Sonic Unleashed: Angry Birds Edition

I didn't get to record the run I wanted, but I got this...

All sorts of results from D-speeding there.  What happens is simply circumstantial.

It's been infuriating frustrating... but I'll get it.

That run when everything goes according to plan!

All while I'm not recording of course.

Seriously, I hate to say it but I'm sort of in doubt that I can pull off a faster time... well, actually there was one trick up my sleeve I did not incorporate in that run that would shave off a second.  I say this because my previous time was a whopping 4+ seconds slower.

But yes, I've been busy with Unleashed.  I have attempted to record this stage, but I didn't like the results.  Still, I should be saying that I can do better.  Running this stage was me starting at 1:40ish to 1:30ish to 1:20ish and now sub-1:20.  The fastest time I believe is Kakipi1000's run who did it at 1:07 (and yeah, I'm using glitches as most non-glitch runs are low to mid 1:20s).

I really would have loved that run recorded because it seems like some of the success is luck based.  Compared to Generations, Unleashed just feels like a more unstable environment.

Not to mention Sonic is a more unstable hedgehog here, too.

Sonic Dash is out today.

It looks fun, but...

Totally not missing out on anything by not getting it, am I?

ragequitmoar

Speed running when you're already frustrated about other things is a recipe for a broken control pad.

... luckily, it still works!  Will try again later.

Sonic 06...

I WILL. TOUCH. IT.

Sega's decision making about Sonic.

Why the hell does Sega continue to release ports of Sonic Labyrinth?  I just realized they did this last year.

Until games like Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic 06 were released, this was arguably the worst game in the series.

Why is Sega so bent on keeping the bad Sonic games accessible when they should be forgettable over making the good Sonic games more accessible?

Why does Sega try so hard to slow down Sonic?

Seriously, Sonic Labyrinth?

Before Sonic Pocket Adventure?

Before any of the Game Gear titles

Before the Advance series?

Really, Sega?

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.

Clement's Sonic Heroes Let's Play.

He may not have the best video quality in general, but I enjoy hearing his commentary.  Seems like I've been watching a lot of his videos lately.

When I get the urge to play an old Sonic game that I played before but didn't like, it's probably not a great idea to watch someone else play through it.  This is mostly because if I'm reminded about why I didn't enjoy the game in the past, it might ruin the appeal of playing it again.  That's not something I should seriously worry about when it comes to this game because I do not own the XBOX version of the game.

Ugh.  Well, he uploaded his playthrough of 3 out of the 4 teams, and I was reminded just how poorly implemented some of Team Chaotix's missions are, but that won't stop me from playing it.

Too bad it's not on Steam, but even if it was, I'd still have a bit of a problem playing it as for reasons beyond me, my corded XBOX 360 control pad doesn't want to work.  It was a $30 aftermarket pad (forgot which company made it) and it wasn't perfect.  RT would sometimes catch/get stuck (sucks for needing to drift in Unleashed/Generations)  I find it bad that I own 3 XBox 360 pads and I have an issue with all of them.

The one that came with the console (the one I use the most) has an LB that doesn't want to work (this is problematic for Sonic Unleashed if I want to QSS.)  The second cordless pad I bought (which turned out to be an older model) has a d-pad that responds iffy when I need to use it (I remember this being an issue for games like Bayonetta) and occasionally the pad wants to lose it's signal.

Feels like my days with the Sega Genesis where buttons would get stuck - and that was back when we all thought the mouth was the dirtiest place on the body.  I think I went through at least 4.  Nope.  It's your hands, and it doesn't take an actively used control pad to prove it.

But I definitely encourage keeping game pads clean with a toothbrush and hands cleaned with soap and water.

Sonic 3 & Sonic & Knuckles.

