In terms of gameplay, is Sonic Adventure DX substantially different from the Dreamcast version?

It's been around since 2017-ish, that's when Sonic Twitter began the endless barrage of whining over that line specifically, usually comparing it to some "Live, Laugh, Love" -esque line from Black Knight.

 

I still think the classic era is superior in practically every way, but I am also sincerely happy people are gaining more love and respect for the other eras over time. I never liked the toxicity over the brand split to begin with, even if I understood why it happened and was a big fan of 1991-1997 era material myself.

But now I've gotten more classic material, so I have no need to obsess over it being neglected. In fact, I vastly prefer Frontiers over SuperStars as a game right now, even if I think both were flawed. And the fangame/mod scene does a ton to fill in the void I had during the 2000s.

Also, I have a ton of nostalgia and fond memories from 1999-2004 as well, so I'm not exactly shy about it anymore. My dark years with the brand were 2005-2009, and even then I still at least got some enjoyment from Unleashed and am 100% onboard with the "please port it ASAP" train.

Long story short, the remaining "elitist" classic fans need to check themselves and respect that other eras are genuinely popular now, and that's okay! Thankfully, we're doing much better with that lately.

 

Why are you bringing up Black Knight. Did anyone here mention it.

Anyway, Twitter isn't a place where reasonable opinions form and flourish, it's a place where the loudest and simplest criticisms float to the top because that's what the site is designed for, and what the "popular" opinion on something is can flip like a light switch. I don't take anything that happens on that website as a serious indication of any widespread fandom opinion and I feel like most others should refrain from doing so as well.

 

No I've been on Sonic message boards since 2012 and people have been complaining about that line and colors in general about as long

 

I 100% agree with this. Personally speaking, I have nostalgic attachments to Sonic 3, SA2, & Unleashed, but I can admit that SA2 isn't as good in terms of level design as SA1 and Unleashed's Werehod stages drag on way too long (Sonic 3 is perfect though, fight me). I tend to take the series on a game by game basis rather than let my "nostalgia" color my opinions of the games. Not really sure you can me down to being a fan of any particular era of the franchise (especially if I have nostalgic memories of 3 out of the now 4 eras) and I'd be cautious about doing the same to other fans.

That said, I think we've veered well off-topic here...

 

About 2012-2016 for me. No Generations 2, Lost World ended up being the first mainline 3D game I still haven't played, and Boom was Boom. I wasn't into mobile stuff either, so it was very much a drought for me until Mania reignited my interest.

 

Without saying much, I recently played through SADX and SA2, and honestly I still love the SADX experience.

Had glitches once in a blue moon but never had a problem with any release, played on the DC, GameCube, and the Xbox 360 but I tend to stick with the 2004 pc version.

Slightly off-topic, I replayed it right after replaying frontiers, and now I want to see SA1 remade in the frontiers engine! In over 20 years I never thought I’d see the day a desire like this came along.

 

That bug exclusively affects Intel integrated graphics (I think it's actually a bug in the original game code that only surfaces on Intel graphics because of a difference in handling NaN values), and the mod loader has had a built-in fix for it for a few years.

I severely doubt this, in fact I asked PkR about this exact thing several years ago and got this response:

We've studied the collision code to some degree, and come up with the idea that for the DX version, they haphazardly ported over some collision code from SA2, grafting it on to the SA1 code in an attempt to make porting the Chao Garden system from SA2B easier. The Xbox 360 prototype contains some debugging symbols that match with info from SA2 debug builds, rather than SA1 debug builds.

 

It was when Lost World came out in 2013, take this old Sonic in Minutes video. In 2010-2012 nobody cared that much because the go-to example for shitty writing then was still Sonic going into a lamp and fighting genies.

RE: Blue Arms, I don't remember complaints about them specifically (at least anything that gained traction), that was entirely CWC. The main complaints about Boom I remember were about Knuckles' size and the sports tape.

