Sonic Game 2006 Storytelling

I was a SEGA kid, so I’m a big Sonic fan. One day I stumbled upon a Youtube group named HellfireComms, basically a group of Let’s Players who specialize in, among other things, Sonic games. Out of morbid curiosity I watched their Sonic 2006 playthrough, which looked like a nightmare. A glorious, hilarious nightmare.

Then I saw they had a playthrough for Sonic Unleashed. This is a game that got absolutely panned in reviews, netting a 60% on Metacritic for the 360 version. Figuring it’d be as hilarious as their Sonic 2006 playthrough I gave it a look-see as well. With the Werehog and what was then expected to be low-quality, nonsense storytelling from the franchise, how could it be anything but an absolute trainwreck?

But to my shock and amazement when I watched NTom64 play through it not only did it not look awful, it actually looked downright great. The levels were beautiful, the mechanics were, dare I say, elegant, and the story … really didn’t take itself seriously, which was actually refreshing. It was ridiculous, knew on some level that it was being ridiculous, and channeled that self-awareness into humor. Between this game and Colors we had some of the funniest Eggman moments you could ask for.

“Golly, I wanna play that too,” I said. Based on NTom’s playthrough I promptly purchased it and found the game quite to my liking.

Think of the gameplay from Sonic Adventure, but on a much bigger scale, infinitely more polished, way more exciting, and with art and lighting that looks like it came out of a Pixar film — or, at least as much as your eyes can discern moving as fast as this game does. It’s hard, but it’s the good, classic arcade game kind of hard, the kind that makes a level satisfying to not only beat, but obtain an A-rank in.

But, nobody gives this game the time of day, because.

Yeah, the Werehog. Nobody was especially begging for this to be in a Sonic game. Think of a really watered-down version of God of War and you know what the mechanics are like.

And… do you know what? It doesn’t completely suck. At the very worst it was merely tolerable. The levels never seem to figure out how to handle pacing, in that some Werehog stages can be 45 minutes long (seriously). But, as far as the controls and mechanics are concerned it was serviceable and at times, dare I say, even fun. If you use the boost button he goes into this hilarious puppy dog run.

Heheheheh. Ingame it’s just adorable. Look at that, Sonic thinks he’s a doggie. If they’d shown this in the previews I’d have bought it on day 1.

And now we get to the point. It should be very, very apparent that what I value in a video game compared to what reviewers value in a video game are extremely disparate things.

For whatever reason we do not agree on very much on what I daresay is a fundamental level. Sonic Unleashed is a 60% game on metacritic, yet, I’d play this every single day of the week — no, I’d play the Werehog stages every single day of the week — sooner than I’d feel the urge to pick up Uncharted 4 and play it even one time. Whatever technical and pacing faults Sonic Unleashed may have — and rest assured it does have technical and pacing faults — pale in comparsion to the raw, abject lack of enjoyment that I experience playing the Uncharted games. And that isn’t for lack of respect for Naughty Dog or lack of appreciation for their technical prowess; it’s simply that the Uncharted series just doesn’t do it for me.

And, this isn’t a trend that’s exclusive to me and my relationship with the Sonic and Uncharted franchises. As I paid attention to sales figures and purchasing habits I learned that many franchises of substantial critical acclaim, games that are so-called “greatest hits,” scarcely distribute more than two million units worldwide on a given platform — and at the time that was a pool of 80 million users on Xbox 360 and PS3 each. Two million out of 80 is only a little better than 2% of the gaming audience, and these are games known for getting above 85% on Metacritic. The most distant outliers reach above 10 million, which is still less than 15% of the gaming marketplace on a given platform. That means that 85% of gamers not only don’t play these so-called “definitive” games, but never play them.

Why is that? Well, simply put, video games aren’t one product market. The activities represented by Final Fantasy, Sonic Unleashed, Cities: Skylines, and Minecraft are all essentially unrelated but for the fact that they’re played on the same device. If you were to brush aside the world of game reviews and gaming academia and pay attention simply to what these products are, it would be readily apparent to you that none of these products are designed to fulfill the same niche as activities or the same sense of enjoyment as one another. Call of Duty and Resident Evil are simply never going to be substitutes for one another.

And yet, we try to rate them on the same numerical scale as if they were.

What I’m trying to get around to is that the very concept of a monolithic gaming review system is fundamentally flawed. The assumption tends to be that a game with a 90% rating or higher should find universal appeal — but that’s not the case, so much so that many gamers have grown frustrated with reviewers and feel misled by them, to the point of generating conspiracy theories.

To be extremely clear I don’t think that’s the case at all. I simply think that being a game reviewer puts one in a certain mode of playing games, evaluating them less for what role they’re actually supposed to fulfill and more in a kind of “book club” sensibility. Remember that it’s a job and they go through tons of games in a month. What they’re looking for in order for a game to stand out is one extremely clean playthrough with a lot of novelty value, which will lean heavily towards action-adventure games and action-RPGs with a high level of cinematic polish.

And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that, but, nine times out of ten, I don’t. I find a lot of cinematic action to be hollow spectacle, a lot of scripted events to be pointless hoop-jumping, and a lot of so-called “immersive” traits in games to be largely meaningless to my overall enjoyment. Give me arcade action — discrete levels I can crunch through and try to get S-Ranks in, secrets to find and weapons to collect, play styles to experiment with. To that end my favorite shooter in recent memory is Doom 2016, which is just about an ideal game for me. But for IGN it was apparently a 71%. They just… plum didn’t get why you’d want to play it, apparently.

Quite likewise there’s a multiplayer-centric gamer out there somewhere who probably doesn’t care much about all the dialogue that I enjoy reading in Paper Mario and sees that as being hollow — “if I wanted a book I’d read one.” And, there’s probably a strategy-centric gamer with a special keyboard shortcut bound just for the purpose of automating the act of chortling at what the rest of us plebs think of as “complexity.”

… See what I mean? Ten to one says you’ve met all of these people, and their preferences are flatly irreconcilable. What they want out of video games is just way too disparate to be summed up under a single review score.

So, I’ve totally quit listening to reviewers at all. I keep an eye out for interesting announcements, games that catch my eye, games from developers who tend to align with my tastes, and games my friends are into. Then, it’s up to gameplay footage to sell me. Don’t care about pre-rendered trailers. Don’t care about Gamestop’s shitty pre-order commercials. Don’t care about flowery words by someone actively trying to sell me something. Paul McCarthy singing “Hope for the Future” didn’t sell me a copy of Destiny. Likewise, someone bitching hollowly that it’s not an entirely different game — what did you expect? — won’t convince me not to play it.

Footage of someone playing and enjoying Destiny, on the other hand — running a raid in the Vault of Glass — sold it to me in almost a heartbeat.

“Golly, I wanna play that too.”