic Rush with ugly attempts at remaking Sonic 2 tilesets is also irrelevant. I mean games that actually had development budgets and time put into them. There's only been one time when they've let such a game be developed in such a context, and: Sonic Boom was SoA flexing on SoJ as part of the eternal struggle between the two divisions. That's the only 3D game in the series that Sega didn't make themselves, and we now know that SoJ was meddling with its development on a near constant basis even before the game was fully greenlit (as was SoA after the show was greenlit). I'm saying "old guard Sega" as a measure for how much influence they have in the company, which at Sega has traditionally had to do with tenure and at some point in the past having done something important. How convenient that the only thing Iizuka can apparently do to show that he cares is burn up his capital in order to step out of the way and let an outsider take control of the series.

Colors and S4E1 both had a spectacularly divisive leadup to their releases, and Iizuka made a couple gaffes that inflamed people far more even than they originally were. Remember back when Naka decided that enough was enough and left to go do the stuff he actually enjoyed doing? Up to that point Sega had already demanded that they have something to show for E3 2005 when the game had barely started development. Then they demanded that it get a Wii port before Sega actually got Wii development kits, which forced the team to be split in half but still working together as they tried to figure out how to do it. Then the port got cancelled because everyone realized it was fucking stupid, and instead Sega told them that they needed to have a completely different game made for the Wii to hedge their bets on the system being a success (at which point Ogawa was locked out of the development of 06 even though he was the original director). At this point the halved team was still being forced to put stuff together for trade shows and operating on a design document that never got finalized even before things started falling apart with the demands of the Wii version. By the start of 2006 the game was already likely doomed, since they were starting to do voice acting for the story when they weren't sure what parts of the script (and game in general) they would have to cut to get the game out. Then Naka got fed up and left to form Probe just before E3, after months of rumors of him leaving. He took several members of the already downsized team with him. Sega looked at the havoc him leaving had caused on their flagship AAA Sonic game (being hyped as promising a level of production values versus its contemporaries probably unmatched since the Genesis titles) meant to celebrate and commemorate the franchise on its 15th anniversary, in addition to all the turmoil it was already facing by that point. Sega saw that the game couldn't possibly be ready by its planned release date due to Naka leaving and all of the nonsense that they had dumped on the development team before he had. Even as they sent out people to give interviews and show previews of it to put a brave face on things publicly and show off how great it was at E3 2006, Sega knew it wouldn't even come close. The E3 showing was kind of a disaster compared to how well it had been received the previous year (even though the demo shown there was polished to a higher standard than the actual game was to that point), but luckily for Sega Sony had spent the entire conference preemptively flushing the first three years of the PS3's life down the toilet so it flew under the radar. And Sega demanded another demo for a Microsoft trade show in the fall. Sega saw that the only time that the game was getting a good showing as if it was improving on its problems was in custom built demo builds with improvements tailor-made for the demos that the team didn't have time to implement into the actual game. And they said "why, that's terrible." And then they released the retail version anyway, as originally scheduled.

How many of those people work at Sega right now and would be allowed to oversee a Sonic game that Sega throws tens of millions of dollars at? Nakamura? Because that's what Iizuka is. That's what Naka was before he decided he had had enough of the bullshit that was going on at the company in the middle of the last decade. Before Naka chased him away to Sony, that's what Yasuhara was, toiling away in the charred remains of S.T.I. trying to keep some semblance of quality control in the series on the Saturn while Naka was in Japan isolating himself with the SoJ big wigs. All do respect to to the highly talented and passionate Christian Whitehead and the Streets of Rage 4 team, but they are not and never will be old guard Sega employees with enough clout to tell Sega (and Sega of Japan in particular) what they don't want to hear when they least want to hear it; to calm the fuck down and shut the fuck up. It isn't any secret, and hasn't been for decades now, that running interference from Sega's meddling is part of the job when you are overseeing Sonic games. I say this as someone who never was thrilled that Iizuka was handed the reigns of the series back a second time (mostly because I feel he's far too conservative more than any quality failings on the games he oversees): It could easily be far worse than it has been since 2010. Sega didn't have to bankroll Mania when they had developer ties already established to shit out Sonic 4 sequels until the end of time. Sega didn't have to give a shit about the remakes of Sonic 1, 2 and CD when they could have just dumped ROMs and an emulator on the iOS/Play store instead. Even those pointless M2 remakes of the first two games are more effort than anyone at Sega had to do. And I can easily imagine a Iizuka-less Sonic Team being fine with any of that just as easily as anyone can dismiss it as "well any idiot could have thought to have Whitehead make a new game."