Sonic Social Media Shenanigans (This totally just happened...)

This meme is super old and it's weird that it's making a comeback, but there's plenty of history on it here: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon

 

I'm glad I wasn't going crazy thinking "Hold on, this meme has been done before hasn't it?" - glad to see the Internet's doing some recycling. There's pleny of good content that hasn't reached it's top meme potential yet.

 

Good ol' fashioned shade-throwing at IGN is always appreciated.

 

Just wanted to point this out since I've seen a fair number of people here and elsewhere on the internet talking about the IGN review (and the score in particular). The person who reviewed the game for IGN, Heidi Kemps, is one of if not *the* most qualified video game critics to be reviewing a classic Sonic game in 2018, as she was in 2017 when she reviewed the main game and gave it an 8.7, which just so happened to be *very* close to what the average of all reviews for it ended up being. She's been a Sonic fan, especially of the classic games, for a very long time. You can find an interview and accompanying photo of her with Yuji Naka from 2004 here. She has interviewed Naka many times (as well as many other well-known developers). She is not a full-time employee of IGN; she's been a freelance reviewer for quite a while now. I strongly suspect someone at IGN purposefully contracted her to do the original "Mania" review and now "Plus" because they knew they needed to get someone who understands classic Sonic and would assess it properly due to all the backlash they received from the silly comments some of their full-time editors said on one of their podcasts.

So please, don't criticize IGN for their review purely on the basis of "lul they said Sonic was never good that one time." I'm not defending IGN as an apparatus; I think that generally they are one of if not the weakest outlets for video game reviews, news, and information available. But in this instance they went out of their way to get one of if not the best possible people to review the game for them, specifically because of how much backlash they'd already gotten from Sonic fans over the "was never good" remarks.

Heidi Kemps is the sort of person who has probably been reading this site and other leading sources of Sonic information for a very long time. She RTed this Retro thread yesterday. Don't be an asshole to her or IGN for the "Plus" review.

Also, do realize that most DLC does not score very highly. This is a weird situation where some reviewers seem to be reviewing the entire package including the main game again, since this is a unique situation where the DLC and physical version are coming out at the same time. (DLC for other games has always come out after, usually long after, the physical version went on sale.) If other reviewers were only reviewing the DLC like IGN did, their scores would probably be lower/in the 7-8 range, because almost all DLC for any and every game scores in the 7-8 range. Even the most critically acclaimed DLC that's been released since the term was adopted--"Blood and Wine," "Left Behind," "Minerva's Den"--only scored in the 8.5-9 range, and those are incredible exceptions. Like I said, almost all DLC scores in the 7-8 range, which makes sense since in almost all cases it's just minor additional material that is meant to be supplemental to the main game. Kind of by definition DLC is not meant to be an incredible 9-10 range experience.

Anyway, I'm sure Aaron meant zero harm whatsoever and was just joking around. But also he should know well who Heidi Kemps is since she probably knows as much if not more than he does about Sonic, and he probably should not have specifically made a joke about IGN's review and inadvertently invited fans to pile on more salt towards them. Ironically Sonic fans that don't know who she is/her background in the Sonic community look as out of touch as the IGN editors who made the "was never good" comments.

 

CollectiveWater back again with those super knowledgeable, incredibly insightful and amazing posts. All that info is awesome dude. You seriously know your stuff.