Sonic Free Riders

Yeah that looks like Sonic Riders with a shitty motion add-on alright.

MOTION CONTROL. WAVE OF THE FUTURE

ALSO 3D

AND IM ALL OUTTA GUM!

 

What's this pile of shit here? Oh it's just another Sonic Riders game.

I'll be blunt here, I hate Sonic Riders with a passion for three reasons.
1: It manages to be more popular than Sonic R, but Sonic R was way better in that it actually played somewhat like a platformer and jumping didn't cause aneurysms.
2: You're forced to play as characters you might not want to in story mode, and those characters all play the same, except some can use paths others can't, and they control nothing like they would in a traditional Sonic game like Adventure 1 or one of the classics, something Sonic R actually did right: The characters were prett identical to their platformer selves.
3: There's a fucking fuel/air/whatever percent. What the fuck? Ok, let's see, you give me terrible control, with terrible gimmicks and terrible character choices and now you expect me to pay attention to a damn bar on the side of the screen wile dodging left and right to avoid shit and try to get ahead in a race that feels like all the NPCs' steering is cheaply perfect?

I don't like racing games and I usually just avoid them, unless they're like Sonic R which was actually fun and had an awesome soundtrack, but I rented Sonic Riders a couple years ago, maybe longer, hoping it would be kind of like Sonic R (I owned the PC version of R, mind, so I couldn't talk about the other versions) which had really good control for a racing game even though the collision was whack but it was still easier than trying to steer a 2 ton hunk of metal around at 200 MPH, which is exactly what Riders feels like to me. (The easier steering in R might have also been due to most of the characters being much smaller than race cars usually are.)

I never touched ZG, and I never will, so I couldn't say if it's better than Riders, but the fact that it's got the Riders name in it's all I need to do to stay away from it.

 

Except it's not a traditional Sonic game, so I fail to see why that matters, but to each their own, I guess. I found Sonic R excruciating to control and supremely thin as far as content is concerned.

 

You don't understand how a racing game works. Yep you should definately stay away from Riders.
NPC's are "perfect", so that it is a challenge to win. I remember Sonic R being horrendously easy.

 

Unfortunately, Riders 1 just had this hideously steep learning curve that sapped a lot of the fun out of it for a while, so it's kind of an opposite extreme from Sonic R in that regard.

 

I believe the reason Sonic R is so less popular than the Sonic Riders series is that for one, the console. It appeared on the SEGA Saturn, and well...okay, I'm not a pro at the SEGA stuff, but didn't the Saturn didn't do so well back then? Plus wasn't the Dreamcast was close to coming out and that practically overshadowed it? I rarely hear about Sonic R unless someone is talking about the music (which is usually negative) or that how "OMG SCARY" the Tails Doll is.

Sonic Riders is on all the current gen consoles (I think), so obviously it's going to be popular because it's more well known and easy to spot.


I've seen a relative play and a couple of gameplay vids and I gotta say, it doesn't appear to be all that great. Not bad, but...not great. Plus the music...it isn't bad, but "Can You Feel the Sunshine," it sounds really unfitting for a Racing game in my opinion (or even a Sonic game, but that could be me talking since I'm more used to what the 3D games have done). Megamix's remix was pretty good though.

And really...

It's a racing game, dude. Why would they play like their platformer counterparts? That doesn't really make any sense. They're on boards or skates, not on feet (or cars, hovercrafts, planes, etc). Of course they're going to play the same, but they have different stats to effect their speed, acceleration, turning, or whatever. That's the point of a racing game, well...most of them.

Plus I think the "fuel" gauge actually gives the game more of a challenge, rather than being straightforward. Just my opinion, of course.

I never played Sonic R, and I kind of doubt I will. I gotta say it shocked me that Screwattack thought that was the worst Sonic game of all time (yes, worse than Labyrinth, and worse than 06). Hehe. Oh well.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cwSU5rL4y8

Might have been posted I forget but that ign video explains a lot about the game, and if they can tidy up and refine the camera movements so there are less mistakes I think this would be real fun, hope they can balance it well.

 

The product page on Xbox.com has new info: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/s/sonicfre...ers/default.htm
It will have online play with 12 players, and the game is being developed by a company called O-Two

 

O-Two is not unfamiliar with the franchise, it turns out: They apparently had a role in developing the Wii edition of the original Sonic Riders Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. (Ooogh, that mistake made it into my story, too!)

I have to think, given how the in-house dev teams are stretched at this point, that they will assume principal responsibility for this game.

 

The what now?

 

Agreed. I'm intrigued by a Riders title on an HD console, but I just can't shell out so much to play it. If there was more for Kinect that I was interested in, maybe I'd get one, but it's not looking so good. I've got DDR pads in a closet somewhere if I ever want to jump around in front of my TV.

 

I love how that IGN video basically admits that they just copy-pasta'd sonic riders and haven't really figured out what to do with it to market it as a new title.

 

I don't think they intend to. This is pretty much a quick job to cash in on a launch of a new peripheral.

 

So this is just a port of Riders to the 360, with controls that look like they are a failed Genesis device?

 

This actually looks sort of promising. The whole "the way you stand determines your special ability" angle sounds interesting.

Probably not going to shell out the money for a kinect though, so too bad.

 

It at least features all-new stages. Beyond that, it's not clear.

 

Well, despite the fact that you have to lean around and flail your arms like an idiot, I think it actually looks surprisingly really fun and easy to pick up. It's kind of unfortunate that it's just a cash-in on the new peripheral, because it actually looks like it would have some potential outside of that (I'm considering the fact that this is both 100% possible on the Wii and with a regular controller), but with Colors and Sonic 4 on the horizon as well, I'm not complaining. Maybe whenever Kinect goes down in price and it actually has some other good games, I'll pick it up.

 

My dad, who hasn't touched a video game since Super Mario Kart, actually asked me about Kinect today, after hearing about it at work. I described it as well as I could, but didn't recommend spending a few hundred dollars to do shit you could go do outside.

 

So you can go outside and ride a hoverboard? I'm jealous...