Slashdot Mirror
How Sega Can Save Sonic
You may recall the conversation we had at the end of last year, riffing off of a Retrogaming article on how Sega ruined Sonic. 1up has returned with a response, positing how the company can save their mascot from the death of ignominy. Their advice is simple: Go Fast, ditch Shadow, make fewer games. "Remember Blast Processing? It was a sham, sure, but the idea behind it was a perfect summation of what Sonic was about: A game so fast that the Genesis had to be specially programmed to keep up with it. Slowing down to drink in the ambiance or whatever is pretty much the exact opposite of Blast Processing. Being forced to, say, go fishing in a Sonic game is like buying a Ferrari so you can take naps in the backseat."
The final straw for me was when they introduced the god-awful fake pop music, complete with vocals and lyrics about Sonic. Something about it just really makes me cringe.
They need to spend more time developing each 3D game. The first Sonic Adventure game for Dreamcast was decent, but everything since has been just 'meh'. Because there are always tight deadlines for each game, Sega ends up producing a mediocre game with bugs, sloppy controls, unimaginative level design, and God-awful voice acting. They shouldn't have ever given them voices.
But, because Sega continues to pump out one game after another, and because they try to meet deadlines, we end up with crap like this.
A name as big as Sonic can afford to suffer one or two release setbacks for the sake of having more time to test and refine a game into something higher-quality, even on-par with the likes of Mario.
Or they could just hand Sonic over to Miyamoto...
/* No Comment */
Unfortunately in this day and age, 2D games don't really come out for major consoles anymore. People seem to expect every game that is released to have beautiful 3D graphics and huge environments to play in. This isn't a problem if you're starting a new franchise, but if you're taking a game that has always been 2D on older consoles, then its a hit or miss in my opinion. Super Mario and Metroid have done this successfully, but Sonic has completely failed at this. Like its said in the article, Sonic is too slow in 3D and that makes it almost painful to play for me. If Sega released a new 2D Sonic game, I'd buy it without hesitating.
I don't even recall where I read it, but I read a fairly technical explanation as to what "blast processing" boiled down to. It was actually the ability to load background images into memory quickly enough that you can run across many background screens worth of data without it having to wait up for the next screen to load. Moving an individual sprite around a static screen means moving him a larger distance in 1/60th of a second, and both SNES and Genesis can do this with no problem. The issue is, the SNES takes a longer time to load a whole background's worth of data, which is required for the illusion of a character running quickly. After all, in the sonic games when you are moving quickly, the sprite is actually not moving at all relative to the screen but the backgrounds are flying by rapidly, which is the hard part. While I wouldn't go as far as to say SNES couldn't run a Sonic game, I think certain effects would have been impossible. Remember when you were invincible AND had the speed shoes AND were running through tunnels at the same time, how fast the screen could move? I don't think SNES could have done that at full speed, even if the rest of the game was quite possible. Uniracers on SNES moves "quickly" but also has repetetive backgrounds and just a single track in the foreground. Maybe, on Genesis, uniracers could have supported more detailed backgrounds. In short, blast processing wasn't a sham and there IS a limit to how quickly you can load up concurrent background images, but SNES could still deal with "fast" games. The extent to which its limited, I do not know, but the fact remains that there was a limit to how fast SNES could display concurrent background images.