Retro-boners exploded into streams of rose-tinted ejaculate with the announcement that the next Sonic game will be rendered entirely in crisp, high-definition 2D. The accompanying teaser trailer charged over the horizon with the thunderous roar of retro sound effects, the classic logo emblazoned on its banner and cries that Project Needlemouse was here. Sonic hasn't answered to the call of Needlemouse since he stopped being a rough design scrawl on a diner napkin; any more old-school and he'll be shipping on a cassette tape with a badly-translated text scroll for the ending.
Predictably, comments have fallen into three catagories; the ones struggling to type over the floods of salty tears, the slightly more realistic ones that point out that Sonic Team can ruin anything given enough time, and the naysayers to whom Sega can do no right and probably use the entrails of babies to divine their next plotline, those Dreamcast-axing Nintendo suck-ups.But let's not forget that this is a 2D game, and to the present day Sonic's record has been pretty good:
That's an average score of 82% for the last five straight platform games, not counting Rivals 1 & 2 as they were a) entirely rendered in 3D and b) utter wank that deviated from the template anyway.
In other words, the 2D games have been good. Very good. Depending on who you ask, they are average at worst and brilliant at best. So really, there's still no reason why Project Needlemouse can't be a good game. Just look at what they have to work with!
Sonic AdvanceBy far and away the most old-school of the post-Adventure titles, Advance took the Megadrive classics and gave them a fresh coat of paint. The music is warmer, the intro is slick and small touches like sprite rotation give it a smoother finish. Moreover, it treats fans to some pleasing retro moments, including a direct copy of the classic stand-off between Sonic and Knuckles (only to reveal him as a rocket-powered robot replica) and iconic boss battles from the very first two games. But the stand-out moment comes in the final zone, the first act taking you across the ominously quiet launch pad and up into Eggman's satellite as it rises into space, and the second act throwing you into a gigantic and vibrant inner chamber. A different timer that resets itself whenever a section of level breaks away hits the player with a last-minute change of structure, and is exactly what lent Sonic & Knuckles its epic feel just seven years earlier.
Sonic Advance 2 Having apparently decided that the first installment was too tame, Sonic Team donned a beer hat and went ape-shit. Everything is more frenetic - the speed, the gameplay, the presentation, the lot. Even bosses consist of running battles against speeding machines. The result didn't please everyone, with criticism being levelled at the ability to complete many levels by simply holding right, with the occasional enemy unfairly thrown in the player's path to slow them down. But anyone who plays the game like that misses out entirely on Advance 2's biggest accompishment - some of the most intricate level design in video game history.
To complete the game properly, you need the chaos emeralds. To get them, you need to collect seven special rings in one act of each zone, which let you access the special stage. And to get these rings you either hit GameFAQs or you explore. And explore. And explore. Even when you know where to get them, by Christ those rings are hard to get. They involve quick wits and nimble fingers, with some of them hidden behind the most dexterous platforming ever required in a Sonic game. Advance 2 demonstrates that levels can criss-cross and flow seamlessly, the concept of multiple paths doing an injustice to how organically the different elements of each level fit together. It's the first Sonic game where players really can 'hold right to win', and the best at showing how idiotic that is.
Sonic Advance 3Gimmicks and Sonic: a match made in hell. But with Advance 3, Sonic Team and Dimps hit upon a system that tailored the game to suit the player without ever getting in the way. The player is joined by a second character, who plays pretty much the same role as Tails in the original games - a nice companion, maybe dropping an enemy or two along the way, but never one that gets in the way. So far so samey.
But Advance 3 took that idea and ran with it. With five playable characters there are 25 unique combinations, and each one changes the way you play. Choosing Cream as your support gives you her Chao-based homing attack; picking Amy will change your jumping and attack style. Moreover, certain combinations have extra effects. Cream as support alters the way Tails can fly, while Sonic gives Knuckles an extra-fast superglide. And the best thing about it is that it never gets in the way, and the levels are designed to accomodate any combination. You choose your character, you pick the modifier that suits you best and away you go. Advance 3 gives you 24 more ways to play than that hairy-ass werehog does, and is 24 times better to boot.
Sonic RushThe first game on DS and a new chapter for the series, Rush took one look at Advance 2 and said 'Pff. That's the best you can do?'
