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Sonic Colo(u)rs Ultimate released for Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Epic Games Store

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by MH MD, Apr 9, 2021.

  1. Beltway

    Beltway

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    Review aggregates update.

    Opencritic - 75 "Strong" (37 reviews), 51% of reviewers would recommend

    Metacritic: PS4 - 76 "Generally favorable" (35 reviews), NSW - 73 "Mixed and/or average" (4 reviews), XBO - N/A (1 review), PC - N/A (no reviews)

    There's a report of some retail copies getting ahead of the September 7th release, IIRC; but Sega also allowed "early access" for people who pre-ordered the game digitally. I imagine most people encountering/reporting the glitches are those who got the game via the latter option.
     
  2. qwertysonic

    qwertysonic

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    Literally every Sonic game has been rushed starting with Sonic 1. Sega doesn't care about quality, they just care about deadlines. They had to put in the Sonic 3 manual "be careful of Robotnik's traps" in reference to the glitches that could just kill you for no reason. The only reason the original trilogy was any good at all is just because Naka was an outstanding programmer.
     
  3. JaxTH

    JaxTH

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    Jack shit.
    The Ghost Racer and scrapped achievements was mentioned by Dark Sonic earlier, but I hadn't heard of the other stuff.
     
  4. Anyone else finding the Jade Ghost Wisp to be pretty underwhelming? They pre-release material definitely made it sound like you could pass through any walls or solid objects with it, but in fact it's only very specific designated warp points.

    At least Rival Rush is pretty cool, I guess, and I like how each act has its own unique music... but for the most part the changes are pretty subpar, tbh.
     
  5. Vanishing Vision

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    I saw this in gameplay footage and assumed it to be a labeling issue. I saw the player hit a bunch of prisms with Laser and get the bonuses for them, but they were incorrectly labeled "Checkpoint Bonus". Are you saying that you're seeing bonuses awarded that don't correspond to the current action at all, like at a rate that doesn't match what's happening on screen?
     
  6. Josh

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    Yeah, plus it was MUCH more common in those days for games to be made in a year or less. I remember Super Mario 64 being in development for TWO WHOLE YEARS was seen as this monumental deal. With 16-bit games and a brilliant programmer, you could often get away with it. It didn't bite Sega in the ass until they started expecting Sonic Team to get 6th gen titles to fly under the same constraints. (And frustratingly, Sonic's brand recognition was such that the market kept making 'em multi-million sellers despite all the bad press, which only FURTHER encouraged Sega to keep making them crank out increasingly awful Sonic titles.)
     
  7. ItsBrieDude

    ItsBrieDude

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    It sounds to me like this was initially pitched @ a significantly higher scope and either for cost or deadline reasons had to be downscoped at least once. That’s the game dev biz for you, especially being a contract studio.

    Here’s hoping some of these ideas (namely ghost recording) come to fruition in later patches — or are at least partially restored by the community. Especially given how much tooling leaked, I wonder if their method of recording the Metal ghost data is in there somewhere.
     
  8. raphael_fc

    raphael_fc

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    Looks good to me. Not an amazing score, but not a mediocre one. Just a good, fair score, for a good, fair game.
     
  9. Dark Sonic

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    Given Metal Sonic's animations, his movements, his just slightly out of place positioning, and the fact that his routes don't involve wisps OR water, I almost suspect Metal Sonic's routes in Rival Rush are just pre recorded.

    They combined two features we didn't get into one. Pre recorded ghosts and Metal Sonic's model being placed over Super Sonic :eng99:. Something tells me Metal Sonic would have been essentially like Super Sonic only not invincible and no ring deductions.

    Btw I hope a modder eventually figures out how to A. Let Super Sonic double jump and B. Let Super Sonic use wisps like he could in Lost World. At least A, without the double jump aquarium park in particular is a mess when Super because you can't spam jumps underwater to "swim"
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2021
  10. ItsBrieDude

    ItsBrieDude

    my brain is the spinning seal gif Member
    Indeed, that's what I was getting at. I think that Metal is just playing back a ghost recorded by one of the devs, presumably using the same setup they would have used for online ghost sharing.
     
