The Hotdog Laserhouse

I was just thinking about that yesterday.

I dunno. Is there interest in watching me finish the game? I’ve never played a long game like that to completion through multiple streams before. Usually it’s just stuff I can finish in a single sitting.

I mean if people want it then I guess we could figure something out.

One’s own personal voice is important, so it’s best to stay true to yourself. If you have something unpopular to say, it can still need to be said.

But you also have to remember I started this blog nearly seven years ago to make fun of people who were yelling at me for my Sonic 06 video. I’ve never been afraid to reply to comments on my Youtube videos. People will tell you not to read the comments, but I always read the comments.

Even now, considering I don’t post about making fun of Youtube comments terribly often any more, I still read every comment. I have email alerts turned on, the whole deal.

That being said, there are things you can do to minimize angry comments. Chief among them is phrasing; steer clear of factual declarations when it comes to your opinions. Titling a video something like “Sonic the Hedgehog is a Bad Game” invites outrage, because you’re making an objective statement as opposed to a subjective one.

The more ways you can emphasize that it’s just something you personally believe, and the better you are at tracing the path that lead you to that opinion, the less blind rage you’ll get in your comments section and the more legitimate discussion you’ll open up.

And if things get to be too hot, don’t be afraid to just mute the person off your channel, or even shut down the comments section for a video entirely. There’s no shame in any of that. I have a fairly robust set of muted words, too, and Youtube even offers a default set of their own now. Anyone who says something containing one of those words will have their comment automatically held for review.

But don’t sweat it so much. The really rude people only come out for the big Youtube channels. One of the reasons I make an effort to keep reading my comments and responding to people there is because when a person leaves a comment and they feel ignored, they think that gives them license to say anything.

It’s like the Palace Guards in London. Their job is to not flinch for anything, so there’s all kinds of videos of people messing with them, doing all sorts of rude things in an effort to make them blink.

Big Youtube channels often get so many comments that they can’t respond to even a fraction of them, so the people leaving comments feel ignored and start acting out just to provoke a response. As long as you validate their humanity and act like a human yourself, most of the time they’re going to be pretty well behaved.

You’ll be fine!

I mean the most obvious thing in Sonic level design is multiple routes. Generally speaking, you have one upper route that’s higher risk but higher reward. Usually there’s more items up there, it’s faster, but there’s a lot of ways to “fall off.” Enemies to knock you down to lower routes, spikes, etc.

Enemies are almost never just sitting in the middle of the road where the player can run in to them without seeing. If you look at a lot of enemy placement in Sonic level design, they’re specifically placed around slower sections, and never, ever in a place where the player can run in to them at full speed. The only place where this works is in a game like Sonic Rush, where you can count on the player being invincible for 80% of the stage.

Something that bothers me in some fan games is placement of item boxes. Christian Whitehead was particularly bad about this in early builds of Retro Sonic, but I see it in some other games too – item boxes are mostly used as rewards. You have to do something to get them, even if it’s small. Just leaving them out randomly in levels devalues them as a reward mechanism.

Similarly, Dimps goes in the opposite direction, and power-ups are the sorts of things that are almost never found by accident, which is equally annoying.

And, of course, something I tried to do way back in Sonic Forever’s Prism Hill Zone is to emphasize the “right way” to play Sonic through silent, unspoken tutorials. This means things like forcing players in to a roll in order to demonstrate what rolling does. This means engineering scenarios where rolling is clearly beneficial, and then showing them similar scenarios later on where they AREN’T forced in to a roll and can feel the difference for themselves.

Level design IS game design in that way. It’s always about teaching and testing.

I feel like this is all super basic information but hopefully it helps.

Right after we did the Sonic 06 race we were actually trying to figure out what game we’d do another stream like that with

Resident Evil 6 was floated at some point because Imran wanted something more in his wheelhouse than mine and then I guess I never bought RE6 so those plans fizzled out

And now we’re both probably too busy (him more than me, but still)

I’ll teach you to have faith in me

That’s making a lot of assumptions on your part for the things I left out of the last post, but okay.

I am totally honest with myself. If I didn’t think I was good enough at a particular thing, like artwork or video production or game development, I wouldn’t still be doing those things.

Months ago I mentioned an incident where I tried my hand at coding in C++ and it was so stressful that it left me a broken mess. You know what happened after that? I have never even so much as looked at C++ since then.

But I still have good ideas for games. I know, on some level, what I’m doing. You know, nowadays, we have games like Outlast and Slender: The Arrival, which try to replicate the found footage horror movie genre in video games, but all the way back in 2005, after I finished my horror game experiment (”The House”), I immediately wrote out a design document for the “real” version of that game I’d like to do some day, and it was a found footage horror game. And now, like, half of all horror games on Itch.io are copying the found footage style.

And a few years ago, a developer from Frictional Games put up a post discussing what they thought were important elements of horror games. And reading that, I had, like, 75% of those elements in that found footage horror game design document I wrote in 2005.

