The Hotdog Laserhouse

It can’t be that much of a minority for how much I seem to hear it.

When I think about Sonic Adventure 3, I ask myself: what is a Sonic Adventure game? Well, if you define it, it’s like:

1. A heavy focus on narrative. Checking Youtube for “movie” versions of SA1 and SA2, both games had more than two hours of cutscenes each.
2. Lite RPG mechanics. This means learning new abilities, equipping new gear.
3. Multiple playable characters, and usually more than four. In keeping with the RPG mechanics, these characters are usually divided up in to classes of abilities. Speed, platforming, exploration, stealth, shooting, brawling, etc.
4. Some kind of massive, explorative space full of NPCs, shops and quest-givers. 

With a couple of exceptions to the above rules, we have four games that fit this mold.

1. Sonic Adventure
2. Sonic Adventure 2
3. Sonic 2006
4. Sonic Unleashed

By all definitions, Sonic Adventure 3 was actually Sonic 2006. Now, stem your tide of discharge right now: I’ve heard the story that Sonic Team originally intended Unleashed to be called Sonic Adventure 3. I don’t care. I’m dealing in logic, here. And logically, Sonic 2006 is the third game in the Sonic Adventure mold. Therefore, it is Sonic Adventure 3.

But that makes an important distinction: I am against Sonic Adventure 3, even though, by all definitions, Sonic Unleashed, a game I won’t stop professing my love for, is a Sonic Adventure game. Certainly, “Sonic Adventure 3”, whatever that is, could be the game I pitched as Sonic Unleashed 2. And I would be pleasantly surprised!

But they didn’t call Unleashed “Sonic Adventure 3”. They called it Sonic Unleashed. If they’re going to go with the name, they’re going to attach it to the things people expect out of a game called “Sonic Adventure”, and that’s going to be the things you don’t want, because that’s what Sonic Adventure is. Otherwise, they’d just call it anything else.

I’ve told bits and pieces of this story elsewhere across a dozen or so other blogs here, so I’ll hide it behind a “read more” tag for those who would rather choose to skip it.

Read More

More power to them, I guess.

Real talk: I’ve actually wondered if maybe I’m starting to like it ironically. It’s kind of hard not to get swept up in that sometimes, where people enshrine things because they are bad. That’s definitely already happened with Sonic 06, and I’m definitely guilty of some of it, myself.

When I watch Game Grumps and they completely talk over some of the dumbest cutscenes and don’t even bat an eyelash because they aren’t even paying attention anymore, I kind of get bummed out a little. I’m actually getting really tired of their Sonic 06 playthrough because of things like that - they’re only playing it because they’re forcing themselves to. I’m not against “this game sucks and we don’t have anything to say about it anymore so let’s find something else to talk about for a while”, but Jon and Arin don’t even try, anymore. Their conversations and what is happening in the game are so divergent these days that you could overlay audio from any given episode on to some Sonic 06 footage and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

But I digress.

Sonic 06 probably isn’t the Rocky Horror of video games. It’s also probably not the Troll 2 of video games. But it’s obviously worth laughing at, and that’s fine, I guess. It’s not like Sega’s getting any off that money these days.

I’m sure there’s other “Same Name Reboots” out there. Telltale’s Sam & Max probably counts. Maybe. And, uh… um…

Hey! Wait a minute! Sonic 2006 isn’t even listed on the Same Name Reboot concept page. You’re a sham!

Edit: Oh wait, I just had to click “view all 35 entries”.

Glad to be of service. Here’s a link for people who read my blog and don’t want to bother copy/pasting a Youtube URL. Figured I’d wait until after April Fools answer this publicly like this because… well, y’know.

I want to say that I actually laughed out loud but I honestly don’t actually remember. It was one of those things you knew was coming, because everybody had spoiled it the day beforehand or even two days beforehand (this was launch week, remember), so you were just kind of waiting to see how it actually happened.

In the original tech demo trailer, it was probably supposed to be symbolic; with nowhere left to run, Sonic the Hedgehog dies and is reborn better than ever, ready to tackle any challenge. I always likened it to Perfect Chaos - when I first saw the footage for Perfect Chaos bursting out of that building, it was incredibly impressive. It grabbed your attention and made you take notice.

That first Sonic 06 trailer was the first thing that impressed me like that since Perfect Chaos. It was daring! Bold! They killed Sonic! Stakes raised! All bets were off!

And how does it happen in-game? A character best described as “Shadow but more evil and cool (as defined by a 13 year old)” sneaks up behind him and shoots him with some kind of energy beam… thing? And he falls over dead. Just like that.

There’s so much wrong with that scene.

