Spider-Man Games In Full Form

When it comes to two superheroes who share a great deal of history together, while having very little to do with each other, Batman and Spider-man are right up there. Not only have they had similar histories, but their overall personas are two sides of the same coin. They are also arguably the most popular superheroes in the market today. Similarly, their video games have shared a great deal of success and downfalls throughout the decades. Ever since the early development of video games, there were games for Spider-man and the caped crusader. Whereas Spider-man got his debut appearance in Atari 2600’s “Spider-man” released in 1982 and Batman made his debut in “Batman” released for home computers in 1986. This is prominent for the mere fact that several would draw the conclusion that Spider-man video games are largely knockoffs of the Batman games, which is not true.

Yes, there was probably some ideas gained here and there throughout development of both, but to bury the needle immediately without getting the facts is a mistake. Just because the combat system in the 2018 Spider-man game is very similar to the one in Arkham Asylum from 2009 does not mean that every single asset was ripped from the Batman game. Case and point:

Spider-man 2 (2004)

Hailed as one of the most unlikely gems to grace the wall crawler. Not only was this a free roaming sandbox, but it was also a movie tie-in game. Both of these elements normally spell immediate death for any game developer and whatever video game they were commissioned to produce. It went against the odds and not only survived, but thrived. It is still hailed as one of the best classic Spider-man ports of all time.

While it is not without its faults and glitches, the game is still very enjoyable as a whole. One highlight of the game is that you are able to travel throughout the entire city swinging your web just like the webhead himself. Beating up criminals is fast paced, fun and simple without making the game too much of a chore to learn. This is where much of the gameplay in question comes into play. As you are about to be hit by an opponent, your spider-sense goes off to tell you to dodge. The mechanics and the interactive fighting is not as polished as the Arkham games, but they still have their own charm. The graphics are bright and colorful, though, in retrospect, they didn’t age all that well. The people themselves look like blurry alien life forms. Still, that’s just how things have progressed over the years.

The boss battles are plentiful and diversified in their mechanics as no two are exactly alike. One of the more agitating ones is chasing Black Cat through the city, following her trail. However, in keeping with the movie storyline, Dr. Octopus is the man of the hour and his boss fights do not disappoint. There are other usual suspects from the Spidey rogue gallery, including the Shocker and Mysterio who don’t have so much to do with the plot. They’re more there to keep the energy up and the game a bit longer.

Much of the cast from the movie reprise their roles for the video game. Though the voice work is rather choppy in many areas, mostly due to the fact that they had limited numbers of voice actors, it’s not distracting from the overall quality. With a variety of side missions to perform and an overarching story, it’s still relatively short. What game there is will keep you occupied throughout. Though, one side mission that many have cited as a more dismal memory was “I lost my balloon!”

Spider-man (2000)

Though the name is not very imaginative, the game itself is very much deserving the name. Based on the 90’s animated series, what it lacks in three dimensional graphics, it more than makes up for in purely fun gameplay. Whether you prefer the N64, PS1 or Dreamcast version, it doesn’t matter. The wall crawling is still very easy to learn and the graphics are easy to get use to.

The game is a marvel of its time, featuring a vast number of Marvel characters throughout. It can get especially easy in some areas, for sure. However, if you’re just here to experience the game, it is quite the ride. Not only are you playing as the titular character, but you are also running from the police as you have been framed for a crime you did not commit. Now you must fight to clear your name with the help of allies such as the Captain America, Daredevil, Black Cat and Venom… wait what?!

Despite its born on date, this game has aged with some grace. Though, it still comes with the obligatory glitches and mechanical failures. For the year 2000, it’s quite the marvel. They may not have added the webs to his character model, but they brought numerous alternate costumes as a wonderful incentive to keep playing.

As you may have noticed, Spidey has gotten a lot of love from game developers who just wanted to do him justice. Games that had no business being as good as they were turned out to be classics that are still played and talked about to this day. Very few super hero games can do that for you. To be able to play a game and feel like you are the hero is a very rare quality, even today. The fact that Spider-man had games that could achieve even a fraction of that feeling back in the early 2000s is outstanding! Yes, he has had his fair share of the stinkers, every hero with his library size has.

He still has better games than Superman, am I right?