 

Blue arms is a psyop, I swear its consistently brought up as something those darn sonic fans wont shut up about but I dont remember a single time Ive seen someone actually give a shit about them, besides CWC as speeps said.

 

No I've seen artistic/aesthetically minded Sonic fans bring it up, with tan arms being both a critical part of his color balancing and helping with the visibility of his arms/hands in the classic games. I tend to agree that they have a point...but I also don't notice blue arms a lot of the time until it's pointed out to me, so yeah

 

I seem to recall Boom explicitly being a spin-off and not actually the main Sonic brand softening most of the criticism people had for the character redesigns.

 

Personally, I hate them. Blue arms make Sonic look like he's wearing a superhero costume. I don't get why they always fall back to them.

 

For me? It's blue short sleeves

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Correct. It was supposed to be the start of a new Western canon, separate from the Japanese one. Of course, once they presented their ideas to Japan, suddenly they were not allowed because they conflicted with Japanese canon.

For example, they wanted to introduce an inventor. Cue the Japanese team saying that according to their bible only Eggman and Tails were allowed to be inventors.

 

The problem was, at the time, we honestly didn't know that. Boom was marketed for awhile as "the next big thing", with no clear 100% confirmation that it was just a spinoff for about a year, if I recall...

That's where the controversies stepped in. Especially when many of us just wanted Generations 2 or something along those lines.

 

I definitely give a shit about blue arms Sonic, because to me blue arms was like, the number one identifier of bootleg trash. It was basically how someone said "we don't give enough of a shit to get this right."

I also think about the talk Valve gave about designing Team Fortress 2 characters and how they very deliberately made sure everyone had some kind of decoration (vests, undershirts, sleeves, armbands, etc.) because if the arms were the exact same color as the body then it made it harder to understand character locomotion at a glance. They specifically made sure you could tell hands, arms, and shoulders apart, no matter how far away or how fast a character was moving.

The fact that so many shut down all conversations about legitimate art design concerns with "oh well CWC cares about it, therefore I don't need to care about it" really pisses me off, actually, and I will continue to die on this hill.

The thing about this is corporations say things like this all the time when they're taking risks. Like Nintendo spun the Nintendo DS as a "third pillar" that "wouldn't replace the Gameboy"... all the way up until the part where it was successful enough to replace the Gameboy. But by saying it wouldn't replace the GB, it gave them an easy scapegoat if their gamble with the DS didn't pay off.

If Sonic Boom exploded in popularity the way Sega wanted it to, it definitely could have replaced the entirety of the Sonic franchise as the defacto interpretation.

 

That's true, but wasn't Lost World developed during the same time as Boom's development? Remember, Boom was made to appeal to a western demographic. If anything, we could have had a situation where us westerners had Boom Sonic while Japan had Modern Sonic.

 

Sonic Boom was a very long term project as I understand it and originally started life as a pitch for an Xbox Live Arcade game that would have told Sonic's origin story. It evolved several times over its development, to the point where I'm pretty sure Sonic Lost World was pitched, developed, finished, and shipped before Sonic Boom came out. It seemed to me like Sonic Lost World deeply, deeply underperformed and that spooked Sega about the Wii U as a platform.

Like, remember: Sega entered into a contract to develop 3 exclusive Sonic titles for the Wii U and we only got two, because they retroactively claimed Mario & Sonic Olympics Sochi was one of the three.

BigRedButton asked for an extension on Sonic Boom and Sega declined, basically willingly sending that game out to die. They backed the wrong horse and were trying to abort as quickly as possible.

 

When the deal was announced, Mario and Sonic was confirmed as one of the 3. It wasn't retroactive. It was always intended to be in the bundle.

The retroactive addition was Sonic Boom, which is why we lost out on the PS4/XB1 versions and recieved what was by all accounts a rushed, sloppy Wii U port as the only release. Sega seemingly offered the game up as a sacrificial lamb to prevent the next mainline game from coming up short in the same way Lost World did a year prior.