Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

So apparently in the peelout animation Sonic will just flash a chili dog two frames.

 

I was seeing this on social media but I didn’t want to post this because I’m gullible as hell and was worried this is a hoax or mod. Hopefully this is real, because this is great.

 

Heh, that's pretty cute. If they all have peelout animations (Maybe as an add on for DLC?) , I think Tails would flash a wrench, Knux would flash a small emerald, and Amy would flash either a love heart or a smaller version of her hammer.

 

The main issue I have with the game is just a lack of.. cohesion. Now, it's something that's not really expected of most Sonic games (The Sonic Advance games kind of did whatever it wanted in terms of theme), but I was kind of expecting it here.

There's a lot of different ideas, but most of it doesn't fit together in any neat way.

Spoiler: Spoilers

- It's on the Northstar Islands, kind of moon shaped, yet not particularly space themed, or have anything to do with the moon
- The Big animals. They're neat but not really explored. Why are they big?
- I like that the Golden Capital Zone is them making a pinball-ish area make some sense, but then we already had Pinball Carnival, so we have two Pinball stages?
- Why is Cyber Station here? What it making that a thing that's happening on this island?
- Most of the Chaos Emerald abilities are kind of useless, kind of just duplicates of each other (Fireball & Vine are kind of the same thing)
- Most of the stage gimmicks (Death clock in Press Factory) aren't that fun.
- Egg Fortress' gimmick of time going back through a level is neat.. but that's not what the game is about at all! This has nothing to do with time!

Even with a game like Sonic 3 & Knuckles having a wild variety of stage designs, it still seemed to have a better read on what's happening, or what Eggman's goals are.

Compared to a Super Mario Wonder, it has a simple premise (Wonder Seeds do weird stuff) everything is themed around the Flower Kingdom). I would have liked to have seen a more cohesive, thought out set of stages

I feel that the premise could have been simplified by focusing on the Fruit that does weird things to people, and make that the gimmick of the game.

Eggman is trying to discover the ultimate Dragon Fruit, which is meant to make things grow huge when eaten. There are huge animals everywhere, they must know!

Emerald powers are instead based on various Fruit Trees that grow across the land that have various effects. Make you grow big, make you grow small, make you turn into water, or grow trees, etc. Make them a "Color Power" of this island.

- Pinball Carnival is more about Eggman turning these foods into Candy
- Lagoon City is more about the water source for all these plants
- Press Factory is more about canning and smushing fruit into foods
- Switch Cyber Station to be more a way that Eggman is taking stuff off island, via Trains.

Final Boss of the main mode is an ACTUAL Giant Eggman.

 

This all seems incredibly believable, and even if it's different I wouldn't be surprised if its not too far off this.

 

I will pry that wrench from Tails' cold, dead hands after a mercy killing if I have to. I know he's the world's smartest iPad kid and I think that's an important part of his identity but goddamn I wish it wasn't all there was to his identity these days.

 

Do we think this showing up for only 2 frames is a glitch, or intentional?

 

I'm absolutely showing my ass in terms of ignorance of game development here, but it's baffling how they have these tiny little details in animations that people aren't reasonably going to see that demonstrates this labour of love and attention to detail, yet the bigger things in the game just whiffs so hard. Priorities, Arzest!

 

Crunch does this.

They create a solid baseline of high quality animation and physics, start designing the early stages...

Then realize they've got 3 months left to go gold (no, I don't know the literal amount of time, this is just an example) and crunch the rest, resulting in... pretty much all the problems we see.

SEGA is notorious for this, and in fact has been for a very long time (Sonic 06, anyone?), and Stealth pretty much confirmed it when it was clear they rushed Origins out the door for the anniversary date last year despite his willingness to fix many obvious bugs (bugs they did in fact fix over the next year and seemingly still continue to fix, even).

Now, one can argue that some developers also poorly telegraph the use of the time and resources they do have, and that too would be a fair point, but still...

This game was rushed for the holiday. It really is that simple. You can see it in most of the flaws that hold it back from greatness. Not all of them, but many of them. Even some of the design choices Azrest made deliberately would've probably been tweaked with more through playtesting from a wider variety of testers, but this is one of the first things that can go out the window during a crunch period.

Heck, I just spent 10 hours yesterday building a level in RSDK and testing it solo across several different builds. And you know what? It's a pain in the butt to do, and I only put that much time into it because I'm a hobbyist and have strong feelings about the project. And if I had far less experience on these types of games, it would've been even worse, let alone if I had a strict deadline for release.

 

Unfortunately that’s the mindset of most gaming companies now. It’s really bad with sports gaming because they know if they patch it out, the average consumer will forget about the games being a glitchfest or corners being cut. Then again, they are also building off of an engine that is already polished. Sonic games need more time to bake in the oven. I do remember in the early days they released each game annually (Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3). I guess they just kept that tradition going of rushing games out. You can get away with that on sprite based games but not 3D or 2.5D.

 

Sonic 06? More like Sonic 2. Hell, even Sonic 1 shows evidence for crunch. Arguably most Sonic games have had to deal with crunch in some form or another, it's probably one of the more consistent things in the franchise.

 

Yea it is kinda amusing how people don't realize this. Sonic 2 is one of my favorite games of all time but it has blatant signs of being rush (Metropolis being stretched to 3 acts, Metropolis as a whole, Hill Top being a recolor of Emerald Hill, unused audio in the sound test, tons of signs of Hidden Palace Zone left in the code, etc.). I think Sonic 1 is probably one of the less obvious ones in terms of crunch as I can't think of anything off the top of my head but I'm sure they are there. Sadly I don't think Sega will ever fully learn their lesson even if sometimes it seems like they might've. (Gens, Mania, etc.) I think Superstars is still a great game in spite of the problems and is at least less blatantly unpolished as Frontiers.

 

This board was literally founded on researching the results of the game being massively crunched and changed from the original vision.

But it doesn't have to be this way, other companies have adapted fairly successful "when it's done" approaches, and in truth sometimes you really do only need a few extra months.

 

If Sonic 3 was fully finished, we wouldn’t have “& Knuckles” nor “Lock-on Technology”….trippy to think about.

 

Belly-flopping enemies as Dr. Eggman? Long overdue! A little like Big in Sonic Heroes

 

The kicker is that this is probably the single biggest thing that could put Sonic back on par with Mario, frankly. Mania has proved that this franchise is still capable of putting out entries that stand proud at the top of the video game pantheon and Froniters has shown that there's a desire to experiment with Sonic again (though hopefully with less reckless abandon than during the 00s). If we can just do away with deadlines, then I think Sonic as a series would absolutely be in the right environment to make its Mario Wonder moment happen. For all the shit I give it, I don't deny that Superstars could've been that if it had been given the time it needed to cook properly. Given we've had Origins Plus, Final Horizon and soon Dream Team this year, Superstars really could've had at least another year in the oven and been all the better for it.

 

Extracted this from the artbook. It's nice to have it in sharper high quality. There's a weird post-processing like filter over all the actual in-game animation.

 

Would love to get all the artbook extractions too! Want the highest quality Metal Knuckles you can give!

 

Man, I have tried at least 25 times and spent at least two hours trying to beat the final final boss and I simply cannot figure out the part with the timing reticules. I don't want to look up a solution but nothing I'm trying seems to work. :\

 

You have to press the dash button in time with the circle reticles kind of like some of the QTEs from Frontiers.