I could have been a very rich man. I could have launched a career. But I’m slow, the timing was wrong (this was pre-Unity, pre-UDK), I wasn’t focused enough, so on and so forth and etcetera. But I struck on some good ideas, and at least there’s value in that. Maybe I’ll get’em next time.

Or maybe I’ll sit on my ideas for decades until everything I thought of is considered old hat, crippled by always being in the wrong place at the wrong time with never enough motivation or focus to do just one thing at a time. Always taking the hardest routes and never getting any pay off.

I guess we just won’t know until we get there.

Anyway, I just don’t want to look like a jerk by bragging or acting undeservedly like a hot shot. If you have an issue with someone acting humble, that sounds more like something you need to work through and not anything they’re doing.

I’ve written a response to this three times over the course of the day, and each time I end up erasing it and starting over because I’m not happy with what comes out.

There are reasons I am harsh on myself. For one, I decided when I was very young that ego was bad. I had seen enough shows and enough people who were consumed by their own egos and made out to be fools for it, so I decided then and there that I would never let myself get an ego if I could help it.

That meant constantly underselling everything I did. I also discovered, as a consequence of that, that it was better to promise less and deliver more. People like it when you surprise them with more than you said you were going to do.

But it also lead to a fear of responsibility, in a way. I became terrified of under-promising and then also under-delivering. So, as long as I avoid putting myself on the line, I never disappoint anyone.

And it still happens. Any time I dare give an estimated release date for anything, literally anything I personally do, I always miss it. And not by a little, but by massive, ridiculous amounts. And it’s happened over, and over, and over, no matter how much wiggle room I give myself.

That’s not very rad-tacular.

But at the very least, I’m getting better. Slowly. I know I’m not worthless. I have certain talents. But I also try as hard as I can to stay humble and realistic. That’s all.

He’s already been around this long. It would take something genuinely heinous on a pretty large scale to get him to go away at this point. It’s sort of like I said in my Le Monde interview:

“When something gets popular enough for a long enough period of time, it ends up taking on a life of its own. Once enough fans embrace it, it cannot be killed or destroyed. Think about Transformers, and how sometimes there were many years between movies or TV shows, but were still Transformers fans out there on message boards or at conventions. There will always be Transformers now, in some form or another, until the eventual extinction of the human race. The same is likely true for Sonic the Hedgehog.”

I mean, jeeze, they brought Furby back. If that’s still around, Sonic will last forever.

I could have sworn I already did this, but I guess that was probably for Sonic Unleashed, come to think of it. Sure, I’ll give this a shot.

LEAST FAVORITE

• Planet Wisp - So much of this level feels like it totally misunderstands the appeal of the original Planet Wisp. I don’t like the music, I don’t like riding the minecarts, it’s terrible as the last level, it goes on way too long, and it’s like 90% side scrolling 2D. The slower, fiddly, platforming-heavy bits of these modern games are always my least favorite.
  
• Seaside Hill - This is one of the most head-scratching inclusions in this game, because Sonic Generations already had Green Hill Zone. Seaside Hill was created to evoke Green Hill; its presence in Sonic Generations is like the snake eating its own tail, nostalgia for nostalgia. I appreciate the stage’s size and how many alternate paths there are, but a lot of them also just aren’t very fun. The underwater section, platforming across turtles’ backs, the kart section… ehhh.
  
• Green Hill - That’s right, I’m going there. Green Hill Zone in Sonic Generations kind of sucks! It has the unfortunate role of acting as the game’s tutorial level, but what this means is that it coddles you more than any other stage in the game. Every inch of this stage is covered in invisible walls, protecting you from even the barest minimum of danger. You can’t even look at a cracked stone wall without an invisible barrier pushing you away. Green Hill is the worst helicopter parent.
• Sky Sanctuary - Like Green Hill, Sky Sanctuary has a lot of invisible walls trying to protect you from yourself, and some of them are so bad that you can’t even boost across tiny gaps out of fear you might not make it all the way across the two foot space. I also don’t like the part where you have to race the enemy to push a button (the controls can mess up and make you face the wrong way really easily), and, once again, it’s another level that starts to crumble around Sonic even though he isn’t actively causing damage?
  
• Chemical Plant - Chemical Plant has one “holy cow!” moment, and it’s right at the start when you realize you can stop and jump across to the other roads, because most Sonic games would make that stuff off-limits (and it’s especially surprising after GHZ). The rest of the level… is… meh? The sliding box platforms can be finicky with their physics hacks, and it’s really weird to me that the stage just begins to self-destruct halfway through even though the game never tells us why. Does Sonic just emit destructive force? Also, this and Seaside Hill have the most framerate problems on PC thanks to bad shaders (something Dario said he could fix, but never did :p)
  
• Speed Highway - This is up there with some of the most technical levels in Sonic Generations; it’s really easy to mess up a drift, or fudge an air boost, and throw a whole run in the garbage. That’s not really a complaint. I keep wishing they would have played up the sunrise aspect more – they fake it pretty well by hiding the skybox until the very end, but once you notice the illusion it kind of breaks. But at least they let you run on the highway itself with the cars.
  
