Summer of Sonic (7.5): Sonic Generations Unleashed mod + Dolphin style Sonic Colours

Modding and emulation have been facets of the computer gaming world going back as far as I can recall. I can remember emulating the original Pokemon and playing modded levels of Doom at least two decades past, and I'm sure they existed long before that. But with the advent of the internet, also like two decades past, they crystallized into something even more pervasive. Through the wonders of these tools, it is possible to play Sonic Colours on PC, and through the 3D levels of Sonic Unleashed modded into Sonic Generations, so also on PC.

I'm going to preface this with the statement that in both cases - the GMI driven Unleashed mod and running Sonic Colours through Dolphin - I have both an uneasy feeling about blatant if benign piracy and a lack of willingness to really tinker under the hood to optimize the experience. Playing both of these games, or rather a mod and a game, has much less to do with coming to a fair evaluation of the individual game and more to sort of acknowledge the Sonic cycle.

I had to talk about the Sonic Cycle somewhere in here, and I feel like we're at the point where we can address it, given we just passed by what is subjectively - and maybe objectively, I don't know - the best Sonic game in recent years until mania strikes next year. I also sort of hoped to do it away from the depressing horror show that is Sonic 4 Episode 2, which is coming up next, unfortunately.

This is review 7.5 of 9 reviews in The Summer of Sonic! We're almost done. The previous review is here and the next review is here.

Summer of Sonic (7): Sonic Generations

If you're going to launch a title that hopes to cash in on legacy and nostalgia, Sega has essentially built a road map to do it, and how not to do it. But we've yelled about Sonic 4 Episode 1 enough, at least until Sonic 4 Episode 2 comes up and it is coming up fast. No, bae, it's Generations time.

And it's about time. Also, it's about time.

Sonic Generations has a lot of unique elements for me, first and foremost I don't think I played a non-early era Sonic game for the entire period between the release of S3&K and Generations. I watched someone play Sonic Adventure and thought that isn't for me and wrote the entire franchise off. Took it outside and buried it in the sidelot. I might have played Rush, but that's not a main console release.

Except I played Sonic 4, Episode 1, back then. And I thought - I'm not kidding here - that I'd downloaded some sort of knock off game.

I had no experience with Sonic in 3D up until I fired up Sonic Generations, and I glumly fired it up, resigning myself to being forced to play Sonic in 3D, which I'd heard so many horror stories about. I mean, I've seen the Sonic R video Jontron did. I'd read about Sonic 2006, a game so bad it still stands the test of time as bad. Sonic in 3D was a place I didn't want to go, but the promise of Sonic in 2D made to the old timey standard instead of whatever nightmare alternate reality had...

Look, I promise, no more Sonic 4. That's back here, and after this review, we have a bonus review here and the next review will be here. The next review is more Sonic 4.

Magic Duels: Nomrakrul

Last month, or thereabouts, was the one year anniversary of the free to play Magic the Gathering introductory product, "Magic Duels", made by Stainless Studios. The game has now seen three major patches since I last wrote about it, which was admittedly only ten months ago.

I wanted to do a follow up review to briefly address how the game has changed, but since this isn't an overly exciting prospect, I'm going to cut the usual introductory preamble short and just immediately go to a cut. That's not to say this is negative, but if you're not interested, why waste your time?

Summer of Sonic (6.5): Sonic After the Sequel

I'd be happy to know that most people don't know the internet like I do. I've been browsing online a pretty long time - over twenty years now, in fact  - and I've seen some shit. Unfortunately, a couple years back Steam started Early Access, and that was a rare portal into what Indie gaming kinda actually is.

A lot, and I do mean a lot, of unfinished work. Not as bad as Patreon but... Yeah... So digging through Sonic fangames is a bit of a sad affair. It is a lot like digging through Fallout New Vegas mods, mostly abandoned, patched together ruins of games that never will be. A lot of them have blog posts like "We're not canceled guys, just getting things back on track" with dates like April 2009 and so forth.

