Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

This dropped a few days ago, love his reviews and he even used one of my ancient compositions on his channel some time ago:

I’ve been debating whether to get Windows 11 for my Mac Mini to play games on Steam, getting a new laptop with decent gaming capabilities, getting a Steam Deck, or a current gen console. My husband says I should just buy a console.

We played Sonic Superstars at the Sonic Speed Cafe in Chilo Hills, CA and realized just how bad the game runs on my current prehistoric laptop.

 

I got a deal for an HP Victus 15. That’s all you need. I can even run Frontiers. It’s only $479.99 at Bestbuy.

 

I've been fighting the urge to get the game for my new PS5 just because the price seems pretty pricey and now it's late enough in the year that I'd rather wait and see whether or not they do a Sonic Superstars Plus.

Beatz shouldn't be used as an example when it comes to modding Unity games because nobody else usually has the knowledge and willpower to go as far as he does.

The biggest barrier to entry for level mods could possibly be the fact that the levels are structured with chunks a lot like Sonic 1, or, interestingly enough, Sonic Generations 3ds.

 

While we're on the topic of mods, I'm curious to know - where are the engineering discussions about Superstars? There's nothing on Retro and I can't find anything online except the mods themselves on Game Banana. Are people just working alone? Or is there some cool new community platform that I'm too old and unhip to know about?

 

There's a Discord but last I checked it was pretty dead.

 

Here's a link to a Superstars modding Discord server.
https://discord.gg/kARXBAc7
It's fairly active

 

I think that's just the case in general. We used to be the place for Sonic hacking, but our community is getting older. Speaking for myself, I'm in my thirties with two kids now. I barely have time to post here much less do actual modding anymore.

It is weird that there isn't a new Sonic hacking community. I know discord is pretty popular, but it's not the same. And I hate it because you can't really use it as a repository for information like we have here at Retro.

 

I just saw your post anytime you want a mod for a game just search google with Gamebanana. For example "Sonic Superstars gamebanana". You can sometimes get them in the description links on YouTube.

 

All the resources are in Discord servers, gamebanana and other mod hosting sites suck ass, YouTube overtaken by bad search results (or outright irrelevant recommendations) and endless showcase channels that will steal your views or bury you trying so you can't even self advertise and self host... it's no wonder modding is dead.

 

I tried this, but I'm particularly interested in code mods and there seems to be next to no dicussion about that. Code modding is clearly possible, as there are a couple out there for Superstars, but I can't find any resources about how they did it, what they understood from the code, hook addresses, etc. I hoped it was hiding away on the internet somewhere but I think it's just a handful of people doing it alone and then sharing the mods rather than the knowledge.

 

So there was a new patch on steam. Does anybody know what was in it?

 

having Thoughts and Opinions about this game. normally i would save my thoughts for once i'd well and truly beaten everything, but, well...
the long and short of it is that the egg fortress boss made me straight up give up on the entire rest of the game, trip's story and all.
much like with mania, the fun is severely front-loaded in this game.
however, unlike mania, where the back half of the game is like, half enjoyable zones (mirage saloon, lava reef, metallic madness) and half not-so-fun zones that are kinda tedious and plodding (hydrocity, oil ocean, titanic monarch), superstars's back half is basically all stinkers.
the game just fucking drags after you leave sand sanctuary.
every zone afterwards left me feeling like "okay, the next one's gotta be the last one...right?", which is really not the feeling you want to be giving a player on zone 7 when you plan to take them to zone fucking 11.
worse yet, the bosses start to become these long, plodding, miserable stretches of tiptoeing around hoping for a chance to hit them while avoiding having your body quickly separated into 500 pieces by a metallic alien noise or whatever. and if you do get hit (you will get hit) you get to start from the very beginning of a like 3-phase fight that takes 10 minutes to deal with. nightmare shit.
it just sucks. it's absolute misery to play. and the egg fortress boss was just the dingleberry cherry on the shit sundae.
i think the most fun i had was when i finally picked up enough of sonic's super special FunCoins(tm) to finally turn my little robot guy into Metal NiGHTS. and then i played as Metal NiGHTS once, in an online match, and i won. and that was the last time i ever played that mode.

also...
at least mania had dope music all the way through; superstars stops having good music, again, basically for the entire back half of the game. it just becomes a mess of senoue's faux-megadrive slop with uninteresting, uninspired compositions straight through from press factory to the end.
and the bizarre thing is, the faux-megadrive sound can actually sound really good when they actually try! case in point: sky temple zone's theme, which despite using the faux-megadrive style, has an absolutely lovely dynamic composition that's a joy to listen to! it's just as good as any tee lopes joint on the soundtrack! so what the fuck, man? why does the rest of the game straight-up sound like sonic 4?
i seriously straight up can't square senoue's sloppy, weak work, either on sonic 4 or on superstars, with the great stuff he turned out for sonic 3d blast, like panic puppet and green grove. hell, i can't square it with the rest of his body of work, in general. i just don't get it. i guess he's just showing up for the paycheck. whatever, man.
anyway, The Thursday Nite Rant (tm) over. i will be handing my copy of the game to my friend for him to enjoy as he wishes on saturday, and with that i'm washing my hands of the whole thing. fuckin' hell.