  11. I believe so. I noticed this when going for an S rank and my scores were inconsistent despite doing the same actions. I started paying attention to the bonuses and saw that I had received grind bonuses while on rails when it’s appropriate and also when standing on flat ground.

    Also, on the point I wrote about not properly attaching to inverted slopes - I was finishing up the red rings yesterday and there was a point in Aquarium Park were you launch from a spring or rainbow ring (can’t remember - also not sure of the act but it’s 4, 5, or 6) to a boost pad on an upside down half-loop, and it consistently does not work. Sonic never landed properly and instead was propelled slight around the slope while in his normal mid-air animation.

    Despite all this crap, I have to say that finishing up the red rings yesterday made me realize how much I really enjoy the level design in this game. Asteroid Coaster in particular has some incredibly intricate designs and offers a lot of pathways for players.

    Edit: I also want to mention that I have regular problems with the Jade wisp not locking on to targets. In almost every instance I use it, there will be a point when it stops locking on and I need to run out the clock and collect another after transforming back to continue. Haven’t noticed a pattern to it though.

    Blind Squirrel tweeted out to contact Sega support with our issues so I sent an email over with that list from my last post. Most of my issues seem pretty typical from what I’ve seen but hopefully they address the bonuses and inverted slope problem because those aren’t as talked about.
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2021
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  12. Mana

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    Yeah, in hindsight it was foolish to think Colors Ultimate would garner a much lower review score than the others. It's a good game that plays it safe where it needs to while still having great gameplay and platforming challenges. There's no notably BAD part like Adventure has with Big or Unleashed has with the werehog.

    Just fun Sonic solo play going through creatively themed and designed worlds. 3D world and Skyward sword dropping in score is a result of perfect scores and 9's becoming 8's and 8.5's. Sonic Colors is still a solid 8/10 experience 10 years later so the review score stayed the same for most of them.

    I still hope we get a new experience after this that goes beyond what boost is capable of but it is interesting to see how many people love this style too.
     
  13. Yash

    Yash

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    Like I said earlier in the thread the fandom talks itself in circles about what the series should be, and I think what that leads to is a lot of conversations where we evaluate the pros and cons of each entry, and are even willing to give credit to some of the worst received games in the franchise (like 06 and Unleashed) when they do things right because we're always thinking a game ahead. "If the next Sonic game was just built around the Sonic/Shadow/day stages without any of the filler, it'd be great!"

    The critics take a simpler approach - do I enjoy myself while playing this game? If yes, great! If not, it sucks!

    Likewise I think something like Unleashed has much higher highs than Colors or Generations do, but I'd be crazy to call it a better overall package when roughly half the time you're stuck playing as the Werehog and spinning your wheels on medal collection.

    I'm glad you brought up Mario because I think there's an interesting point to be made there about how - contrary to Internet shit takes everywhere - Nintendo doesn't let itself get trapped in the formula with those. The only two games in the 3D Mario series that are direct evolutions of a previous game's formula are Galaxy 2 (built on Galaxy 1) and 3D World (built on 3D Land). Everything else - 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, 3D Land, Odyssey - gets to do its own thing and has its own identity. Even 3D World's re-release added Bowser's Fury which plays completely differently from any of those other games. The key is that all of them are good. With a few exceptions (I'd say Sunshine is very undercooked by the series' standards) they all manage to execute on their concepts very well, and don't suffer much for glitches or rushed development, things a Sonic fan would be extremely familiar with.

    I think that's why you see such high praise for Colors, it just does its own thing with the gameplay, and admittedly the blockier 2D platforming seems to be much more comfortably in Sonic Team's wheelhouse, so as a result it's better executed than a lot of their games with much higher ambitions.
     
  14. Blue Spikeball

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    No, you spend half the time going through forced gimmick levels instead :V

    I honestly put those on the same level of tediousness as the alternate play styles in previous 3d games.
     
