Review: Sonic Generations

It's taken an uncharacteristically long time, but Sonic is finally back

As I said in my preview of Generations, I ended my review of Sonic Colours on a fairly bum note. As much as I liked the direction that Sonic Team had taken, I felt that the core gameplay hadn't stepped up its game enough to stop the series sliding back into mediocrity as time goes by and standards continue to rise. I wanted to see Sonic Team stripped of development privileges and to have the series turned over to a third party developer, on the assumption that Sonic Team weren't capable of learning any more lessons. Now, I'm not so sure.

My criticism of Colours was based on the assumption that its flaws were endemic to the gameplay style itself; raw speed seemed to inevitably lend itself to unfair deaths, endless collisions and reaction times beyond the reach of man. It made the new pseudo-racing style feel like a dead-end, one that didn't offer any opportunity for further development and only really had the option of getting faster and more linear. Let me tell you, for a long-term Sonic fan it feels good to be able to say that that is now, very apparently, not the case.

Sonic Generations

Hands-on with the demo

A few months back, I concluded my review of Sonic Colours on a fairly bum note. For the most part it was a fast and fun platformer, and it showed that Sonic Team still have huge creative potential, but they just didn't have the skill to match the creativity with tight, slick gameplay. Judging by the newly released demo of Sonic Generations, I'll be needing to give Sonic Team a little more credit come November.

1.5 is the new 2.0

Are console bolt-ons the next step?

The console life cycle has started wobbling in the last couple of years; there's barely been the faintest hint that a new home console is on the way, and if the Kinect is anything to go by then Microsoft, at least, is more interested in shoring up the 360 than moving on to another console. And let's be honest here, exactly what point would there be to a new console? The Wii is suffering from an image problem rather than a lack of horsepower; a HD upgrade and an enormous GUI overhaul would be a better option than dropping the console entirely. And as for the PS3 and 360, what would a better model offer? Once upon a time you could look to the ever-advancing PC and arcade markets to see where better capabilities would improve the play experience, but what do either of them offer that consoles don't? Crysis 2 does little new in raw mechanics despite looking pretty as all hell, and the underlying physics aren't proving much of a problem for current gen consoles. And despite native support, console gamers still aren't giving a single shit about the potential of the keyboard and mouse combo. Most of the current innovations in gaming are coming through firmware patches, peripherals and the online arena; what part of that equation requires a new console?

Sonic 4: Episode 1

After years of experimenting, Sega return to what they know best

Let's start with some context: I have roughly a dozen beta versions of Sonic 3, including the 3c beta that represented Sega's last-ditch effort to fit the game on to one cartridge before splitting the second half into Sonic & Knuckles. I have a screencap of the old Sonic 1 title screen where Sonic had a human girlfriend called Madonna. I know that in the first teaser trailer for Sonic 4, they used Sonic's beta sprite from Sonic 2 instead of the one that made it into the finished game. Sonic Crackers, Sonic-16 and Sonic Eraser - every one an obscurity, and still I hunted them down.

Now that we have my fanboy credentials in order, I have to say that as much as I still enjoy the original games, they're not so perfect that a reinvigorating update isn't in order. The physics are far too weighty, there's not much in the way of collectables, and later titles like the Advance series showed that there's more to be wrung out the classic Sonic template with newer tech. And Sonic 4 does exactly that.

Following directly on from Sonic 3 and its follow-up Sonic & Knuckles, this is Sega's take on New Super Mario Bros - a fusion of classic gameplay with more modern series elements, and for once the intrusions into the Sonic formula blend together well. Get stuck on a slope in 1991 and you were due a tedious traipse back down the hill so you could get some speed up. In 2010, Sonic feels far lighter and nimbler, practically skipping from one platform to another, yet his top speed is still limited to accommodate the multi-path exploration that made his classic titles feel so adventurous. Homing attacks and speed boosters are present from his Adventure days, but they're complementary rather than essential, letting Sonic hit springs instantly and jump to full speed without his trajectory or lack of inertia breaking flow where once it would have.

This fusion pervades Sonic 4, from gameplay to visuals; netting a continue gives you the same miniature Sonic sprite and celebratory jingle from Sonic & Knuckles, as pixellated and imperfect as ever, and it feels genuinely charming when it could have been glaringly out of place. The music comes as a slight disappointment then, given that it occasionally falls into the territory of imperfect imitation that the rest of the game so skilfully avoids, but there are a few jingles that rank among the franchise's best, and fans are sure to notice the tap-tappy drum beats of the Megadrive sound bank. It's a niggle that is noticeable purely for the quality around it, and that's something we haven't been able to say of Sonic in years.