But you're not wondering about that. You're wondering, why is there a Sonic fangame in the middle of this Summer of Sonic? Because fangames are, unfinished or not, a part of the Sonic gaming genome. When Sonic CD took a fan-gamer's work at porting it and put it up for sale, it legitimized fan-gaming and Sonic Mania continues that. I feel like if Mania does well, and it sounds like it should, we may see Sonic opened up to 2d fangaming slash indie development. But if you're wondering, why this one and not just why, it's because most fangames either aren't done or turned into Freedom Planet or something of the sort. This was one recommended, that works and is done.

I knew very little about this game before installing. I believe the developer went on to make a kickstarter something that people in the SA "Thousands dead, injured as Sonic Mania sweeps the nation" thread described in less glowing terms, but I might be conflating mod makers, and really that's neither here nor there. Apparently the game connects with Sonic 2 in some capacity, but I'm not certain exactly how that works either. And I don't care. To me, canonically, Sonic CD is before Sonic 2, and then Sonic 2 goes right into Sonic 3. There's not a lot of room, but it doesn't matter. Sonic's world is the childhood world, where there's sprawling cities and insane abomination carnivals in the middle of uncivilized islands, but also vast sweeping ruins 'just over there'. He can have as many adventures as people want to put him in.

The point of reviewing a fangame, I guess, is to briefly talk about what Sonic 4 is not, and to look at someone's attempt at doing that without being an official Sega whatever. That being said, I'm mostly doing this to play the game, not to delve into what honestly should be meaningful research in re-creating physics and the mod scene.

Summer of Sonic (6): Sonic 4 Episode 1

To go back to a point I started to make in the previous review and then stopped, let's talk about how I'm dividing up the eras of Sonic games. I'm of the general belief that paradigms shift in a gradual way that does not become obvious when looking for extreme granularity. Sonic, in my mind has three eras, but trying to define the when and where of those eras is tricky. To put in very evident signposts, very clearly: Sonic 1 is early era, Sonic Adventure is middle era, Sonic Unleashed is modern era.

Actually defining where the early era ends is the most difficult: Simply put, the pixel based Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Gear, SMS games are all very evidently early era. But Sonic gradually went into weird places, and while the Dreamcast is the middle era, the exact points around it I don't know.

The modern era, as I said elsewhere, lies with Sonic Unleashed. Everything I've read has stated that Unleashed is where they nailed down the 3d and got it working in a way used in Colours and Generations, and that's where I imagine it is going to stay. At least for the games Sonic Team's repulsive inability to stick to a working model doesn't rear its head.

It's very true, however, having played Sonic Adventure 2 (and hating it, yes) that Sonic's 3D begins all the way back there in some capacity. You can feel the outlines of the new ideas taking shape, but it's not there yet, and that's why I'm defining it like that. The middle era is when Sonic didn't "get" 3D, but it's still Sonic, I guess. Sonic Heroes was better about this, but it's still not quite Generations.

Meanwhile, Sonic actually has quite a few 2D games. Rush, Advance, so on and so forth. Many of these were developed by DIMPS, and while I don't personally like the DIMPS games, they went to them for the atavistic throwback that is Sonic 4 Episode 1, a modern era game desperately trying to be an early era game.

The results are... Interesting...

Sonic 4 Episode 1 is the sixth of nine games in the Summer of Sonic! The previous main entry is here, while the next bonus entry is here while the next main entry is here. Those two won't be up open initial posting, but that's just how this works.

Little spaceship adventures: Mysterious Space

There's this weird feeling I get sometimes when I wonder about how children growing up nowadays interact with video games and imagining what they'd want. Not in the sense of them imagining the games they want to play, since the hype pumping media handles that, but what they imagine when and if they imagine some hypothetical game. What spills from their imaginations, now that gaming is pretty unrestricted in what it can do.

