Next Sonic Game to Be 2D HD

[Nico0020]

Episodic = bitch move
Title "sonic 4" - Trying to grab the faith of old fans like me who gave up a LONG time ago on sega
Not to mention isn't there only like one person of value left in sega that was apart of the sonic 1-3 dev teams?
Only sonic? - It's always one extreme or the other. 1000 shitty characters, or none at all. The sonic, tails, knuckles formula is just fine.

Seriously, I can't imagine who thinks sega can put out a decent new product anymore. Phantasy Star Universe was good.....in Japan. I love the game, but the treatment here is such shit. Other than that I can't think of anything recent sega has done of value.

[Specially Cork]

It is ripping people off.

No it isn't.

[Christuserloeser]

It seems ever since they were bought out by Sammy their quality in games have gone downhill.

Sammy got nothing to do with it.

When Peter Moore cancelled Dreamcast, Sega's stock soon turned into toilet paper. They had to restructure the entire company, close down dependancies and studios, merge others and fire thousands of employees just to stay afloat.

If there was one particular moment in time that caused a drop in quality in Sega's games, it was Dreamcast's discontinuation.

One explanation why you wouldn't have noticed it during ~2002/2003/2004 was that most of the games released for PS2/GC/Xbox were in fact games developed during the Dreamcast era (see Super Monkey Ball, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Shinobi, Toejam & Earl, etc. pp.).


Another reason as to why you might perceive a drop in quality that perhaps actually never happened is the Sega of America vs Sega of Japan thing: During the Dreamcast era, most games developed by Sega of Japan were released in the West (even things like REZ or Space Channel 5). That wasn't the case during the [post 1992] Genesis and Saturn era, when Sega of America published their own games (see Ariel: The Little Mermaid, Jurrassic Park, TaleSpin, Taz-Mania, Eternal Champions, Comix Zone, Vectorman) instead of localizing games by Sega of Japan (Monster World 4, Pulseman, Golden Axe 3, Super Fantasy Zone, Phantasy Star MD, Hybrid Front, Surging Aura, Pengo, etc. pp.)

Dreamcast was a short period where SOA -perhaps thanks to Stolar and the people he hired- would departure from the norm and actually did publish most of Sega of Japan's games in the West.

That again changed a few months later with Dreamcast's discontinuation: Sega of America started focusing more on US and European studios that they acquired (Visual Concepts, Creative Assembly, Sumo Digital, etc.), and didn't bother to localize games by Sega of Japan (see Sega Ages series, Thunder Force VI, Streets of Rage Mobile, etc.)

So, while "Sega" probably still is a company with some talented game designers and a remarkable output on quality games, we are likely missing out on quite a few of these.

[ASCIIN]

I don't think it has to do with lack of localization because even the soj games arent that great (IE. PSU)

[cube_b3]

Episodic = bitch move
Title "sonic 4" - Trying to grab the faith of old fans like me who gave up a LONG time ago on sega
Not to mention isn't there only like one person of value left in sega that was apart of the sonic 1-3 dev teams?Only sonic? - It's always one extreme or the other. 1000 shitty characters, or none at all. The sonic, tails, knuckles formula is just fine.

Seriously, I can't imagine who thinks sega can put out a decent new product anymore. Phantasy Star Universe was good.....in Japan. I love the game, but the treatment here is such shit. Other than that I can't think of anything recent sega has done of value.

Takashi Iizuka creator of Knuckles is still at Sonic Team and he was one of the lead designers of Sonic 3.

[DaMadFiddler]

My gripe is relatively minor. I'm not expecting the game to be amazing, but I do at least want to buy it, which is more than I can say about the last several Sonic games (the last one I bothered playing was Sonic Heroes, which was only barely worth it). The thing that bothers me is that they're still using the gangly-limbed Sonic Adventure style character model, which looks kind of goofy in a sidescrolling environment. They need to bring the character design back to something closer to the Sonic 2 model.

[Eviltaco64X]

It still might be good. I was really hoping for a hires 2D game with Tails and Knuckles, and they let me down on that.

Still, if it's at least fun, I'll be buying.

[not just souLLy now]

This might be a Sega related forum, but how the hell does a game that every one of us knows is going to suck, get 5 pages of comments? There's what 3 new posts a day on the whole of DCEmu? Until I see full HD FMV of Cream being violated in all manner of positions as a bonus feature on the disc I have zero time for this game.

[Eviltaco64X]

This might be a Sega related forum, but how the hell does a game that every one of us knows is going to suck, get 5 pages of comments? There's what 3 new posts a day on the whole of DCEmu? Until I see full HD FMV of Cream being violated in all manner of positions as a bonus feature on the disc I have zero time for this game.

We all know that's exclusive to Japan.

