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Sonic Colors: Ultimate - Announcement Trailer


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13 hours ago, McGroose said:

A Sonic game where the big reviewers like IGN and Destructoid are giving mostly praise to the game while fans are roasting the game all over the place.

It feels like I haven't seen something like this since Sonic 4

It's kind of crazy how it turned out. I often see this dissonance with reviews of remakes/remasters, but usually it's because of visual or music changes or something like that so I get why it's not a huge factor in a professional review or it's attached score. But of course, this game's another story, while deliberate changes are one of the things that were bothering people it's easily been overshadowed by the huge technical issues (something I honestly wasn't expecting, even after finding out about the developers' previous work).

For the record, I tend to be open minded to changes in remakes or the like, even if it can go very wrong sometimes. I'm definitely not feeling some of the remixed tracks in this game in fact.

Spoiler

However, dark Tropical Resort still actually looks pretty cool to me. I'm so sorry 😔

Also: they should fix the Wisp music glitch by removing Wisp music altogether. I was playing the (original) game earlier and I actually feel strongly about this. I hated those tracks more than I expected. Game's still pretty okay though!

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7 hours ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

However - the lack of achievement for completing all of Metal Sonic's races is absolutely baffingly, given that it's the only real main feature Ultimate itself brings to the table.

Does it matter though? You still have to do all Metal's races if you want 100% on each world. You can't avoid them if you want all trophies/achievements.

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9 hours ago, Rocketjay8 said:

While some people have faked by running it through an emulator, others like this person has proof that they ran it on official hardware

So it looks like this game is still cursed.

Wait… is this evidence though? Data and Videos can somewhat haphazardly be transferred back and forth between switches and devices (with great difficulty from what I understand). So…

But either way, that’s pretty dodgy with the emulated version running worse and being shown off to highlight problems that aren’t there (if I’m understanding this correctly?)

It would somewhat explain the review scores a bit more now (not that I don’t appreciate there are still issues highlighted from those that have played the game here).

Ugggh… one month until I actually get my hands on this to see for myself. Maybe it will be in a better state by then?

(Probably not) 🤣

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3 hours ago, Ming Ming Hatsune said:

Does it matter though? You still have to do all Metal's races if you want 100% on each world. You can't avoid them if you want all trophies/achievements.

I mean, in my opinion - kinda. It’s not a huge deal, but you’d think Metal’s rival races and even S-Ranking all stages would constitute a trophy, given that one is a new collectible feature in this game and the other is probably the biggest hurtle of the game in terms of requirements.

5 hours ago, JezMM said:

I'd actually put the focus the other way around here.  A lack of achievement for beating all the Metal Sonic races doesn't mean anything to me - just an arbitrary tickbox achievement for something that most players who care about the game on anything above the most casual level will do anyway.

Unless they're absent from the PC version so it's gone over my head - there is no online functionality in the game at all right?  I haven't seen anything about uploading or racing ghosts.  I was actually thinking about it when flicking through the score screen yesterday - the original had online leaderboards where you could compare with your friends (very cumbersome leaderboards since you had to manually connect to a server and wait every time you wanted to update them, but leaderboards nonetheless).  Nothing of the sort here, which honestly makes the player icon being 1/5th of the cosmetic options all the more meaningless.

I don’t know, to me - it feels like each collectible of a game is deserving of an achievement, easy or not. Given we have achievements for things like collect 300 rings in a stage, or collect five RSRs, or get an A Rank, it seems to me that one of the more pointless achievements could’ve been nixed to offer an additional reward for the rival races, given they only hand out park tokens and random cosmetics. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a weird exclusion for a hyped new feature of the game.

As for the ghost situation - this definitely seems to be a cut feature from the game. Between the cut achievements and the fact customisable icons are a thing - and those icons being hyped up as a way to stand out from the crowd, it seems likely there was supposed to be leaderboards and you could upload a ghost racer of your runs to compete in those leaderboards, like TSR IIRC. On one hand, it’s weird this online functionality was cut, but on the other - as a trophy hunter, I prefer these trophies being cut from games as arbitrary online trophies always put a time limit on completing single player games. Gens on PS3 is in the same boat due to its two online leaderboards trophies, so it’s pretty YMMV here.

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There was indeed supposed to be a Ghost Racer mode going by the official Microsoft Store description on Xbox, which is still mentioned as of this post. This is a feature I was actually looking forward to.

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So unless Sega actually come out and say they intend to add it in a post-launch patch, wouldn't this technically be false-advertisement?

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5 hours ago, Son-icka said:

Wait… is this evidence though? Data and Videos can somewhat haphazardly be transferred back and forth between switches and devices (with great difficulty from what I understand). So…

But either way, that’s pretty dodgy with the emulated version running worse and being shown off to highlight problems that aren’t there (if I’m understanding this correctly?)

