It's always a treat to see Oshima present new Sonic illustrations. That particular Classic Sonic I really like. Probably because he didn't box the design to the established style guide and went a bit further into the Saturn direction that really is the best design for the character.
Naoto Oshima asked followers on Twitter to draw Sonic fanart to support Forces, and he's been retweeting pretty much everything coming his way (even something really stupid I slapped together in MSPaint). I gotta say, the team involved with Forces seems VERY confident that it will be well received, there's a lot of positive energy from the team and from the fans going around. They're really drumming up excitement even though a lot of us are worried about the gameplay.
Are they doing it because they're confident it will succeed, or because they aren't confident and want people to be excited so they'll buy it?
I can see why they might seem confident. Even though traditional sonic fans don't like the game, many younger modern fans are into the light, cinematic gameplay. We should know by now that there are strongly competing ideas of what Sonic is and increasingly so the further removed from the 90s "classic era" we are. Even 10 years ago this game would likely be laughed out of the development studio by reviewers but Sonic has been down this road for so long, and accrued enough younger fans that they may have a strong enough base to support the game. I think it's probably more likely that this game will do just fine, especially if reviewers give the game a pass (meaning it does not get widely slammed with avg scores around 60 or below). If it does gets slammed though, all bets are off. I just don't see it happening. It's not a technical monstrosity.
for those of you who don't mouse over, it's (the demo) out on the japenese e-shop today, and likely Eu and US by tomorrow.
a 1 min per stage demo? The unleashed demo on 360 gave you a full stage! How is anyone suppose to be able to play enough of force's demo to be able to WANT to get the full game now? (Heh, my avatar is now my reaction to the demo's time limit) So anyone want to call sega out directly on that demo time limit? because it's doing them more harm than good, especially with the hint bubbles getting in the way.
Maybe they put all of their effort into polishing the first minute of gameplay of those levels, then it trails off from there. :P
might have something to do with how the impressions of it in reviews haven't been as positive as the other systems? I don't know really, but that's just my guess. Ok playing Classic's boss in the demo, I came to realise that the drop dash is classic sonic's form of boost.
Well considering how spamable his spin dash was in Generations this doesn't seem like much of a change. But yes send this demo the PS4's way thanks.
Wow, only a minute? Well, I suppose it's a bit longer than that when the game is constantly pausing the game to throw tutorials into your face. ...and what's with the constant locking on despite being on the ground?
I managed to get far enough into the Custom character's demo stage and I didn't realise it at first, but after getting far enough in, I discovered the stage was the Space port one that was shown off last week.
fwiw, the trailer didn't really cut anything out. It simply started after the 5-ish second intro trailer. Holy shit, this is even more automated than we thought. Whenever there's a dash ramp up ahead, Sonic will start to auto-run! There are boosters on the ground, but avoiding them makes no difference because the game will play itself anyway! It happens when the Avatar gets nears loops as well! This game actually plays itself. You barely have to do a thing. This very occasionally happened in Generations, UNleashed and Colours, but it wasn't a constant and was more subtle. They saved it for the interesting set pieces. SEGA, this is bad. You have made a bad game.
made this edit of the thank you image to show my feeling of the time limit on the demo stages. [media]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DM_9u-5UMAAtrQe.jpg[/media]