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

Hmm... this was my indirect suspicion. Not that they'd be using Unreal but more off that the screenshots posted earlier implied a performance profile that was incongruous to Sonic Team's own work with HE 2 on Switch. There's usually a balance, and one of the screen was enough of a jarring texture quality drop and geometry cull that I suspected it might have been closer to what my experience was with the Balan Wonderworld demo on the Switch relative to the other versions. I vaguely remember people mentioning only the PS5 version was decent on that front, though.

 

So I'll love them :P

 

Sonic bosses in general are kind of bad. Even in the best Sonic games, they still feel like a pace-breaker and not really like a challenge or proper test of the player's skills from up to that point. Loren, Sid and Bruce complained about them during SA1 way more than I thought.

CD is focused on weird gimmicks, but honestly the main thing that sets it apart for me is that most (all?) of them don't take 8 hits to beat, and many would be a pain in the ass if they did. That's the main break I noticed with Superstars here, that neither the miniboss nor the main one for Speed Jungle take 8 hits -- and would be annoying if they did, because sadly they play to modern Sonic boss design, where you have to wait for them to expose their weak points and then hit them 1 (one) time.

 

Calling the CD bosses "kinda lame" is being generous honestly, most are either downright pathetic or brainless (or both) and the ones that aren't are just infuriating (pinball). It would be difficult to be worse then them.

 

It will likely suffer from shader compilation shutter like many UE4 games on PC unless they have a precompile progress when launching for the first time, this has been an ongoing problem with UE4 games on PC especially this year and the last. UE4 games that are still using DX11 instead of 12 might not suffer from this but I’m not absolutely sure, Balan for example did use DX11.

 

New guy is named Trip

 

Seems apt even with what little we've seen. I feel like he'll be the bumbling sort throughout the game now instead of just in the little snippets that have come up.

 

Do we already know which animal and which gender Trip is?

 

Chickenshit, apparently

 

Man, whenever this argument comes up I give his compositions a new chance and, every time, I just confirm I simply don't like Senoue's output. I just... don't like him as a composer either. He's been a Sonic composer for more than half his life and all of mine, and I can count his bangers on the fingers of one hand. Panic Puppet Act 1; Be Cool, Be Wild and Be Groovy; That's The Way I Like It for Metal Harbor; the Options music in Sonic Adventure. And that's it.

(And Angel Island, both acts, if you believe they're his like I do.)

But other than that, his musical ideas just sound really repetitive. Bright, peppy and somewhat long melodic lines that feel like there are lyrics in mind, major keys and "happy" chord progressions all over the place.

So yeah, I'll just resort to be grumpy about it from now on. Can't be arsed to wait and see. I've not once been surprised by him, anyway.

 

OMFG! Talk about unexpected!! Sonic 4 Episode III as you’ve imagined it!

Like, I just became a 6 year old all over again.

I’m actually trying to clean up and make my old Dell Laptop (but still maxed to the gills) run lean as Mania doesn’t work in my Mac Mini, so I’m hoping I can run this on it through Steam.

 

My favorite gender.

 

And what's the first thing we saw Trip do?

 

As we all pointed out, the powers of the Chaos Emeralds look like the wisps powers in Colors because they were actually the main inspiration.

 

This TechRaptor interview has a few interesting tidbits.

Emerald powers are confirmed to be selected using the right analog stick. There's a cooldown on the powers. There's also a context sensitive functionality/option that has the game select a relevant emerald power when you're in proximity to a relevant means of application. The game was previewed on a Nintendo Switch, apparently.

 

I'd imagine at some point Trip's helmet will be removed to reveal his face. Also, who wants to bet Trip will betray Eggman & Fang at the end of the game and join forces with the good guys?

 

One thing I'll have to say about the Sonic CD allegations is that Sonic CD's level design is just far superior, and not nearly as "schizo" (as @Starduster called it) as you guys are making it out to be. In fact, everything in the jungle zone there is a lot weirder.

For starters, the only stage in Sonic CD with such a focus on ground gameplay is Stardust Speedway. If anything, people hate Collision Chaos and Wacky Workbench because of just how focused they are on airborne gameplay and, due to that, a relative lack of control over Sonic. But even in Stardust Speedway, the stage is carefully divided in landmarks/sections inside which you can bounce around however you want (time traveling being such an important part). And, very importantly, there isn't such a clear divide between "speedy sections" and "platforming sections", at least not like that: rather, there's an "upper zone" (less chaotic, full of floating platforms and springs that require more precision) and a "lower zone" (more chaotic, full of dangers and springs or boosters etc.). So striving to go up means something: more control and less danger, although it requires more skill and there's less chance of mantaining enough speed to activate time travel.

Very critically, you're not just thrown forward choosing paths arbitrarily. Verticality in Sonic CD means a lot, but here... I don't see it. They all just look the same. As a matter of fact, the jungle zone reminds me of Advance 2 more than anything.

 

Well, that shonen-coolness has a lot of "cuteness" to it, but executed in a slightly "aggressive"/"assertive" way. While characters are on the smaller side and have a certain "roundness" to them and even a certain (also very japanese) cheerfulness to them, they will also alternate that with intense stares and look of determination. In these moments, the facial expressions will acquire much sharper lines to it, eyes and eyebrows may even exude "bestial" qualities to them. We'd see this going all the way back to Sonic 1 and 2's japanese manuals and some artwork pieces of that time -- which exude cuteness, coolness, juvenile seriousness and determination in different points in time (and using a very japanese style of brush too)

Something which western mimicries of that same style USUALLY drop the ball on. One needs to go no further than to take a good look at most "anime-inspired" western titles on Steam for example, to see quite a few crucial details are missing. Other times the spirit and intentionality of the art is also all wrong, which also stems from a divergent cultural background.

A quick look at some timeless japanese shonen reveals some of the same SOVL to be found in the quintessential sonic games.





Oshima's drawings are exemplary of that intersection between the cute, the juvenile, and the serious and/or determined -- a hallmark of shonen and its hero journey type stories. Mania, as the high quality take on that same vibe, also managed to exude these contrasts very well in its sprites.

However, thus far, from the models and animations we've seen of of Superstars, it seems to miss the mark in some aspects of its art design and artistic choices.

 

Does shadder stutter slow down the performance of the actual gameplay or does it just result in weird graphical glitches while the game plays as normal? I apologize if these are dumb questions, l’m tech illiterate when it comes to this stuff

I love the name. I’m wondering if the name signals that he tripped into being bad. Like Fang of Eggman TRicked him or something. This is prob a stretch tho

 

When a new shader effect appears for the first time it will cause a momentary pause the severity of which depends on the hardware, it shouldn’t cause anything like prolonged slowdown or glitches but even on a high end CPU/GPU these stutters are noticeable. Watch Digital Foundry’s video on the PC port of Sackboy to get a good idea of what this looks like and why it happens.