Passing question - 24 mins into the podcast, Jonny wonders if Sonic Boom's failure will make Sega pull back on the "bad" sonic games and reconsider releasing garbage.
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This part of this podcast made the plain ride home from Seattle SOOOO much longer. My head started racing with how much ill-informed info was in this segment of this podcast, which is why I was actually dreading James playing this.
1.) Sonic Boom was a different dev. it was a western dev. there was ex-naughty dog guys working on this game, which is why a lot of it feels like super uninspired Jak and Daxter stuff.
2.) Gui is SO far off base with his sweeping accusations on 3D Sonic. it's almost as bad of an accusation as the whole "Sonic's friends suck we don't want to play as them!" argument.
some of the most fuffiling level design in Sonic Generations comes from the modern sonic stages. Modern Seaside Hill and Modern Sky Sanctuary are so chock full of wonderful alternate routes that come from the 3D gameplay and the sort of twitch reflex platforming that you really don't get anywhere else. there is a joy in the sort of free-form rythim gameplay that comes from doing time attack on 3D Sonic stages in generations or the daytime stuff in Unleashed.
a lot of the mods out there for the PC version of Sonic Generations? Modern Sonic levels. there's a whole level pack that is a faithful recreation of all of SOnic Unleashed out there since that game never got a PC port. there's a really inspired SOnic adventure mod pack, there's all sorts of levels from all over sonic history and unique ones still, and all these mods tend to be for modern sonic rather than classic. there's even a few colors levels out there where they do what they can considering the limitations they have with wisp coding.
Sega HAD a really good formula with the mix of 3D and 2D stuff with unleashed/colors/Generations. maybe not something faithful to the idea of momentum based platforming that made the 2D games great, but they had a working formula, and then they kinda decided to experiment with Lost world, a game that at the time of release, was far too frustrating with how kill-happy it is and the fact that they didn't program in extra lives at 100 rings for some infathomable reason. thankfully between Zelda DLC level for grinding lives and the patches that fixed a couple of really crappy things like wisp motion controls and such, the game is actually pretty good, but the damage is already done there.
Sonic 4's complete disregard for physics and more importantly, decent level design is aclear call that just makign sonic games 2D isn't the answer. I find sonic Rush's on-rails approach to the platforming to be kinda less fuffiling because the roller coaster effect just isn't as dazzling in the 2D gameplay as it is in 3D.
Then again, I'm one of the folks out there that thinks Marble zone has really good level design that's maybe just a bit mismatched with the hero that's stuck platforming it.
Also, fun fact; Jun Senoue's butt-rock band, Crush 40 (the guys that brought us such classics as "Live and Learn") actually did an album with a song called Sonic Youth on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOLpBTDvd24 Enjoy, James. >:3