Adblock or Adblock Plus? The former leaks memory like a sieve, and the guy who wrote the extension was either too apathetic or too incompetent to bother to fix it. It was forked into Adblock Plus and is now a lot better at managing its memory.
Firefox sans extensions and themes does not use a lot of memory. It's the extensions which invariably cause the memory bloat.
I tried running Powershell a while back after getting frustrated at how awful cmd.exe's scripting capabilities are in comparison to my usual environment (bash, in linux). It wasn't terrible, but I can't ever see it taking off. There's practically zero useful documentation to explain how to use the shell beyond the very basics. It also doesn't seem possible to get it to run older batch files (I have a few of them that are necessary for my job and I don't have time to rewrite them all), and I couldn't figure out how to set environment variables either. I'm sure that a lot of the things I was unable to get Powershell to do are actually very easy, but when there's no documentation available it might as well be impossible.
That's not really true. Velociraptors were turkey-sized and lived in Asia. The dino you're referring to is, I assume, the Utahraptor, which is a different species discovered in a completely different part of the world. JP's 'Velociraptor' was modeled off the Deinonychus. The reason for that being that Crichton had read a book that decided that Deinonychus was a subspecies of Velociraptor, a theory which has been pretty much universally rejected for years. Not to mention that we know now that the Deinonychus (and other Dromaeosaurs) had feathers, not scales.
Hironobu Sakaguchi mentioned in passing in an interview that he believed that Squenix had ported the White Engine (the engine behind FFXIII) to Xbox 360. Granted, he left the company, but as the founder of the whole franchise and essentially the only reason that Square survived the NES era at all, you'd imagine he probably still knows some of the Square team.
Additionally the other FFXIII (Verus) is running Unreal Engine 3, which as we're all aware is running quite nicely on 360 hardware too.
There's another factor which you need to consider as well, and that's that generally speaking the Final Fantasy games have done better overall outside Japan, and that the PAL and US markets are both substantially larger. If 360 has a decent lead there, then Squenix may well decide that it's smart business to mutliplatform the game for PS3 and X360 so that they can tap all the markets, rather than just do well in Japan. In the greater scheme of things, Japan is less important than you're making out.
Australia uses only cane sugar for processed goods, yet the obesity rate is growing at practically the same rate here as the US. Cane sugar is just as bad for that. The only real benefit to switching relates to the studies that have shown correlation between HFCS and heart disease.
Well, mine certainly didn't. I purchased it just before Christmas because they had a bundle deal going, but the way that worked was taking the premium system and adding a separate box of goodies to it. The Australian Xbox site agrees. As if I didn't feel ripped off enough paying an extra $125 USD for the thing.
As for transferring data, the 120gb drive comes with some kind of device to transfer your data from your old 20gb to it, which as you said is something you'd expect to get at that kind of price.
A lot of TVs and monitors don't support 1080p over component. I know mine doesn't. HDMI is certainly better than VGA on a decent TV, and let's face it, if you actually have HDMI, you probably have a TV that you'll notice the difference with.
The extra $80 also gives you an Xbox Live headset, something the standard bundle doesn't. I agree that they've failed to justify the price though - the core unit should have been killed, the premium moved down to that price bracket, and this should have slotted in as a replacement for the premium system. Of course that may be what they're intending to do down the line.
Myself, I'm more miffed at the stupidly high price of the 120gb Hard Drive. They're using laptop HDDs, thus the higher price, but even standard 120gb drives in that form factor are about half as much as they're asking for the add-on. As a reasonably early adopter of the 360, I don't really like feeling that I've been disadvantaged for jumping on early, and the price of extras gives me that feeling. Especially since I live in Australia where we inexplicably pay 20% more for the same things.
I tend to agree. FF12 did some things extremely well, and other things very badly. It certainly shows that they took a lot of ideas from FF11. Personally I think they changed the gameplay too radically. My main beef was the change to the initiative system - instead of a character having an initiative gauge that built up, and upon filling the character was marked as 'ready' to perform an action immediately, with different actions having a different recovery time, they switched it to idle characters having to 'charge up' an action before using it. That caused a massive disconnect for me, it took me hours of play to get my head around such a subtle yet fundamental change.
When added to the rest of the changes they'd made, you can see why FF12 seems to have polarised a lot of people. Had it not been released as Final Fantasy XII, no one would have even noticed the difference, but the Final Fantasy name for a lot of people implies certain gameplay conventions, and most of those are simply not there any more. It's a great game, but it doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game.