 

The game is such a victim of doing just about everything short of making it great. So many baffling choices! Some of the music is fantastic, other choices are ass. The difficulty spikes are ridiculous at times, and they didn't even bother to put in any checkpoints for the bosses after all this time.

I can't say I hate it, though. To me it's like the NSMB of modern "classic" Sonic, or like a new Sonic Advance. It's better than any of the Advance games, frankly. It is by and large quite a good Sonic game, but its many baffling choices hold it back from being great.

 

I think this is the best way I've seen Superstars described. It's not bad, and on the whole I honestly really like it. But it consistently falls short of what it should be. Unlike plenty of other games in the series that are just plain bad, it's sometimes difficult to see where Superstars went wrong because it gets so close at times.

I'd gladly take another Classic Sonic game made by Arzest. Superstars manages to scratch the Classic Sonic itch for me. It's just that that Arzest are, you know, Arzest. I'm not convinced that a second game wouldn't have the same kinds of shortcomings and overall whiff of amateurism.

 

Senoue's tendency to marry Genesis-style music to Genesis-style gameplay doesn't even make sense with this game's mission statement. Superstars was meant to be for Classic Sonic what Frontiers was for Modern Sonic, yeah? A break from previous traditions with the goal of laying a new foundation to build from. And you definitely see that in many aspects of its design: 3D graphics instead of pixel art, emerald powers, co-op, a new setting with a new playable character, even re-thinking fundamental control aspects like simplifying the way those rotating orbs (in Press Factory) and cylindrical spinners (in Golden Capital) work.

And yet, a good chunk of the soundtrack is still trying to sound like it could've been done on a 35 year old game console. And I think a lot of it's actually pretty good, and I'm glad to see someone else acknowledge Sky Temple as a banger. But unfortunately, some of the worst examples are ones that recur a lot throughout the game, like the early boss or menu music, which colors people's perception. But even at their best, this sort of approach is MUCH more out of place here than it would've been in Sonic Mania, which did feature a complete contemporary soundtrack despite holding the Genesis style as sacred in most other ways.

It makes me wonder if the intent wasn't to redo all of Jun's compositions the way Tee Lopes et al clearly redid many of them, and they simply ran out of time to get it all done. Especially considering early previews of the game four months before it came out were running without music.

 

Before release, I was pretty damn certain that the boss music was a WIP placeholder. And although I've wondered the same as you, there's not a lot of evidence to back it up. Of course we have the fact that certain tracks were completely remade by Tee Lopes, but that only begs the question why Senoue couldn't have reworked the soundtrack himself. He was the sound director and clearly wanted to go for a faux-Mega Drive sound, when absolutely none of the other musicians went in that direction at all. At best you've got Sky Temple; IIRC there's evidence to suggest that it was written and composed by Senoue but then re-arranged by Soma.

Thing is, even Senoue's approach to "retraux" is pretty inconsistent throughout the game. The Act 1 boss music sounds like a free MIDI from 1998, whilst Frozen Base 1 and Golden Capital Knuckles sound like they came from S4 E1 and E2 respectively. And there's also the fact not long before Superstars he chose to give us the horrible new Super theme in S3K Origins along with all those other poorly mastered tracks.

Senoue is responsible for some of the best music in Sonic history and TSR proved to me that he's still got it. But when it comes to anything that's meant to sound vaguely chip tune, it's like he's deaf.

 

Not to mention, the soundtrack hasn't been released on streaming or disc yet. I've noticed with Sonic games that Sega usually releases the soundtrack within a month of its release. (Or a day for The Final Horizon.) There has to be something happening behind the scenes.

 

I played the game while listening to my own music the other day and it was an infinitely more enjoyable experience lmao. The game is solid and I enjoy it, but they really botched the OST, sadly.

Again though, it's a better foot forward for 2D Sonic than any non-Mania game since the classics. Hope the next one is even better.

 

So... think I should buy this sometime?

 

You have 256 pages of material to make up your own mind.