Notice how as well, Sonic Heroes doesn't have unlockable moves. You start the game with every special move (in-stage leveling up notwithstanding) that you're going to complete it with. How very oldschool. You know, if the stages weren't so copy-paste and the control not so twitchy, I'd probably love this game. Spoiler Who am I kidding? It's my guilty little secret, even if it makes me rage at times.
Regarding Heroes, most of my problems with the game could've been solved by not having every stage floating in the sky, with instant death falls greeting you absolutely everywhere (and then giving you characters that can potentially charge you off the edge of a stage without any recovery). This does apply to other Sonic games as well, but Heroes is probably the worst offender. Just some kind of alternate route or floor/recovery spring under a level would be a godsend compared to a cheap death. I do like the simplistic plot, but I felt Heroes might've been a bit *too* basic. I mean, Knuckles didn't even get a reason to be part of the Adventure aside from being SONIC SIDEKICK #2 (even Cream the Rabbit got a conviction to be in the game) I could've forgiven the stages being copy-pasta if they'd at least mixed up the order for each Team. (Team Dark could've started at Eggman's Base in Rail Canyon. Team Chaotix could start in the City/Casino stage etc...) But fuck it. We're 10 years on and there's no point giving an opinion injection about it. Except I've just done that. Well, shit. Sorry.
When I got Sonic heroes on Xbox I loved it. Then I got it on PS2 and hated it. Then I got it on GameCube and felt mixed about it. I love the artistic designs of the levels and such but the actual level design is not as good. Mind you it wasn't terrible, I still have fun if I just stick to Team Sonic or something, which would've been a nice option instead of having to play every time for the final mission.
It's shocking, the amount of people I know that only played the PS2 release and nothing else. That version was an abomination at the best of times. Still, anything better about the Xbox version that made it stand out? I always assumed it was near identical to the GameCube release (at least in terms of presentation/framerate etc..)
The Xbox version had language options and higher quality FMVs that the GCN one. That's about it for differences.
Call me a massive weeaboo for this, but I did think it was a shame that the one first Sonic game to have characters talking non-stop througout each stage, didn't feature a dual-audio option on Gamecube (and PC by the sounds of it). Then after the era of Heroes/Shadow/06, with (more or less) forced 4Kids voices, we go back to Dual-Audio Sonic games... when characters are no longer talking non stop. Brilliant. (Still. A minor complaint more than anything though. I do like my cheesy English VA's, but I also like being able to choose some equally bad Junichi Kanemaru if I feel like it.) GOING BACK TO HEROES BASHING THOUGH. The other thing that really ticked me off? 15-20 Minute long stages... Sonic Adventure 2 had maybe a couple of those if you weren't too sure of what you were doing. Heroes? Pretty much every stage after Bingo Highway was going to be a marathon. Good luck getting that A Rank, it's gonna be an endurance run.
I'm surprisingly-okay with it being an 'endurance run'. I came to view Sonic Heroes as a kinda "Sonic Adventure for Super Players" (in the vein of Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, or SMB2JP) in that it was just the Sonic gameplay (with a little gliding and flying thrown in for good measure, to justify the whole team thing) ramped up to 11. Unfortunately, that kinda means the flaws are ramped-up (or, more apparent) too. But I can't fault them for trying.
Except the camera (the main cause of difficulty) was considerably worse than the Adventure games. The vast majority of lives I lost resulted from missing jumps because I couldn't see where I needed to land them. That's not "for Super Players" difficulty. But really, the game's biggest problem wasn't the difficulty. It was that it was massively annoying, and loaded with filler. Switch puzzles aren't challenging, just a waste of time. Wave after wave of enemy spawns (especially entire levels of nothing but this) not only isn't Sonicy, but it's boring and exhausting. When the game was just being a 3D platformer, and when you weren't having to jump down, it was actually pretty fun.
The entirety of Sonic Heroes was piss easy, with tight controls and easy to grasp mechanics from start to finish. The style was great, the music funky, the characters Ll well represented, and I find it difficult to grasp how people dislike it. Granted, there were non-stop death pits in every level, but that was only a bit of a step-up from the previous games because it was the Sonic levels that were made like that and they were previously only a third of the game instead of all of it.
15-20 might be a lot but 10 is definitely not a stretch. Unleashed's night levels were longer but I still thought they were better designed. The level design was incredibly lazy, filled with kill the enemy rooms (first game to add health bars to enemies... bad idea) and, as mentioned before, switch puzzles. You also had levels which were just paths above bottomless pits which were awfully linear, and to add length (Despite the fact it was definitely not needed), many levels are simply repeats of previous level geometry with the objects arranged differently, meaning you played each level basically twice in the same level. Bundle that in the fact that you had to do that about 5 more times after Team Sonic (since Team Rose did not repeat sections to make it easier), throw in some of, if not the worst/laziest bosses in Sonic history, and that's my reason why I don't like the game. It goes right up there with Sonic Lost World in the category of "good idea that actually plays pretty well, but the levels don't do the main gameplay justice." Also the music is subjective really. I don't think it's bad per say but I can't think of many of them that I liked.
Wow. I would love to play your version of Sonic Heroes, because it sounds amazing. Just kidding. I'm glad there are people that like it. I think it's got the best case of Marmite syndrome next to SA2 most days. :D Maybe a minor exaggeration, but when you had Team Dark/Chaotix stages making you go back to the beginning if you didn't fulfill the target, you'd tend to find your clear time slowly ticking well into double digits. (I am including the 'Hard/Extra' missions here though, not just your one-off casual playthrough. Someone trying to 100% Emblem Heroes will suffer a lot more than someone just doing a quick play-through to get to Metal Overlord.) And then there's my personal issue of seeing fuckers like Big the Cat, grinding on rails and running loops. That shit doesn't fly, son.
Do we have better scans of those Marble/Labyrinth/Star Light Zones concepts ? (this page comes from a "all about Sonic the Hedgehog" magazine published in UK)
Now that's a game I haven't touched since doing a straight-up 'get to Final Story' run. I recall some of the cyber/inside computer stages giving me a big of grief though. Blimey. Is that a recently published mag? I did notice something Sonic related in the local Premiere corner shop down by the comics. God knows what's inside though.
I still haven't beaten Shadow. I'm like 95% finished as of last year. The Ark is a fucking nightmare!
http://youtu.be/sBQRWDoT6Ck Check it out guys, its the promotional trailer and tutorial for CR Sonic, the pachinko machine! We need more informaton about this machine in the wiki, think this trailer will help?
