Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

Something about the old model looks like a Sonic Forces OC or background NPC.

 

Looks like they set it to 720p in dock mode to get 60fps. Wonder what the performance hit looks like at 1080p. Although it already has a bunch of dips in this video so probably not good.

 

but unlike, say, the S3&K OG tracks, the Rush OST did a disc release, which means the tracks can be obtained lossless....

 

I just completed everything on Hard Mode, including getting all S Ranks (I'm not gonna try to get Rainbow Rank on the Hard Mode White Space challenges though, hell no) and... I'm gonna be 100% real with you, fighting Mephiles immediately after Metal Overlord really does showcase how much easier Mephiles is. Seriously, I had to retry Metal Overlord so much while Mephiles didn't take me nearly as long. Do remember that Hard Mode Mephiles doesn't have any rings at all while Metal Overlord does.

Anyways, that makes this the 3rd Sonic game I've 100% (Or in Forces' case, 119.99%). Funny, isn't it? I 100% my 3rd and 2nd favorites in the series, but refused with the one at the top of my list. Really shows how much I loathe Eggmanland. With Frontiers there's actually 2 things stopping me from even considering it. While I may have gone through the effort to unlock the Cyberspace Power Boost, I am not going to bother with Extreme difficulty. The 2nd? 4 words. Final Horizon Cyberspace stages.

 

Mephiles now being a random jobber who Shadow has no reason to care about or even feel threatened by is a rare instance of gameplay and story conveying the same message successfully.

 

One very minor change to Sonic Generations I've not seen mentioned - in the secret statue room, the small animal statue now lists the chicken's name as "Clucky" rather than "Cucky", in line with other recent classic Sonic media.

 

I can handle broken scripting. I can take classic Sonic's fucked up top spine. And I'll put up with a modern drop dash that doesn't work as well as Frontiers' and I often trigger by accident, flinging me to my death. And I can even look past poorly rewritten cutscenes with no pacing adjustments and animation changes where their effort should have been placed elsewhere. But I CANNOT put up with this revisionism, and I WILL be making a mod to fix this as soon as Hedge Mod Manager supports the remaster.

 

Censorship has gone too far.

 

Shadow taking this Keanu thing too seriously

 

Seeing this clip kinda makes me wish you could activate AND deactivate chaos control. IMO would make more sense for the door to only open when time is not stopped, that would add an additional tiny bit of skill expression by making the player think when to deactivate the ability.

 

You can’t??? I just spent my entire time playing thinking my controller was magically bugged then? *crying internally*
That feels like the most obvious inclusion to make! Would be nice if they added the option for it.

 

So just for fun I decided to sort out where the movie DLC's portal is going to be.


It's just in front of the Ark. I was kind of hoping to go on a little Geoguessr type of investigation and discover an overlooked area of White Space that's suspiciously void of objects, but nope. I guess the only thing to note is that you can enter the DLC directly after playing Ark Act 1, seeing as the Ark's pillar thingies are still blank.

 

It's not entirely consistent, but the game often knows when it should override Chaos Control and make objects move anyway. For example, if you hit a switch during Chaos Control, the associated object will usually activate even though it should be frozen in time. The Death Egg Robos in Sunset Heights 2 can still fire their lasers during Chaos Control under certain conditions too. The developers had the foresight to consider that sometimes the ability would be more of a hindrance than a boon, and ending Chaos Control early might still leave some say pieces broken.

That example in SCA1 with the giant projectile that initiates a QTE is one of the clunkier examples of foresight though, and tbh they should have just had automatically Chaos Control end early there (as it does for the Radical Highway transitions). You also get moments where you can be left waiting around if you need to destroy enemies or fire spears to progress, because they will be frozen in place until time returns to normal. That's where the ability to end Chaos Control would have come most in handy.

 

I remember people thinking the launch trailer CGI was not from Marza cause their style was really different and wondering what new studio worked on it.

Well, it turned it it was Marza after all!

https://x.com/marza_official/status/1854821167439192164

 

This just says they worked on the announcement trailer, the launch trailer isn't mentioned in this.

The launch trailer looks way more like Hardlight's style.

 

My mind translated “announcement” to “launch” for some reason, i stand corrected.

 

I checked their site again and just noticed they have the launch trailer in the media section so I guess you're not 100% wrong lol. Weird that they didn't list it the way they did for the announcement trailer, maybe it was made in collaboration with another studio?

 

Completely agree about the physics, and personally I would go as far as to say it kills the whole experience for me. The whole appeal of the Boost style games is that they drop the physics angle and make Sonic control a lot more like a car, but in exchange deliver a level of spectacle and raw speed that's a lot more difficult to do otherwise. These post-Forces games feel like the worst of both worlds for me. The player controller doesn't feel even half as satisfying as games like Adventure 1 and 2 because they're still built around this really stiff "go fast in a straight line" mechanic, but what really frustrates me is that it's not even fast enough to justify that.