It would somewhat explain the review scores a bit more now (not that I don’t appreciate there are still issues highlighted from those that have played the game here).

Ugggh… one month until I actually get my hands on this to see for myself. Maybe it will be in a better state by then?

(Probably not) 🤣

It may not be, but at least this one is more believable. There are alot of times in this game where things flicker in the backgrounds. The Seizure ones seem a bit more sus though.

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I'm thinking about a hypothetical patch list to get this to a state most people will be able to find at least acceptable. Note this is from the perspective of playing on the PS5.

Prios (needed asap):

  • "Seizure" level visual bugs (obviously, you can't just knowingly leave that stuff in)
  • Save data corruption due to game crashing
  • Various audio bugs (music and sfx cutting out or failing to play at all, audio becoming choppy seemingly after extended play, erratic stereo mixing when playing with headphones)
  • Gameplay-affecting visual glitches (missing laser fx on the chaser robots, double vision and lack of visibility during aiming when using laser wisp)
  • Broken splines (certain upside down loops and hover wisp ring trails are currently impossible to traverse properly)

 

Ideal (If we're focussing on polish and not just stability):

  • Sonic floating down offscreen at the beginning of that one Starlight Carnival level
  • Object culling (quite a lot of instances of objects disappearing too soon, or spawning too late)
  • HUD glitches (weird "blocks" on the gauge during the final colour blaster, wisp bonuses being listed as checkpoint bonuses)
  • Object display oddities (eg black dots and transparent pipes during drill sections in Tropical Resort)
  • Silent credits (throw in some level tracks to fill the extra time brought in by the new credits if you expect folk to sit through them)
  • Metal Sonic race HUD (player icon permanently stuck at the start line, might be exclusive to tropical resort)
  • Freezing when navigating between sections in the options satellite

 

Wishlist:

  • Toggle for Navigator hints in the options satellite (If I'm not mistaken you only get to turn this on or off when starting a new save file)
  • Toggle for remixed/original songs (ideally it should be customisable per level)
  • Fix the weird eyelid issue on Sonic (That little bit of top eyelid remaining visible every third blink or so is still driving me nuts 😂)
  • Speed-up Tails save (he takes way too long to release you currently)
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I really wish the remixes were togglable to be honest.  While my original gripe was wishing they were switched (original for first half of zone, remix for second half), either way you end up with at least one act per zone where a piece of music in the game, be it original or remix, is exclusively attached to an act which is really short/heavy on wisp usage so you barely hear the song anyway.  The ability to disable Wisp/Super Sonic music would go hand-in-hand with that, mind - I hope that's something modders can come up with.  Feels a bit to "fan nitpicky" to ever be an official quality of life update.  Even in Mania, this functionality for Super Sonic was hidden behind a cheat code for hardcore fans only.

While I'd never recommend it to a newcomer, I kinda wish I could have the remixes playing all the time now that I'm in the post-story 100% completion busywork.  I'm intimately familiar with the original OST, so as a veteran it'd be nice to have the latter 3 acts in each zone having remixes too.

 

I will say though, I want to praise something - despite the lack of depth in the sense that they're just glorified time trials, I AM pleased with Rival Rush's inclusion.  Making beating a stage as fast as possible in a single life an officially recognised challenge does actually do quite a lot to bring the gameplay to something more resembling Unleashed in terms of difficulty and intensity, and I've been enjoying it.  It's a shame there's only 6 of them, especially considering Metal Sonic himself is just a glorified demo playback of regular gameplay.

On that note though - I've thought this since before the game's release but keep forgetting to mention - regarding Rival Rush's music... what a missed opportunity to finally add a re-arranged, full quality version of the Colours DS Special Stage theme to the soundtrack.  I never really expected them to do so, but it's one of the first ideas I had personally.

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Ok they're real but it sounds like you have to do a lot of shit that frankly nobody playing the game casually is going to do so representing it as something that just happens is still incredibly shitty and will most likely affect sales of the wider release. 

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Unless you can prove that the original person was trying to make a glitch like that happen and that they are actively making it look like it can happen to anyone (and even then...), there's nothing wrong with them reporting on something that they found while playing the game. 

It's not a thing that most people will see but it is very important to let people know it's there. 

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8 minutes ago, SBR2 said:

Ok they're real but it sounds like you have to do a lot of shit that frankly nobody playing the game casually is going to do so representing it as something that just happens is still incredibly shitty and will most likely affect sales of the wider release. 

I don't really buy the "nobody will do this" logic. It's very easy to hypothesise that someone may, for instance, tab in and out of each world fairly rapidly to do something like check which S Ranks they have, or which Red Rings they're missing. Hell, I probably did so subconsciously myself, just avoiding the issues because I'm on Xbox. 

