Sonic X Shadow Generations announced, releases Autumn 2024

Jim Carrey would show up as the official Celeb voice of Robotnik in a very canned but passable voiceover of the character, but everyone else would be played by a random mix of Frank Welker, Troy Baker, and Mark Hamill. None of the official Sonic VAs would be in the game at all for some weird licensing reason.

 

Yeah other than a few hidden gems (SpiderMan 2 was actually great) movie tie-in games are garbage.

 

I was personally fond of the spongebob movie game for gamecube growing up, and heard the toy story game was also actually decent.

 

I don't agree with that. There have been lots of games movie tie-ins that have been really great some of which don't get the credit they should, where people just go on about GoldenEye.
I found Jurassic Park on the Mega CD to be fantastic, Jurassic Park the Lost World (model 3) to be utterly incredible, The Thing is a brilliant take on the film, loved Alien Trilogy and Alien Resurrection, and even Aliens on the ZX Spectrum was ace.
I could name a lot more, but my fav was Riddick on the XBox what a game and what a showcase for the power of the system too.

Magnus Hogdahl is a genius coder

 

On the topic of tie-in games being bad, I think that’s more a case of games being pushed out with small development time and budgets than anything else.

And even then Traveler’s Tales notoriously were capable of releasing really solid games as movie tie ins with incredibly small development times. Of course, I get the vibe that they were probably heavily crunched and working on something like that would not be healthy. So there’s definitely a downside there.

I grew up with a lot of their Disney games though, and they were really great games. Loved Toy Story 2 on PS1 a lot.

I personally really love The Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands games that were released to coincide with the Sands of Time movie. The PS3/360/PC versions are solid if pretty generic, but the Wii game is not only phenomenal but also an entirely different game from start to finish, with an entirely unrelated plot. Fantastic puzzle platformer that goes above and beyond and pretty much gives you full freedom to create puzzle solutions yourself later on in the second half of the game.

the game seems to have had a rather long development time though, with the general vibe that I guess if the movie fell through they could release it as an entirely unrelated game. Not many movie tie ins have that freedom though.

 

Uh, do we have reason to think Shadow gens has had a long dev period? We don't even know who's working on it, other than some in-house Sonic Team staff. Kishimoto seemed to have been entirely busy with the Frontiers updates throughout last year, so unless someone else is directing Shadow's portion of the game (which would be the first core 3D Sonic to do so since the original Generations), I can't imagine he's been on the project very long.

 

I was more trying to tie everything together. But I’m half awake and yeah, that was a bad point I’ll delete it considering we know so little about it other than surface level details. I just thought it looked better than it had to but time does not equal quality and it’s ridiculous of me to assume that.

 

I mean it certainly doesn't appear to be a trainwreck. I wish we knew more about it as a whole, though.

 

We know the producer at least, Shun Nakamura of 2006 and Forces fame

 

In terms of the extra content we can assume that it was maybe half way produced or the concept was settled by December 11, 2023, as the files for the Shadow costume started showing up in Superstars. So that's an absolute minimum of 248 days (estimating that it's source is to go gold on August 15th). But it likely started before that, because the trailer looks far too complete for it to have been only done in 2 months, so probably a year or a bit over a year. The port job could probably be done in a few weeks if what we've seen is as underwhelming as what the final result is set to be (Probably an exaggeration but it definitely couldn't have been what's taking most of the development resources). So a year and a bit for about 3-6 levels? Doesn't seem bad.

 

I mean, do we really have enough to judge it by at the moment? Don't get me wrong - I'm all for a competent port of Sonic Generations to modern consoles, and I'd love the accompanying Shadow content it to be great, but we literally have almost nothing to go on for either half at the moment. Discounting CGI sequences, the trailer gives us 20 seconds of in-game Sonic Generations footage, and around 27 seconds of Shadow Generations, at least half of which seems to be from cutscenes (or possibly quicktime events in some cases) rather than the main gameplay. That leaves us a grand total of around 13 seconds of Shadow Generations footage from normal stage or boss gameplay. Let's face it, we need to see a lot more before we can accurately gauge what's going on with this one.

 

Vanilla gens being mostly identical to its original version was reassuring to a lot of people here, that's all I was really saying. It didn't take much of a look at Colors Ultimate for people to decide how they felt about it, for isntance.

 

Meanwhile in an alternate universe where Sega trusted Blind Squirrel again:

 

They're called Blind Squirrel for a reason

 

it could also be that work on it started after Frontiers with a smaller spun-off team working on the later updates for that game.

also I wouldn't assume that the porting would only take a few weeks. Gens is on a proprietary engine and it has been at least a decade since it came out - it wouldn't surprise me one bit if tech changes/advances has made it very annoying to port it and call it a day, though I bet the cyber space levels in Frontiers was effort that went to porting this.

 

real ones will recognize Nakamura for being the director of Samba de Amigo

 

Realer ones will always remember his masterpiece and SEGA’s hidden gem: Rhythm Thief

 

It would just be a port of SA2 Battle to systems that aren't the GameCube with the designs from the movie ported over and the voice actors.

People now would be making retrospective videos about it "That weird port of SA2 with the movie designs no one remembers"

 

Or that once he composed a song for Yakuza.

 

Or "remember that time when SEGA randomly rebooted Sonic 3 & Knuckles and made it so edgy for no reason"