On the other hand, it should be held up as an absolutely shining example of how good English localisations of games can be when your company actually puts some effort into it. The quality of the voice acting and everything really sets it apart from a lot of Japanese RPGs.
I recall the Forza 2 team commenting just recently that their AI drivers were being powered by neural networks which they'd managed to train to the point that they were actually using some extremely cool braking and steering behaviors that they had never been taught. This seems quite similar.
If they're bleeding the market of any SKU, it'd be the core system rather than the premium one. In fact, in a lot of countries the major retailers have already stopped selling the Core system altogether. The most sensible approach for MS is to move the Premium system down to replace the Core, and add this new Elite system in as the new Premium. Especially given the way they've been trying to push the 360's online features as something to differentiate it over the PS3. It's not possible to use Live without a hard drive.
The Wiimote concept doesn't excite him as a developer and he doesn't think it'd be useful for his RPGs, so he must be a corporate shill? That seems like a bit of a jump in logic.
As a PAL gamer frustrated by the lack of availability of more niche titles, I have a large library of both PAL and NTSC-US PS2 games. With the removal of the Emotion Engine from the PAL PS3 and the move to software emulation, is there any possibility that Sony might be able relax region restrictions on PS1 and PS2 games? The inability to play half of my game collection on such an expensive piece of hardware is a significant barrier to entry for me.
Oh and put aside money for your retirment and stay out of debt.
If Yellowstone is going to erupt, it might be worth making sure that money you're putting aside includes a bar or two of gold. Yellowstone would cripple the USA and cause the US Dollar to become completely devalued, which would cascade around a lot of other currencies as well and likely trigger a global depression.
That's a pretty feeble cop-out. They could have protected their chief market of the UK if they felt like and set a precedent for the others. They could have even taken it you the Europen Court for a definitive ruling (EU courts trump national courts). They didn't turn up at all. It's not like they didn't have EU presence since they had a large warehouse operation running in Germany.
Do you have any idea how much that would have cost? The suits were filed simultaneously, they couldn't just fight in the UK. They'd need to also have some kind of legal representation in all the other EU nations that Sony filed suit, just to keep the case from going to a summary judgment against them. Fighting one case would have meant fighting all of them. As a small retailer, they simply couldn't afford to fight dozens of simultaneous lawsuits, each in a different country in which the courts speak different languages. Sony could easily afford that, and they knew Lik-Sang couldn't. If Sony had wanted to simply stop Lik-Sang exporting to the UK, then they would have only filed suit in the UK. They didn't want Lik-Sang to stop, they wanted them destroyed, so they used a legal loophole (the PSPs that Lik-Sang were exporting did not have CE-approved power supplies) to burn the company down. Couldn't have them reminding European consumers that they were getting a PS3 which cost over 20% more, has less features, and is 4 months late, after all.
Considering that Halo 2's release was the highest grossing release in entertainment history, it's probably safe to assume that MS don't really mind putting up that $20 million to develop it. They're the platform holder, the game is developed and published by them... I imagine you're talking about at least a 20% profit off each sale. Assuming a 20% profit per unit, with $60 US per unit, then MS need to sell 1,700,000 to break even. Halo 2 sold 2.4 million in 24 hours, and has moved 9.2 million copies worldwide. Not a problem. More money going into a project means greater risk, but with greater risk comes greater potential returns. I very much doubt they could make that order of magnitude's profit from simple casual games.
I don't think it's fair to say that Wii is 'dominating'. They are playing for a different core audience (while there is crossover between 'casual' and 'hardcore' gamers, they are not the same market). In terms of sales they've got a leg up for January of about 40% over MS and 45% over Sony, but it's worth keeping in mind that the Wii retails for close to 40% less than 360 and 60% less than PS3. Anyone can flog a product that's less than half the price of the competition. Additionally there's a massive amount of media hype surrounding it, which won't be sustained. There is continued demand because they were unable to manufacture enough over Christmas - people who missed out on one to put under the tree are likely still trying to grab one. Finally, Nintendo systems have always sold well out of the blocks. Wake me up in six months and we'll see if they've kept their momentum. They're going to need some substantial third-party support too, something which they've really shown no signs of having at all. The hardware sales aren't nearly as important as the software sales, and on that front Wii only had one of the top 5, and it wasn't close to the top-seller for the month (Lost Planet).
