It all boils down to the level of "badness" that you're willing to tolerate to have a good time. Personally, I think Heroes is pretty glitchy, but I can still have fun with what works there. 06, on the other hand, is too sluggish and has too much loading for me to enjoy sitting down to play for an extended period. The broken physics are fun, but I don't find the loading and slow characters to be worth it, at least not on my own. I'd rather play it vicariously through LPs and the like. In the end, it comes down to personal preference. If I were you, I'd at least try a bit of the games to see if you enjoy them before dismissing them out of hand. You might find that you enjoy it more than you'd expect.
I don't mind Sonic 06. The worst part of the game is how difficult it is, it's a hard game for all the wrong reasons. It isn't hard in a tradional sense; it's hard because of how badly programmed the game is. It also has some unlikeable stages like the ones that make you run really fast and you die every time you hit something.... Sometimes the camera goes in front of you so you can't see where the hell you're going. The game does have some redeeming qualities, although not by much. Silver's gameplay is actually pretty fun compared to Sonic's. Addmitely I still haven't beaten Sonic 06, because like I said, it's a difficult game.
Fan theories? I recall reading an interview where (I don't remember who, but a key player in the development of the game) said that the game was originally planned to be released on all three 'next gen' consoles, and after seeing how pissy the Wii was, the team was split in half at that point, other half working on Black Knight. That, and with unfamiliar hardware (and a lot of developers were saying how the PS3 was anal to develop for, even after 'experience'), and with SEGA wanting a holiday release, they had a lot of stress put on them. Understandable, even without the 'SEGA rushed us lol' theories. The team was split in half. They bit off more than they could chew. That being said, SEGA had the perfect formula for a Sonic game with 06. Town stages, Action stages, room for exploration, multiple paths, multiple character play styles, jizz inducing music, dynamic levels, and pretty good visuals for a launch title. The story I feel doesn't make sense at points, where I think 'shortcuts' had to be taken to make everything a package by launch. They had a lot of fantastic ideas, but the execution is what brought the game to its knees. Once you work around the collision glitches and how sensitive the controls are, the game is actually very enjoyable. Hell, there isn't even visual consistency in the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes, which should speak volumes as to how rushed this thing was. Edit: And I give the game credit for trying to stay at 60fps. Something that Sonic games since then haven't done on a console. (I think)
Whether Sonic Team was rushed or not is irrelevant, there is no excuse for such shoddy game creation. I find it funny when people try to stick up for drivel like 06 and make excuses as to why it ended up so bad. There's no excuse. They charged parents and kids £40 for it. If it was a tenner then fair enough. It's like trying to persuade your girlfriend that the toaster you just bought for the flat was a worthwhile purchase when it freezes bread instead of toasting it. Take that piece of shit back to the shop, and get a refund. It's completely stupid. I think 06 had the WORST possible formula for a Sonic game. Rubbish story, boring visuals, humans, generic music, the list goes on. Possibly the best example how not to make a Sonic game (although with Boom out now that's debatable). Best formula would be eye-searing visuals with style. Neat new graphical tricks. Good music referencing current music trends with high melodic content. Solid gameplay based on the fact that Sonic can roll into a ball. It's really not that difficult.
Am I the only one who liked the story? I mean, the music and level design was fine, and the rest of the game was utter shite, but I liked the story.
Yes, because the story of Sonic 06 is soo awful that it had to include time traveling bullshit, Elise also being the worst of the entire cast. half of Sonic 06's soundtrack is pretty rad but very unfitting that sounded like it's meant for Phantasy Star or Ratchet & Clank. Also I recommend playing Shadow the Hedgehog for simply being a single character Sonic Heroes rom hack with a gun gimmick.
To be honest, I don't hate it. It intrigues me to an extent, if only because lol time travel, but more than anything else... It's just so incredibly out of place in a Sonic game of all things.
But time travel is awesome, and was actually done correctly in Sonic '06 (assuming Chaos Emeralds are eternal and the Last Story is bullshit, which is a caveat you have to apply to almost everything you actually want an ending to in a time travel story), something I can say of very few things in general. They actually thought about the story somewhat, allowing different characters to learn information unknown to others at their own point in time, showing they are all doing what they deem to be "the right thing" based on the information they have; when those sets of information are aligned, their goals also align, even though each has their own reason for taking action. I feel it's incredibly unfair to call that "soo awful" when it's honestly something I'd like to see more of. Tone could've used some work, voice acting moreso, and ending especially, but generally speaking... I liked the story.
