Sonic 06

Backwards time travel = new timeline.

I'll give it a shot.

 

I've already answered your PM, but I'll answer the relevant points here again: conversations evolve over time. There's only so much time that can be spent pointing out the same flaws before the topic either dies or changes.

 

Up to this point, I think we have very much done so. The game is broken and unfinished, with glitches nearly everywhere, shambled together mechanics and lots of dashed hopes. A game that could have been good, but was rushed or cut maddeningly, leaving a miserable at worst, mediocre at best, game. As for your standards, play the game, then play SA or SA2; both did nearly everything '06 did, but infinitely better. I like the direction the thread has taken, the conversation can go more deep into the game itself and we'll be able to determine more about the game than merely the surface stuff we've already talked to death.

 

If a mod or admin believes the thread needs to be split it will be done. The thread has progressed to a constructive discussion based around the storyline, including Digital Duck's trime travel analysis, which was a great read. This thread has elevated itself to contain elements worth documenting on the wiki. I don't see the problem.

 

The problem is he doesn't care about Sonic 06's time travel nuances. :v:

I suppose there was plenty to do, but was any of it fun? Part of what I liked about the Adventure Fields was their simply being an unobtrusive connection of worlds leading to their respective Action stages. The fact that they were so small and well designed made it much easier and quicker for you to get to the next stage, all the while giving you some nice vistas, really nice "overworld" music, and mostly speedy characters through which you could breeze through them at your leisure.

Even if Sonic was slow, I shouldn't really have any objections to a well designed 3D world to explore, given competent controls, camera, collision detection, etc. Otherwise I would never have bothered with games like Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time. Still, if it's a Sonic game, I'd like to run around fast. I don't see Sonic & co. running around that fast in '06's hub worlds, the controls look 10x worse than how SA1 Sonic controls during high-speed causeways, and talking to people looks like even more of a chore than the casual diversion in SA1, either because of them talking like those Mac commercial morons and saying too much or because there are so many side missions.

 

I disagree. I thought it was a bad game. A Terrible one, in fact, and you're talking to someone who loves Sonic, who has kept his old plush toys, and figures, and books, and posters, and bike helmet, and has played pretty much every game to death.

I like a game with difficulty, getting the ranks on Sonic Adventure 2 has been one of the hardest things in gaming I'e ever done, and in fact, I'm still a few emblems off too. Sonic Colours was difficult in some areas, where I got Game Overs a few times, but they were for legitimate reasons, in short; I sucked at the Unleashed versions on the PS3 and Xbox (though I only played an hour or so), and I had to get used to the varying game mechanics which were ever so different from past 3D Sonic titles.

The reason why everybody hates Sonic 2006 is, well, there are a lot of reasons. Here are mine;
*The camera makes the game nearly unplayable- I got quite dizzy on some sections, because my eyes were straining to see what the hell was in front of me, and my anger at the camera really stressed me right out after a good couple of hours.

*The game is incredibly unfair- The running sections are particulary bad. There's no skill involved, it's just being lucky enough to eventually tilt the joystick at the right split second long enough to move Sonic The Tank-Hog away from ... palmtrees!? Stones!? That's if you cann even see over Sonic's head.

*The game was unfinished- the game lacked overal decor. Ther was little direction for the player. I remember spending an hour looking for my objective, which was to visit some dock in another part of a city quite early on in the game, and then mash up some badniks which spawned without a counter to check your progress. After I didn't kill them in the (unspecified) time limit, I had to start over again. The silver battle was relentless because if you got caught, you only got caught once, and then it was a good long cutscene of Sonic having his ring smashed (giggity) until he was dead. And up against a crate too. This isn't the film Scum.

*The story was clearly rushed, and lacked anything really resembling Sonic-like. The worlds weren't Sonic like. The characters weren't Sonic-like, hell, even Sonic wasn't his cool self. he was a cross eyed blue guy who fancied a lady. Spin backwards to Sonic Adventure, or Heroes, or fast forward to Colour, ans it's a different story altogether.

There are other things to dispise about this game, like the way it was meant to create the middle-plot between Sonic Rush's games and the Rivals series, but never quite got there, although it did give us the hint, which obviously no one ever seems to get here, or anywhere. The Sol Emeralds were, and can be a part of the game via hacking, and the plot was changed so much throughout development that even SEGA released stuff which never even appeared, like that Super Sonic trailer, or the day/night cycle, and the online capability, and the two player modes which they spoke about.