Personally, I'm skeptical as to whether Nintendo can keep the same momentum going given the lack of software in the pipeline. And additionally, as a gamer I hope that everyone is dead wrong about them dominating the market. I'm not a casual gamer, and while a few fun gimmicky toy games like Wii sports are great, I would die if everything was like that. For me, the games Nintendo seem to be pushing are like candy - they taste great, but they burn away pretty quickly and in the end you can't sustain yourself on them.
Maybe the Air Canada aircraft I flew on last time were the exception rather than the rule, but I'm not at all surprised to hear something like this. They were clearly in drastic need of some upgrades. I just hope that they were skimping on maintaining the unimportant systems in order to afford to maintain the critical systems.
The 'magic' of the Wii was pretty much destroyed for me the instant that the details of the launch were revealed. Specifically the price (the Australian Wii is $400 AUD - $315 USD), the lack of games (originally it looked like Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxies would be close to the launch, and there's not much else in the pipeline at this point) and most importantly the bitter disappointment at Nintendo backtracking on their regioning policy, with the Virtual Console and the Wii and Gamecube games all being locked down to PAL so that they can more effectively rip us off (Wii games have a retail pricetag of $110 - $85 USD). I cancelled my preorder in the end, and I'm not upset that I did. Having played with one, I can tell the system is really not for me.
Everyone always cites WoW as being the most successful MMOG out there, but really that's not true at all. Certainly they're successful, but compare against Neopets, for example. As of the 1st of August last year they had 123 million accounts (though this figure is disputed), and the last figures I saw indicated they currently had about 35 million active users. Additionally they were doing it with a lot less staff than Blizzard have to employ, and using a lot less resources too.
WoW and Neopets certainly aren't in the same market, but they are peripherally related so it's worth keeping things in perspective.
Personally I believe you should be intending to spend at least as much on games as you do on the hardware, so I divide the price of the console by 100 (rounding up to the nearest integer) and there has to be that number of exclusives that I really want for me to bite. Though this does work better for me in Australia - our games are roughly $100 each, new. So with a $1000 AUD pricetag, I would expect there to be at least ten PS3 exclusives in the works that I want before I buy one. Or the price would need to drop.
You left out the fact that a lot of them are extremely poorly written. A lot of the OSS code that I've looked at is undocumented, uncommented, messy spaghetti code. A lot of the programming work I do for my job is maintenance-related, and if I was asked to maintain a lot of the open source code I've seen then I'm pretty sure I'd end up having a nervous breakdown.
If you're playing an RPG which feels like you have to do heaps of grinding in order to be able to progress, then it's not a sign of some deep malaise affecting the whole genre, it's a sign that you're playing a game which has not been tuned correctly. Fighting enemies in an area while completing your current task list should level you up to the point that you're powerful enough to complete all the plot points in that area. In other words, there shouldn't be any extra work to follow the core storyline. You should find it challenging, but not incredibly difficult. If you want to do sidequests, then those should require some extra preparation.
Vogel is bitching about FF12 here, which is a good example of bad tuning. You literally have to go out and grind for hours at the beginning of the game if you don't want to be stomped repeatedly a few hours into it. Compare it against, for example, Namco's Tales of... games (avoiding the tired comparison against Oblivion, you can't fairly compare a linear JRPG against a sandbox RPG like Oblivion) which are perfectly tuned such that if you fight the bulk of the enemies you encounter in an area while you're collecting the various bits of loot scattered about, by the time you reach the area's boss you will generally find your characters are at just the right level to make it a challenge without being a frustration. You also will have just the right amount of gold that the next time you're in a new town, you can afford to upgrade everyone's gear.
The problem with the recent Sonic offerings is that Sega is no longer Sega any more. Sega died in 2003/2004. After discontinuing the Dreamcast, they were brought out by Sammy. Sammy changed their focus from making interesting new games, and switched Sega entirely into focusing on turning a profit above all else, along with a reduced focus on 'home software'. Sega are forced to produce Sonic games as cheaply as possible, because despite them being awful, they still sell. Unfortunately the change of focus has meant that a lot of Sega's great franchises like Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Toe Jam & Earl, Ecco and Panzer Dragoon appear to have been shelved indefinitely because they generally haven't performed incredibly in the marketplace.
Then again, it's arguable that Sonic had already started on his downward spiral before Sammy acquired them - Sonic Adventure 2 was awful.
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Adblock or Adblock Plus? The former leaks memory like a sieve, and the guy who wrote the extension was either too apathetic or too incompetent to bother to fix it. It was forked into Adblock Plus and is now a lot better at managing its memory.