I hated the story, because it was not simplistic. Yeah, it was easy to follow and not exactly complex, but it wasn't simple. When I play Sonic, I want simple stories about Eggman imprisoning something (animals, wisps, whatever) and Sonic and Tails going to stop him. :v: I still don't get why people say this, the 06 formula was exactly the same as the Adventure formula and I think it's pretty unanimous on here that they've since hit on better ones?
When talking about bad Sonic games, 2006, Unleashed, Black Knight, Secret Rings, etc. are always the prime topic. Nobody ever talks about horrid abominations from the classic era like Sonic Labyrinth on Game Gear, which the Angry Video Game Nerd even reviewed in his two-part Christmas Wish List episode from 2013. Sonic R is a very disorienting game, yet the music is the main thing people complain about. I actually kind of like it (please don't kill me for saying that.) One game that people really look too hard to find problems with is Sonic Adventure DX. Many people considered SA1 outdated by the time this port came out, IGN even giving it a 5.0 rating, which I think is a bunch of bullshit. Maybe Sonic Team could have took notice and fixed some of the bugs found in the Dreamcast version, but DX is the one I grew up with and enjoyed, and for the longest time I didn't even know what a Dreamcast was! Both the GameCube and Dreamcast are from the same generation of consoles, so I don't see how it can be considered "dated" as IGN called it. It was a great port for the kids who never had a Dreamcast, especially since it was discontinued so early. I honestly believe that Sonic 06 was so bad because there was probably a Christmas deadline involved, a la Sonic X-treme. Even the 32x version of DOOM was rushed for Christmas with half the levels missing.
I didn't mind the story of '06, myself. I think most of it's problems are based on the fact certain things are not explained. Like, why is Elise still a Princess when she should be the Queen? Why did her dad put Iblis in her, when possibly putting them in him and then dying would have fixed everything? The Chaos Emeralds, Mephilis' delayed merging, the list goes on. I hate with an absolute passion when people hate on "realistic" (I use the term loosely) graphics in any Sonic game, because '06 tried it and was a crap game. Course it was crap. Doesn't mean the art direction was too. Lost World is a steaming pile of shit, but nobody will ever say "cartoony graphics are bad because Lost World rofl". Cartoony or stylised art directions are certainly much nicer to look at, but saying one visual style is unsuitable because the game itself was bad is, to me, idiotic.
Except I don't think this is why people dislike realistic visuals in Sonic games. Well, it's not my reasoning anyway. I don't mind it too much - Unleashed did it well but it made use of emphasis and exaggeration really well. I just think an understated, almost 'muted' look of realism just does not mesh with the characters and gameplay aesthetically. That's all there is to it, for me at least.
That's not what I was talking about. There was at least at some point a dumb fan theory out there that Microsoft or Sony (I don't remember which) made SEGA/Sonic Team put the game out by holiday 2006. Someone once tried to put that on our Sonic 2006 wiki page and we had to undo it multiple times. :v: You're giving far too much credit to what this game tried to be considering it really just tried to be another Sonic Adventure game. Sonic Lost World.
I think the problem is that when everything else looks realistic, it's really hard to make a giant supersonic anthropomorphic blue hedgehog fit in.
Yeah, Sonic himself looks really odd when put into a seting that's too realistic when he himself isn't that detailed, it's a clash of art styles that's jarring to look at. As for the story of Sonic '06, I'm in two minds about it. Silver's story was really good and I thought it was genuinely quite sad when Blaze disappeared on him at the end. The time travel elements were generally handled really well too, but that's about all the praise I can give it. Some parts of the story in general were just plain ridiculous, can we say Sonic's "death" onwards? I still take exception to that, but then again the whole "hey guess what, we just killed the protagonist! lol j/k we can magic them back to life again" thing generally pisses me off, so that could be part of it - and let's not forget that the means of bringing Sonic "back from the dead" here was questionable, to say the very least. Also, the whole thing about Iblis staying sealed inside of Elise as long as she didn't cry just doesn't sit right with me. You're not telling me that she never cried, not even once, in her whole life after Iblis was sealed inside of her - I'm sorry but that's complete and utter bollocks, no-one is that emotionless, especially not young girls (and I should know, because I was one myself once =P).
Speaking of Sonic 06, has anyone ever wondered what the hell is it with Sonic and time travel? Sonic CD, Sonic Adventure, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic 06, The Storybook series... kinda, Sonic Generations, fuck even Sonic Boom. They all have some element of time travel incorporated in them.
Sonic Team seems to have some strange fetish for that kind of thing. I swear, if those rumors about the next-gen Sonic game are true AND they'll put time travel AGAIN in that game's story, I'm done.
Please put time travel in the next one. Please put time travel in the next one. Please put time travel in the next one.
