2016 - Year of Sonic - Year in review

Usual caveats and ranking and caveats to ranking apply. All of this is subjective, these are my reviews, if you think as I do you'll agree. But you don't, so here's how the system generally breaks down;

A - A game I would recommend to people who don't like a genre, something good enough for people generally against it to try. These are the games I think you should definitely look into. This isn't a ranking like "10/10" or "four and a half stars, delivered pizza to my house, performed sexual favors and then changed the oil on my car", this is evaluating games subjectively, from my perspective, who I'd recommend them to. Which is the point of reviewing, to me, anyway.

And these are the games where I'd say "More than the usual". Mind you, I don't mean you should move hard outside you genre just to force yourself to try them. If you hate shooters, it's unlikely an A-rank game is going to redefine how you look at them. Look for them on sale and the like. These are games in X genre that appeal to people who don't usually like X genre.

B - Being games are excellent examples of their genre, but don't stand outside their genre. You have to be interested, at least a little, in playing this sort of game. They have to be your jam.  That's not to say a B rank game is necessarily more or less fun than an A rank game, as frankly, I had the most fun with a B rank game this year. This is more that it tends to be a little more bogged down in genre conventions and you need to be keen on how it works.

C - Games that you need to want to play the genre to want to play. Essentially, if B rank games are games where if you like ARPGs you'll like them, C rank games are ones where you need to be in the mood for the genre to like them. If you're not feeling it, well, you probably won't feel it.

D - Games I feel personally won't appeal to most people even within those that like the genre. That's not to say D rank games are all unplayable, or even that they're all garbage. Just that I'm not sure even if you were in the mood you'd be up for these.

E - Games I never finish reviewing, so they don't go on this list. There's about 10-20 games a year that fall into this category.

Also, this is a listing of games I reviewed this year, very few of which are ever actually from a given year. This is a guide to going through Steam sales and picking out stuff you might have missed at a low price, not a guide to the latest and greatest. I'm not even suggesting you buy these games this year.

I generally tend to lean toward lowering the ranking of games that are more difficult. As I said, this is about recommending games, and "difficult" is something of a subgenre. I've never met a "tuned to be difficult game" I would actually say I would recommend to anyone to pick up and try. There's lots of good ones, but the harder you tune a game, the less people who can play it and enjoy it.

The Gap: There's a four month gap in my reviews this year, which often happens around March, but went kinda wild this time. Basically, I played Serious Sam 3 - which I hated - Arkelash Legacy - which was disappointing - and spent like fifty hours dicking around with Skyrim but never actually finished it. Also Phantasy Star 2, which I think I eventually reviewed but who cares.

Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.

Witch cards will drop: Blazerush

Blazerush is an old standard of game that has, on the most part, gone out of style. I played RC Pro AM back when I was a wee tyke and I'm sure everyone has heard of Rock n Roll racing, which was in the news recently when some Russian studio tried to make a clone and launch it on steam. That got deleted off Steam pretty quickly.

Anyway, basically you drive cars with an overhead isometric perspective, but rendered in proper 3d as opposed to the classic sprites that make up the long ago champions of the genre. In this case, you choose a driver and with it a car, and then drive around vaguely sci-fi tracks with a variety of scenarios. The basic game mode of driving to win the race makes up about a third of scenarios, with 'king of the hill' style races and this weird game mode where you're trying to stay in the lead because there's a giant rolling machine chasing the race and also not fall off, and you score points as people crash. The latter makes for some really enjoyable gameplay; the former usually starts with an AI breaking into the lead and then you just restart because the other AIs will jump on you if you try to catch up.

The gameplay is less built around consistently holding down the lead and more consistently recovering your position as you, and other cars, tumble off the track or get exploded by power-ups. In this sense the game is relatively fun for a couple hours, but it didn't hold my attention long.

In terms of visuals and audio, it's a nice looking little title with a couple decent sounding tracks. Nothing impressive, but easy on the eyes with some cool car designs. In theory there's hovercars and rocket cars, but they don't perform all that differently and don't expect F-zero style speed out of the game. In fact, since the camera aims to fit all the cars on the screen at the same time, you'll never get much of a lead going in this game. If a car falls back far enough, it actually gets leap frogged forward. So the sense of speed is lost a little, and instead the game is as I said, mostly about constantly recovering and tumbling off the track. Even the power ups feel kinda pointless in this. You get a mix of boosts and weapons, but most of the weapons will only knock someone back a little bit. There's just not that far back to actually go, probably because the game is designed as a couch game. Which is good if you're playing it as such, but I never did and I don't think I'd take time out of a social gathering to play an updated RC pro am, you know?

