Big Belated Blaze Blog #1

by blazehedgehog

So like two months ago I said I was going to write more blogs. And I didn't. You can blame twitter for that, I guess. It makes it a lot harder to care about writing a blog when I get all of my thoughts out in 140 characters or less, and qualitative discussion about videogames is better served with reviews. I don't even remember what I wanted to write more blogs about - I guess at one point I wanted to write about Starcraft 2, but then my SC2 buddy moved across two states and I don't think either of us has picked the game back up. Not that I could, anyway. I didn't buy SC2, and the guest pass he gave me has undoubtedly expired by now. I don't even remember what it was that I wanted to say, other than it started with the familiar "I don't really care that much about RTS games, but". But that doesn't mean I don't have a reason to talk about videogames! Because I do.

So Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 was finally dated and priced. I don't know that I've ever spoken about Sonic 4 here, or my feelings towards it, which is probably for the best because I am not really sure what I feel. On one hand, the marketing for this game has been borderline comedic. Things started strong enough, with some pretty big hype and lots of supposed community interaction. Things rapidly degraded from there as community involvement very quickly ceased to matter and the protracted march of countdown timer upon countdown timer on the official website just to unveil basic things like concept art wore thin. Then the game was leaked, we all had a good laugh at the horrendous minecart segment, and Sega delayed the game on a promise to "fix" it, with some very specific problems being called out. It was recently revealed that the original minecart level has undergone serious revision (in other words, redesigning the entire stage from the ground up to be completely and entirely different), but not much else has been fixed - including the wonky physics and abundance of scripted speed booster segments, despite promises specifically referencing those two elements as things "to be fixed". On the opposite end of things, the game does not actually look bad - it more or less looks on par with the Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush games, which were actually pretty fun. The problem is that Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush still pale in comparison to the very careful, metered gameplay pace and beautifully abstract art design of the classic Sega Genesis Sonic games. With a name like "Sonic the Hedgehog 4", you're just asking for trouble if you don't make a serious effort to truly replicate what made the 16-bit titles so memorable back in the mid 90's, especially after we've had Sonic games so face-meltingly awful that they've actually retroactively ruined perception of actual good games by relation. And, from what has been shown, Sonic 4 isn't doing enough to deserve its name, leaving the entire product feeling like a hollow bid to cash in on your nostalgia for what the character used to represent. That's only exacerbated by the $15 price tag, for what is essentially a small piece of a larger product. If I didn't have to buy it to write a review for our website, I would probably skip it for that reason alone, because there are much longer, no doubt much more enjoyable games out there on digital download services for under $15.

In other, slightly related news, I've been trying to get a review of Ivy the Kiwi written. It's a difficult game to write about, partially because it feels like there's not a whole lot of meat to it. It feels like the kind of game that was targeted at mobile phones (and it probably was), though that may also be because it hearkens back to the old days of super-simple, arcade-style gaming, which makes sense, given it's from Sega-retiree Yuji Naka. Still, finding words to say about it without sounding like I'm being unfair to the game somehow is difficult. Part of me thinks I should just throw down the gauntlets and go for the throat, but puzzle games like this really aren't my style, so I worry about saying something that's out-of-line. It was a bad idea to commit myself to reviewing it, but I'm gonna stick it out.

I suppose it would be easier to talk about games I don't have plans to review, which would be all of the junk I bought on Xbox Live lately with those 32,000 points I won. Out of all of them, I guess there's only one I really want to talk about right now, and that's Rocket Knight. Rocket Knight, not unlike Sonic 4, was more or less met with groans of disappointment upon its reveal. Whereas games like Bionic Commando Rearmed managed to nail a definitive look and feel that captured the spirit of the old NES game while simultaneously bringing it up to date with the current standards of gaming, the first screenshots for Rocket Knight looked like a bad Dreamworks movie with gaudy colors and overbearing depth-of-field blur. Unfortunately, despite effort to clean up the graphics in the final product, Rocket Knight is still an ugly game with poor art direction. Rocket Knight, the wolf enemies he fights against, and the pigs caught in the middle of it all look like they belong in three completely different games. The demo was sort of an odd duck; offering two difficulties ("Normal" and "Hard"), it turned out that the game was agonizingly easy on "Normal" mode, but became challenging enough to be fun once you switched it to "Hard". The problem is, "Hard Mode" has to be earned - every time you face a boss character, there is a "special technique" that can be used to defeat them. It's different for every boss, and if you defeat them with the "special technique", you earn the ability to play the next level on Hard Mode. It's completely ridiculous in a bad way, as it doesn't make much sense to punish players looking for a tougher game by dumping them down to normal mode if they cannot find the "special technique". Maybe it doesn't matter, though, because regardless of what difficulty you're playing the game on, it eventually stops being fun. I stopped playing about the time I got enough game-overs to run out of continues and the game decided because of that, it would be a good idea to basically delete my save file and have me start all over from the beginning again. I can understand committing yourself to making a "retro-styled" game, but that's a little too far for my tastes. I don't have any plans to go back to it.

I suppose that's it for now. One last thing: If any of you remember those "Afraid of Monsters" videos I did for Halloween last year, I'm doing something similar this year over at my Youtube channel, for a Half-Life 2 mod called "Nightmare House 2". Playlist is here, and I just uploaded the first video. I'll be uploading gameplay footage of the whole mod all throughout October, so if you're interested, make sure you check it out. It definitely gets better as the game goes on, too, so if you aren't totally wowed by this first episode, just know that the next one will be better.

I will see you hep cats later.