But surely that fact makes it even more fucking disgusting that they charged £15 on consoles for a poorly made game that plays itself? When playing this on the iPhone, I thought that all the automation was there so that is was easier to play on the iPhone, it made sense, the physics also felt better using tilt controls. If this wasn't the intention and Iizuka, along with DIMPS, honestly thought that what they were producing was a quality product suitable for consoles, then fuck me, some firing needs to be done. I can believe that Sonic 4 or "Project Needlemouse" did really start out as just a quick iPhone 2D Sonic that someone had the bright idea to turn into Sonic 4.
The game sucked on all platforms. I believe you can make a good Sonic game on pretty much any platform, what we got was a lazy attempt of Sonic 4. Saying it was for Iphone first (which I don't believe) is silly. It could have been great, but no, we got a pathetic excuse of a game.
Surely I can't be the only one laughing my ass off at people still tossing hyperboles this way and that over this game. It's not even bad. Sure there could be fewer boosters and the stop-on-a-dime nature of the physics are a bit weird, but I'm eager to see more and am hopeful for possible improvements.
I'm quite sure that if S4E1 had just been called iSonic and sold for the Iphone, we'd all be bawwing for it to be on consoles, so maybe SEGA can just never win. I would still rather have a either a game for idevice or for consoles, so each game can have unique design that plays with the strength of that platform. All we have now is a bad game available for everything. EDIT: cos it didn't make enough sense.
I liked Sonic 4 for iPhone. I play it all the time. But then again, I can play Sonic 1 and 2 just as well on my iPod as I could on anything else.
@corneliab: Oh, I'd like to see more too. That's not to say S4E1 is merely decent if not pretty bad. But yeah, I'm totally looking forward to Episode 2 ... just in that its almost nothing like Episode 1. Better handling, better music, better design, and better art direction. Simple.
Since sonic colors is out, if we can figure out how to edit the levels, why not try to port Sonic 4's levels to Sonic colors DS and see if they really do need to redesign them?
That is such a gross oversimplification of the matter it's not even funny. I rather liked the design and didn't mind the graphics, for instance, while I felt the music needed better instrumentation and the handling was wildly inaccurate. Personally, I'd just settle for better handling, since it's the only thing that can objectively be measured up against something else. Everything else is incredibly subjective.
Here's my problem with the graphics: They look nice, but Sonic's (and everybody else's) pseudo cel-shading clashes with the uber high-quality JPEGs of the surrounding stage and looks fucking ugly. Speaking of the backgrounds, I also don't like the dead, shrinkwrapped, shiny plastic look of it all, at least with Splash Hill Zone. Basically, I feel they need to revise the art direction and give us something much more organic and living rather than prerendered and lacking colors. You have a million different colors for every square in every stage, and you can only give Sonic a meager 3 shades of blue? The level design is an improvement on Rush's design, but it nevertheless still is Rush's design. This fact is made no more evident than with the bottomless pits and the numerous amounts of Bubble chains. That combined with the physics and constant presence of bumpers and speed boosters pretty much ruins the game for me after the first playthrough; it's like they were trying to figure out how to compensate for not having a boost button and settled on placing boosters everywhere in lieu of actually programming proper momentum and using it in the level design. The overall homage is mildly nice and I actually enjoyed the revamped challenge of the final boss, despite the buildup and music still being fairly garbage and nothing new. This is not Sonic 4. Not as it could have and should have been. It's a barely decent game, so I'll give it that much, but it simply was not that fun and not nearly doing justice to its predecessors. If it serves as an effective springboard for a far superior and actually worth-a-damn Episode 2, then better late than never.
So, I hear the iPhone version of Sonic 4 has some very serious problems, like it constantly crashes or, a more common one, the lack of Retina Display support. I imagine this is a problem with iPhone 4, otherwise we'd see more complaints here. Other than that, Sega seems to have released a patch on Dec. 16 or something and people are still calling for another patch to fix this.
I haven't seen crashes, but there's plenty of complaints about the lack of Retina display. And it's not just the iPhone 4, but the 4th generation iPod touch. But they added the game center support like they promised, so they were good on that part.
Sometimes on my iPhone 3G the app would just quit instead of load up a level, it never did it mid level so only a minor problem really, still for £3.99, it's one that shouldn't be there.
I do as well but wouldn't that be a mammoth of a job to do. If Sonic Colours level art was ported to the Sonic 4 engine, I'd rather see original layouts than reuse the ones in Sonic 4. I though one of the main issues of Sonic 4 was bad level design. Anyway I can only hope that some techs from Retro decide to join up and do something similar.
another major issue was the physics and Sonic Colors DS has the closes physics to the Classics I've seen in a modern Sonic Game. Plus Sega was saying that they couldn't modify the physics because they would then have to modify the levels. If we ported the S4 levels to Sonic Colors DS, we could have a chance of Busting that Myth or proving it true.