Rush is all about speed. The focus is the tension gauge, which fills up as you destroy enemies and perform mid-air tricks. Activating it unleashes a burst of speed that ploughs through absolutely everything; the difficulty lies in balancing a genuine need to boost with path-clearing priorities and trying to get enough air to rack up a good score. Fast, breezy and nimble with a pounding soundtrack from the Jet Grind maestro, Rush does its job adequately and gives Sonic a fresh new look. But that isn't the reason I love it.
First off, it introduces the best new sidekick since Tails in the form of Blaze, a feline princess with a mean line in fiery attacks and icy demeanour. Not as fast as Sonic but much better at boosting through the air, Blaze is better at accessing those tricky routes that Sonic can't quite hit. Moreover, she is very much Sonic's equal, the two playing off each other like Sonic and Knuckles, but without the latter's bone-headedness. They even square off against each other near the end of the game, with a satisfyingly frantic end-game as Blaze tries to tear our spiny hero a new asshole.
Secondly, and most importantly, Rush has, hands down, the best special stages in the entire history of the series. It takes the half-pipe stages from Sonic 2, wraps them in slick 3D graphics, splashes them with primary colours and overlays it with the freshest, funkiest soundtrack they could muster. Combined with touchscreen play that lets you rocket from one side of the screen and back again in a second and a nifty jump with a flick of the stylus, Rush features the smoothest and most pleasant special stages Sonic has ever traversed. It's like he's died and gone to hedgehoggy heaven.
Rush Adventure Taking its cue almost entirely from its predecessor and calling it a day, there's really not much to say about Rush Adventure, other than... Pirates! Rush Adventure loves its pirates; the bad guy is a pirate, your opponent in the special stages is a pirate, one of the levels is a haunted pirate ship, the final level is called Pirate Island... Eagle-eyed players might notice a certain nautical theme. But this is a good thing, because it does what Sonic should do - just occasionally, providing us with a calm and breezy adventure with none of the urgency that constantly having to save the world brings. Rush Adventure gives you a map, a few boats to explore it with and a plot that bobs along like a bottle drifting in the swell.
I've run out of nautical imagery, so I'll call this one a day.
It's pretty clear, then, that Sonic Team has a lot of material to draw from in its own catalogue. Whether that will equate to an excellent game is another matter, but will we at least be given a good game? I'd say the answer is yes.
The underdog of the JRPG proves his worth on PSP
Perennial favourites Mario and Sonic have managed to weather the ever-thinning herd of fuzzy corporate mascots, the former because of continued bouts of brilliance and the latter through stubbornness, but even 90s heroes Crash and Spyro are the footnotes of recent years. The world is jaded, and the cheerful and vacant anthropomorph is out. Gamers want grit; they want brooding anti-heroes; mostly, they want misdirected violence and a bandicoot-shaped punching bag to throw it at.
Nippon Ichi have
struck solid gold with their mascot design. Introduced in the Disgaia series, the Prinnies are a race of stitched-up, peg-legged penguins with the ever-uncertain demeanour of a race that has an odds-on chance of exploding every time they sneeze, and sport the kind of cuddly physique that makes their tragic deformities oh so hilarious. Their facial expressions waver between sweat-dripping fear and the vacant stare of the soon-to-be-deceased, and their lot in life is to be mown down by the indistinguishable thousands for the most inane reasons. Truly, they are the mascots of the twenty-first century, simple and gaudy enough for the kiddies with a veneer of hopeless dispensability for the adults, who have long since realised what an asshole Crash is and want to force his vacuous, shit-eating grin into a meat grinder.
The result is a game that balances black humour and genuinely colourful charm and does so beautifully. Nippon Ichi weave an epic tale of a Demon Lord of the Underworld who has mislaid her pudding; in no way petty or malicious, she sends an army of one thousand Prinnies on a mass-suicide mission through the Underworld to make her another one, acknowledging the fruits of their sword-slashing, Prinny-combusting labour with no encouragement or praise whatsoever. The Prinnies hack their way through each level with such grace and charm that you can forgive its faults just to see their adorable faces scrunched up in determination, usually just before their explosive demise. By mid-way you find yourself chanting along as they yell their lines with wholly unwarranted optimism, their personality so infectious and overblown that it takes the sting out of the many, many deaths you will suffer along the way, while the music plays itself across your brain long after you turn off the PSP. For sheer personality, Prinny has no trouble reeling you in.