Which is fine, but don't expect it to feel like a skill-based racing game. There's not really much to talk about, when it comes to Blazerush. It has lots of medals and badges and scoring, but none of them really seemed to do much of anything besides unlocking tracks. As long as I continued to do ok in events, I never even noticed tracks needing more medals to unlock, pardoning 1 track once. Because of the game's chaotic nature, I barely even noticed the different tracks anyway. The power ups and game mode are way more crucial than the design of the track.

Anyway, Blazerush isn't a great game by an metric, but it's a solid enough title to play for an afternoon as I did before getting bored with it. Like I said, you don't find much variety in the tracks, but on top of that they don't change all that much or really push the limit. You can't fall back that far or get that huge a lead anyway, so it doesn't make much difference in the end. The night levels looked cool, but they actually just made it harder to pick up power ups, which is already a luck based hassle to begin with. If you happen to see it in a bundle or have it from a bundle, it's fine for said afternoon. But nothing I'd seek out at full price.

Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.

Top Seven Zones I'd like to see remixed in Sonic Mania

I just can't stop talking about Sonic these days. I recently watched a video that presented the youtuber's personal picks for the top seven they'd like to see. It's a good video, feel free to watch it before I go over my picks.

And now, I use the break function, because reasons

From the forge of Donut Steel: Freedom Planet

While Sonic After the Sequel, made by one LakeFeperd, remains firmly in the camp of fan game not all Sonic fan games remain as such. To my understanding, Freedom Planet is the effort of a team that started out making a fan game and then realized they'd, you know, actually like to own their work. This is of course something of a double edged sword, as a Sonic fan game gives you a built in audience - LakeFeperd went on to begin working on Spark the Electric Jester, with a kickstarter and all though - but also you can't monetize in any real way.

Well, sort of. I mean Team Four Star does "fan parody" work on youtube and they've monetized the crud out of that. There's often ways around. But regardless, Freedom Planet's team wanted to actual make money off the game, maybe not some alternate channel, so it ended up as whatever you want to call it now.

I find it kinda jarring when people describe a game as a "fangame of X" and then go on to then admit well ok it's actually a fangame of X, Y and Z and then also a weeb fantasy and a lot of weird stuff that kinda makes me think furries got worked into the game past the Sonic threshold to boot. And don't get me wrong, Sonic is on a threshold and he crosses it in some games as well. Don't make out with teenage human girls Sonic. That's wrong.

Freedom Planet is, ultimately, more or less it's own thing. Whatever people claim is a big part of the game honestly comes off as utterly diluted into the larger whole of the game's influences until while you might recognize an individual part, the gameplay of the gestalt is not really recognizable. I think that's sort of a plus or minus; if you're looking at this review as a review of a "Sonic fan game" no, not really.

But if you're looking for a game that doesn't play a lot like other games in the genre and feels like something unique - for better or worse - I actually think Freedom Planet does manage a lot of that. How well, though, eh...

As an aside, I played about an hour of Freedom Planet several months back (actually maybe in 2015, I'm not quite sure) and then shelved it. The game just didn't grab me, but, given this was just the Summer of Sonic I felt like if there was a time to play it, this was it. 

Sonic Mania May 31st CE

Argh my wallet blargh get hype LOOK AT THAT GORGEOUS BOX got hype

why couldn't I stop myself from buying this

IT NEVER ENDS

Summer of Sonic: Wrap-Up

Tables of Contents for the Summer of Sonic;

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic 2

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Sonic CD

Sonic 4 E1

Sonic Heroes

Sonic Adventure 2

Sonic ATS

Sonic Lost World

Sonic 4 E2

Sonic Generations

Unleashed + Dolphin Colors

After the break are a couple closing statements and thoughts on the series, good and bad, as well as my favorite Sonic game and so forth. And yes that table of images looks even worse on my end. I have no idea why blogger hates me so. Sorry. It also won't let me set them up in chronological order.