1. Sonic has been shown to have borderline telepathy earlier in the game - and I don’t mean that as a serious character trait, mind you - I just mean that there are at least two separate instances where he seems to “know” when he’s about to be attacked and dodges out of the way, almost like he has some form of spider-sense. And yet, Mephiles doesn’t register. I suppose you can explain that away by saying “Mephiles used magic to conceal his energy”, but that’s the kind of writing excuse you would expect from a child.
2. Mephiles kills Sonic using almost no effort - but he waits the entire game to do it. His goal from the beginning is to release the flames of disaster and rejoin with them to form Solaris, but he dorks around with Shadow and Silver for a few days trying to convince them to kill Sonic for him. He literally tries two separate times to do things the hard way before giving up and taking the easy route by just doing the job himself. Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem like a very intelligent way to handle things.

Sonic’s death doesn’t feel earned. There’s no emotional impact to it. There’s no great drama to make you feel anything. It’s just…

It doesn’t even work as shock value. While the ending to Sonic 06 is an obvious deus ex machina where everything is magically reset and everybody is okay, the way Sonic dies is almost basically one, too, because it only happens because the writer said “welp I don’t know where to go with this, so here’s something dramatic and unexpected to get the plot moving again”. It’s like a bad fanfic.

In actuality, I was probably really angry when I saw this scene. The moment I became fed up with Sonic 06 is actually captured perfectly on the internet on a message board forum post:

Re: Sonic The Hedgehog (2k6/Next) Thoughts
« Reply #33 on Nov 16, 2006, 12:00am »

So far: Not bad. Feels… well, I know most reviewers are going to say last gen, and that’s what it is. It feels like the kind of game that could’ve and SHOULD’VE been done on the GC/Xbox/etc. Soleanna reminds me a lot of Delfino Plaza, too. Controls feel a bit smoother [than the demo]. Sonic’s homing attack is different - it shoots you a ways horizontally before gravity takes over.

High speed sections are terrible. Even in the first level (Wave Ocean) they expect you to squeeze through tiny little spots and the collision detection is iffy (I wasn’t anywhere near a palm tree and it still registered a hit). Production values on the cutscenes have defenitely improved. The CGI kind of makes me want a CGI Sonic movie, and the cutscenes for the ingame engine, while not as good as the CGI, are still a step up from Sonic Heroes and the ilk.

Tails likes to commit suicide sometimes. Every now and then you’ll hear he’s accidentally jumped straight into the ocean (marked by a morbidly humorous “Aruuugghhhhhh!”).

Strange bug just now; Tails appeared next to me and prompty laid down and died…and his dead body stays there. He doesn’t get up or respawn or anything. He just lays there. Dead. Presumably forever.

Re: Sonic The Hedgehog (2k6/Next) Thoughts
« Reply #51 on Nov 16, 2006, 2:38am »

The whole thing just feels really unpolished and arbitrary. Soleanna feels TOO big. Streets are absolutely mammoth in their width, but there’s not many people walking around. It feels dead.

The game also suffers from a lot of slowdown issues. And pop-in. And poor control. And a lot of other stuff. Like, Sonic gets “caught” on a lot of little objects. It doesn’t make him stop, but it makes him (and the camera) jitter and kind of wobble when he does it and looks really bad. Some of the stuff you can do is really dumb, too.

For example: I’m in White Acropolis. While you’re there, there’s these spotlights. When you homing attack certain objects in the game, you sort of bounce up and can keep homing attacking. If you played the demo, there’s lots of stuff you could do this to (like the eagle statues).

Now, you can homing attack up the spotlight towers like this, all the way up to the spotlight itself, where you can shatter the glass and turn off the spotlight. I thought that was a nice touch. I stood up on top of this tower and looked around, and I noticed that the giant walls that surround the level didn’t go very high, so I promptly jumped off the top of the tower and thought I could walk around above most of the normal level.

Nope. Sonic clipped right through the wall and fell into a black void, promptly dying.

Re: Sonic The Hedgehog (2k6/Next) Thoughts
« Reply #96 on Nov 16, 2006, 9:16am »

I’m just shocked at what a catastrophic failure this seems to be. The more I play, the worse the game starts to get. There’s just so much wrong with nearly every aspect of the game. Beyond just controls.

There are a couple levels here and there that are okay, but almost every level has something blindingly frusterating about it. Either they force you to play as Tails, or Rouge, or you have to drive one of Shadow’s shitty vehicles, or you have to do a mach speed segment…

And all of it is implemented so shoddily and half-assed it’s almost unfathomable how Sega… could… even comprehend to release it in this state. Part of me almost wonders if they’ll announce some sort of patch in the next couple of days, because I just… I can’t accept this. Not in any way shape or form.

This may be the first and only Sonic game I am actually willing to take back to the store.

I was pissed by the time I wrote that last post. I most likely continued to be pissed when I saw Sonic (both figuratively and literally) die.

But it’s more amusing to say I laughed. Or was it crying? Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell the difference.