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

Original title: Sonic the Hedgehog
Country of origin: USA
Genre: Comedy, action, adventure
Year: 2020
Running time: 99 minutes

Why, yes, I do movie reviews too! Not as often as I do video game reviews, but I do them. And here’s one I’m still very happy to be writing.

Yesterday I went to see the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which had raised so much -and so despair-inducing- controversy because of the title character’s look and having to go fast (ha! ha!) into his redesign. I won’t dwell on that, however.
I’ve liked the Sonic video games all my life, and I’ve always held on to the hope that the character’s public reputation (marred by a long string of video game installments ranging from “okay” to “abysmal” and a horrendous, insane mass of scum of a fandom) to rebound. Well, here’s the movie that may have just accomplished that. No; I’m certain that it did accomplish that. That’s right; I am giving a positive review to Sonic the Hedgehog, the movie that no one gave a dime for and which seemed doomed to fail. Keep reading and you’ll learn why…

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As is common, though not universal, in the microcosm of Sonic adaptations, here we have Sonic as an alien who falls to our world. At a very early age, Sonic discovered his amazing ability to run at the speed of sound -and with his body covered in lightning like he’s a Super Saiyan-. The enemies of his mentor, an owl named Longclaw, found him out, and to save him, she teleported him to Earth using a Ring -although it may not look like it, this is a reference to the video games; specifically, Sonic 3D Blast, where you had to gather birds and put them into Big Rings to teleport them out of danger.
Ten years later, Sonic has managed to live alone and secretly on a California small town called Green Hills, becoming familiar with its inhabitants and especially its police sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden, whom I first knew as Cyclops in the X-Men movies), who is planning to move to San Francisco because he dismisses his own home town, where nothing ever happens.
Oh, Tom, are you in for a real happening! Because Sonic, since he can’t reveal his existence to anyone, doesn’t have any friends on Earth; which is what he truly wants and the cause of his biggest frustrations. Taking said frustrations out one night, he runs so fast that his power causes a PEM big enough to leave the entire Pacific Northwest without electricity, which attracts the attention of Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), a government scientist extremely depreciative of society, who develops an obssession with capturing Sonic and use him to power his machines. Sonic ends up revealing himself to Tom, and together they head to San Fran to retrieve Sonic’s bag of Rings, which he needs to use to teleport to the Mushroom Village where Longclaw said he would be safe from her enemies.

When Carrey was announced as the villain, many assumed he’d be the only good thing about the movie. While he’s in good acting form -although not necessarily physical, nor, sadly, mental-, he’s not the best thing about the movie. The best thing about the movie, against all prediction. is Sonic himself. He’s been written as a sort of Roger Rabbit; wacky, but not loud; neurotic, but not unbearable; and, above all, optimistic. He spends the majority of the movie having the time of his life, making wisecracks and doing all kinds of fantastic -as in fantasy- stuff with his superspeed (his bar fight scene against a bunch of biker thugs is a total riot), and the viewer can’t help but join in his enthusiasm, never seemingly able to get tired of his antics. I think a good reason for this is precisely that they redesigned him into something that looked more like he does in the games, but I’m not saying this because I’m one of those horrendous, insane Sonic fans. I say this because it helps put the audience into the mindset that he’s a cartoon character, like Roger Rabbit -hence the comparison-. It’s a lot easier to take a cartoon character’s antics with a straight face when they look like a cartoon character. As far as I can remember, the last movie that did this with CGI was The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), which I haven’t been able to see yet.

But the comings and goings of a Hollywood cartoon Sonic aren’t what drives me to recommend this movie.

The cockfighting between Marvel and DC movies has led Hollywood’s movie industry, its audience and its critics to believe that live-action adaptations of family-friendly material can only be done two ways; either “darker and grittier” like Christopher Nolan’s Batman, or “ironic” and prone to savagely making fun of the source material like Joel Schumacher’s Batman. Each form is approached -by both its makers and its audiences- from the assumption that any person who prefers the other is evil. Due to this, we have lost the tendency there was with Superman II, Batman 1989, or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy; that of telling the stories with “sincerity”. That is; knowing that these are unreal stories about unlikely heroes saving entire worlds from the threat of demented villains with evil laughs, they tell them just the way they are, without the need to “justify them” or “ground them in reality”, nor to “constantly reassure the audience that we acknowledge that this is a very stupid thing that no one should care so much about”.

