Instruments of SATAM

[davidn]

Thanks to my neurotic limit-of-one-per-day posting habits, you've probably now already heard that Sega just announced that their top secret Project Needlemouse is, in fact, Sonic 4, in the most confident series misnumbering since Grand Theft Auto. The title seems to be an indication that this time they're determined to ignore the entire direction of the series after 1994 and to go back to what people who grew up with the Megadrive (as I sort of did) thought made the game special.

You might as well not bother with the video now

There really isn't much to the video linked above, apart from showing a brief glimpse of the game being rendered in 3D but actually played in 2D, almost Donkey Kong Country style - fortunately the notoriously mental fan community has naturally got to analyzing ludicrous things such as the tiny reflections in bits of the video like they're on CSI, to reveal some more theories about the game.

If other indications are to be believed it'll also have 16-bit-styled music (listen to the Z80-style brave attempt at a snare drum sound!), which is something I'd look forward to immensely - nostalgia service on recent things I've played has been very high indeed. I did feel a pang of apprehension at the "Episode 1" bit because of the number of ways it's possible to abuse piecemeal-downloadable games, but then I realized that my favourite games ever were all episodic, so that's probably all right. And they accidentally pioneered the concept in cartridge form with the third game anyway. So, for the moment, we can confidently repeat the Sega mantra of the last ten years and just say "This is looking like it might not be terrible".

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

"Just when I thought I was out... they drag me back in..."

Dammit. I thought after the horrible controls of Sonic Heroes, and the near-nonsense plotline of Shadow the Hedgehog (although that's technically not a Sonic game, but still), I'd managed to break out of the cycle of eating up Sonic games. And I stood, vindicated in my choice, as the Xbox Sonic The Hedgehog turned out to be crap, and Sonic and the Black Knight. And I know some people liked Unleashed, but I stand by my claim that were-Sonic with stretchy Dhalsim arms and bosses that require split-second timing to defeat else they regain half their health and carry on fighting was a fucking terrible idea. But... an old-school Sonic game, without 20 new meaningless "characters" (or rather, bland stand-ins inserted for plot device and game-mechanic-explanation purposes), or humans other than Robotnik (that never worked, even back in Sonic Adventure days)... dammit, that might be the thing that could draw me into it again.

*sigh* Dammit, Sonic the Crackhog. You were WoW, fifteen years before WoW existed.

D.F.

[davidn]

If you've been playing them you've been paying more attention than I have! I borrowed Chronicles from my brother, and that started off all right but got agonizingly repetitive by the end. The last I remember playing was the first Adventure game in 1999 (on that same Dreamcast where I overwrote the Soul Calibur save), and I thought it was amazing at the time but it's surprising how tatty it seems going back to it now via an emulator.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I desperately wanted to like Chronicles, but I couldn't get past the Quick Time Events needed to make the battle system work. By the time the enemies started using them against me, I just died wholescale, against rubbish; the equivalent of getting a Total Party Kill from facing a single pair of Goddamn Bats. I never made it past the second chapter.

Yes, I suck.

D.F.

[davidn]

It's strange, because I remember saying to you at the time that I liked those and thought that they added something to the usually menu-based RPGery, but... once you've seen/done them a hundred times they take far too long, like every turn being an Eden from FF8, and it's those that put me off finishing (especially when near the end you'll frequently just do 0 damage for status reasons that aren't always obvious).