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

I am pretty lucky with my job. On 30k on a good teaching job. But I lose about 50% of my salary on rent. So yeah, it sucks having so many games coming out and having to buy them carefully. It's why I was on the fence with Sonic Superstars. But I'll bite the bullet and pay in. I'll almost certainly enjoy it to some degree.

I mostly get games on sale now. Got Resi 4 on sale recently (amazing game by the way).

January-February will be brutal for me. FF7 Remake 2, Persona 3 Reload, Tekken 8. Damn.

 

As the world's #1 Mario dickrider, I definitely think Wonder looks better than Superstars. But honestly? I couldn't give less of a shit. I'm just happy two of my favorite series are getting new games I'm bound to enjoy, in a genre you rarely see get attention in the AAA space nowadays. I'm planning to play them back to back this week and I haven't been this excited for new games in both franchises in a long time.

 

One cake got the right recipe, the right amount of time, and added some decorations that's a bit gaudy but you appreciate the variety

The other cake got the right recipe, the right amount of time, and comes with a parade and chorus of talented choir boys who sing to you with every bite

 

If I really wanted to, I could juggle but its probably not a good idea to juggle my rent. I make roughly 40k a year, which will be going up to 50k in a few months and my job offers plenty of OT. So my only chance is to bust my ass working OT to be able to get my entertainment in lmao.

I like Superstars, but its hard for me to justify paying $60 for it atm and I'm a much bigger Spider-Man fanboy anyway. I haven't played a good 2D Mario platformer in a minute tho.

 

I have a strong feeling that, like Frontiers, there will be a black Friday sale.

If you have to wait, I'd aim to pick it up around then.

 

Sonic Superstars costs one fourth of my country's minimum wage. Now I make more than that, and I am grateful and lucky for it, but it can't be a cake. It would only ever be worth it if it was the whole party, and it doesn't come close to being that.

I'm not one to complain about time/cost ratio, because I think it's a stupid way to value games -- or any kind of experience, for that matter. I try my best not to commodify art or, to some extent, not even entertainment. But I've seen enough of Sonic Superstars to be absolutely sure anyone praising it as if it was somehow better than all the classic games it fails or doesn't even try to improve in any way -- at least in everything that matters about those games to me -- has too much emotional skin in the game. I can't excuse the laughable bits of soundtrack or the parts of the whole game design that are simply not for me.

If Sonic Superstars was able to provide me a better time than Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic CD or Sonic 3 & Knuckles, I'd gladly spend the $300 it'd cost me. Right now, it wouldn't even be worth $60 if that was what they were asking of me.

 

Sonic has been a C~B+ tier franchise far longer than it was an A tier one; I think we're just at a point where this is honestly the best we can expect from them in terms of output. It really shouldn't be that way, but it is. And its natural that since its been that way for so long, a lot of people really don't mind the game as it is.

Superstars was never going to be better than the Classics or Mania despite its efforts, so its worth will depend on if that's a deal breaker or not for you.


Personally speaking, I think it looks fine, but I can't justify paying $60 for it over Super Mario Bros. Wonder or Spider-Man 2, which have much more going on imo.

 

I get not thinking it's worth the price, but assuming that everyone who thinks it is, that it's great, even, has "too much emotional skin" is ridiculous.

I looked at the game and thought "oh, it seems pretty good". I played it myself and thought "oh, it is pretty good".

Whether Superstars improves on the classics is debatable (and it also doesn't seem to be its intention, to play devil's advocate), but to say it "fails" at anything about the classics is a take I don't agree with. That's where it stands up the most. Its new additions are more flawed but in my opinion, they make the game worth playing.

It's funny, because I personally think even if it was "objectively" better than every other classic game, I still wouldn't pay $300 bloody dollars for it. Honestly, I don't think any game should be $60. Whether I buy one at that price depends on if I want to buy it as soon as possible, if at all, and not any particular assessment of quality or content.

I rarely have to contest with a game the size and length of Undertale at $60 for this mindset to fail me.

In terms of Sonic the franchise, games have been better and have shown improvement over previous titles; in terms of Arzest, this is the best they've done by such a wide margin that it almost seems like they found the game they can really make. Like MercuryStream making Metroid after making some mediocre Castlevania games.

In any case, there's no reason to believe there's a plateau until a sequel proves it wrong or right. People like and love the game, not just "don't mind it". They like the game because it satisfies them, not because "they can't imagine better". Don't project such cynicism onto everyone else.