Sonic doesn’t do either of those things. Sonic is a movie about a cartoon blue hedgehog who can talk and run very fast, who beats down an evil scientist in red with a very bushy mustache, and saves the world. The argument is never told as if it was anything else. It has humor, but it doesn’t take potshots at itself the whole time. It has serious moments, but it’s not pessimistic. Its makers feel no shame about the material they’re working with, and therefore they make no attempt to justify its existence, nor themselves. They know they’re working with a character who doesn’t need to be one or the other to succeed. They know there’s a spectrum between grimdark and irony, and they have wisely put their movie within it.

This is why I recommend this movie. This is why I say my hopes of seeing Sonic vindicated have come true. And I know there are others like me, even if we won’t open our mouths to expose ourselves. And their hopes might have come true as well.

In conclusion: We need more movies like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Survival Horrors – Do’s and Don’t’s

Survival horror is perhaps one of the most slippery slopes in gaming. That feeling you get when you walk into a room you have never been in. You can barely see, the shadows in the room take on forms that look ominous, the silence in the room is louder than any noise that you will ever hear, and everything is still, motionless, eerie. There is a creeping feeling in your brain that tells you that you should not be there, and the darkness begins to take its toll on your nerves. There is a sudden flash from outside the black curtains in front of the window that makes you stop in your tracks as all of the forms of the room are brought to light for a single instant, but that only makes it worse as the darkness returns. One sudden motion, and your heart can skip a beat, you begin to feel the dreading that something is watching you, something is coming for you, something is about to crawl out from underneath the furniture that is covered in white sheets and grab your ankles, pulling you into a place unknown, a shadowy place of which there is no return.

It is up to the game developers to first capture that feeling in a setting for your character, and simulate that feeling of absolute helplessness. Do you have a weapon with which to defend yourself? Can you survive if something truly does lurk in the shadows? Well, that’s where we start to get into the true cusp of a much larger world, one that has captured the hearts of millions, but also caused some of the largest disappointments ever seen in the gaming world, rivalling that of E.T. for the Atari.

Truly terrifying horror games are some of the most difficult things to write and develop. While there have been some terrific successes, there have also been some horrific failures that completely trounce the number of good games that are meant to invoke fear. When you step out from the middle of the trees, and get a good look at the forest for what it is, you can start to see where the successes bleed together. They have certain elements in them that are worth noting and if used properly, can truly give the player what they came to see and feel, true terror!

Horror movie fans are normally the target audience. Those people that go to the theater to see a scary film, even if chances are it is not going to be good, they are willing to risk it. These are the ones that want to take that extra step further and live in that world. They want to interact with that horror movie and be a part of it. If you can make your audience feel like that, you have won the race that is called survival horror, and you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts.

Then there are attempts that just miss the point entirely, or do not have the means nor the know-how to truly make the player become engulfed in their dark, horrific reality. This could be from a lack of funding, a lack of skill, or just a simple lack of knowledge on the subject. Some people think it’s just as simple as shoving someone into a dark room and have people talk cryptic nonsense. Well, today we’re going to delve into some of the elements from certain games that got it wrong and right. In the next article we will go over some important items involved with making survival horror video games in detail. Stay tuned and be sure to keep an eye out.

Heavy Artillery: Do not get me wrong. There are plenty of games that give you weapons, and still maintained their stance in the survival horror world. However, the use of guns such as machine guns, gatling guns, sniper rifles, lasers, whatever they are; these are things that just do not belong. When you give your player the means to wipe out monsters with air strikes and missile launchers, that fear and dread you mean to invoke are just not there. A big bad monster comes out of nowhere. Oh, I shot him. Well that was fun, what next? These are known as action games. Do not slap the genre “survival horror” on a game and give your player a magical one-hit sword. Most of the time, it just really does not work.

Over Complicated Puzzles: Puzzles in survival horror are quite common, in fact, they’re in just about all of the noteworthy titles. However, there comes a time whenever you need to look at your overall story and ask yourself “How long will this puzzle take?” If you’ve done your job correctly, given your player a good amount of fear factor in an area, made your haunted house nice and spooky with that subtle tinge of fright, good on you! However, putting a Myst-level puzzle in the middle of a room with which to slow their progress is highly discouraged. After a while, you lose all feeling of uneasiness in favor of confusion. That confusion can turn into boredom very quickly if you are not careful. Then your player goes off to a walkthrough of the game and that just takes them out of the experience as a whole. Was it really worth it?

