Warning: The following contains some arguably un-nessisary language, so viewer discretion is advised.
What They Did To **** Up A Respected Game Known As Sonic
10 years ago, a golden age took place, though it was not recognized as so at the time. Sonic the Hedgehog games were popular, and no one knew how horrible they would become, going from a side-scroller with simple jumping, rolling, and in some cases, flying to a bastardization where the closest thing to a roll is where Sonic grabs his two companions and shoots off the edge with them.
Perhaps the first Sonic Adventure deserves more credit than I give it. After all, it was a first attempt at a new concept, allowing more characters to be played, and generally keeping the essence of the known ones. Sonic could roll, Tails could fly, Knuckles could kick the ass of any enemy within a foot (If you wanted to get technical, you could point out that this was not in fact the first 3D Sonic game. I did not say it was). With a few new characters and a plot that was actually evident, this was a big step for Sega, and though it is not comparable to the original games and probably lead to the horrible games we all (unfortunately) own and hate today. Of course, it was Sonic, a brand new 3D system, and pretty good reviews, so many bought it like a present at christmas (no you're a bad synonym!).
This is where the trouble started. Unfortunately, somehow Sega took the "Oh let's buy this because its Sonic" as "Oh let's buy this because it is an awesome game plan, and plot is exactly what Sonic games need!" As you can imagine, this did not bode well. First, look at Tails. He's not even Tails! Sega obviously decided that Mechs and robot-type things were cool at the time, and figured they could stretch and excuse to land Tails in one! Why the hell don't they just kill him off in one of their "acclaimed cut scenes" and have Sonic meet Robo-man, the half robot-half man who coincidentally is Dr. Robotnik's match in machinery!? And that leads to another point! Why the hell did Dr. Robotnik suddenly die to be replaced by Eggman? He doesn't even look like an egg! If they wanted some idiotic name for Sonic and Tails to use, maybe they should have attempted to look at the history of Sonic instead of being too lazy and arrogant to watch a cartoon, and so "fix" the problem by inventing new names that you can convince mindless innocent children are correct with an overusage! "Hey! Tails! It's Eggman!" "By golly Sonic! You're right, just look at Eggman!" "I, Eggman, will get that chaos emerald!" "Watch out for Eggman's non-killing fire of ring-loss!" "AAAAAAH! Eggman hurt me!" I mean, come on!
But that's not the end of my "How they fucked up the best game of all time" list, I just decided a new paragraph was in order. The next thing, I'm sure every one has realized and been angered by, and if not, get the hell out of here and play some Mario game (you Sonic-hater). Every. Single. Level. Included a 5 minute showing of Sonic grinding or rolling around and around on all these nicely colored loops and twists. If I wanted to pay 50 bucks to spend half my time watching Sonic do the exact, same, thing every single time, I'd buy five copies of the movie and watch them simultaniously. ONE rolling scene and ONE grinding scene MIGHT have been in order. It might not even be so bad if you could actually control it! Sure, you can control it, but if you do you're just going to fall off the edge. Again: WHY THE FUCK DO WE NEED TO SEE THE SAME THING 20 TIMES??
Yes, the list can go on, but now I need to demolish the next, and most disapointing of all the games, Sonic Heroes.
Yuji Naka: "We're trying something different from the Adventure games. We've had two of those, and probably will make more, but we wanted something new to go along with our new graphics enhancer. 'Sonic Heroes' will allow players to choose between four teams of three characters each. This is an entirely new concept, and who knows, if it is popular we will probably make more Heroes games."
This quote (not the exact words, but very close to it) appeared in an issue of EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) a few months ago. At least five times Naka stressed that Heroes would be very different from the Adventure series. And guess what? IT WAS NOT. If he thinks that allowing you to badly control three characters instead of one makes it different any way other than superficially, one comes to the conclusion that a) He's selling out, going for money over quality now, or b) His brain died after Sonic Adventure 1. As might be expected if one read my past rants, I would go into depth on these two theories. However, Smokey the Bear was not Sonic, and I don't think anything will say it better than that.
On to page 2!