No, it's really not cheap at all. Dead Rising 2 Case Zero? That's cheap. $5 for a game that takes 2 hours to beat and has at least three or four endings that will take multiple playthroughs to see. Sonic 4 is three times that price for its measly 2 hours. I can name a lot of Xbox Live Arcade games for $15 (or less) that are way better money vs. length/quality value propositions than Sonic 4: Castlevania SOTN ($10) Shadow Complex ($15) Bionic Commando: Re-Armed ($10) Castle Crashers ($15) Monkey Island SE ($10) Monkey Island 2 SE ($10) Splosion Man ($10) Perfect Dark ($10) And so on. Sega developed a really nasty habit of overcharging the hell out of their digital downloads.
Maybe it's differet in America then. I pay £35-£40 for a new Wii game. A DS game used to cost £30ish. On the Virtual Console, Sonic 3- a game of the same length as Sonic 4- costs 800 points. Sonic 4- a brand new game- cost 1500 points, which I paid £10 for through the Wii online shop. Upon initial release, Sonic 3 cost £30-£40 quid. In comparison, £10 could get me 4 Quarter Pounders with Cheese from McDonalds. Not really a lot of money, considering it would take the average worker in Britain just under 2 hours to earn. For the 50 hours I've played Sonic 4 on the Wii; the time attack and leaderboards, the 4 Zones with 3 Acts and a boss each, as well as collecting all the Chaos Emeralds and playing through as Super Sonic and finding the alternative routes and such, I think £10 is a pretty good deal. Unless you genuinely dislike the game, whereby it's the same as anything- you won't want to pay a penny for something you dislike. Nowadays, if you haven't bought S4 already, there's enough good indication through feedback, as well as videos and such via Youtube to make your choice to buy it. It's a 2D Sonic game, storywise the sequel to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but is plays like a 3D Sonic game.
A major reason I dislike the game is because of its rip off price. Sorry, but the game doesn't offer enough content to purchase when compared to the list Blaze posted which has equal or cheaper superior alternatives that offer a much better bang for your money. It's $15 dollars sure, but that's $15 dollars I can spend on a good game. Sonic 4 simply can't compete with its competition. There's a demo easily available and he can make his decision with that.
You can, however, flip it around on a game you do like - 50 hours on a game as anorexic as Sonic 4 is not the norm. You did that because, well, I dunno why you did that, really - maybe you really fought hard to get good time attack leaderboard positioning (a shame about all that cheating, then). I'm talking base level content here. All of the games I named are full length, "full price" games - anywhere from 5-10 hours long. Obviously if you like something like Bionic Commando: Re-Armed, that number goes up - I know that in various iterations, I've probably spent over a hundred hours playing Castlevania SOTN over the years. But it's still a 6 (ish) hour game. Sonic 4 is 2 hours for $15 and that's ridiculous. And as I implied, it's a trend you can see in a lot of Sega's digital downloads - All-Stars Racing gave you one track and one car for $7. That's half the price of Sonic 4! When games like Forza 3 put out "booster packs" that contain multiple cars and multiple tracks for half that price! The fact that Sega had the guts to charge for Sonic Adventure and the "DX Upgrade" separately is kind of disgusting, considering how little is actually in it!
Perhaps the saddest thing about this is the demo is only an Act long, and that takes less than a minute with your eyes closed. You can barely get a feel for the game at all with so little to work with. But then, when the game is as short as it is, putting more than one Act into it would be practically giving you half of the game for free. God damn, this game needed like, at least two more Zones, desperately. Then maybe it would feel like I'm playing a video game and not a really long demo. :specialed: If Episode II is going to be worth a damn (which I severely doubt, but we'll see) then it needs to address these issues. And others, but making it longer than an hour would help. 15 bucks for less than a quarter of a game is highway robbery, no matter how you cut it. Cut that price in half, and maybe, we'll talk. Maybe.
To be fair, now that you mention it, S4EP1 does feel like a prologue after all. Though making Episode 2 longer than Episode 1, I believe, probably won't happen in order to stay with the 'episodic release' plans. I see Sonic 4, as a whole at the moment, as 2D Sonic's StH'06. In which I'll play it for the Achievements and such now and then, but I just don't enjoy playing the game, even if it was a whole game now with the release of future episodes.
I always thought that Sonic 4 Episode 1 was a horrible Nostalgic trip rather than a "new' game. Also, I thought it was confirmed that there would be a total of 24 Levels in each episode?