Fast and Easy Scares: Perhaps the most used and abused element of the survival horror genre. Before terror or eeriness sets in, we are treated to a big fat monster with scary fangs going booga booga! No… just no. There is a method to this, and popping out at the very beginning to scream at your player is not the answer. These things take time to build, they need to progress slowly before you jump the gun.

Atmosphere: Let’s face it, if you do not have the skills to create a truly unsettling atmosphere for your player to lurk, survival horror is going to be nigh impossible. This can be done in several creative ways, some ways need very little expensive backgrounds, but at the same time, the more creative you aim, the better you should probably be with your surroundings and the more time you should spend adding just that extra tinge of subtle paint on a wall that looks like it may or may not be blood.

The Antagonist: Perhaps one of the most important things you can get right and wrong is the main villain of the game. Dracula is a very hefty example of this, so let’s use him, shall we? Dracula has been depicted in thousands of ways, whether it be the ancient Transylvanian vampire or a new age, bleak depiction of the vampiric lord, he can be menacing, or he can be an outright joke. Say you bring him into the fray and he does his thing, but then in walks his father. The bigger, badder vampire guy with the aura of mastery will overshadow our favorite blood sucker, and then all credibility will be lost. You just killed any vibes you were aiming for in favor of a new, scary bad guy with bigger shoulder pads. Well, what about Dracula? If he’s sitting there trying to impress his daddy, why do we care?

Or, let’s say you go a little overboard with his villainous traits, give him that evil laugh that we all know, make him just walk in, spout out some threats and kill a kitten. Well, now we’re just sitting there saying “Okay, we get it, we want to kill you. You don’t need to rub it in!” Subtlety, that is the key to giving us a fulfilling urge to reach the goal, and it also makes us fear this guy. We need to be afraid of his fangs and his power, and once we get into that final boss battle, we can truly concentrate and wonder “Well, crap, what do I do now? I need to pay attention. OH GOD! PLEASE HAVE MERCY ON ME!”

Helplessness: This can be completely abused and horribly mistreated. However, when done right, it can be the kicker that makes your game truly great! If you truly feel helpless in the eyes of a terrifying entity, but have that chance of escape/victory, the urge to survive will come to you naturally. Hence the name “survival horror.” You want to survive, and thus you will play every facet of the game in order to obtain the ability to do so. Even if you are given a pistol with which to defend yourself. If that pistol does not stop the monster, though it may slow it down, the horror is heightened! “Crap! What do I do now? I need to run! Please don’t catch me!” Boom! You have just successfully upped the fear factor and made your game that much better.

Forced Fear: Finally, it is worth talking about one thing that many games seem to fall back on as a means to invoke some sort of reaction. Do not tell the player what they are feeling. Do not have a fear meter or some random character saying “This place is so scary!” We will be the judge of that! Telling us to be scared and driving it into our heads like you’re commanding us to emote just does not work. Yes, having the character we play show how scared they are can affect us, but that is only if it is done properly. There are tones you need to set, traits you need to build upon and relationships you need to cement into us before we truly begin to feel for what they are going through. Telling us when to scream is overstepping your bounds as a game, and usually draws an opposite reaction of perpetual eye-rolling.

You can have a great game with amazing game mechanics at your disposal. Good on you. However, before you start labeling your genre to the capacity of Lovecraftian horror of the survival variety, make sure you at least make an effort to bring us into that mindset. It is not easy, especially if you are aiming to truly make us bite our nails. You can throw in all of the jump scares you want, but unless you get us in that dark, abysmal place in our psyches that invokes those emotions we came here for, you have failed your mission. Pay attention to what truly brings out the scares and makes us delve into that world. You will be glad you did. But first, always remember to drink water.

Indie vs. AAA: The Sonic Spectrum

To be frank, Sonic has had it pretty rough in the past decade or so. Ever since his massive success on the Sega Genesis in three massively beloved titles, he has been the victim of some very bad luck. Many would attest that it all began with Sonic the Hedgehog on the Xbox 360 (commonly referred to as Sonic ‘06), it actually started further back than that, Sonic ‘06 is just when it really became noticeable. Going back and forth in quality from the decent success of Sonic Generations to the abysmal failure of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, the Sega Mascot has had a dual failure/success rate of gigantic proportions.