As a child, I imagined a lot of the things that are now common place. Open world, overworld maps, exploration and procedurally generated, these concepts all seemed "the future" and they slowly came to pass. Now that we're here, well...

They're pretty great. Anyway, Mysterious Space is, I think sort of the game I imagined as a child. Admittedly this is a very budget little indie title, nothing exotic or exciting about it, but it does have that sense of wonder to it. It is basically a game about a little spaceship, adventuring across the stars, or more in particular flying down to planets and exploring them for precious fuel.

Oh, and yeah, Mysterious Space is essentially a roguelike or roguelite or whatever I'm supposed to call this basic set of mechanics. They are grafted onto a simple space shooter, but the combination actually works really well, as opposed to my general feeling toward rogueLs.

This game doesn't have the brutal fatigue that sets in, nor the unexplained mechanics you just try to figure out desperately that the game maker assumed you'd read a wiki on. It's very easy to figure out what you're doing in this game, which is a plus and a minus at once.

Summer of Sonic (5.5): Sonic Heroes

Super Bunnyhop also did a video on "the first levels" of Sonic games, and one of the ones he said he quite liked was the opening to Sonic Heroes. After a bit of digging, I realized this game had a PC port, but for whatever odd reason was never ported to Steam. I assumed that it wouldn't work out of the box, wouldn't install, and if nothing else wouldn't work with Windows 10. That would explain why it wasn't on Steam.

I was wrong.

Well, I was sort of wrong.

Out of the box it did in fact install and does in fact work with Windows 10. It starts up, the game loads - albeit sluggishly initially - and then I began the tutorial. At first I thought "this looks at a little better than SA2, but the camera is bad" and then I thought "uh the camera is really bad, what is going on" and then I realized: the camera spins incessantly and builds speed until it begins shearing through the earth.

I want to point out that the SA2 camera is so bad it took me a while playing the next game to realize the camera was bugging out. That's not to say that Sonic Heroes camera is a dramatic improvement, just that SA2 soured me so much I was surprised at something working improperly.

Luckily, the apparent fix is to plug in an Xbox 360 controller - which took me a day to dig out, but whatever - and replace the Xbox One controller with it. I've got to admit I'm not exactly pleased to be using the 360 controller, given it just feels worse, but it's a great deal more functional than the camera spinning incessantly. I assumed if the game was a complete dumpster fire I'd just put it right down.

I mean I also assumed it was going to be a complete dumpster fire. Middle era Sonic! Dumpster fire! Right into the trash with you, hedgehog!

This is review five and a half out of nine (But how many halves!?) of the Summer of Sonic review set. Review five is here while review six, which will be up sooner than later, is here.

Summer of Sonic (5): Sonic Adventure 2

I'm unwilling to spend too much time in the middle era of Sonic da Hedgehog, but there's not that many middle era games in the bundle anyway. For my purposes, I'm labeling "middle era" as everything after the Genesis/CD/32x games but before Sonic Unleashed, though there's probably some mobile games or something that don't sort evenly. The division here is that, from what I've read, Sonic Unleashed is where they actually "got" 3D even though it also has a werehog for some blighted reason.

Think of the middle age as the awkward teenage years of Sonic and you'll probably be able to visualize where it begins and ends. I would actually not mind giving Sonic Heroes a try, since it sounds bizarre, but that game isn't on Steam even though it apparently had a PC release? And no, I am not going to pay money to buy a physical media of a PC port of Sonic Heroes. Especially since I'm out of devices that I can install CDs or DVDs onto.

You ever looked at the number of Dreamcasts sold? It is pretty grim. I mean, it sold a little less than where the Xbox One is at now. Less than the Xbox One! Funny thing is a friend of mine owned a Dreamcast, but I never wanted to play a Sonic on it. Early console 3D just made me sick. That early console 3D game people gush over? Yeah? I hate it.