Firefox sans extensions and themes does not use a lot of memory. It's the extensions which invariably cause the memory bloat.
I tried running Powershell a while back after getting frustrated at how awful cmd.exe's scripting capabilities are in comparison to my usual environment (bash, in linux). It wasn't terrible, but I can't ever see it taking off. There's practically zero useful documentation to explain how to use the shell beyond the very basics. It also doesn't seem possible to get it to run older batch files (I have a few of them that are necessary for my job and I don't have time to rewrite them all), and I couldn't figure out how to set environment variables either. I'm sure that a lot of the things I was unable to get Powershell to do are actually very easy, but when there's no documentation available it might as well be impossible.
That's not really true. Velociraptors were turkey-sized and lived in Asia. The dino you're referring to is, I assume, the Utahraptor, which is a different species discovered in a completely different part of the world. JP's 'Velociraptor' was modeled off the Deinonychus. The reason for that being that Crichton had read a book that decided that Deinonychus was a subspecies of Velociraptor, a theory which has been pretty much universally rejected for years. Not to mention that we know now that the Deinonychus (and other Dromaeosaurs) had feathers, not scales.
Take a look at this chart. Notice which country is at #4 and which is at #20.
Hironobu Sakaguchi mentioned in passing in an interview that he believed that Squenix had ported the White Engine (the engine behind FFXIII) to Xbox 360. Granted, he left the company, but as the founder of the whole franchise and essentially the only reason that Square survived the NES era at all, you'd imagine he probably still knows some of the Square team.
Additionally the other FFXIII (Verus) is running Unreal Engine 3, which as we're all aware is running quite nicely on 360 hardware too.
There's another factor which you need to consider as well, and that's that generally speaking the Final Fantasy games have done better overall outside Japan, and that the PAL and US markets are both substantially larger. If 360 has a decent lead there, then Squenix may well decide that it's smart business to mutliplatform the game for PS3 and X360 so that they can tap all the markets, rather than just do well in Japan. In the greater scheme of things, Japan is less important than you're making out.
Sony revealed that they haven't signed FF13 as an exclusive yet, so going multiplatform would hardly be breaking the deal.
Australia uses only cane sugar for processed goods, yet the obesity rate is growing at practically the same rate here as the US. Cane sugar is just as bad for that. The only real benefit to switching relates to the studies that have shown correlation between HFCS and heart disease.
Well, mine certainly didn't. I purchased it just before Christmas because they had a bundle deal going, but the way that worked was taking the premium system and adding a separate box of goodies to it. The Australian Xbox site agrees. As if I didn't feel ripped off enough paying an extra $125 USD for the thing.
As for transferring data, the 120gb drive comes with some kind of device to transfer your data from your old 20gb to it, which as you said is something you'd expect to get at that kind of price.
A lot of TVs and monitors don't support 1080p over component. I know mine doesn't. HDMI is certainly better than VGA on a decent TV, and let's face it, if you actually have HDMI, you probably have a TV that you'll notice the difference with.
The extra $80 also gives you an Xbox Live headset, something the standard bundle doesn't. I agree that they've failed to justify the price though - the core unit should have been killed, the premium moved down to that price bracket, and this should have slotted in as a replacement for the premium system. Of course that may be what they're intending to do down the line.
Myself, I'm more miffed at the stupidly high price of the 120gb Hard Drive. They're using laptop HDDs, thus the higher price, but even standard 120gb drives in that form factor are about half as much as they're asking for the add-on. As a reasonably early adopter of the 360, I don't really like feeling that I've been disadvantaged for jumping on early, and the price of extras gives me that feeling. Especially since I live in Australia where we inexplicably pay 20% more for the same things.
I tend to agree. FF12 did some things extremely well, and other things very badly. It certainly shows that they took a lot of ideas from FF11. Personally I think they changed the gameplay too radically. My main beef was the change to the initiative system - instead of a character having an initiative gauge that built up, and upon filling the character was marked as 'ready' to perform an action immediately, with different actions having a different recovery time, they switched it to idle characters having to 'charge up' an action before using it. That caused a massive disconnect for me, it took me hours of play to get my head around such a subtle yet fundamental change.
When added to the rest of the changes they'd made, you can see why FF12 seems to have polarised a lot of people. Had it not been released as Final Fantasy XII, no one would have even noticed the difference, but the Final Fantasy name for a lot of people implies certain gameplay conventions, and most of those are simply not there any more. It's a great game, but it doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game.
