The collision course.

Between playing Sonic and watching people's playthrough and review of Sonic games, lately I seem quite focused on what happened since I started to stop paying attention to the franchise.

Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Heroes... Sonic's jump into 3D was indeed a rough one.  The only 3rd generation consoles I owned were the Dreamcast and the PS2, and I think I must point this out for the sake of Sonic Heroes.  Unlike the 2D predecessors which I still love to this day, SA1, SA2, and Heroes especially all annoyed me for similar reasons.  The first would be the disobedient camera and clipping through the floor.  Now, that's not to say the classics were free from the floor clipping, but it was extremely minimal.  Also, it's not something I hold against the game designers now, but when I think about everything I disliked about those 3 games where SA1 and SA2 had me with their music, sort of had me with their graphics, and hit or missed me with their gameplay and Heroes just...

When I think of summing up my experience with Heroes, all I see is Team Sonic just clipping through the floor for no reason whatsoever and the lack of collision detection makes me want to call this Dreamcast Era, "The collision course."

Because by the time I finished Heroes, I decided that I was finished with Sonic.


By the time Shadow The Hedgehog came out, I remember the ads.  All I could think of was, "Yeah, I'm probably not going to buy this game."  In 2004 and 2005, I was extremely curious about the Advance series while I was working in the video games department of Target.  Eventually somewhere down the line, I played these games and they were truly awesome.  They were so good (or more specifically, a much better experience than SA1 to Heroes), I couldn't fathom how unpopular they were (and still are).

However, it eventually made sense to me when I thought back on Sonic's reputation on handheld games during the 16-bit console era.  Yeah, handheld gaming in general didn't always have the stereotypical legitimacy found in console gaming.  In spite of the fact that by the time the Gameboy Advance was hot, when it came to Sonic fans, the expectation actually didn't meet the old reality.  Well, in a way it met the old reality that there was actually a legitimate classic Sonic experience being produced very well.

I find it strange to think about where I was in life in 2005 and 2006.  I won't get into it too much, but I will say that like Sonic, they were not the best years of my life either.  Shadow The Hedgehog was avoided and Sonic 06 was completely off my radar, and now they seem to have my attention.  After watching Clement's playthrough of Shadow and Johnny's review of the game, I conclude that story in this series... is worthless.  It raises too many questions in my mind about how the game even came into fruition and the million dollar question is why did anyone, especially Rouge just simply tell Shadow what happened?  Because they didn't: Shadow The Hedgehog (2005).

This is the point of the series where it just collides into chaos and I was somewhere off in some MMO far away from the accident.

Due to my absence, ShTH and 06 are deserving of some attention due to my undying love for the franchise.  I think I've seen enough, though.  It's sad that in spite of 06 arguably being the worst game in the series, I find Shadow was just the most unnecessary.  I wouldn't mind seeing a game starring Shadow, but I believe it would've made a better handheld game.  A competent 3D Sonic gameplay should have been produced first because there truly was no need to release this game asap.

But at least I can credit it for being the last main series game with characters that were remotely confident (aside from them being able to be thinking characters in a serious plot, at least SA2 did that right), because after this?  Well... there's still Amy.

And by the time Sonic 06 was released, it's clear that unlike the scene in SA1 where Chaos destroys the city, or when Eggman splits the planet into 7 parts... this time, there were casualties for real, Sonic among them.  I would call this era of Sonic games "The crash site."


My return to console gaming in 2011 would eventually lead me to Sonic Unleashed.  If the PS2 version of Sonic Heroes at best succeeded in annoying me, then the 360 version of Unleashed would succeed in ultimately pissing me off.  If I were to review the game based on my first playthrough of the game, I'd probably rate the game a 4 out of 10.  What did I dislike most about it?  Certain werehog elements like the camera and no shadow or light beneath the werehog indicating his position if he were to jump.

Sonic 4... at first, I thought the game was okay, but eventually it began to bore me.  Never has a Sonic game that I've played, done that.  It was and still to this day, ununderstandable how Jun Senoue is responsible for the music.  At first I thought it was the composition, but later I realized it was actually the instruments that made most of the music sound so terrible.  I had never played a Sonic game before where the music was just an insult.

Generations was... good.

Yeah, really.  That's all I'm going to say for now.

Oh, and Colors was great.  Still need to play it more, though.

What would I call this era of Sonic games, though... from Unleashed to Generations... (or Episode 4.)

Probably "The Ego (False self) vs The Soul (True Self)".  More than just gameplay-wise, most of Sonic 4 easily represents a false Sonic to me.  A lot of Sonic in his 3D games represents his true self, granted he was definitely best in Unleashed.

endrant.