My concern here isn't SEGA's bottom line, it's an absurd and arguably dangerous glitch. Get those priorities in order. 

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15 minutes ago, SBR2 said:

Ok they're real but it sounds like you have to do a lot of shit that frankly nobody playing the game casually is going to do so representing it as something that just happens is still incredibly shitty and will most likely affect sales of the wider release. 

Nobody here has access to Sega's bank account so you have zero reason to care about that.

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17 minutes ago, Tracker_TD said:

I don't really buy the "nobody will do this" logic. It's very easy to hypothesise that someone may, for instance, tab in and out of each world fairly rapidly to do something like check which S Ranks they have, or which Red Rings they're missing. Hell, I probably did so subconsciously myself, just avoiding the issues because I'm on Xbox. 

My concern here isn't SEGA's bottom line, it's an absurd and arguably dangerous glitch. Get those priorities in order. 

And at the end of the day, these are issues that the original Sonic Colors didn't have. Sonic Colors didn't break into epileptic fits just by navigating the freaking map screen. We've had map screens figured out since Super Mario Bros 3, so no the fact that the cause seems to be somewhat esoteric isn't an excuse for a remaster of a 2010 game in 2021.

The amount of cope I'm seeing people engage in defense of this is pretty unbelievable. Like I know people want Sonic to have a W, lord knows I really want to, but this isn't it Chief.

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5 hours ago, Wil348 said:

There was indeed supposed to be a Ghost Racer mode going by the official Microsoft Store description on Xbox, which is still mentioned as of this post. This is a feature I was actually looking forward to.

spacer.png

So unless Sega actually come out and say they intend to add it in a post-launch patch, wouldn't this technically be false-advertisement?

Wonder if we are getting a REAL Day 1 patch on Tuesday that adds that feature and fix some extra bugs.

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I'm just saying that for wanting the series to succeed at all people sure seem to be willing to mislead people about how bad the glitches actually are to make sure the game won't. 

Frankly this whole situation has soured me even further than I thought I could get on this fanbase. Yeah these glitches are awful but I have no doubt in my mind they'll be patched once the wider release. 

My worry isn't on Sega's bottom line it's that fans have become so bitter they'll actively look for absolutely anything to present the game as a complete mess just so that they can have yet another thing to laugh at and get clout from bashing even though again these bigger glitches requirea shit load of things I sincerely doubt most people are going to do.

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2 hours ago, SBR2 said:

Ok they're real but it sounds like you have to do a lot of shit that frankly nobody playing the game casually is going to do so representing it as something that just happens is still incredibly shitty and will most likely affect sales of the wider release. 

Reportedly, just progressing through the game normally will do it too. Doing it "quickly" is just making the issue trigger faster.

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13 minutes ago, SBR2 said:

I'm just saying that for wanting the series to succeed at all people sure seem to be willing to mislead people about how bad the glitches actually are to make sure the game won't. 

Frankly this whole situation has soured me even further than I thought I could get on this fanbase. Yeah these glitches are awful but I have no doubt in my mind they'll be patched once the wider release. 

My worry isn't on Sega's bottom line it's that fans have become so bitter they'll actively look for absolutely anything to present the game as a complete mess just so that they can have yet another thing to laugh at and get clout from bashing even though again these bigger glitches requirea shit load of things I sincerely doubt most people are going to do.

Why do you care about any of this stuff over having fun, complete and polished games to play?

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3 hours ago, SBR2 said:

I'm just saying that for wanting the series to succeed at all people sure seem to be willing to mislead people about how bad the glitches actually are to make sure the game won't. 

Frankly this whole situation has soured me even further than I thought I could get on this fanbase. Yeah these glitches are awful but I have no doubt in my mind they'll be patched once the wider release. 

My worry isn't on Sega's bottom line it's that fans have become so bitter they'll actively look for absolutely anything to present the game as a complete mess just so that they can have yet another thing to laugh at and get clout from bashing even though again these bigger glitches requirea shit load of things I sincerely doubt most people are going to do.

Why the fuck would you care about that instead of the people who can get badly affected by accidentally seeing this glitch.

Some of ya'll sonic fans have some wierd priorities.

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I think that guy's post was kind of bad, but here's the deal: I think almost all of us care about people's safety, and nobody wants a buggy game, much less a dangerous one. When someone makes this "reputation" argument about the bugs in the game, I don't think they really care more about Sonic's reputation than people's safety, but it becomes voiced because this is personally upsetting a lot of people.