Which isn't to say that the design is airtight and seamless, mind you; the balance between obvious imitation and fitting homage is definitely skewed the wrong way at first, but manages to right itself as the game goes on. The physics are reasonably well judged but wildly inconsistent, with Sonic happily strolling up vertical surfaces, and while segmenting the bosses into two slightly different forms has been a staple of the 2D games since Sonic Advance, it at least came with some amount of subtlety back then rather than drawing as much attention to it as possible; Sonic 4 occasionally lays on its new-and-old veneer a bit thick, but with fans baying for the old days, this is probably the closest Sega can come to recreating the feel of the original games while keeping things slick enough for newcomers and those who are slightly less anal about the hedgehog's past.

2010 seems to be the year that Sonic fans have been waiting for - consistently positive coverage of what could be the first genuinely excellent 3D game, Sonic Colours, and a strong retro revamp in the second dimension. I never felt that the 2D games needed fixing, and would still love to see more from the Advance and Rush series, but not only is Sonic 4 a tidy and fun title, it also demonstrates a keen awareness from Sega of every age their flagship franchise has gone through. That alone may be the key difference that has so suddenly changed Sonic's fortunes, and long may this new state of play continue.

Verdict
Sonic 4 isn't ground-breaking or innovative, but it is great fun and so very, very Sonic. A fitting start to the successor of the Megadrive classics, if a little pricy for its length.

Bioshock Infinite Announced

The Bioshock series thus far has taken us through a city built with both the best of intentions and a healthy dose of insanity at its core, with nostalgic 1960s design drowning in the eerie darkness of one man's madness. It should come as no surprise that the next instalment continues with the same basic theme.

What is surprising, though, is for Infinite to be set 20,000 feet higher and bathed in brilliant sunshine; the open skies have given rise to more varied architecture, with quaint terraced housing in evidence amongst skyscrapers held aloft by gigantic dirigibles, while the fresh air gives stark contrast to the claustrophobia of underwater Rapture. It would be easy to forget that this is Bioshock, if not for the hulking, blood-thirsty monstrosity whose presence opens the trailer.

While nothing has been confirmed yet, don't expect to see Bioshock Infinite until next year, though a multi-platform release seems likely. Watch this space for more info.

Earthworm Jim HD

A perfect conversion - but is it still a perfect game?

Reality just can't match the wackiness of cartoons, which is pretty much why they still exist. The incredible horsepower of modern consoles has been good to us, but while modern remakes of Mega Man X and Castlevania have stayed true to their source, it's a rare LittleBigGame that captures the soul of pastel-bright animation with polygons.

After years of 2D remakes in 3D clothing, it's refreshing to play a retro classic so obviously in love with its roots. For better or worse, Earthworm Jim HD is as beautiful, manic and frankly insane as the day it was made; the original captured Saturday morning cartoon visuals perfectly, and they are all the better for being in HD. Jim's animations are easily the match of contemporaries like BlazBlue, and the high fidelity polish has been applied to visuals and sound alike.

Jim has aged well, then. But if we're being brutally honest, his first outing wasn't without its problems, and while they haven't really gotten worse with time, they're just as annoying as you remember them. A useful edge-grab that hoists you back on to platforms is all that stands between you and a controller-damaged flatscreen, as you struggle constantly with collision detection apparently designed to mock everything that decades of gaming have taught you. There's little to the controls beyond jumping, swinging and shooting, yet hitting enemies is a pain, targeting swing points is finicky and you always seem to fall off platforms with one step left. A pixel-perfect update is no bad thing, except when a touch more pixel-perfection would have improved things by a small but significant margin.

The best example is For Pete's Sake, where you aim to protect Peter Puppy as he skips obliviously through meteor showers, pitfalls and killer plants. The meteors will break your thumb, as you have to cycle through at least three directions of fire with the d-pad, fast enough to create a barrier against the relentless hail of rocks, while the precision needed to keep Peter Puppy on solid ground verges on the ridiculous. Combine this with a badly overused chase level, occasionally aggrevating bosses and some truly obnoxious enemy placement, and you'll begin to appreciate why no-one feels nostalgia for the patience needed of the mid-'90s gamer.