On the other hand, it should be held up as an absolutely shining example of how good English localisations of games can be when your company actually puts some effort into it. The quality of the voice acting and everything really sets it apart from a lot of Japanese RPGs.
I recall the Forza 2 team commenting just recently that their AI drivers were being powered by neural networks which they'd managed to train to the point that they were actually using some extremely cool braking and steering behaviors that they had never been taught. This seems quite similar.
If they're bleeding the market of any SKU, it'd be the core system rather than the premium one. In fact, in a lot of countries the major retailers have already stopped selling the Core system altogether. The most sensible approach for MS is to move the Premium system down to replace the Core, and add this new Elite system in as the new Premium. Especially given the way they've been trying to push the 360's online features as something to differentiate it over the PS3. It's not possible to use Live without a hard drive.
The Wiimote concept doesn't excite him as a developer and he doesn't think it'd be useful for his RPGs, so he must be a corporate shill? That seems like a bit of a jump in logic.
As a PAL gamer frustrated by the lack of availability of more niche titles, I have a large library of both PAL and NTSC-US PS2 games. With the removal of the Emotion Engine from the PAL PS3 and the move to software emulation, is there any possibility that Sony might be able relax region restrictions on PS1 and PS2 games? The inability to play half of my game collection on such an expensive piece of hardware is a significant barrier to entry for me.
Oh and put aside money for your retirment and stay out of debt.
If Yellowstone is going to erupt, it might be worth making sure that money you're putting aside includes a bar or two of gold. Yellowstone would cripple the USA and cause the US Dollar to become completely devalued, which would cascade around a lot of other currencies as well and likely trigger a global depression.
That's a pretty feeble cop-out. They could have protected their chief market of the UK if they felt like and set a precedent for the others. They could have even taken it you the Europen Court for a definitive ruling (EU courts trump national courts). They didn't turn up at all. It's not like they didn't have EU presence since they had a large warehouse operation running in Germany.
Do you have any idea how much that would have cost? The suits were filed simultaneously, they couldn't just fight in the UK. They'd need to also have some kind of legal representation in all the other EU nations that Sony filed suit, just to keep the case from going to a summary judgment against them. Fighting one case would have meant fighting all of them. As a small retailer, they simply couldn't afford to fight dozens of simultaneous lawsuits, each in a different country in which the courts speak different languages. Sony could easily afford that, and they knew Lik-Sang couldn't. If Sony had wanted to simply stop Lik-Sang exporting to the UK, then they would have only filed suit in the UK. They didn't want Lik-Sang to stop, they wanted them destroyed, so they used a legal loophole (the PSPs that Lik-Sang were exporting did not have CE-approved power supplies) to burn the company down. Couldn't have them reminding European consumers that they were getting a PS3 which cost over 20% more, has less features, and is 4 months late, after all.
Considering that Halo 2's release was the highest grossing release in entertainment history, it's probably safe to assume that MS don't really mind putting up that $20 million to develop it. They're the platform holder, the game is developed and published by them... I imagine you're talking about at least a 20% profit off each sale. Assuming a 20% profit per unit, with $60 US per unit, then MS need to sell 1,700,000 to break even. Halo 2 sold 2.4 million in 24 hours, and has moved 9.2 million copies worldwide. Not a problem. More money going into a project means greater risk, but with greater risk comes greater potential returns. I very much doubt they could make that order of magnitude's profit from simple casual games.
I don't think it's fair to say that Wii is 'dominating'. They are playing for a different core audience (while there is crossover between 'casual' and 'hardcore' gamers, they are not the same market). In terms of sales they've got a leg up for January of about 40% over MS and 45% over Sony, but it's worth keeping in mind that the Wii retails for close to 40% less than 360 and 60% less than PS3. Anyone can flog a product that's less than half the price of the competition. Additionally there's a massive amount of media hype surrounding it, which won't be sustained. There is continued demand because they were unable to manufacture enough over Christmas - people who missed out on one to put under the tree are likely still trying to grab one. Finally, Nintendo systems have always sold well out of the blocks. Wake me up in six months and we'll see if they've kept their momentum. They're going to need some substantial third-party support too, something which they've really shown no signs of having at all. The hardware sales aren't nearly as important as the software sales, and on that front Wii only had one of the top 5, and it wasn't close to the top-seller for the month (Lost Planet).