Beating this game made me realize I really liked Frontiers for two reasons: the first was that I liked the atmosphere in the open zones a lot and enjoyed running around, exploring, and maintaining a flow state with some really high speed movement and momentum-- this is also really dependent on the *second* reason I liked Frontiers a lot, which was that I installed a momentum physics mod like two hours in that vastly improved my overall enjoyment of the game. I played Shadow without any mods (besides one that makes him skate when boosting because I think the vanilla boost animation looks stupid) and the emphasis is almost entirely on the stages themselves, with the White Space being a lot harder to enjoy just hanging out in than Frontiers' islands.

I dunno. I always feel a weird guilt about dampening the positive atmosphere when a game is actually well received, especially with Sonic, but I just couldn't enjoy this one at all. I was relieved to finally be finished with it when I beat the last boss and the idea of it being a much better game than the original Gens... it's just very foreign to me. I can't say I see it at all. The HE1 boost games sacrifice control for insane speed and unmatched spectacle. The new boost games feel like run of the mill platformers to me, and I'm not even really a platformer guy outside of Sonic and other really high speed games like Rollin' Rascal.

 

See the thing is, the speed is actually not all that different between these games. If I recall correctly, power boost in Frontiers is the fastest of any Sonic game of this type. Camera and FOV accounts for a lot of it. Which makes me think that with the use of really carefully planned stages, there's room for a middle ground that provides the exhilarating thrills during straightaways and an actually operable perspective during platforming.

That being said, I honestly prefer everything since Lost World in a lot of ways over Unleashed, Colors and Generations. There's a stickiness, a lack of responsiveness that comes with their brand of leaning into turns and in particular the short-hop which makes every normal jump feel slightly lagged, to say nothing of how much I hate the drift in every game except Generations (and still don't think it's a substitute for just letting Sonic turn). He's sluggish. He's also sluggish in Lost World, but in a different, more preferable way. I think it comes down to the boost inherently encouraging binaristic stage design and Sonic in Generations and especially Unleashed being built so slippery that it feels unsuited to the stages whenever platforming does happen. He just bounces off of shit on solid ground sometimes and it freaks me out whenever it happens.

Obviously the lack of depth and polish and stuff was a problem for every subsequent game, but cutting out that middleman and going for binaristic game design feels more...honest? I dunno. Forces is full of dumb bullshit with its bad air control, incredibly stiff boost turning, low double jump and weird acceleration lurch, but there's a responsiveness to the actual basics of moving and jumping that feels more reliable, and that continues into Frontiers and Shadow Generations, enough that by those games I prefer almost everything about their open-zone controls...with the caveat that in both games they fucking change the controls out for worse ones in action stages. Cyberspace is so open that it feels like it actually would allow for more creativity in platforming than Shadow (especially Final Horizon), but it's so fucking handicapped by the godawful boost turning and air control that it's wasted.

Shadow should have solved this by letting you turn as smoothly as you do in the open zone, but they fucked it again, it's just not that big a deal since the camera more often turns Shadow for you, and any use of the stick you do yourself more than likely won't be while you're boosting so much as setting up a jump or air boost. That being said, it still feels more reliable than any previous game control and polish-wise. I really hope people stop saying Unleashed's stomp and homing attack were good, too. Those things get me killed as much as any stage hazard.

 

I don't think I really disagree on much here other than the more "honest", rigid design being preferable to the looseness and relative lack of precision of Unleashed. My favorite official 3D Sonic is still Adventure, but I'm willing to accept Unleashed as a totally different take on what a Sonic game is because it nails what it tries to do by deemphasizing platforming in exchange for speed. Even ~15 years later it is thrilling carving down the highways of Not New York, blitzing down the Great Wall of Not China like a tiny blue rocket, and dodging obstacles as you run on top of the water navigating between the islands of Not Indonesia -- where one screw-up completely kills your flow state at best or kills you at worst. I don't think Generations was quite as successful at making me say "wow" at every setpiece but it still did a good job.

These new games completely fail at this because they're going for something different. That's fair enough, but where Unleashed almost completely dropped the platforming angle for something completely new and unique, to me at least it feels these new games are trying to force this core framework back to platforming - in other words trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It does this by shaving the edges off the square and it is functional but man, if they're going to do a platformer build a platformer that actually feels fluid and satisfying to control. These games feel like you gave a racecar legs and slowed them down enough to do platforming. It's hard to put into words but the tl;dr for me is when I see one of those bouncing music notes in the White Space fly off to the top of the platform that's at the same height as the one I'm standing on, the solution isn't to find a way to build enough speed to slingshot over there, it's to run down and do a little obstacle course to the spring that takes me there the "right way". I really hate it. The fantasy of watching the Sonic CD opening and playing as that character is not even remotely there for me with these new games (mods notwithstanding).