Which isn't to say that Jim HD is a bad game, merely one that approaches its conversion a little too perfectly. Bungie-battling over a monster infested lake and riding a bloodthirsty hamster are as fun today as they were yesterday, and as with all games of its kind, practise eases the pain. A brand new multiplayer mode and three exclusive bonus levels show that the series is still capable of its own creative flair; an ill-judged Keyboard Cat parody comes across as a little sterile, especially compared with the game's own Evil the Cat, but head-whipping a demonic granny into fumbling for her glasses is classic Jim all over. It bodes especially well for an updated sequel, which was a distinctly tighter package all round, and a brand new instalment hasn't been ruled out. Jim HD is by no means a perfect game, but as a timely reminder of the joyous insanity that gaming used to revel in, it's the perfect nostaliga piece.

Verdict
Too stubborn to make the improvements it needs, Earthworm Jim HD manages to hold up well nonetheless. The low price point should make it an obvious purchase for fans, and a consideration for others.

Mega Man Universe Announced

The Blue Bomber returns, confuses millions

What the hell is Mega Man Universe? Just about any theory based on the mystifying teaser trailer is plausible, from a Mega Man-centric Capcom nostalgia-fest to a LittleBigPlanet DIY version of the standard Blue Bomber experience.

Given that it is being developed for download on PS3/360 but NOT for Wii, could it (whisper it) be an Invisimals-style affair for Xbox Kinect and Playstation Eye, using the gamer's lounge as a playing environment, or using real world objects for Mega Man's weapon upgrades? With everything from claymation to cardboard cutouts gracing the trailer, and the tagline 'Your world. Megafied', it's as good a theory as any. Hell, MMU could be a mash-up of every rumour going. Mega Man may not have the status to spark a thousands rumours from one game title alone, but an equally mystifying interview certainly seems to have done it.

Mega Man Universe is due for release on 360/PS3, with a date yet to be nailed down. Expect a preview later in the year.

Preview: LittleBigPlanet 2

It does credit to the community surrounding LittleBigPlanet that, having so thoroughly exhausted the vast resources available to them, a sequel is warranted just two years later. A constant stream of DLC has swelled the enormous arsenal of textures, stickers and other creative pieces that have contributed to almost three million user-created levels, spawning at a rate of almost four thousand per day; LBP must surely rank with Second Life and Garry's Mod for sheer unbridled passion from its fanbase, to the point that a game that didn't seem to warrant a sequel this generation is in sudden need of one.

While LittleBigPlanet aimed to let players create stand-alone platform levels, enthusiasts soon started exploring far beyond these bounds, with working calculators, side-scrolling shooters, musical renditions and a complete recreation of Contra emerging from what is essentially a digital mash-up of Lego and Mechano. With that in mind, Media Molecule have begun removing the limiters from their saccharine marvel; a flexible camera allows for top-down gaming and fully directable cutscenes, logic-based AI makes the fiddly task of programming complex enemies a much simpler task, and new options allow for entire games to be created, not just individual levels.

The core of the game remains unchanged, but as with the original, a myriad of features both great and small are likely to be explored in amazingly creative ways by a community that is hungry for more. The visuals have been given a subtle overhaul as well, with the engine from God of War 3 giving a much smoother and softer edge to the atmosphere, and hopefully eliminating the occasional slowdown issues that an overly-ambitious level could generate. Even in pre-release shots, the game is noticeably prettier.

LittleBigPlanet 2 is set for release in November, and if the last two years have taught us anything, PS3 owners are about to be surprised in ways they never thought they would be, all over again.

Bridging the Gap

The gaming industry needs a massive change of perspective to gain true mass-market appeal

Nintendo managed to get the casual fluff out of the way pretty early on in their E3 conference, and given the retro-soaked smorgasboard of wonder they served up afterwards this is probably a good thing. If they thought that anyone was going to be fooled by another Wii Sports repackaged with Mario characters then they had another thing coming, and the ripple of applause that wouldn't have troubled a goldfish that followed the announcement of Wii Party was an invitation to move on at best. But what really got me was hearing Reggie Fils-Aime desperately describe Wii Party as a 'bridge game' that will supposedly give newer gamers a boost into more traditional fare. That's a lot to ask from the most unfortunately-titled game ever made.

