Whatever the WhoCares

I would honestly rather have Stern make a Sonic-themed pinball machine. Seriously, if you go to your local barcade and look at the fancy new pinball machines they have now, you’ll be drooling for a Sonic one. I’ve played a machine with a loop-de-loop ramp, so that’s doable too.

The more I think about it, the more excited I am to play these games. The 16:9 aspect ratio does so much good for 2D Sonic in the games it’s been implemented. Maybe I’ll finally finish one of them besides CD and Mania for a change.

I still don’t think I’ll be buying this if there’s no way to disable that irritating homing attack sound effect. It actually hurts my ears.

I just look at these other open-world games and the magnitudes they have to sacrifice to run on Switch… Xenoblade 1 and 2 drop well below 480p for example. What chance would one of these games have if the protagonist could move, I dunno, 6 times faster? I’d have to imagine that, if Sonic Rangers does come out on Switch, it’ll be extremely blurry, fairly choppy, and low-res all around. Anything more would be a milestone for the device.

With the news that the Switch is getting no performance upgrades, I have to just hope at this point that the Switch version of SR is developed separately.

Marine the Raccoon. Yes I’m aware she has a reputation for being annoying, but if you tone down her troublemaking a little, you’d have a really adorable kid character.

You know what would be easy to implement without actually producing more content, per se? A continuous mode, where the games lead into each other seamlessly to form one long game? Or hey, how about a Zone Scrambler mode, where you just sit down and play these levels in random sequence across the 5 games? Maybe custom level playlists? Music selection? I dunno, they could definitely put some cool stuff into this without even drawing one new sprite.

No way in hell is a new open-world game reaching 60fps on last-gen consoles.

Nah, this is fun.

Adding to this, it’s not even necessarily about branching paths. The overall direction can be linear without the EXPERIENCE being linear, as long as you give the player some spaces to wander around in, fight enemies, solve puzzles, and find goodies. Emerald Coast is a great example of this, where there really aren’t many path choices, but there are plenty of spots where it feels pertinent to just take a little pit stop for some power-ups and Chao-animals.

It’s not the “open world” aspect of the game that has me questioning its viability on Switch, it’s the “speedy open-world” thing. Honestly if a friggin Sonic game were in development and you told me that ONLY next-gen consoles could handle it, I’d believe you. I get that the Switch compromises resolution a lot in order to maintain parity in poly counts, but even then, from like a GPU standpoint, how the hell can this console handle an open world Sonic game.

Another possibility is that it’s a Switch Pro exclusive, and they just haven’t announced it.

I would actually not at all mind if the Switch version had an entirely different art style. Cel shading or something.

I hope the tone strays away from the meta crap we’ve dealt with for the last 11 years. Go back to the earnestness of Black Knight and before, please. Imagine how great that could be with the benefit of modern presentation.

I actually really like the idea of “two dimensions” rather than “past and present” because it means Sega can expand upon the classic lore without cramming more events behind Sonic Adventure chronologically. I mean, look at Star Wars. Between all the Legends and new expanded media, neither the Lucas nor Disney era really has an in-universe week of down time for these characters. They’re always in some caper like every day. It’s kind of ridiculous. Tying this back to Sonic, I definitely prefer to think that Sonic got to just relax for a while before the Chaos shit went down. Not to mention, “two dimensions” makes Sonic and friends seem more competent and mature, unlike Generations where they were just the Modern characters’ younger, weaker selves. And I gotta admit, I prefer having the characters being exclusive. It gives these series their own identities, something they desperately need if they’re really going to continue being separate. Ironically at this point, it’s the modern canon that needs more fleshing out (what even is Sonic’s world?), but that’s a topic for another thread. One thing I really want to see is Sega changing the names of Classic and Modern to something else. Something that removes the temporal implications. This would really allow the Classic series in particular to grow.