Have Nippon Ichi crafted a genre-defining masterpiece? No, but for a company whose expertise lies in thoughtful, turn-based RPGs to dive straight into a frantic action-platformer with apparent ease is more than enough reason to clamour for a sequel. The ridiculous plot is echoed in a fantastically morbid lives system in which 1-UPs are non-existent and you have an army of one thousand to complete the entire game with. The Prinnies run and jump with the X button, while attacks are dispensed as fast as you can mash the Square button; a smattering of vehicles and explosives smear on an extra layer of gameplay to top things off. The Prinnies have a basic ground slash and an aerial attack that hurls energy beams from their swords, which explode in a flash of blue energy on contact. As the ground attack extends roughly three pixels in front of you, the aerial attack will be your weapon of choice; that means jumping, which is at the heart of the Marmite-wide discrepancies in review scores for this game. Although they are armed with a double jump, the Prinnies can't change direction once they are airborne, and how well you take to that particular quirk of precision will define exactly how ball-gnashingly aggravating you find the game; sadly, that isn't the only difficulty to overcome.
Prinny starts off promis
ingly with each level graded in difficulty. It is only once you get a level or two in that you discover that the difficulty is notching itself up across every single area, and you suddenly find yourself wondering if you should go from the top of the list and watch the difficulty curve soar or clear the later levels first and take a few hard knocks at the beginning as you try to adjust. Whichever you choose, you soon find another set of levels thrown on to the pile that far outstrip the others in frothing, console-throwing madness, and it culminates in a boss rush capped by a villain who is immune to your most useful technique, has jaw-dropping amounts of health and only allows three minutes in which to defeat him. We all love a challenge, but not when the reward is Carpal Tunnel.
Whether or not Prinny is worth the asking price for a new game depends ultimately on your tolerance for maddening hikes in difficulty and a flagrant disregard for physics, but it is most definitely worth playing in the first place. The characters, along with the entire premise, are overblown to the point of idiocy, but always with a knowing overtone. For memorable charm Prinny has to rank as one of the best experiences on PSP, and while it is clear that Nippon Ichi still have things to learn about anything that doesn't involve isometric grids, they attacked this project with such enthusiasm that it would be a shame if they weren't given the chance to try again. For that reason Prinny is worth at least some of your time, even if you don't last the whole distance.
Verdict
It lays down a challenge that many won't see the end of, but Prinny is so full of charm and enthusiasm that it is worth a piece of your time, however much or little that may be.
Having rennovated their headquarters with bricks made from wads of money, Nintendo have decided to raise the price of the Wii in the UK, citing depreciation of the pound.
Call me cynical - pernickety, even - but I feel the need to poke a few holes in their fiscal policy. Nintendo are alone amongst the big three in never having made a loss on their current-gen hardware, and have sold far more consoles than either of its rivals. Not only that, but they haven't yet needed to drop the price of the Wii, and have reduced the cost of hardware production by forty-five percent. In other words, Nintendo have been shitting out gold bullion from day one while Sony and Microsoft were scrabbling for spare pennies down the sofa to afford a few more hard drive units. The only possible danger to Nintendo is that the amount of cash they are making might be downgraded from 'obscene' to 'staggering'.
While the DS continues to play home to some truly excellent handheld titles, I can forgive Nintendo a lot of things. But raising the price of existing hardware models is a pretty naff precedent. Sony eviscerated the PS3 one year into its life span while Microsoft settled for charging obscene amounts of money for proprietory hardware, but losing money on every console they sold is a not entirely unreasonable excuse for doing so, and they have never upped the price on a model. Please guys, don't be the first to set a bad example.
The creator of Katamari tries for brilliance and comes up short
Katamari was a slice of pure, distilled insanity, but on some vague level it still made a strange sort of sense to roll around in a giant, planet-purging ball like those rollers for removing cat hair. It may have had madness slathered all over with an over-enthusiastic trowel and it may have been a glorified way of getting you to do the hoovering, but at least there was method to Katamari’s madness. And if Noby Noby Boy is anything to go by, method is increasingly the last thing on Keita Takahashi’s mind.
