How Sega Ruined Sonic the Hedgehog

The always entertaining RetroGaming with Racketboy has a long post up railing against Sega for ruining Sonic the Hedgehog. The blue, spikey hero has had a rough time of it of late. Outings from the series like Shadow the Hedgehog, and even the next-gen title simply named Sonic the Hedgehog, have gotten simply terrible reviews. He longs for a return to simple, fun, not-creepy play. From the article: "As the new generation of platforms emerged, Sega used Sonic as a way to show off their newest graphical technologies. There is no doubt that the new Sonic the Hedgehog for the XBox 360 looks nice, but as the abysmal reviews indicate, graphics are not everything. In order to push its cutting-edge graphics to the limit, Sega, in their infinite wisdom, felt the need to bring Sonic and his friends into a more realistic world, filled with life-like humans. As you can see from this video, there is something creepy about some giant hedgehogs interacting with humans. My point is that Sega doesn't seem to know what it wants to do with Sonic. It seems like Sega assigns various quick-and-dirty development projects in order to see what ideas sticks with consumers. Unfortunately, Sega fans have had to suffer through this process."

The xbox 360 game is terrible.

[Deag]

The demo is on xbox live if anyone wants to try it, and it is all I have played
But good luck, it is very very bad. Doesn't look the worst but it is impossible to control. The camera goes all over the place and the little bastard you are supposed to be controlling just flys about the place very quickly, yes that is what sonic is supposed to be, but it is not good when you have to follow him at this pace.
No idea how a modern Sonic game should go, I think it would be best if they just gave up on this one, maybe release a newer version of the platform game on the arcade services for the new consoles. I don't think anything else would work.

my 2 cents...

[daddyrief]

I have beaten almost every sonic game for genesis (3D blast being the exception.) I was also younger than 12 at the time, and all I can say was that despite recycling themes and gameplay for 3 sonic games, the first sonic trilogy was FUN. They had a formula that worked for level design, bosses were always different and creative, certain levels had other things to do(slots in casino night zone? checkpoint minigames?) Now, I'm glad they didn't make another sonic side-scroller back then, as it would have been simply milking for cash.

But how should Sonic look and behave next-gen? (now, current gen?) It's simple.

-Keep sonic badass. Sonic has always been badass, but not OVERDONE. He always looked badass just by looking mean and shaking his finger. Tails should serve as a foil to his badassness. Shadow makes me cringe as a one-time sonic/sega fan -- way too overdone.

-Keep the former cast of Sonic. There was no need to create a slew of new characters, IMHO. With the comic book series from a few years back, plus minor characters from other games, was there a need for new characters? Guess the old ones weren't cool enough for 'next-gen.' Familiar characters would have kept old fans coming back. Sonic has even had love interests in the past! Don't tell me you can't work that into a game.

-Most importantly -- KEEP the feel of GAMEPLAY. The old Sonic games were easy to pick up and play. You couldn't really get lost, and there wasn't a myriad of moves to learn just to understand the game. Mario made the transition well into 3D; Sonic didn't. I saw another /.er's video of the Wii Sonic to come out, and I must say it looks closer to what a 3D Sonic should look like. Fast paced gameplay, ring collection, but in a 3D environment. Sonic should feel faster than Mario and other platformers.

So ends the rantings of a former fanboy. I must also admit, I haven't played many of the recent Sonic iterations, but if reviews (user and site) are any indication, I'm not missing out on much. Sonic needs to return to its roots.

Tell our youth the truth!

[Admiral Frosty]

I have a younger brother who is only plays the new 3D sonic games, and loves them. Its horrible, seeing his mind being warped into thinking that somehow these are games that we should welcome into our consoles.

I've only ever passed the first level in these games (heroes and shadow) once, and never EVER felt the urge to play again. You can't see what your doing, but your sure to do it fast. And if the gameplay wasn't enough of a reason to ignore these games, the whole repulsive attitude thing is, as it will make you wish death upon whatever mentally deficient sub-human thought it would be "cool".

Then Shadow comes along, and makes the gameplay and story somehow worse by adding broken and aggravating objective, non-aimable guns, not to mention the idea of a large, anthropomorphic, amnesiac animal in love with a disproportioned eight year old is enough to drive one mad. The guns themselves are the equivalent of adding a dating simulation to Half-Life 2, only instead of courting Alyx, you court headcrabs.

Then, they have to go a prostalatize it with Racers and other spin-offs.

Sonic is the gaming equivilent of Star Wars. The old ones where fun, but the new ones rape all my old memories, leaving me feeling hollow and jaded.

Please Sega, if you have any shread of decency, they will kill him instead off leaving him in this tormented existence that is worse then death.

Project S

[Stormwatch]

These days, the only new Sonic game I really want is Project S. It's a fan project that aims to complete the infamous cancelled Saturn title Sonic X-treme [wikipedia.org]. And here's the most interesting bit: the project is being led by Sonic X-treme's own director, Chris Senn.

Re:Hope for the Wii version

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I bought Rush mostly for the music (It's amazing, no one can deny it), but I think they need to slow it down. It wasn't even remotely hard unless you ran off a cliff. Level design is just "run bitch run" and unlike the originals there doesn't appear to me many routes you can take.

But yea, it's a step in the right direction but still needs work.