So, I decided to play both of these games (well, all of the classics except CD) to get a high score, seeing that one of my friends on my friends list was beating me in every classic Sonic game.  I think I was able to rank at the top for all games except Sonic 2 because I really do not like the bonus stages in that game.  I understand that it's mostly memorization, but the design was never appealing to me.  There's no sense of speed, no sense of platforming (like Sonic 1 or even Ep1's bonus stages) and I don't get how Sega felt it was worth bringing back in many future titles since 1992 all the way to 2012.  Maybe it's because Sonic 2 was their favorite game (as well as for many fans of the franchise, too) but I dunno.  To me, it just took away from the experience instead of really adding to it like the other bonus stages in the franchise... which I have a lot to talk about soon enough.

But I want to discuss these two games.  It's rare that I'd play them separately, but this was a score attack and generally, score in a Sonic game is trivial to me (and I just noticed Sonic 3 & Knuckles - the complete game... has a Leaderboard as well, where my score ranks at the top of the list on my friends).  A casual playthrough of both of these games would involve me getting the Chaos Emeralds as efficiently as possible and taking routes in stages that I am most comfortable with.  This time, I wanted to clear acts with as many rings as possible, though I don't know which routes allow you to profit the most, so my goal was just to not lose what I've collected.  (I also do not know if Tails is the better character for this, but given his added mobility, I would guess YES, but I played as Sonic & Tails.)  It's easy enough for me to not die playing both these games so this wasn't generally a challenge.  Another way of ensuring you can attain a high score is to complete a special stage in either game with a Perfect, and this alone separates the Sonic 3 special stages from the Sonic & Knuckles ones in terms of difficulty.

Personally, if I simply clear all of the blue spheres in the stages for the Emerald (as I've always done as a kid), I find that Sonic & Knuckles has the easier stages, thus it makes getting Hyper Sonic or Knuckles (or Super Tails) that much easier.  However, obtaining a Perfect in Sonic 3 is much easier because turning blue spheres into rings mostly involves collecting the outer blue spheres (until the last stage where it begins to become a bit tricky).  In Sonic & Knuckles, the difference is that you're not only turning blue spheres into rings, you're also turning red spheres (surrounding these blue spheres) into rings as well.  The concept is still the same where you're still turning the outer blue spheres all red (which form a square or a rectangle with reds in the center) so they can all turn into rings.  This means that you have to take a whole new approach at collecting rings.  Plus, Sonic & Knuckles (unlike Sonic 3) has loose rings already scattered on the stage, and there is one stage in particular that makes collecting them pretty challenging as the stage speeds up gradually from you being in it.

Nevertheless, I got a perfect in all the stages and even got a perfect while still failing it once (which means an extra 50,000 points, so I suppose you can make the most out of this if you know where every super ring in both games is and save 7 of them for getting emeralds and a perfect to obtain the highest score from each stage.)

Sonic 3 was a score of 672910.  I think my previous score was literally under 200k for both games.
Sonic & Knuckles was a score of 783920.  Interestingly enough, I rank at 130.  I'm guessing because there's no Tails.

In the future, I'll run Sonic 3 & Knuckles and do a score attack.  I may try another Sonic 1 run because I don't know the bonus stages well, so I had bad luck collecting more than 2 emeralds.

I'll be recording another speed run soon.  It will be my first full Unleashed stage and fortunately (or unfortunately) I can't think of a song to use for the run, so it might wind up being an upload that's not double compressed...

... or is it triple compressed if I upload it to YouTube?  Shit.

Sonic games I would like to play that I've never played before.

This will be ultra brief.

Sonic Rush Adventure - I like the artwork (not so much the 3D artwork), the characters, and the rush gameplay does interest me.  Blaze The Cat kind of interests me.  Currently, I own no handheld system, so who knows when this will occur.

Sonic Colors (DS) - From what I've seen, the story isn't... all that memorable.  Again, gameplay curiosity.

Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) - This is seriously up in the air right now.

Sonic Pocket Adventure - My pleasure button could possibly be pressed very firmly with this title.

Sonic Generations (3DS) - I'm actually kind of pessimistic about this title.  It couldn't possibly be as bad as Sonic 4.