Relevant to Sonic: Fotonica

Most of my gaming news comes through a pretty narrow selection of youtube channels and the occasional hit off my otherwise trump-riddled facebook news feed, which tends to overlap with google news feed and complaining media isn't what I was going to get into. Anyway, I mostly watch superbunnyhop, wish I could enjoy his podcast but one of the trip is a donger, and then I get the rest from Super Best Friends and a bit of Total Biscuit, who is also a bit of a donger but at least a focused one.

I mean I get you want to talk about protecting the consumer and all the menu options and FOV sliders, but sometimes I kinda wish you could just click on a video and here a review. And sometimes you can so... Anyway, Fotonica got played on the 2BF's youtube channel. The game didn't look super amazing, but it looked like a 3d running game, so I picked it up as a method of contrasting with the Sonic games.

At its core Fotonica is one of the simplest titles you'll ever play or look at. It has one button, and that button is Goes Fast. Upon clicking the goes fast, you go Goes fast. When you release, you jump, and if you click again while jumping you attempt to force toward the ground to try to Goes fast once more. The game's visuals are complex wireframes, but not much beyond that, and the gameplay is...

Something alright.

The game relates back to Sonic because it creates longevity through levels which must be learned through muscle memory and rote memorization. Player skill is largely irrelevant; the game under-explains its mechanics and you're often left wondering what you were supposed to do. It also goes fast, beautifully fast, but then abruptly it doesn't, You don't so much die as fall off, and unlike Sonic, the game instantly restarts when you hit another button, although for whatever reason it's the Back button on the xbox one controller which feels a little awkward as that hand's side of the controller isn't otherwise in use.

One plus is the game has an excellent, minimalist score that frames the weird atmosphere beautiful. It's not beepy boop chip tunes, but gentle and enticing techno. It lends an airy sense of tranquility the game's design does not carry with it. Fotanica, you see, is not about player skill in the least - you are incapable of seeing the things you're going to respond to, so once you have the basics down you see little improvement - it is entirely about rote memorization. You can only get better at this game through replaying levels, though there's a period of learning how to master the jumps.

The game touts exploration as a feature, but I don't think that has any real meaning. The terrain is intentionally flat and devoid of substance; which is beneficial to the design, but offers nothing to the brain. The levels are all around the same difficulty, eventually you memorize them, or more likely, eventually you join me in getting bored. That being said, if you can get it in a bundle or the price tag doesn't bother you, I think there's a unique - if short lived - experience here.

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.

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.

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.

Summer of Sonic (3): Sonic CD

For a long time in my childhood and even into my adulthood, I completely did not realize Sonic CD was really a thing. I imagine I had at some point seen or heard about it, but my affection for the Genesis was never so great as to spend that kind of money on a wasted peripheral. So I just put it into the back of my mind and never considered it. Sonic to me, like many franchises, was swallowed up in the 3D era and forgotten about. Which is to say I pretty uniformly hated each and every transitional game of 2D into 3D. Yes, even that one, or that other one you're excited about. Yes, Sonic CD is 2D and gorgeous 2D at that, but by the time I had the funds to pursue a Sega CD, I certainly wasn't interested in doing so.

I believe the game was ported to be PC a long time ago, but I never saw that either. I hadn't realized I could be playing the game until it was ported to Steam, and even then, I think I pirated it and played it briefly before forgetting about it.

Sonic CD has, to my understanding, an interesting history. It is a marquee title for a system that sold very few copies. It is basically like headlining the titanic. It is also the product of splitting the Sonic team in half and producing two Sonic games at once, with rapidly divergent design perspectives. I feel that itching in the back of my teeth when I read about it, that sensation that the whole story isn't being properly presented to me, so I'll let readers do their own digging. It's certainly an interesting way to continue a franchise.

Sonic CD on Steam is, to my understanding, the Taxman / Christian Whitehead port in all its glory, and it does run well. There's a story about that guy in the first half of this Superbunny Hop video here, which deals with Sonic Mania, the announcement of which feels oddly coincidental. I didn't know, but realizing I picked up the anniversary bundle and this is the 25th anniversary announcement, it actually isn't much of a coincidence.

This is Sonic game #3 (done in chronological order) of Summer of Sonic. The previous game is here, and the next game will be here, once I actually get that written up.