That banned guy from a week ago was wrong about Sonic's critical reception being subject to some sort of systemic bias, but the Pokemon comparison does hit upon something that is at least a little bit true: Sonic has something of a social bias, especially with online fans. The series was for many years and often still is a punching bag, whether the games are good or not, and that inevitably carries with it some punches down on the fans of those games. Journalists may not be scoring the series correctly, but you only have to see a couple status updates here before there's some discourse about the oft-repeated "Sonic had a rough transition into 3D". This is in a franchise that has really inconsistent review scores, which was compared to Pokemon, which also has inconsistent review scores, but you don't see the same jokes peddled around about it.

Now, the degree to which the series themselves have an effect on this is debatable. Obviously if Sonic was perfect all the time it wouldn't have this much flak, but I don't think even if it started getting consistently good again this rhetoric would just magically disappear. But also, that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm not here to have that debate, I'm here to dissect the upset.

What I think is that Colors Ultimate was supposed to be "a win" for the fans who put a lot of stock into other people's opinions, or else are affected by them to such a degree that they have to rationalize something like this. I used to be this way myself, I told myself and everyone around me that it could never be as bad as it was in the mid-late 2000s. Which is objectively correct of course, and anyone who disagrees is a stupid doodoo diaper baby, but that's irrelevant. The fact is, I saw people getting upset at things whether I (in my infinite wisdom and ultimate true authority over the franchise) knew them to be better than they used to be or not, and eventually I stopped giving a shit. Who cares what some chode on a news website says the series' history is? I've been here for fifteen years and I know what's up.

But you just can't go assuming that everyone has gotten to that state of mind yet, some of them are still in the phase where shallow opinions do in fact mean something to them. So when Sonic Colors is technically not even out yet but is already getting lambasted for things we hope will be fixed, it doesn't even matter that the remaster scored just as well as the original game, because the discourse is now "Colors Ultimate broken".

Now, I for one don't think it's going to stay that way. I think the bugginess of the game is certainly being exaggerated, but I also think that it's a big enough problem that the patches will do something for the game. The narrative can't be "Colors Ultimate broken" if the game stops being broken. But sitting and waiting isn't gonna do it if you're an impressionable kid who needs Sonic to be perceived as good by people who, let's be honest, probably weren't going to play the games anyway.

I think the closest thing to a "solution" we're gonna get is just trying to be more nuanced, telling people they shouldn't worry if a thing they like is not universally liked (nothing is, after all) and generally making an effort to take the discourse in a direction that involves understanding why we like certain things and why others don't, and tapping into whichever state of mind opposes yours. The reason art is better than political discussion is that nobody actually is objectively correct.

So, with all that said, patch your shit, SEGA.

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I already said earlier in the thread if they nip the bud on the problem early they'll regain some ground. These games have a long shelf life beyond how badly the launch went, and most of the biggest blunders people can still remember are broken games that they did not try very hard to fix post launch(06, Unleashed, etc.) so showing some initiative at all here will probably slow the bleeding by a lot.

There's just not anything you as a fan can do to make the fix come faster, so you also shouldn't worry about it. Sonic isn't your friend. He's not even a real person. If the brand is taking heat for a mistake, let it play out. Sure, there are people who are going to exaggerate for the sake of attention, but I've never seen the point in caring too much about that when the majority of the feedback is genuine. Worst case scenario, Sega gets pressured into fixing their shit and you get a better game out of it. Where do you lose?

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A lot of young and impressionable fans define their entire identity around their favorite forms of media; Sonic isn't real, but to many, he feels real, so when people mock him, its like you're watching your best friend get mocked and you're powerless to do anything about it.

 

Now obviously that sounds dumb as fuck to some of us, especially given we're somewhat emotionally and grounded in reality. But its very easy to forget, Sonic is a kids franchise, and to a lot of kids, Sonic is their entire world. 

 

All of the fanbase's bitching and moaning is born from just wanting the best out of the series. Unfortunately, many don't have good ways of expressing that...and social media isn't helping.

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11 hours ago, Graystripe2000 said:

Patch on the way. 

 

Even if they fix the glitches and bugs this port has caused, this port will still be inferior to playing Colors on Dolphin. And playing on the game on the Wii goes hand in hand, because the Wii for some reason looks graphically better than what Colors Ultimate. Not to mention a way better soundtrack to go with it.

Add the soundtrack toggle (this includes the opening and ending), make the game graphically better along with fixing those bugs/glitches. Then I can say Colors Ultimate is the superior version.

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Well, I am curious to see what can be done with the PC version. We've already got a mod combining act 1 and 2 of aquarium park, and I saw a Metal Sonic model swap on twitter yesterday. I dunno about an in-game toggle, but I can't imagine simply switching which song plays on what act so the originals come first is too difficult, and replacing them entirely shouldn't be much harder.

Not saying all this stuff shouldn't have been in the vanilla game, but honestly I don't understand the point of buying a rerelease of a game if it's not to fuck with it.

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