One clear example of this is the very recent fanmade super game headed by Christian Whitehead, Sonic Mania. One could say that Sonic Mania is the most success the little blue hedgehog has seen in literally over a decade. That’s not to say there aren’t good recent Sonic games by major developers, but Sonic Mania has seen success that is unparalleled by the likes of Sonic’s most recent game, Sonic Forces. Talk about quality difference of day and night, Sonic Mania has enjoyed the highest ratings even by some of the most skeptical gaming reviews while Sonic Forces has been left in the super speeding dust.

Even with the dream game mechanic of original character creation, Sonic Forces had very little else to offer. With poor level design, questionable controls, and the fact that you play as Sonic through most of the game anyway, onlookers were scratching their heads asking “why create a character in the first place??” Sonic Mania blew all of it out of the water and turned that nostalgia dial to eleven. We were gifted with familiar gameplay and level design with a nice little twist here and there to brighten it up for the new generation of gamers while leaving plenty for older gamers to ogle. Even the seemingly outdated graphics are updated and beautiful in a way that does not impede on the oldstyle 16-bit look.

It’s starting to look pretty clear on what Sonic games should have been doing the entire time. There have been successful titles that go outside the fast-running platforming of his original games, but those have been so few and far in between. Now we have two that are mapped out and marketed very near one another for a comparison that paints a very clear picture. Sonic fans are now hoping and praying that Nintendo takes some serious notes of this outcome, because it’s clear that even true blue Sonic fans are getting fed up with the treatment that he has been getting as of late.

In the end, it was a one hit knockout. This contrast really goes to show you that innovation and imagination can do some serious damage against just throwing money at a problem in hopes that it improves. AAA Gaming has been under some serious fire for lack of ideas in the ways of Sonic franchise fatigue, cash grab titles and using nostalgia as a way to lure oldschool gamers into spending their money for games that have little to no effort put into them. This fan game may have been distributed by Sega, but let’s face it, it’s an indie game through and through. Now Sonic fans are hoping that the Sonic Team can learn from this experience, but at the same time, given his very questionable past treatment, there is really no telling what they have in store for our blue radical dude. All we can really do is stay tuned and drink water.

Indie vs. AAA: Mighty Number Nein

Although there are innumerable times where AAA has defeated indie games in the rat race, there was one particular time where the failure was so great, it caught the eye of countless among the gaming community. Any retrogamer will tell you about Mega Man, released in 1987, and a great majority will tell you which one is their favorite, whether it be part of the original series of games or part of the Mega Man X series. Both parts of the franchise were legendary among gamers.

Mega Man 2 is very popularly known as the favorite among the original series, while the first Mega Man X is held as the king of the second. Whatever side of the franchise they stand on, both factions will tell you that they were wholly disappointed by the crowd funded passion project known as Mighty No. 9. Keiji Inafune had worked on the original Mega Man, and since Capcom hadn’t released a new Mega Man for several years (due to extreme franchise fatigue), he decided to take it upon himself to create what he called a spiritual successor.

The game was fully funded within just a couple of days and, by the end it had reached around three million dollars, several times more than it was expected to reach. This is where a great deal of mystery enters into the fray. Despite infinitely more money than they could have ever needed, the scene became quite bleak. Though fans were still on the hype train with beautiful gameplay still frames, promising kickstarter prizes and a game mirroring the greatness of the blue bot himself, they curbed their doubts. However, for reasons unknown, the game was met with numerous delays. Many questioned how they could be losing so much time with all of the budget they could ever want and plenty of time between the start of its production to its intended release. Still! They thundered ahead and readied themselves for the release!

The fans were stomped with absolute disappointment. The graphics were not nearly as good as they initially looked in the original press release, the gameplay had very questionable extra, unneeded content, the voice acting rivalled Mega Man 8 for how terrible and stilted it was, and the story intermixed with constant interrupting character dialog was so very frustrating when you were trying to concentrate on playing the game!