It's not terrible. Just terribly underwhelming and overpriced. Give credit where it's due, guys. They at least had the decency to remove the boost and do away with much of Rush's level design in lieu of more Genesisy designs, shoddy physics programming notwithstanding. Also bring back Super Sonic. That being said, it isn't that great. Especially not for what it was billed as.
So I downloaded the 20th Anniversary app. Neat little app, Sonic the Sketchhog is really fun (and has better renditions of S4 music). Anyways, it had a demo for S4:E1 in it. Having not played it in ages, I decided to give it another run. It was fun, I was going fast and the gameplay felt great!... and then I let go of the virtual d-pad. You know, going back, I think we all overreacted by a long shot, even though (like MegaDash said) it isn't that great at all. It's a good little bit of fun, but it's mostly spoiled by stopping on a dime, deadweight rolling, and homing chains / uncurling. On the bright side, I feel a bit more lenient to giving Generations3DS a try. If it at least fixes two out of three of those problems then I may have some fun with it.
Well consider I've had it since launch day. The fact that I often play all the 2D Sonics a lot, and that I've spent a lot of time on the game because I genuinely find it pretty decent (time attack does factor in to it quite a lot), as well as having general playthroughs where I've tried beating the game in the fastest time possible with the least failings on Chaos Emeralds/losing lives etc. I think 50 hours or so is pretty good. For a game that's been out 328 days, having played for roughly 50 hours... that's about 9 minutes and ten seconds per day (maths is not my strong point), which in actuality is a tiny amount, especially when it can takes hours in itself to get a good time attack run through on a specific level. At the end of it all, I still think £10 for a game the same length as Sonic 3 with 'new' features is good, especially If you love 2D Sonic. All the games are similar enough to the average joe anyway. I don't know about the average person, but I earn well over £800 a month, and to spend a one off £10 of that for one month and get that much out of the game is fine. The issue people have is that it's episodic (and the fact that the physics aren't 'classic', which I totally understand- you can't make people get used to something which shouldn't change), therefore they'll be buying another part of it the game at a late stage- but isn't that basically every Sonic game? The only thing that makes the game episodic is that very same title- "episodic". Episodic by gameplay and story- but aren't all the 2D games anyway? And weren't they more expensive despite being the same basic length? They're cheaper because they're old and they've generated millions to SEGA already. Not trying to shove my views on you, but that's how I feel about it. Also, I did have to LOL. That was very good :v:
It does? Is there anywhere to listen to it online? EDIT: man, it'd be cool if SEGA put the game on PlaySEGA or whatever when it's back up. I'd like to play this.
nope.avi Sonic 4 Episode I isn't even the same length as Sonic 3, much less bigger than it. 6 zones with new bosses versus 4 remix zones with rehashed bosses, plus a filler boss rush lifted from Sonic Advance 2. And homing attacks off of bubble chains haven't been new since Sonic Adventure.
Sonic 4's got the same amount of levels, though. More if you count bosses + Death Egg EGG Station Zone (but we all know they don't). The problem with Sonic 4's length is that none of the acts are as tremendously large as even as Sonic 3. That's a problem I've had with all Sonic games since then and until Sonic Colours ('s last two zones). None of the acts have felt HUGE. But anyways, even with "more" levels than Sonic 4 it's still a shorter game.
Sonic 3 = (6 Zones x 2 Acts) + 1 Final Boss= 13 total 'acts' (No, I did not forget that there are Multiplayer Stages, but do they really count when one considers that we are talking about the main game's length here?) Sonic 4 = (4 Zones x 3 Acts) + 1 Boss Act per Zone (x4) + Final Zone= 17 total 'acts' (even if you don't count the Boss acts, it would bring it to an even 13) (Disregarding the quality/originality of said stages of Sonic 4, it technically has more Single player stages) *EDIT* This, however. Sonic 3's huge stages (Which have better, more expansive level design, plus a flight-able Tails) make for much better replayability.
S3 has 12 full acts, seven special stages and two characters to play as. S4 has 12 full acts, seven special stages and only one character to play as. I'm not going to count bosses because they're also in S3, just as part of the levels. As well as having a second playable character, the stages in S3 were much larger. And more subjectively, they were much better designed as well. The only acts in S4 that felt both large and memorable were SHZ2 and 3. The rest just felt very messy and half baked.
I forgot about Sonic Heroes. I haven't played it since... whenever it came out. You're right they were actually huge in that game. Which I kind of liked except for the fact you had to play through them four times with little to no variations between each playing. -.-