I personally never once understood this odd stance where Sonic "should be better" but also everything it does is bad because it isn't the very best.

A Sonic game is simply mediocre and it's treated like garbage; a Sonic game is simply good and it's treated as "not good enough" and no one should even like it lest the creators believe that they did something good; a Sonic game is "good enough" and people find reasons to act why it's an anomaly.

 

Palas lives in a country where it costs the equivalent of £350.

 

I can tell. That is an absolutely ridiculous price. Don't know enough about economy to blame their country, so I'm blaming Sega for that. Even so, yeah, I get them not thinking it's worth the price.

 

Of course I'm biased. Of course I have emotional skin in the game. Sonic is formative to the way I approach every game, so if I expect more of what made me like videogames in the first place, it's from Sonic -- and Superstars doesn't seem to want to deliver any of these things. So I'll be way less lenient towards those two 50-second-loop songs for Press Factory and scrutinize their composition, which I think are generic and shoddy. I'll have more difficulty to see what the game is actually doing and to look past my own appreciation for backtrackable levels with the least hand-holding possible, providing the most possible interactions for the fewest possible actions.

I'm sorry, I made it seem like anyone liking Superstars isn't being genuine. That's not the case. But the tendency to overlook what I would see as flaws in favor of what you would see as positives is both taste and bias in both our parts, because it seems to be delivering what you like about Sonic. Price is just an aggravating factor.

 

Oh, okay. That's fair.

 

Heck, $60 in the US is already too much. Imagine how awful it is to live somewhere where prices are deliberately inflated.

And that's not a "2D games can't be $60" thing, that's a "the amount of content and budget thrown into this game is not comparable to a normal AAA full-price game" thing.

 

Here in Brazil it's just like that. Superstars' price is 60 dollars directly converted to reais, so it's around 300 reais. But our minimum wage is like 1300 reais, so...

 

If I wasn't so ingrained in the Sonic community I'd choose Mario over this in a heartbeat. And even then I'm still getting both because I preordered them and put money down over the course of months. And if anyone asks me I'd recommend Mario. And if they have a PS5 I'd recommend Spider-Man.

Superstars is a fun game from what I've seen but a $60 experience? Nah.

 

My views on the pricing probably don't make any sense.

On one hand, I don't think the game looks like it's worthy of £50. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of a quality expectation being equated to a certain price. I do understand why people do it of course since it's a lot of money. But it's created a gaming landscape where the majority of games which launch at £50 are incredible works of visual presentation and meaty products. Which is not actually bad at all. It doesn't sound like it makes sense and it's hard for me to express my feelings, but I miss the landscape of PS2 a bit. Where you could get many full retail games which ranged greatly in visual fidelity and content size. Not bad games to be clear, just a bit janky around the edges but unique in their own way. I think it's a bit sad that we've lost that. People like to joke on IGN for giving most games 7+ but it is because the quality of gaming now is probably better than it has ever been. Just in a way which is much more formulaic and less bold in design than in the past.

So does Superstars look like it's going to be worthy of the quality of most £50 games? No. I've thought that from the beginning. But if they are charging £50 for this game it probably would never have been made at all if not for this indulgent price point. It's easy to assume the worst with game publishers but this game genuinely might have cost more of a budget than we assume. i'd rather live in a world where we get these niche mid games that appeal to people like us than not have them at all.

At the end of the day, you can always just not buy £50 games. It's actually the easiest route.

 

To be fair, that is a relative difference. Sonic 3 cost £60 back in the day. But you could only compare it to contemporary games. We are just spoiled for choice now. But in a way which I think has somewhat encouraged formulaic designs (despite the doubtless improvement in quality).

 

So I learnt a few weeks ago that Sonic Superstars may be running an engine you might not expect, Unity...

Yes, it actually is running on Unity. We may have been hoping on a extremely faithful engine to be used. But at least they tried to make it feel and play like a classic Sonic game. If it beats Sonic 4, then hey, it's pretty good. And the thing is, Unity is pretty easy to mod, so any problems in the game can be easily fixed. Something that is pretty funny though that I've recently found out is that Unity has created a runtime fee program and since Superstars is using Unity, that means if Superstars is successful, Sega is going to have to pay based on the amount of people that are going to play and the version of Unity that they're using.

 

That was one of our first guesses.
They also walked back on retroactively charging the runtime fee. It's only on the newest version of Unity moving forward.