Sigh. It took me some strength to grab Lost World on 3DS (and was somewhat pleasantly surprised). This announcement just reminded me that another 3DS Sonic game (excluding Olympic spinoff crap), existed. At least Smash Bros 3DS existed for Sonic's 3D outing. Makes me recognise how happy and appreciative I was of the Advance / Rush series.
Imagine if in 2009, Rare had announced a direct sequel to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. This makes about as much sense as that would have. Sonic Boom left SUCH a bad first impression, and unless this new game is a borderline-masterpiece, it won't make people forget. Even if it's just okay, it'll bring more attention to the downfall of the brand and keep it on the forefront of people's minds. Like Covarr said, an alternate universe spinoff is not inherently bad. The cartoon, I think, is a lot of fun. But Sega REALLY needed a mainline, well-received Sonic game before they announced something like this. Because whether it's true or not, the perception will be that this is the direction the franchise is going.
Even though I have no interest in this game and think it'll probably turn out to be a lousy game (but less lousy than the original game), it would funny if this game surprisingly ended up being good. This game was a really bad idea for Sonic's brand image.
Basically, Sonic Boom (the cartoon) is actually doing reasonably well and they want to get some more money out of it. More people have a 3DS and the sales there are generally better, plus the development's cheaper because it's handheld. Then you've got Sanzaru who already have an engine and Nintendo giving SEGA money to put it out. See this as free cocaine money for SoA, they get to fart out a cheap game in fuck all time and even if it sells naff all, they'll still probably make money because of dat Nintendo dollar. Having seen the trailer I think I'm going to skip this one. Unless we find out that Ruby is a hidden character
Except the biggest problem Nuts & Bolts had was that it wasn't a Banjo-Kazooie game, aside from that it was actually a pretty good game that had a decent reception.
Oh yeah, I really enjoyed Nuts & Bolts. It got pretty good reviews, but an awful commercial reception, and nowadays is usually seen as the downfall of Rare. People who've never played it proclaim to hate it. I was speaking more in terms of the damage this does to the brand than to the quality of the game. It's like how Sonic '06 is still regularly invoked on mainstream blogs when a new Sonic game is announced. I think the reaction would have been much better if they'd waited until the announcement of whatever Sonic Team's hopefully been busy with for years. Because yeah, this is obviously meant to springboard (and ping-pong) off the success of the cartoon.
So I suppose I'll post my serious thoughts on this as opposed to my initial kneejerk reaction to just post the Twitter reactions. This is worrying and nightmarish news for most of us here. It not only demonstrates that the Sonic Boom initiative is on-going and therefore may continue to persist for the foreseeable future; it casts an extremely worrying layer of doubt on whether Sonic Team is actually working on anything. We're all assuming they have a long in-development game for the anniversary next year in the pipeline but this assumption isn't actually based on anything concrete. We're just presuming that's what they're working on based on Generations being released for the last anniversary and vague quotations from Iizuka indicating that console Sonic games are set to continue. What's worrying me now is his statement might not be referring to Sonic Team developed games; he could easily just be referring to console games in the Sonic Boom universe. Effectively this announcement confirms Sega's momentum with Sonic is still revolving around Sonic Boom because somewhat understandably the television show was moderately successful. As Aerosol said although this announcement is pretty much horrific news for everyone here it is understandable to a certain extent. Sonic Generations had all the soul and love Sonic Team had to give and still only sold ~1.5 million units on two consoles with ridiculously massive install bases. To put that in to perspective Alien: Isolation sold well above ~2 million units and Sega considered that an under performance relative to their expectations and essentially a failure in terms of commercial performance. The expectation is that Sonic as their strongest selling franchise should be selling millions and whilst Sonic Boom's disastrous market performance should have killed the Sonic Boom universe there and then Sega evidently still see the potential in the series shifting units because their earlier strategy of pleasing the hardcore failed (Sonic 4, Generations) and the television show's success might be introducing an element of blind false hope. Regardless this is just not good news for Sonic fans. Sonic has devolved in to a series of sub-par catastrophically awful games targeted at very young children whilst the spirit and ethos of the Classic series that was briefly reignited with Colours and Generations now seems long gone. This might be a premature overreaction to a certain extent because this could logically just be a cash-in to quickly capitalise on the success of the television show and Sonic Team might still be working on an amazing hardcore mainline game for the anniversary next year that could restore our faith once again as their previous games did; but the primary worrying factor here is what if Sonic Boom truly is the new direction of the series now and Sonic Team has been permanently reassigned to mobile and this is pretty much it for the Sonic franchise? I suppose with the anniversary rapidly approaching and news beginning to leak out we'll find out what core Sonic Team are working on soon (if anything) but this news is the opposite of a good sign. Providing Sonic Team's working on something potentially amazing and cool I don't mind this news. If however this means it's Sonic Boom now for the foreseeable future I think I'm done with this franchise; at least in terms of hope and expectation for the modern games; not this place and the Sonic scene in general.
I'm sure a lot of people are just asking "why is this game a thing"? The one reason I can muster up is that they're taking another punt now that the TV show is out and was met positively. Combined, RoL and SC were the worst selling Sonic games ever. Between them shifted a crappy 4.9k. RoL is the worst received Sonic game ever, and SC only manages to beat out 06 and Genesis. This game exists purely because popular cartoon tie-ins have historically generated sales. It's sad. But beyond that, I can pretty much just ignore its existence.
Not jumping in the hate bandwagon, I really don't mind this game, I actually like what I saw. I thought the demo for SC was nice but 40€/$ is way overpriced for a game like this so I'll wait for a price drop! Here we've got new gameplay elements that looks really interesting and 5 playable characters plus graphics are pretty. As far as I'm concerned, that's all I want from a portable Sonic game, just hoping it's going to end up in a more polished and interesting product than its predecessors.
Damn, that's sad. Especially remembering all the marketing that went into it. But it's not all that surprising when you consider how much better Unleashed sold on the Wii. Sonic Team was caught in a tough spot - they put all their focus on making a game that could only run on PS3/360, and could never be ported well to the Wii. The Wii itself was on its last legs, so even if they had released it there, would it have mattered? The Wii U was still a year away, and who knows how well it'd do? It's also a shame about the framerate on consoles. I think the game would have done better if they could have gotten it to 60fps. The PC version blew everything else out of the water, but alas, that's not the center of the market for Sonic games. Anyone know if Generations has at least had a long tail as the previous gen has died down? I still see it for $20 every time I go to Wal-Mart.
Preview with a lot more info: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/whats-next-for-sonic-the-hedgehog-and-friends Sounds like they kinda get what was wrong with the first game, but also not really and instead of improving it they're just making what they think people didn't like optional. Especially the way they describe what they think people want from Sonic just sounds wrong: Which just sounds like what Dimps thought fans wanted with Sonic 4, and we know how that went... There's also this: The problem with Shattered Crystal isn't that it doesn't appeal to everyone, it also isn't that it focuses too much on exploration. Really the two biggest problems were lack of variety and having to work against the game's design to backtrack, if you can backtrack at all. I'd go into more detail but I think I went into enough already.
Exactly how I'm feeling at the moment. ''Sonic fans were like, "What is this? I just want to run through and hit bounce pads and spring boards and speed boosts and ping-pong around."
Yes. This is exactly what the fans have been asking for. Automation. The same thing we've been bitching about for years for them to stop.