Questions began flying at Inafune at a horribly extensive rate! His gross mismanagement of the game’s content and quality was called into question multiple times and their reaction to these questions boiled down to: At least you got a game. Needless to say, contributors to the funding were not happy, and those old school Mega Man fans were less than impressed with the game’s content. Mighty Number 9 reached the status as one of the Worst Games of 2016 across the internet.

Now, let’s be honest. It really was not a terrible game when you stand back and look at the forest for the trees. It worked, it was challenging, and the level design wasn’t terrible. Sure, some of the bosses were cheap and cringe inducing in their tactics and while the story is abysmal, it still served its purpose for the most part. The reason the game failed in a massive cloud of hatred was because it tried to build itself as a return of a beloved franchise in the form of a fan requested game. It had all of the makings of a great game, but for one reason or another completely missed the mark.

AAA titles have had their failures in the past, and many of them failed harder than Mega Man’s would-be successor. This should serve as a lesson on par with Icarus and the burned wings, but let’s face it, if they can build you up to their hype, development companies are going to do it. Inafune could have won big with this title but failed to pull it off in the end.

However, once again, at least we have our silver lining. Evidently Capcom caught onto Mighty Number 9’s kickstarter success and decided that they would release their own game and do it proper this time. Mega Man 11 is set to release later in the year 2018 and it already looks smooth! Inafune may have spent multiple millions of dollars on failure, but at least his failure managed to cause another AAA win.

Wait, what am I saying?

Indie vs. AAA: I don’t know! You had it last!

The argument between two forms of game development has been going on for quite some time. While it is true that there are pros and cons to both small house indie development teams and big name AAA companies, there has been a noticeable trend of the games they have been producing. Though it is quite often that the big name developers have stomped the indie game competition, the opposite has also been very true. Then there are times when both types of game developers have dropped the ball for one reason or another.

A very infamous example of when both types of developers failed to produce a single promised product was the game demo simply known as P.T. (or Playable Teaser) was free for download. Konami was in the works for the new project of the franchise Silent Hill, titled Silent Hills. The hype train was so huge for this game that many were already calling it the ultimate in survival horror without even knowing the actual core game mechanics. However, the P.T. was so innovative and so amazingly detailed in its tone, atmosphere, storytelling and graphics that no one could possibly blame them. It was a horror experience that did not rely on jump scares to creep a player out. Both Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro were matched up to produce this game themselves, and what they were planning was seemingly made of pure awesome sauce.

However, as many of you know, what the fans got was a big goose egg. Without warning or explanation, Silent Hills was cancelled and the fans were not happy in the least. Another party that was not happy about this was their shareholders, as Konami’s stocks plummeted as a result. Soon after, Hideo Kojima was fired from Konami… more or less sealing themselves to a fate of their own making. While they did survive the backlash from that decision, it was not a fun day for anyone.

But alas! A ray of hope came about gamers in the form of a group called Team17 and their upcoming project, Allison Road. Gamers were treated to a brand new spectacle of survival horror very similar to P.T., in fact so similar to P.T. it was very quickly called the spiritual successor to the non-game Silent Hills. For an indie game, the preview looked amazing, creepy, and surprisingly well detailed. Beyond anything, Allison Road gave Silent Hill fans some solace from the heartbreak of Konami’s screw-up. After scaring the pants off of onlookers and showing us that we may still get a swell consolation prize, once again, fans were completely shot down by disappointment. Team17 cancelled production of Allison Road. Once again, fans’ faces hit the dirt with an audible THWACK.

Though, now there is something of a happy ending to that tale, as the project Allison Road was picked back up soon after its cancellation by another group called Far From Home. However, with very little to no updates on the production’s progress as of January 2018, it is clear that we will not be seeing Allison Road anytime soon.

The good news, though, is that after two complete failures by both a AAA Gaming Company and Indie Game group, a third and successful attempt was already in the works. The P.T. style of survival horror was noticed by yet another AAA Gaming company. Capcom took notice of P.T.’s success, and since Konami pulled the plug on their game, they decided to pick up the slack and produce one of the best games of 2017, Resident Evil 7.