Sorry Reggie, but Wii Party isn't a 'bridge' game. For starters, bridges go both ways, and Wii Party is only going to remind experienced gamers exactly why they're staying on their side of the river, namely that devoting an entire mini-game to one action is unutterably tedious. More importantly, the very concept of a bridge game is incredibly fatuous, as though the gaming world map is divided squarely into Casual County and the Kingdom of Hardcore, with a raging torrent in the middle that we haven't yet worked out how to cross.

For a true bridge game, look no further than Heavy Rain. Its critics will tell you that the game is an over-blown QTE-riddled cutscene, because that's exactly what it is - and is brilliant as a result. Heavy Rain doesn't so much bridge the river as fill it in, and the reason is that it provides a key experience that gaming is sorely missing. A triple-A blockbuster grounded in the prime-time TV thriller, Heavy Rain's story-driven approach strips away the usual video game fluff that gamers are so used to having that we have trouble wrapping our brains around the idea of losing them; Heavy Rain treats the control pad as an intuitive way to interact with a story, not as a system of rules whose mastery is an end in itself. There's no high score, upgrades or inventory screen; with the only goal being to enjoy the story and reach the end, Heavy Rain barely qualifies as a game, while stopping short of being a film. Hell, why can't it be both?

We've spent so many decades calling these things 'games' that when a project like Heavy Rain comes along we just can't shake the assumptions that the entire industry has ground into us from day one, before it could even be called an industry. Any gamer salivating over The Last Guardian knows full well that they won't be playing it to clobber enemies, solve puzzles or nab a few Trophies; as with predecessors Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, the real reward lies in the absorbing atmosphere, the sorrowful world and the emotional punch that Team Ico's dual-protagonist approach has always conjured. The actual 'game' elements play second fiddle to the mark it leaves etched in your heart, and yet The Last Guardian runs the risk of becoming another mild sleeper hit because its approach to interactive media jars with what we expect that media should be.

The result of all this is the laughable mess we have today, where anything not designed for young males with their balls where their brains should be is assigned to either the casual ghetto or the arthouse shanty town; because gamers who want to cultivate an area rather than blow it up and raise animals instead of braining them are a relatively new mass-market, the industry assumes that their inexperience means they either want or need to be treated like simpletons, and by extension don't care about getting a high-quality experience. The glorious HD graphics, thumping surround sound and searing narratives are reserved for the gamers of the old-school, while the less masochistically violent are left to play Farmville, with the only commercial alternative of any note being Harvest Moon. And we're surprised that this new market of supposedly casual gamers doesn't stick around?

That we assume they don't care for games because they find them uninteresting rather than pathetically insipid is both self-destructive and utterly cretinous. Gaming demographics are far more varied than we once thought, and shows a thirst for interactive entertainment across generations and genders. But for gaming to truly succeed as a medium, it needs a new Heavy Rain far more than it needs a new Halo. The big blockbusters will still be the real chart toppers - just look at Hollywood. But like film, and television, and literature, video games have to approach every new project as its own entity, with no obligation to conform to mechanical stereotypes, and they need to stop treating their patrons like idiots. Inexperience and indifference are two entirely different things; learning that one simple lesson could be the true key to seeing the gaming industry flourish.

Final Fantasy XIII

The veteran series comes over all Football Manager

That a new Final Fantasy is polarising is news to absolutely no-one; the series has practically invited it by winning devotees with each entry, then reinventing itself for the next. Every fan has their favourite and their most hated, and the latest installment is no different.

Square-Enix's latest has all the potions, Shivas and chocobos you've come to expect; as always, no matter what the changes, the game is still a Final Fantasy through and through. What has made FFXIII the definitive Marmite entry of the series, though, is just how far they've gone in uprooting the mechanics of the JRPG.

For starters, the game is brutally streamlined. NPCs say their piece when you walk past with no chance to engage in dialogue, towns are little more than monster-free window dressing and shops are accessed through save points, and there are few enough of the first two. The limited exploration and idle chit-chat that flesh out RPGs take place almost entirely through cut-scenes, with a rich backdrop always being at the forefront of the story while never actually getting you involved.

It's a slap in the face for gamers who value the immersion these elements bring, but in many ways the game is better for it. For starters, the cast is the best since Final Fantasy VII; thrown together for a variety of reasons, the anger, resentment and inner conflict that both drives them and separates them is well realised; narrative lead Lightning takes her cue from series predecessor Cloud, but her flaws are much more relatable and human, and rather than fulfilling the classic JRPG archetype of the silent loner who learns to open up, she begins her quest for redemption much earlier in the game, and her helplessness as her efforts cause more turmoil that she is emotionally unequipped to deal with is extremely touching. After several games where the characters were relatively chummy, it is refreshing for the cast to be caught in the same quest, yet be utterly divided in their motivations and goals.