To call this thing a mess would be doing it a kindness; absolutely nothing about it makes sense on any level. The titular Boy is a small pink phallus who lives in a dimension-warping house that spurts out bubbles, and spends his days eating bicycles and shitting them off cliffs. The left stick moves your ass (figuratively), the right stick also moves your ass (literally) and a combination of the two lets you part buttocks from brain cells and stretch to enormous lengths. The face buttons see almost no use, while the shoulder buttons are used for everything and often require you to perform both actions and camera control at the exact same time. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated then you’re in possession of a few marbles more than the dev team.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Takahashi had no clue what he was doing with Noby Noby Boy for the entire length of its development, and it shows. Camera control involves so many different combinations of buttons and analogue movement that the chances of you even vaguely aligning the camera as you want it are almost nil, not least during those moments when the camera decides to leave you running about off-screen before finally deigning to swing round in your general direction. Menus are even worse; scoffing at the ridiculous notion of having everything laid out in neat sections, Noby Noby Boy forces you to control a 2D version of yourself who runs rampant through the text, barging letters out the way and occasionally eating them for good measure. The fact that you can drop him behind the text where he can’t do any damage is a blessing that soon fades as you realise that a game with nothing to do has hundreds of lines of text to wade through in a long and pointless list in order to tell you about it. And that’s assuming you’ve had the patience to sit through the first loading screen, which must surely last longer than that of Fallout 3, a game one thousand times the size and with a thousand times the detail of Noby Noby Boy, as well as approximately the same load times; it doesn't take a startling measure of intelligence to see that there is something desperately wrong here.
There’s not even a thing to do once you hit the game proper. People sit on your body for shits and giggles, then run away the next minute as you chow down on their friends and watch them collect in lumps at the base of your body. Then you fire them out your backside, and they go about their day. That’s it, mission accomplished; go to the next level and repeat until a vegetative state kicks in. Maps generally feature at least one or two potential points of interest, such as UFOs with claws hanging underneath and giant springs with balls balanced on top, but you can’t do anything with them. They just sit there as a mocking reminder of what happens when you let a genius squander two years on something that should have been knocked up in half a year by a penniless indie team.
Noby Noby Boy has one saving grace in the name of longevity, and that is its genuinely intriguing method of progress. By jumping repeatedly, both Boy and his buttocks can fly up through the cold, empty sky to meet the Sun, who lets him give up whatever body length he has achieved and add it to the length of Girl, another penis-shaped monstrosity who grows like Pinocchio’s nose (among other things) through space. With her overall length being contributed to by every player, Girl is already getting pretty sizable at several hundred million metres, and just recently made it to the Moon! Congratulations to everyone involved! Takahashi claims that by reaching new planets there will be new content unlocked, but since the Moon levels offer nothing that the original levels didn’t I highly doubt that such a thing as ‘content’ will ever grace Noby Noby Boy.
It’s hard to know what else to say; the game is simply a mess at every step. The controls are horrendous, the menus confusing, the load times ridiculous, and the content non-existent. Artistic vision gets so badly in the way that the whole thing suffers at ground-level. Even the most meandering and pointless game ultimately has something to work for, a point which Noby Noby Boy illustrates with aplomb by ensuring that the new levels opened up by Girl’s trip to the Moon offer absolutely nothing new. It has a unique and quirky charm that’ll keep you smiling for whole minutes at a time, but once you’ve eaten a few chickens and waddled off the level edge a couple of times you‘ve seen the lot.
People are already throwing excuses at it: ‘it’s not meant to have a point, it’s just throwaway fun’, and ‘it’s quirky and cute, that’s all that matters’. And that’s all they are: excuses. Noby Noby Boy has been in development since at least mid-2007, and the result of this endeavour is a lurching monstrosity of an engine that can’t load a tiny, textureless patch of land faster than Fallout’s immense, post-apocalyptic landscape, a terrible control set with barely a grain of thought behind its layout and an experience ripe for interesting quirks that tantalises but never lets you touch.
At £3.19 it’s unlikely to make you feel desperately robbed of your cash, and it at least admits its incomprehensibility right off the bat, even if it’s less willing to acknowledge its many technical issues and design faults. If scooting your ass away from your body and farting out bicycles sounds like the greatest use of your time since discovering the pin number for the locked channels on Sky, then by all means spend your money and be entertained. Just don’t expect the fun to last long, or for the global progression to bring anything new to the table.