So, in the end, yes, it was a AAA Gaming company that saved fans from a completely dismal experience, but what a bumpy ride! You would think that such a focused concept would have been handled a little better, especially with such an enormous fan feedback. It got to the point where people started to suspect the whole concept was cursed; doomed to failure before its own inception. While the whole story is still fraught with unanswered questions, in the end, we got a game of the year out of the deal and the Resident Evil series has had a soft reboot to a seemingly much brighter style of gameplay. Let’s hope they can keep the ball rolling.

Virtua Sonic: Into Dreamcast

Well, better late than never! Here you go, folks – it’s the first post we have from Virtua Neptune! We begin with his personal retrospective on the Sonic the Hedgehog games on Dreamcast. I personally have my suspicions that they’re not so good as 10 year-old me would have thought (let alone when their fans seem to be so adamant about how they must be played on the original Dreamcast for the purest experience -are there that many Dreamcasts still in good working order today?) but, from my experience with the PC ports, their respective Sonic-specific levels are a pure delight, so it’s not all doom and gloom from me. -Ogni

The Dreamcast was a follow-up system that any Sega Saturn fan could ever want. Not only did it possess Star Wars games (which are strangely absent from the Saturn) but the Sonic games it possesses were far better received and have even garnered acclaim from both gamers and critics. Many Sonic fans will tell you that despite their clench factor, the Sonic Adventure games brought about a whole new genre that the Blue Streak could explore.

That’s not to say these games were perfect. It was, after all, the introduction of the infamous Big the Cat and his stupid frog named Froggy (I’m sure that took all night). These were the worst parts of the game. The biggest complaint is that the platforming in a 3D environment was sometimes atrocious. Some of the tasks made you perform especially awkward feats with your characters (namely Knuckles’ emerald missions) and sometimes this alone would cause players to rage quit.

Still, the gameplay itself had some amazing moments of fast paced, amazing action. The moment of glory that comes to mind is when Sonic commits cold blooded murder, flying away from an exploding helicopter and surfing down a declining street being chased by a semi-truck. Yes, perhaps the devs were compensating for the more frustrating aspects of the Adventure games, but we came out on top with a gaming moment of greatness.

With the addition of the Chao pets, Sega spawned an entire game within a mini-game within the game! People were playing these games for eons just so they could raise a better Chao in their Chao daycare. The mere fact that you could transport these chaos onto a Tamagachi were enough to keep fans breeding them to be winners! (Article now rated R)

Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 can be considered deeply flawed, but no more so than many games that are considered masterpieces by the mass populace. The gameplay is gripping, and the graphics show off the 6th Gen graphics as they move away from that blocky, pixel-heavy look more and more. Our hero has definitely looked worse.

Such as a game where you play as popular Sonic characters in a boardgame-like environment where you compete against computers or other players. This was a totally original concept and was not at all worse in every way. It rose to the top of the charts and did not bomb as an abysmal failure at all. Yes, I am doing this whole paragraph sarcastically, isn’t it sooooooo great?

Let’s be honest, I never played this game, so if you want a detailed overview of its mechanics, you may look elsewhere. What I can tell you is that the really sad part is that Sega has had some bad ideas, but this one is a real head scratcher. Kart racers are one thing to get wrong, but a concept so simple as a competitive boardgame? If the gameplay videos are any indication, you may as well choose another game on the shelf. However, if you find it cheap enough and you’re a true blue fan? Why not? Some bad games are good times. You may even like it.

Then comes the Sega Smash Pack! Yes, this one is a collection that only has one Sonic game in it, the original for the Genesis. That’s right! Sonic came full circle when it came to his roots. He started out in the beginning of the life of the Sega Mega Drive and with that same game, he appeared in his roots in the very last console Sega ever made. How poetic. So, along with a whole bunch of other games, if you wanted, you have another port of the original. Merry Christmas.

Problem is, it’s not so much a port as it is an emulation, meaning it was an afterthought. Nothing was done to improve it, however, it was downgraded in overall quality to make room for the rest of the Sega Smash Pack! Well, it was a cool thought while it lasted, right? It’s okay, Sega. We still love you!

So, yes, the Dreamcast era for Sonic was not without its pitfalls. Whether you love raising Chao to compete or couldn’t look past some of the flaws, Dreamcast certainly left its milestones in the Hedgehog’s lore. The mere fact that they were able to give us a few more unique additions to the Sonic Franchise is something to be grateful for. Sometimes, it’s nice to keep things in house.