  15. qwertysonic

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    Big's levels may suck, but I'd take Tails, Knuckles, Gamma, and Amy's levels over most of Color's 2D gimmicky stages any day. Same goes for the Wearhog.
     
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  16. Mana

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    Maybe it's because I've been on a Mario kick recently but I don't mind the gimmick levels considering MOST levels in 2D Mario games from World and up are built around a single gimmick and learning to use it properly is how you progress through the level. I think that's standard for 2d platformers in general really and a large majority of Colors is in 2d.

    Maybe it's weird because Sonic likes mixing multiple gimmicks per level but the stages are fun for me considering I'm used to the style.
     
  17. Antheraea

    Antheraea

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    jesus, I go to duluth for the long weekend and all hell breaks loose

    Thoughts:
    • If the game really is as hard to mod as people initially think, then I don't plan on getting this. Though, given that we already have a metal sonic mod, maybe those fears are unfounded.
    • It is still really weird to me that they used GODOT for this as I've never heard of it used for a project of this scale. When I was last looking into it (uh...several years ago), it seemed to be this tiny thing that you could use to make small games. What are they doing with it here? You'd think they'd go for an original proof of concept game first before throwing their hat in with this.
    • All the leftovers not included in the original Colors, and even including assets from other games, implies that Sega lacks documentation on the original game. It screams to me "here is literally everything that might be even slightly relevant in case taking out any of these breaks the game".
    • This isn't the first (now-Sega-owned) game to have fan assets. IIRC one of the Persona 4 re-releases had a fan illustration in the files, and inexplicably Catherine had an in-house remix of a Pokemon theme included.
    • If I had to make a guess, the PS4 and PC versions were probably higher-priority with bugfixes, or the Switch version had so many "we literally cannot ship this" bugs that they just simply had no time to fix the glaring ones. As stated prior, polish is triage, and QA generally rates the severity of bugs they find, with programmers fixing the highest-level ones (this is also how QA works in functioning developer teams in other industries). Note that QA also doesn't fix bugs, at all. That is not our job. We look for them and report the ones we find.
    • I'd also like to say from experience that the more disorganized and/or fast-paced a team is, the less QA gets a say in anything. I worked for a team that was relatively small but tight, and was asked my opinion on whether [insert bug here] is a breaking one, and if I said it was, then we wouldn't ship that Wednesday. After we got bought out by a larger company and things got far more hectic, it was like yelling into a void.
     
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  18. JcFerggy

    JcFerggy

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    Maybe it's just my skewed perspective on the series, but Colors is the only Sonic game in recent memory that follows the Mario styled iterative gimmick use, but even then it does it fairly poorly. Sonic games usually have a handful of gimmicks per level that are thrown around haphazardly to denote a stages theme, but the rest of the time you're racing through the stage focusing on timed/reaction based platforming, and of recent years ending on some sort of crescendo ranging from an action set piece to a series of precarious jumps over a bottomless pit.

    Colors has some really unique acts (some favorites are going around the burger in SM or racing around the planet rings in AC), but even the ones that were just awkward floating platforms over previous stage elements, they tried to follow iterative gimmick design to the best of their abilities...

    Looking back, Colors Wii seemed to attempt at a HD Unleashed Daytime styled game, but either due to time or the different internal teams, added what some might call filler content or padding with the block based levels or even Sonic Simulator as a whole. But I would still prefer this style of filler compared to Sonic Forces "collect the shiny things, then do it again, then again" approach. But looking at the additional content with Colors Ultimate, it just seems so tacked on and disconnected from the rest of the original games content.
     
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  19. Starduster

    Starduster

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    I can understand people disliking Colours' filler, and some of the levels certainly are boring, but I think the strength with it is that it's very much blended into the main game by the fact that all the story levels use the same gameplay style and the Wisps exist as the defining gimmick across the game rather than being a segmented playstyle. I would take a level like Tropical Resort Act 3 over the Avatar stages in Forces any day if I'm being completely honest.
     
  20. Overlord

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    And I'm the utter opposite. Even think some of the "gimmick" levels are in my favourites of the game.