The narrative is helped along by a game that is paced significantly better than previous entries, and the world is rarely broken by anything as videogamey as a textbox from loitering NPCs; the lack of shopkeepers is more than made up for by the digital store-fronts, which are clearly a labour of love, and basic tasks like party management and weapon upgrades are a quick in-out job that let you concentrate on actually playing the game. In truth, the game plays a lot like FFX with the edges smoothed to a frictionless sheen; that is, until you hit the battles.

While FFX stripped away the time-sensitive gameplay of the ATB bar, the thirteenth installment does a swift 180 and hurtles over the opposite horizon. The ATB bar is now segmented, allowing for multiple attacks that take up a portion of the bar. Everybody attacks whenever they like, and the resulting clusterfuck makes for some of the most beautiful battles you've ever seen; characters dash and dodge, somersault and spin, and never will you see two opposing forces lining up and taking it in turns to club each other before returning to their designated spot. The tiresome old bugbear of watching a character swing a sword clean through an enemy as the word MISS pops up on screen has been largely banished, with most dodges occuring as your party leader somersaults clean over attacks purely out of happenstance. For a game that is still fundamentally turn-based, it does a better impression of a real-time action game than most action games do.

But with such explosive and balletic eye-candy, the entire focus of combat has changed. You only control the party leader, the AI doing an excellent job of managing your teammates, as well as your own actions when you pick the default Auto-Battle command. At first it seems as through the game is playing itself, but once you get a few hours in and the abilities start piling up, as do the number of enemies and the range of tactics you need to apply, it becomes clear that FFXIII plays less like a JRPG and more like a management sim.

The reason the battles are so gloriously eye-catching is because for the first time in a Final Fantasy your eye is constantly on the battlefield, not just the stat bar. Numbers and skill names fly up alarmingly fast, and to stay on top you need to watch the screen like a hawk, making quick reactions on the fly, and the Auto-Battle quickly becomes a godsend that lets you take stock of your current situation. The focus of combat is the Paradigm Shift, which determines the current role of your characters and the range of abilities they can perform; setting your party's Paradigms before battle lets you switch from a Commando-Commando-Ravager combo for all-out assault, to a Synergist-Sentinel-Medic selection to buff and heal your party when things start going bad. Because each Paradigm allows for only certain skills to be used, making smart decisions with your pre-battle preparations is crucial to pulling off the right combos in every fight, and the result is a Final Fantasy that demands on-the-fly tactical changes to a far greater extent than any other entry in the series, even if the majority of your actions are hand-picked by the AI.

The changes in FFXIII are at once small yet wholly game-changing; the initial linearity of FFX has been streamlined even more, and the Gambit system of XII has been tweaked from a slow-paced and methodical style of combat to one of the smoothest and most energetic gaming experiences of this generation. Square-Enix's latest is a Final Fantasy through and through, but relatively small changes, applied numerously with thought and care, have created a whole new breed of JRPG that hides traditional gameplay beneath a slick, modern game mechanic. Certain deviations from the formula act as stark reminders as to why they existed in the first place, but FFXIII is still a game changer that shows a stubbornly traditional genre just how much you can do with an aging style of play, and complemented with an excellent story, beautiful graphics and a genuinely human cast of characters, FFXIII has more than enough substance to carry you through to the end.

Verdict
Well paced gameplay and an engaging story complement a well-thought out combat system. For those who found previous entries too static and dull, this could be the one to change your mind.

Dude, Where's My Remote Play?

Neglecting an unexplored treasure of the PSP is one of Sony's biggest mistakes

Of all the features the PSP sports, Remote Play is one of the most useful and by far the most neglected. It allows you to control your PS3 using the PSP as a controller, and in exchange beams the sound and video from the PS3 straight back to the PSP's screen, rather than your TV. It gives you a fully functional Playstation 3 in the palm of your hand, whether you're on the bog or halfway across the world. In theory, that is.

Given that the majority of remote access software on cutting-edge PCs rarely let you see the desktop background on your computer back home, I'd have expected Sony to be shouting from the rafters about Remote Play, especially given that it was already proving its potential in 2007's Lair. For me, it was a huge selling point for the PSP, at least until I discovered that the number of games that support it are huddled in a terrified group amongst the ever-growing hordes that don't.