I don't care which. I probably hated it. On the other hand, the Dreamcast is always well remembered by those who played it. Excellent arcade ports, Crazy Taxi and Power-stone and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It's interesting how a well-liked console managed to barely sell.

Anyway, Sonic Adventure 2 was more interesting than 1 to play because it introduces Shadow. Also, it introduces Rouge the Bat, who is like... Knuckles frenemy love interest? Or something? Both of these characters are beautifully terrible. Shadow is the ultimate edgelord, while Rouge is like campy 60s sex appeal except they put a bat head on her. I could totally see her facing off as an Adam West era Batman villain, if she wasn't a bat. If they didn't put a bat head on her. Yeesh.

It's just batty. This is Summer of Sonic review number five of nine; the previous review (which is early era) is here while the next (bonus) review for the middle era Sonic is here and the next review into the modern era will be here.

Indie Gradius: Counterattack

I end up in this situation, pretty often, where I pick up an indie game and I want to write my review like... 15 minutes into playing it. I'm not saying AAA games have more depth, but they tend to ease you into things, whereas games like this you just don't feel like finishing because bam you feel like you already know everything about it.

Counterattack is, before I mention anything else, an early access title. I have no idea what is missing from the game, although the news does mention they plan to revamp the UI. Which is good, because the UI is simply awful, but if they admit they need to work on it I'm not holding it against them.

As for the game itself; it's a side-scrolling space shooter. The storyline is simple: mankind something something, many robots, blah blah, super science space fighter shoot planes, pew pew, off we go to the lasers. The game is a bit lacking in some categories and robust in others.

Summer of Sonic (4): Sonic 3 and Knuckles

Welcome back to the Summer of Sonic, which has now reached what many will join me in calling the apex of the series, and likely the most pointless review of anything I will ever write in my life. Were I to review a loaf of bread, it would likely carry more meaning, since at least I could say something more than one of the few examples of fanboy squealing in my life.

Just kidding. There's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about, just not in the concept of a review.

Sonic 3 (and Knuckles!) is the name given to combining Sonic the Hedgehog 3 with Sonic and Knuckles. In their original incarnations, Sonic and Knuckles was capable of accepting another game on top of it. They referred to this as 'lock on' technology, which they then ... Never used again to my knowledge, typical Sega. You could play Knuckles in Sonic 2, and practice the special stages with other games even. Other games locked on would do this for whatever reason, it would pick a random special stage and you could get some practice with the mechanics.

Sonic 3 inversely featured the ability to save your game, which doesn't sound impressive now, but was completely unusual for a Sonic game at the time. S&K itself can't save, but it's very short, in fact Sonic 3 is pretty short as well. Combined together, though, as a kid the save thing was really helpful.

I'm going to address the game as a unified title and not individually; they're both completely playable, but the game was split in development and re-combined later, so I think this is the game "as intended" and we'll just go with that. (Although yes, as intended is up for debate, since development cut Sonic 3 in half, so who knows what they'd really have done?)

This is review four of nine in the Summer of Sonic; the preview review is here and the next one will be here whenever I get it up.

Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge

Ultionus is one of the groupees greenlight bundle games that looked better than the average and stood out for a while. It took a bit to get through greenlight and get on steam, then get its keys through groupees, but eventually it did. And then the developer said he'd put cards on it eventually, and I guess I just forgot about it until now while browsing through games on my account that still have cards.

Which is like 200 or something, for what its worth. (Worth: About $80)

Ultionus is a remake of Phantis, which was on the Spectrum ZX or something and whether or not it is licensed to do so, I don't know and I'm not going to bother looking it up. You don't care anyway. Phantis was a run and gun platformer/shootie type game and this is too. Frankly, it's pretty generic in this regard.  You play as a lady, she has a gun, you shoot some monsters and progress in a 2d platforming world.

If you're looking for modern mechanics, or even modern gender portrayals, don't get too hung up on this game cuz it ain't interested in doing any of that.