Sonic 06 demo gone from XBL

I don't know why people are saying the download content is gone from xboxlive. I just downloaded most of it yesterday. You just have to click all downloads. It's not a featured download.

 

JaxTH says it's because you can't actually see the DLC unless you have the game itself. I can't confirm that much, but I do have the game and all of the DLC showed up fine last I bothered to check.

 

Well, I'm in the US and don't have the game and I can see the DLC fine. I wouldn't have been able to download the DLC yesterday if it wasn't showing.

 

I never played this game, but I've read almost everything about it... although I will try the demo at least.. I don't know how different is comparing with the final version ...

 

They probably brought it all back into view once Games on Demand came out then. Cause I noticed it was gone when I was looking at Unleashed stuff, but of course at this time GoD wasn't out yet.

 

Sonic Jam for the game.com is much much worse than either. It lags so bad and even running slightly uphill or jumping from platform to platform proves to be a challenge. But that's more of the system's fault for sucking and having weak specs. One the Game Boy Advance or Xbox 360 & PS3 they can't use that excuse.

 

I'm sorry, but after youtubing that game, I'd have to rate that one noch above 06. Even that Cruddy game.com game had the basic jump attack.

 

Bad ports of good games aren't in the same league as games that were never good in the first place.

 

Am I...the only one who doesn't hate this game? It has some great concepts, sure the execution was ass, but I liked Kingdom Valley, Wave Ocean....so...lovely. And anyway, once you get used to the horrible engine it turns out to be pretty fun.

 

I really don't understand how people who even dislike Sonic '06, can say that it had "good concepts" in it. Absolutely nothing the game introduced was new or innovative or had potential, it was all washed up material from previous Sonic games, only made worse. The level design wasn't worthy of merit, each level had one single path and half the time you were being propelled by speed boosters instead of actually controling the game yourself. Silver's physics puzzles weren't fun and the hubworlds were exceedingly uncharming with equally terrible mini-games that weren't fun to play at all, only made worse by their loading times.

 

Kingdom Valley, Wave Ocean, Dusty Desert and White Acropolis had quite open fields and a nice variety of areas to go around in (especially Kingdom Valley, which featured many alternate routes and different areas that all somewhat linked to going forward; possibly the best level design in a 3D Sonic yet). Although I will agree that the dash panels ruined it completely and made it feel all too linear, and they also kept you from going anywhere in the stage by blocking off places specifically for other characters; and while that may be all good and such in S3K, it didn't make sense in Nextgen because there was absolutely no reason certain characters shouldn't go those other places. If they were hidden and opened with a character-specific ability then that makes sense, but it didn't at all.

 

It didn't help that we were restricted on who we could use in each level. If you wanted to play as knuckles in Sonic's Wave Ocean, you needed to hack.

 

Eh, not really. The level design was okay at absolute best, but nothing to scoff at, really. The first section of Kingdom Valley had some alternate paths but, again, it really wasn't anything spectacular nor did it make up for the rest of the game's shitty design. Wave Ocean was just Emerald Coast but with more polygons and less character, and I hated those other 2 levels.

 

They could've been easily used for fun level design (running across those dunes in Dusty Desert would've been great and Blaze's White Acropolis proved Sonic's snowboarding section was much more enjoyable on foot). However, they just had to make it where the sand was "quicksand" (aka an excuse to not code in the sand as solid and thus become a bottomless pit), and the engine was flat-out broken.

Plus, I would've killed to replace all these stupid Mach Speed areas in Sonic's story with the Shadow-and-Silver-and-Amigo-specific areas in the game. Although sadly it still wouldn't have been great thanks to the lack of a good engine.

 

Having alternate paths and open areas doesn't necessarily equate to better design... and I can't say anything about most of those levels was terribly interesting.

 

Think of them using them to their potential though. If they did, they could have been much more interesting. Take White Acropolis. Sure, it's rather empty. But they could've thrown in swinging suspended bridges and all kinds of neat gimmicks to go in those areas, but they didn't. It was places like that that infuriated me after playing; not exactly because the engine was crap (I expected that upon playing), but what was right in front of them that could've been COMPLETELY taken advantage of but didn't happen.

Ah, the laziness of Sonic Team in 2006.

 

Watching the video at the end of the demo again, I bet I know why it shows such a different game.

Xbox 360 devkits have much more RAM as a real Xbox 360. This is so developers can take screenshots of their games at higher-than-usual resolution with super good texture filtering.

But this also lead to certain Xbox 360 launch titles basically running like crap, because to the developer, their game ran fine on the development hardware. When it was played on a retail console, however, the framerate would hitch up (if not crash outright). A number of early Xbox 360 games faced this problem, if I recall correctly.

Thus, when you see Sonic with all this extra animation, it's probably because some knucklehead at Sonic Team thought he was working with twice as much RAM as he actually had. When they eventually played it on retail hardware, they no doubt discovered they were way over their memory budget and started cutting animation and effects in order to keep the game running.

 

I'm pretty sure that dev boxes didn't get the RAM upgrade until the 360 had been out for a while. As for the video you linked, there don't seem to be any animations there that aren't in the final game.

 

Except for, well, the way he actually has an animation for jumping between stone blocks in Kingdom Valley... and multiple "flip" animations to follow up a Homing Attack with, instead of just the one...