 

I re-watched most if not all of the cut scenes in this game out of boredom and curiosity as I hadn't seen them for awhile. Noticed a few things:

-The cutscene in which Knuckles first appears is one of the few/only that surprisingly doesn't need to cut to a loading screen first...which has me wondering if that's got something to do with the fact that the shadows in the scene are heavily pixelated and rather awful looking. It happens in other cut scenes, but looks especially bad here.

-It bugged me the first time around too, but I really don't see any reason for cutscenes like "Elise treats Sonic's non-existent wound in Windows XP Zone" being pre-rendered yet still use the lower-quality in-game character models unless those scenes were rush-oh wait.

-Rouge doesn't mistakenly call the Scepter of Darkness the "Book of Darkness", her GUN agent contact does. Amusingly, this is the same voice actor whose later line flubbing made it into the game. This was a mistake on the Retro wiki, so I've fixed it.

-This time I played the game on an HD television, so I noticed certain polygons seem to...tear(?)...as little transparent pixels appear between them. Rouge's wings and Mephiles' spines (in his crystalline form) seemed to do this most noticeably.

-It may just be due to his near-perpetual frown (thanks to crappy animation), but Sonic seems to act like a dick to Shadow for absolutely no reason in this game. Jarring, considering he was overly friendly to him in much of Shadow the Hedgehog.

-Going back to Knuckles...scenes involving him proved to be amusing on re-watch because I took more notice of just how out of place and forced he is in this game, and not just for the standard "Why isn't he watching the Emerald" reason people love to complain about. He's only involved because he was apparently walking around Soleana and ran into Eggman who gave him a note for Sonic. After that he just kinda...sticks around, doing essentially nothing of note aside from being thrown in a few missions, bickering with Rouge, and getting an Emerald in the Last Story. His animations even make it seem like he knows this: nearly every cut scene has him walking around in circles with a dazed look at least once with little to no actual lines from him, and there's little bits in certain scenes like him fumbling Eggman's invite and kicking a rock around while the other characters discuss serious matters that make it seem like he's mentally not all there. He's like the high-paid actor who showed up for work stoned because he knew it was just a lousy bit part for some crappy sequel.

 

Hahahaha, it's true, it's all true!

Hilarious and terrible at once.

 

Shadows are generated on-the-fly, because they're all dynamic stencil shadows. They get pixelated depending on how detailed the shadows are in a given scene - if there's a lot of objects casting shadows, the resolution of the overall shadow rendering is lowered in order to try and keep things sped up.

The really nice cutscenes were done by Blur Studios - they used to have footage of Sonic 2006's opening FMV in their demo reels, along side Shadow the Hedgehog and I think even Sonic Riders. The shitty cutscenes were probably done in-house at Sega on a far stricter budget, most likely before they established Sega V.E.

 

Actually, the shadows are done with Shadow Mapping. Shadows with the the stencil buffer are typically hard lined with no penumbra and don't get pixelated (Sonic Adventure 2 Dreamcast uses stencil shadows). Shadow Mapping on the other hand, relies on comparing depth buffers at different viewpoints to see what should be in shadow. Pixelation can be reduced with better algorithms, but the implementation in Sonic 2006 is most likely lifted straight out of example code in an early dev kit.

 

I can't speak for everyone, but I believe a sizable amount of Retro goers will vouch for the level design of '06. I love Kingdom Valley and Crisis City, they're both I believe very well laid out, but obviously hindered by the controls, especially the boarding segment of Crisis City.

Beyond that, the level design doesn't really stand out. I never go back and play the train level, and White Acropolis is way too glitchy, I hate the liquid balls of the underwater level, and the rest really don't stick out to me.

 

I thought the level design was great.

Just the engine wasn't.

 

Nearly all the stages in Sonic Nextgen were designed really well. Kingdom Valley and Crisis City are pretty well designed, sure, but I think a shoutout or two also needs to go to White Acropolis, Dusty Desert, Radical Train and Tropical Jungle. Their layouts were really well done, but further destroyed by terrible gameplay and object placement.

The only level I can't say the same about was Wave Ocean (ironically the first stage). That is probably because the entirety of the stage is made up of impossibly huge loops and narrow bridges.

 

Speaking of Sonic alone, I liked the layout. However, I had no desire to go back and play any of the levels, because they're boring to look at. The generic badniks, Iblis / Mephiles monsters, the environment failing to impress, the unpolished feel of the gameplay and the level itself... The levels don't feel or look very Sonic to me. I'd say I like Crysis City the most because it looks the most promising. Kingdom Vally has a nice concept as well, if only it wasn't grey all over with specks of green every now and then.