Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

For sure. Guess I’m just surprised because DF have done plenty of Switch ports and in many cases have been quite impressed.

 

Well this isn't one of those.

 

Eh, I found it fine. I’ve played the majority of my multiplatform games on Switch, including the likes of the modern Doom games which they praised, and frankly I found at least Doom 2016 to run much worse than this despite their praised for it.

 

I mean, that's cool and all. Doesn't change the fact that there is objectively a problem with the Switch port. There's nothing weird about John's findings.

 

Is there a way to remap the controls on ps5? There's a menu for it, including the option to reset controls to default, but all of the buttons are greyed out. I'd like to remap chaos spear to L2 to make Chaos Spear Boost Jumps easier to perform.

 

Are you doing it from the main menu or while in game? I've had to fiddle with it a couple of times and had to unbind things in order to get the option to rebind. I don't remember the exact process, but it is doable.

 

It is? I thought it wasn't possible to remap the PS5 version. But maybe it is possible from the title screen. Language and subtitles can only be toggled from the main menu, but the game explicitly tells you that. I've been wanting to swap the Chaos Control and Chaos Spear buttons. I'll give it a go shortly.

Edit: Yeah, no. I can't figure out how to do anything with the controls on PS5 apart from switch between standard and legacy presets. The title screen menu looks like this:

 

Whoops. I misread as PC.

The PS5 has a custom remaping feature in the Accessibility options that you can toggle on and off. Unfortunately it isn't a per game feature last I checked. If you're only using it for Shadow, it's a possible workaround.

What happens if you adjust the controller type option?

Edit: Nevermind, it's just Legacy and Standard. I remember it giving me Custom on PC. Why would they even have that menu on console?

 

Best guess is that it's there to serve as a control guide. It's annoying that customisable controls on consoles aren't a standard feature. Maybe there's a reason for it that I'm unaware of, but sometimes the presets simply aren't good enough. All that a simple platformer needs button binding is two criteria; 1) Every function has an assigned button 2) No two functions are assigned the same button.

Just let me swap those two bindings please.

 

I don't think there is a valid reason. Especially when all 3 consoles have custom remapping support built in now. I just wish they would make it on a per game setting rather than universal.

 

I played SxS Generations only on the switch, because my steam deck hasn't been delivered yet. It works good and feels fine to play. Sonic Gens works better here than on the Xbox 360, but the only example of how that I can think of at the top of my head as to why that is, is in the going down section of Speed Highway. The running down the building seems smoother, and when the cop robots crash in the garage at the end, it does not chug and stutter like an alcoholic porky pig, like it does on the 360. The PS3 version, I wouldn't know because I haven't touched my PS3 in years.

Shadow Gens feels worse in terms of framerate, although it's probably just me imagining things because both games are 30 fps apparently. I'm no expert on this sort of stuff, I'm just going off my eyeballs.

 

Neat little detail I just noticed: Shadow has a different idle animation without any rings

 

Almost, but there's an extra detail on top. He's only got a different idle animation after losing all his rings. When he simply spawns into the game with 0 rings, he'll continue to use his standard idle animation.

 

Thought the Switch version was pretty great performance-wise, seemed like both games ran at a constant 30 to me, but then again I just do not notice anything that isn't a massive 10+ frame drop.

Even then I really don't see how what he's saying is a serious issue, I really don't get this stuff

 

It's one of this situations where ignorance is bliss.

 

Series S myself, starting with Shadow Gens @ midnight certainly diluted the jittery 25-30fps lol. Very noticeable coming back to it after playing Sonic Gens. I’m going to see if the performance mode is any different at some point!

 

yeah they gave him a low-health animation which is really cool. Another fun detail I saw is that Shadow will actually point his head and look in the direction of NPC's and enemies.

this sounds like such a "who gives a shit" kind of thing but the last time they ever did anything like this was in Adventure 1 where Sonic would dynamically look in the direction of items and objects of interest. Little things like this are fun, someone cared enough to actually program this into the game

 

Finally finished the Shadow portion on a newly built PC (with a 3080 TI I migrated from the last system), at full 4K... and...

Oh man, was this good. Oh dear lord.

This is the Generations 2 I wanted 12 years ago. I'm shocked at how much I'm able to finally get out of this. The campaign took me about 6 hours since I spent extra time exploring the White Space, which is incredibly well designed all around. It's not exactly a long game, but it's very satisfying one, and it rounds out the original Generations also somewhat shorter runtime nicely.

It's the best elements of Generations and Frontiers combined. Much better controls than the latter, but with the perks and design elements of it as well, along with the visual splendor of the former. It's still scripted as hell in some of the sequences, but there's enough variety, paths and tricks to make the stages feel replayable. The latter half of the game is a bit weaker than the first half, but not by much.

It was also piss easy for me, I never lost to a single boss battle even once... but whatever. I've been playing these games for 30 years, and there's plenty of challenge modes and unlockables for me to take advantage of. I'm not unsatisfied at all. Shadow's story and narrative were tightly written, bringing better closure to his character evolution than I'd say Shadow 05/Sonic 06 ever did. It takes the utter weirdness of the entire black doom storyline and throws out all caution, ironically making the concept much more interesting. I still prefer his pure SA2 storyline, but this is a good spiritual successor to that arc. Shadow with his full unlocked Doom abilities is a weird as hell concept that actually works because the gameplay brilliantly incorporates it, and it allows him to diverge and evolve in a much more unique direction than Sonic went in as a character. The fact that he could take on an arguably even stronger version of Devil Doom with his full latent abilites and only 'one' chaos emerald in his position is Dragon Ball levels of absurd power creep, but again, it works. Throwing all 7 at him with this form and I bet things would get even more interesting, but that's going deep into silly fanon territory.

I hope we get a few more patches to fix any instability issues in Generations. It runs well still, but not flawlessly quite yet. I worry that Denuvo could be causing things like long load times and small amounts of performance desegregation, but oh well.

All in all, an excellent package that will only be improved further with time, I'm sure. One of the best modern Sonic titles is now that much better... mostly.

Also, the image gallery is really cool when you see everything. Lots of new concept art. Lots of stuff we can comb over if we want to analyze the development of the post dreamcast titles. There should really be a concept discussing some of them.

 

Interesting note, Nintendo filed a patent on this in 2002 after it's use in Luigi's Mansion I believe, which was granted in 2010, but expired in August, which may be a contributing factor as to why it's been absent for so long.

Or I could be speaking out my ass and Sonic Team just didn't bother.

 

It comes from Frontiers but it’s similar enough to his battle stance that I think most never noticed it.

I like how for Shadow’s he just looks pissed.