Sony have spent so much time transforming the two consoles individually that they seem to have forgotten just how much of a pairing they are. Same interface, same broad expansion into generalised media hubs, same emphasis on high-powered gaming, with online at the heart of the experience. The more the two consoles grow the closer they become, and it seems odd that this parallel development isn't being allowed to jump tracks more than it is. Just look at the compatibility list for Remote Play: some PS3 games will work, if devs can be bothered. But no PS2 games. Or Blu-Ray films. Or protected content. Well, at least PSone games work, but you'd be hard pressed to find more than ten people for whom playing games from the time of blocky 3D dinosaurs was their primary reason for buying a PSP. Or a PS3, for that matter.

It's not as though cross-console partnerships are a revolutionary idea; Sony themselves created the PocketStation, a miniature LCD egg that mimicked the Tamagotchi in design and allowed players to buff up their character in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and send their chocobo from Final Fantasy VIII on a mini adventure. Sega were the true innovators in this field with the Visual Memory Unit (VMU) for the Dreamcast, a super-charged memory card that had few uses other than low-res screensavers during most games thanks to developers who had little cause to use the screen for anything else, but it was still handy for browsing saves and acted as a handy reference for stats in games like Resident Evil 2. Sega's interest continued even after their own hardware had folded, and players could send their Chao to-and-fro between the Adventure and Advance iterations of the Sonic series to be trained and raised in two distinctly different mini-games, just like they had done on the VMU. In the present era we have the PSP, a fully-fledged handheld with game-sharing functions that allow players to send portions of a game to another player, enabling multiplayer or demo downloads without the need for two copies of the game. So why has the promise of generations gone by been ignored, when the functionality not only exists but continues to be exploited in other forms? Where is that rear-view mirror we were promised no less than four years ago?

An argument can be made that the PSP lacks some of the PS3's buttons, making remote play a difficulty, but that's a pretty poor argument. When the DualShock was released, did studios the world over throw up their hands and screech "Another pad? Now what are we going to do?!"? Of course not. They calmly and without any fuss made two control schemes - one analogue, one digital. Two generations later and we can't do a little extra button mapping, or nudge the HUD about so it fits better on a smaller screen? That would take less effort to implement than the mandatory Achievements (and now Trophies) thrust upon games in the last few years, and less thought as well.

At least Singstar works; but wait, what's this? You can browse for songs, but can't actually play? Why not? The two consoles can surely work out the ping rate (the delay between data being sent from one device and coming back again) between the two, and adjust the leniency of the game to prevent players from failing unfairly due to a poor connection? Even Guitar Hero lets you set the lag between you pressing a button and your TV displaying it, down to the millisecond, and the only reason it asks YOU to define it is because it doesn't know itself; when the consoles can take these readings all by themselves, and given that later builds of the PSP include a built-in microphone, what reason is there to deny the player the chance to Singstar their heart out in Tanzania while their PS3 is stuck in Blighty? At the very least it's a fascinating experiment in the limits we can stretch console gaming to, and with OnLive preparing to switch on during 2010, Sony have the chance to ride the wave with their own take on the concept, possibly even upstaging OnLive in some small measure by showing off what their own hardware can do.

It isn't a hopeless case; Sony certainly seem to recognise the benefit of cross-hardware hook-ups, with the MediaGo application for sorting the PSP's media from your desktop, and media sharing for the PS3. Even more promising is adhoc Party, an app for the PS3 that lets you run local multiplayer functions on the PSP over the internet by using the bigger-brother console as a hub. Adhoc Party is an inspired idea that especially helps out western gamers for whom adhoc gaming is largely a pipe dream, and shows genuine thought into what a PS3-PSP union can achieve in the right hands. It only remains to be seen what direction Sony takes in 2010, and with Nintendo hinting that a DS successor could be announced in the coming months, Sony will be under pressure to announce a rival. If they remain true to form it will be stylish, expensive and ready to exploit what Nintendo can't or won't offer. And with the current gen in full swing and online firmly at the centre of the HD console wars, there is no better time for Sony to re-evaluate the potential of their handheld.

Frankenhog: why Sonic HD is going to kick ass

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 Advance

By 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 3

Gimmicks 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 Rush

The 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.

Noby Noby Boy

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.

Sonic Unleashed

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.