Verdict
Big on charm but small on everything else. At a miniscule price point you might as well give it a whirl if the fancy takes you, but hopping on Youtube will tell you everything you need to know within a minute. As much as it wishes to rank itself amongst the elite of quirky gaming, it misses the point entirely by not even having one. With no substance behind the style, it is a missed opportunity.
A tidy engine helps transform another flawed outing into something promising
It's a fairly pointless exercise by this point to list Sonic's many ailments, but I will anyway because I share Sonic Team's love of kicking a dying animal when he's down. Lower back pains have crippled his once sprightly acrobatics, cranial damage ensures his only social interaction is with other mental degenerates, and the radiation of all those gems he insists on hoarding like a rapid magpie have at last taken their toll and transformed him into Cousin It. It's a bewildering relief, therefore, to find that Unleashed shows a few signs of competence beneath the usual aggrevations.
Unleashed shows potential for Sonic's future, bearing in mind that 'potential' doesn't always have 'realised' glued in front of it. Sega appear to have listened to the baying public for once and the menagerie of squeaky Saturday-morning side characters has been through a brutal culling, with a grand total of four regulars making an appearance and the rest presumably toiling in the salt mines of Nightopia. But apparently Sega weren't listening hard enough, because what people have been crying for more than anything else is for that never-ending roster to stop growing, and Sonic Team are nothing if not set in their ways. Irritating twat-du-jour is Chip, a small, purple and entirely superfluous midget who dispenses barely-useful advice and spends most of the game distracting you with his antics (and I use that term loosely) during cutscenes. He's even more pea-brained than Big, a character who spent the entirety of Sonic Heroes picking his nose and asking his bogeys if they were his lost frog.
It's a curious situation where so many aspects of the game have been tightened up, and yet so many others continue to breed and fester. Needless gimmick this time around is Sonic's ability to transform into a werewolf when the sun goes down, a feature that meshes together with the standard run-and-jump mechanics like a pair of stickle-bricks being handled by a baby. The daytime sections are beautifully crafted epics, with sprawling cities and vast landscapes blurring past you at cheek-flapping speeds, while the night-time sections are slow, crammed solid with enemies and far, far too long. Annoyingly, this trade-off of good and bad pretty well sums up the entire game. Ultra-sonic speed has been balanced by unwieldy hubs and aggrevating item collection, and the loss of characters has been compensated for by some of the worst dialogue committed to paper. But despair not, devoted fans and slavering fan-fic writers, because this is the first Sonic game to step into 3D that actually feels whole and complete.
Unleashed marks the first time that everything has come together on a technical level for the series; the graphics are smooth, the animations superb and glitches rare enough to qualify for the endangered species list. Moreover, after numerous games that wavered drunkenly from the ultra-arcadey to the super-realistic, Sonic Team have finally found a tone that works for the series, nestling firmly at the Pixar end of the spectrum with enough pace and cool to satisfy everyone else. The charmingly cartoonish design makes for pleasing eye-candy amongst the broken glass of the gameplay's sweet jar, and embues the series with a much-needed vitality that sits comfortably alongside the slick presentation. There are moments such as the excellent Egg Beetle boss where you'll blur through the trees, deftly side-stepping rockets and kicking a robot three miles down the road in a somersaulting mess, where at last it all comes together. The speed, the movement, the music, the atmosphere... For the first time you get a genuine feel for being Sonic, even if you're struggling to keep pace at times. And while some of the old tat you wish they'd given up on somehow continues to amble through life with a clean bill of health, so much has taken a turn for the better that if Sonic Team could just learn to drop the moments of instant death and irritating side characters then they could have a pretty competent game on their hands. The chance for a Super Mario 64 moment is dead and buried, but Sonic's 3D epiphany may yet have its moment. Unleashed shows, if nothing else, that Sonic Team finally have the technical competence and the correct grasp of tone to carry their flagship series in the direction it needs. If only they could hire an actual script writer, I might even be tempted to care about the story as well; probably best not to get too hopeful.
Verdict
Aggrevating as always but finally starting to find its feet, Unleashed requires as much patience as ever to slog through, with the rewards for doing so greater than before. Much better than their last effort, which admittedly isn't saying much.