Personally, I'm skeptical as to whether Nintendo can keep the same momentum going given the lack of software in the pipeline. And additionally, as a gamer I hope that everyone is dead wrong about them dominating the market. I'm not a casual gamer, and while a few fun gimmicky toy games like Wii sports are great, I would die if everything was like that. For me, the games Nintendo seem to be pushing are like candy - they taste great, but they burn away pretty quickly and in the end you can't sustain yourself on them.
Maybe the Air Canada aircraft I flew on last time were the exception rather than the rule, but I'm not at all surprised to hear something like this. They were clearly in drastic need of some upgrades. I just hope that they were skimping on maintaining the unimportant systems in order to afford to maintain the critical systems.
The 'magic' of the Wii was pretty much destroyed for me the instant that the details of the launch were revealed. Specifically the price (the Australian Wii is $400 AUD - $315 USD), the lack of games (originally it looked like Metroid Prime 3 and Mario Galaxies would be close to the launch, and there's not much else in the pipeline at this point) and most importantly the bitter disappointment at Nintendo backtracking on their regioning policy, with the Virtual Console and the Wii and Gamecube games all being locked down to PAL so that they can more effectively rip us off (Wii games have a retail pricetag of $110 - $85 USD). I cancelled my preorder in the end, and I'm not upset that I did. Having played with one, I can tell the system is really not for me.
Everyone always cites WoW as being the most successful MMOG out there, but really that's not true at all. Certainly they're successful, but compare against Neopets, for example. As of the 1st of August last year they had 123 million accounts (though this figure is disputed), and the last figures I saw indicated they currently had about 35 million active users. Additionally they were doing it with a lot less staff than Blizzard have to employ, and using a lot less resources too.
WoW and Neopets certainly aren't in the same market, but they are peripherally related so it's worth keeping things in perspective.
Personally I believe you should be intending to spend at least as much on games as you do on the hardware, so I divide the price of the console by 100 (rounding up to the nearest integer) and there has to be that number of exclusives that I really want for me to bite. Though this does work better for me in Australia - our games are roughly $100 each, new. So with a $1000 AUD pricetag, I would expect there to be at least ten PS3 exclusives in the works that I want before I buy one. Or the price would need to drop.
You left out the fact that a lot of them are extremely poorly written. A lot of the OSS code that I've looked at is undocumented, uncommented, messy spaghetti code. A lot of the programming work I do for my job is maintenance-related, and if I was asked to maintain a lot of the open source code I've seen then I'm pretty sure I'd end up having a nervous breakdown.
If you're playing an RPG which feels like you have to do heaps of grinding in order to be able to progress, then it's not a sign of some deep malaise affecting the whole genre, it's a sign that you're playing a game which has not been tuned correctly. Fighting enemies in an area while completing your current task list should level you up to the point that you're powerful enough to complete all the plot points in that area. In other words, there shouldn't be any extra work to follow the core storyline. You should find it challenging, but not incredibly difficult. If you want to do sidequests, then those should require some extra preparation.
Vogel is bitching about FF12 here, which is a good example of bad tuning. You literally have to go out and grind for hours at the beginning of the game if you don't want to be stomped repeatedly a few hours into it. Compare it against, for example, Namco's Tales of... games (avoiding the tired comparison against Oblivion, you can't fairly compare a linear JRPG against a sandbox RPG like Oblivion) which are perfectly tuned such that if you fight the bulk of the enemies you encounter in an area while you're collecting the various bits of loot scattered about, by the time you reach the area's boss you will generally find your characters are at just the right level to make it a challenge without being a frustration. You also will have just the right amount of gold that the next time you're in a new town, you can afford to upgrade everyone's gear.
The problem with the recent Sonic offerings is that Sega is no longer Sega any more. Sega died in 2003/2004. After discontinuing the Dreamcast, they were brought out by Sammy. Sammy changed their focus from making interesting new games, and switched Sega entirely into focusing on turning a profit above all else, along with a reduced focus on 'home software'. Sega are forced to produce Sonic games as cheaply as possible, because despite them being awful, they still sell. Unfortunately the change of focus has meant that a lot of Sega's great franchises like Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Toe Jam & Earl, Ecco and Panzer Dragoon appear to have been shelved indefinitely because they generally haven't performed incredibly in the marketplace.
Then again, it's arguable that Sonic had already started on his downward spiral before Sammy acquired them - Sonic Adventure 2 was awful.