[Christuserloeser]

I don't think it has to do with lack of localization because even the soj games arent that great (IE. PSU)

I never played any post Dreamcast Sega games, neither those of SOJ nor SOA, so I couldn't verify that (I'll take your word for it tho ). I was merely theorizing that some people claiming that "Sega's" games would be bad might not be aware of Sega being a company with a billion of different studios all over the world.
And back in the day SOA's games were terrible while SOJ was doing all the classics that people are still talking about today (Sonic 1/2/3/K, Moonwalker, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Alex Kidd, Wonderboy/Monsterworld, Streets of Rage, Castle of Illusion, Quackshot, etc. pp.).

From my limited observations things are quite similar today in that SOA publishes mainly SOA's games, and most of the Japanese games are left in Japan - aside of Phantasy Star Online/Universe/whatever and the Sonic games of course, although some of those are developed by Sonic Team USA, Sumo Digital or Bioware I think. This again is quite similar to the 90s when SOA/SOE produced games like Sonic Spinball (STI), Sonic 3D Blast or Sonic R (both Traveller's Tales).

[Specially Cork]

When you spend millions of dollars on great games that don't sell you can either do things the hard way and fix why they aren't selling or you can do things the easy way and stop spending millions of dollars on great games. Sega took the latter option and now sadly churn out crap. In the 90s they were my gaming my life, now I wouldn't notice it they disappeared.

[cube_b3]

I don't think it has to do with lack of localization because even the soj games arent that great (IE. PSU)

I never played any post Dreamcast Sega games, neither those of SOJ nor SOA, so I couldn't verify that (I'll take your word for it tho ). I was merely theorizing that some people claiming that "Sega's" games would be bad might not be aware of Sega being a company with a billion of different studios all over the world.
And back in the day SOA's games were terrible while SOJ was doing all the classics that people are still talking about today (Sonic 1/2/3/K, Moonwalker, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Alex Kidd, Wonderboy/Monsterworld, Streets of Rage, Castle of Illusion, Quackshot, etc. pp.).

From my limited observations things are quite similar today in that SOA publishes mainly SOA's games, and most of the Japanese games are left in Japan - aside of Phantasy Star Online/Universe/whatever and the Sonic games of course, although some of those are developed by Sonic Team USA, Sumo Digital or Bioware I think. This again is quite similar to the 90s when SOA/SOE produced games like Sonic Spinball (STI), Sonic 3D Blast or Sonic R (both Traveller's Tales).

Well I play Sega Games so I can tell you Christ that it is only Sonic Team that has declined in quality all the other studios have pretty much disappeared.

Am1 + Am7 aka Overworks + Wow Entertainment aka Sega Wow are responsible for the critically acclaimed Valkyria Chronicles although Dreamcast day designers such as Rieko Kodama, Noriyoshi Oba are not involved and aside from Valkyria Chronicles and Sakura Taisen they have done nothing.
Am2 is working only in the Arcades but everything they release is still great.
Am3 aka hitmaker has not been heard off since Virtua Tennis 3 (they were not directly involved in the ports and updates)
Amusement Vision Toshihiro Nagoshi is responsible for the over rated Yakuza crap and Super Monkey Ball which is doing as well as ever.

Smile Bit functions as Sega Sports Japan makes sports games that are not of exceptional quality therefore they are not released state side as of late they are responsible for the crappy Mario & Sonic Sports games.

[DaMadFiddler]

Now with leaked video:

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/28004

[Skynet]

The game doesn't look overly promising. That link DMF posted is dead, it's also been removed from Youtube, I saw it this morning. As I said at BG, either the player is crap or the level design is awful. It did not look good from the 30s or so I saw that's for sure.

[not just souLLy now]

I watched it, it simply looked like Sonic 1 in HD and nothing else, if ever there was an admission of "we have absolutely no idea how to take this series forward", this is it.

[Christuserloeser]

I have to admit that it looks surprisingly good.

[Specially Cork]

Video is no longer available. Sega are pulling it from everywhere pretty quickly. You can find it with Google though pretty easily.

I think it looks good, but I have a couple of concerns:

- People are talking about the episodes having around 4 zones...that's not a lot

- That first zone looks like a throwback to Green Hill Zone which is fine but...are they just bringing back zone themes from previous Sonic games? I'd really like some new ones instead.

[DaMadFiddler]

[melancholy]

Oh damn. I suddenly got excited for a new Sonic game.

[Quzar]

Having seen similarly detailed things before, I ponder if I'm the only one who often has trouble seeing enemies/powerups/etc with so much other ... 'noise'. Do people now believe that stark highly contrasting colors were only there in 'the old days' because of hardware limitations?

Anyways, looks fantastic. Hopefully it provides the old sonic non-stop high speed experience that got lost in 3D.