Has anyone else tried playing this on Switch? It's not just that the Sonic gameplay in Minecraft is clunky (and it is), it's basically unplayable because it's constantly freezing to load the rest of the stage (or whatever is going on). I really want to like it, but so far it's just been very awkward in my experience.
Yeah, same. Mojang said they are working on a patch if I'm not mistaken, so it's not going to be permanent (hopefully)
I know all of the Sonic Minecraft stuff was pretty much forever ago but I just realized that they have even more stuff in the character store than I thought, in addition to the existing free shirt. Items available, in order: Amy's boots Sonic's sneakers Sonic's hair Knuckles' Knuckles Tails' sneakers Sonic - victory spinning (emote) Sonic - finger wagging (emote) Eggman's goggles Sonic - running (emote) Tails' tails Knuckles' sneakers Eggman's moustache Amy's ring bracelets Total price converted from Minecoin/Tokens: $16-$17. A little ridiculous, but that's just how the store works, unfortunately. They aren't included with the pack.
Maybe my perspective has been skewed by the development of microtransactions that has been going on for years, but that doesn't seem too bad a price for all that stuff...
I'd honestly rather use that money to buy other items on the store that can make my character actually look original something like the Steven Universe mashup pack DLC, which not only includes nearly 50 skins, it also comes with a custom-built world and SU-themed texture pack to go along with it that you can apply everywhere else. But that's also because I feel like most of the items on this would be covered up the second you put on a set of armor - and at that point, it's hard to tell you even have anything on. It's not just a Sonic specific issue, but there's aspects of them being on here that make me go "Why should I pay for parts of skins I already actually own, now applied to my character, when they'll just be covered up anyways?"
Meanwhile I'm looking at it and thinking "I can't believe people have lapped up this shit so readily that this is the state of the industry". Thinking that close to $20 is reasonable for a few textures and emotes is crazy. You can buy whole games for that money. Or just in terms of Minecraft itself, the standard Sonic pack is $7.99... But my perspective is skewed by the fact that I've purposefully avoided "live services" and microtransactions ever since they became a thing.
The Minecraft DLC just got an update to tie into the release of the new movie. It adds a new level in the form of Labyrinth Zone and 5 more skins, 4 of which are based on the two movies.
Gamemode One, the creators of the previous Sonic pack, have released a new Sonic Texture Pack separate from that pack. This pack is a little more of what you'd expect from a "Sonic and Minecraft collaboration". A bunch of the mobs are rethemed as animals or robots from the franchise (Some actual deep cuts here, actually, and including some Frontiers elements as well!), with textures attempting to match different Sonic level themes or at least look "Sonic-like". Priced at 990 Minecoins / Tokens (Playstation) or 5.99 USD (which will purchase 1020 minecoins/tokens and immediately redeem 990 of them on the pack) There's also a few new character creator items, including the currently free Super Sonic hoodie, a Mecha Sonic Visor, a Chao head, Item Monitor head, Badnik Creepy (their Creeper for the pack) head, and Eggman's Jacket. All with the similarly ridiculous prices as the previous (and still available!) Sonic items. No world included with the texture pack (the one thing I want out of Sonic and Minecraft, come on, you built structures for the video...), No skins included. You have to buy the Sonic the Hedgehog pack for those. + - (I wonder if we won't be seeing another update for the Sonic the Hedgehog pack to promote either Prime or Frontiers or both?) Minecraft blog post | Minecraft Marketplace listing As for my personal opinion... I still don't like Gamemode's style. I don't think they're particularly successful in emulating the feel of any sprite based Sonic artwork. While their references remain really nice (and I do think they get some of the mobs in the pack looking right) a lot of times it just doesn't look like what I would expect "Sonic in Minecraft" to look like, especially when it comes to their skins. Comparatively, "Mega Man X" by 57Digital manages to recreate the feeling and art style of Mega Man X in the Minecraft setting rather well, even if they also restrict it as a minigame.
I had money left over from my purchase of Red Dead Redemption so I went ahead and bought the Sonic Texture pack. Wow. This is fucking awful. Like, I can't explain how wrong literally everything about it feels. The only thing decent about it are the mobs that actually are the animals they're supposed to be. Everything else - and I mean everything - is just not good looking and honestly just hinders the gameplay experience. Everyone freaks out about Wither Mecha Sonic and the paintings, but like, do you see everything else in front of you? I'm extremely frustrated. This was pretty much the one chance to get something like this and they blew it so hard that I will honestly *never* use this pack again. I hate that this turned out this way. Is this what people who complain about inaccurate pixel art in non-game media feel like? Because I think I finally get it.
The biggest problem is very few of the blocks or items look like the items they're supposed to look like. The item with a stack of 60 - that's Cooked Beef. It looks like a chili dog, but it's cooked beef. But every other meat type is *also* a Chili Dog, meaning it's very easy to confuse any of them. The blue blocks floating over the farm are Glowstone, which normally is various shades of gold, and all the way in the back there is a Nether Wart farm I made. The sounds make it seem like a hard fungus and the color is a dark red, but here it instead looks like some form of Quartz. And the place it's normally found in are Nether fortresses built with red brick made from the environment around them, but in the pack it's changed to metal. All of this because they wanted to make the Nether look like a Bad Future instead of making it look like The Nether in a Sonic style (which they're not particularly good at emulating anyways, they default to dividing everything up by squares with no efforts to add in different patterns) They cared more about referencing Sonic than making the pack something you'd actually want to play with all the time, is my main gripe - actually I can't imagine playing with it at all. It's not obvious what basic items functions are. Even with the text when you switch telling you what blocks you're getting, the visual communication is non-existent. That hammer-looking thing is my Pickaxe. My pickaxe. Hammers don't even exist outside of mods and behavior packs!
Ahhhh, first go around I thought you were talking about the blocks, not the inventory sprite art. Yeah that sounds...awkward.
I'll be honest, they don't even look that much like Sonic materials. If I'd not have been told, I'd have never guessed.
Pretty much all they would have had to do is take some of the existing Sonic sprite work and textures, modify and redraw them just enough to get them generally in the same style and looking right within the context of equivalent Minecraft blocks, and then just make shit up in the same style for stuff that just doesn't exist. This video is a way more glowing review than what I've given it but it encounters basically everything I'd consider a major issue with the pack (aside from the modified bosses and Warden) and kind of brushes most of it off. I do agree with the regular mobs that are basically direct recreations of certain animals in Sonic look pretty great but that's only so much of the Minecraft experience.
Just looking at it, I feel like there's so little variety to the texture of a lot of these blocks. They're all kinda that vague checkerboard-esque texture. I get why they'd take it in that direction, but I feel like they could've done a lot more.
And now they've kind of blown their load on that end because we now have "Add ons" in Bedrock Edition's Minecraft Marketplace, which can be accessed on all platforms. With what these are, they're basically more comparable to mods in the Java edition of the game, and more naturally add things like new pets or furniture or game mechanics. Previously with things like the Sonic the Hedgehog pack everything would be put into one world that you could create that would have its own behavior pack that could only be accessed on that world. With add ons, it's more like an individual item pack you can use anywhere, so instead of accessing a "Sonic the Hedgehog world", you would just outright get Sonic themed things in your world, you could add Sonic enemies and Eggman bases upon world generation to essentially vanilla worlds. If they waited they could have added all the cool deep cut references that were in the texture pack as legitimate features with custom boss fights or even something like a genuine attempt at a Chao system. Maybe they'll actually do something with this but I just can't imagine it working well alongside the Texture Pack unless they change the context of everything that's in it so it doesn't conflict with the new stuff.