• Crisis City - This should honestly be lower on the list simply for the bizarre reason Sonic Team clearly doesn’t want to let Sonic 2006 go, even though Sega itself was trying to bury the game. Unfortunately it’s one of my favorite levels in Sonic Generations, and outside of Speed Highway, probably one of the few levels that comes closest to matching the Sonic Unleashed’s higher level of challenge. The 2D sections are awful (particularly the geyser stomping), but I think most of the 2D sections in Modern Sonic’s levels are awful.
• Rooftop Run - I still think Sonic Unleashed’s original version of this level is a lot better, but this is no slouch, either. The addition of the hot air balloon festival is a nice touch, and the slower, more cozy town area at the start of the slow route is cute.
  
• City Escape - It really is a toss up between this and Rooftop Run. I think I might like this song better, and I think the overall level itself is one of the fastest in the game. If you hit your routes properly, you almost don’t have to slow down ever. Because of that, it’s also one of the shortest levels in Sonic Generations, unfortunately. I think I average around a minute and a half? But, man, what a good 90 seconds. Special shout out to the new and improved truck chase at the end - the sawblade arms are good and ridiculous, and the little wallrun bit with the billboard on the final turn is a great touch.
  

MOST FAVORITE

I’ve been sitting on this for a while because I’d wanted to play SRB2 Kart but never got around to it until now.

A couple years ago, I’d said that one of the things I’d like to make was “The Mugen of Kart Racers.” Now, we’ve gotten kart racers before that have tried to let you build tracks or create characters – ModNation Racers, Zero Gear, etc. But the emphasis here is “Mugen.” Mugen is a piece of software that’s supposed to let you make your own fighting game, but what it really means is that a bunch of people port in stages and characters from other games so you can have Terry Bogard fight Ky Kiske in a wrestling arena ripped from Midway’s Wrestlemania game on the 32X.

I wanted THAT, but for kart racers.

I think that might be what SRB2 Kart is. People are already going nuts making all kinds of racers for the game.

And the game ships, with, what? 30? 40+ tracks? Which cover a huge mix of original environments, Mario Kart ports, Sonic Drift remakes, and adaptations of concepts from games like Sonic Adventure. It’s a truly impressive thing.

On top of all that, it seems to play pretty well, too! You do kind of have to get used to the controls a little bit (mainly drifting), but I wouldn’t call the controls bad. They’re just not Mario Kart. They have their own flavor.

The tracks themselves are surprising in a lot of ways. We’ve known for a while that SRB2′s branch of the Doom Legacy engine was getting big upgrades behind the scenes to support sloped floors and whatever, but SRB2 Kart goes nuts with these new features to create something that looks like it should be impossible to make in Doom. I don’t just mean floor-over-floors, or slopes-over-slopes, I mean, like, interactive polygon objects in stages, 3D skyboxes, and more.

And it all works. Plus looks good! Like, I don’t think it’s a secret that I used to think vanilla SRB2 wasn’t really to my tastes, visually, which is why I ended up making a whole texture pack back in the day that redid almost the entire game. Here, though… the SRB2 Kart development team effortlessly utilizes existing SRB2 assets with new stuff to make what I would actually call a very impressive looking game considering the engine’s origins.

I only really have three major problems.

One, the game is 100% focused on multiplayer. If you’re looking to race, with all the proper items and everything, you have to open the server browser and look for an open game with active players. As of this writing, it is a Sunday night, around 8:30pm, and there are exactly six available servers, and only one is populated with a paltry 3 players.

The only offline mode is time trials, and you race against SRB2 Kart staff ghosts (read: you’ll never catch them). Which dovetails in to my second problem: even though time trials don’t seem to phone home to any kind of online leaderboard, you cannot use modded characters out of concern for “cheating.” Dynamite Headdy? Mario? You can only use them when racing against live humans.

The third complaint would be about track design. With so many included tracks, it’s obvious that not all of them were created equal. Most of them are totally fine, and all of them really stretch the limitations of this engine, but every now and then you’ll hit one with a particularly narrow road around a hairpin turn with no guard rail, or a mesh fence texture will get lost in the noise and you won’t know what’s safe to drive on and what’s a bottomless pit. Some would say that variety is the spice of life, but if I lose a race, I’d rather it be because I was too slow as opposed to blaming an annoying track hazard.

I suppose a secret fourth complaint is this game could use a lot better documentation, because I downloaded the Mario character mod shown above, enabled him in game, and after it complained I couldn’t use modded characters in time trial mode, I tried to disable him only to find the game wouldn’t let me. I don’t know if I was hitting the wrong key, or what, and the readme.txt just lists GNU licensing information and has links to the SRB2 Kart social media stuff. Compared to how robust the rest of the game feels, it’s one part that feels shockingly undercooked. I shouldn’t have to join a Discord or post on a forum just to get a basic outline of how a menu works (or why it wasn’t letting me do what I was trying to do).

But, yeah, man. That thing’s super rad. I just hope they have plans for CPU races in the future.