It should also be noted that, around the time of Adventure, Sega's in-house development teams were formally restructured to be semi-autonomous studios with greater individual freedom; which accounts for why Sonic Team started making so many non-Sonic games around that time.
The studios got merged back into Sega when they went third-party.
i've seen it speculated that the repeat restructuring accounts for the inconsistency of the Sonic series
that is, lessons seem like they've been learned and then they make these huge backwards leaps. Shadow is a much worse game than Heroes; 4 pt. II and Lost World are much worse than Generations
actually thinking about it Shadow is what happens when you take the Chaotix levels from Heroes and decide that's what the whole game should have been like, then bolt that onto the sloppy physics of Adventure and pile on the edge
my brother recently told me his concept for a Sonic game
it was going to be 3D, with free exploration rather than the always-moving-forward mechanic from Secret Rings, but without the bugs that hurt the actual 3D Sonics
the story was going to be: Eggman decides to kill Sonic. Because Sonic keeps screwing up his plans or whatever. So he sends a robot after Sonic, literally like one of these guys but in a larger robot similar to the ones Eggman used to pilot. This happens in the space of like a 10 second cutscene and then gameplay starts immediately, with Sonic running through a meadow-like landscape with lots of rolling hills.
Sonic is joined at various points along the story by playable characters Tails, Amy and Blaze (who gets teleported in by the Sol emeralds because they sensed Sonic was in danger or some handwave like that). Knuckles is also playable, but he starts out separate; he gets involved because Eggman steals the Master Emerald for use as a power supply for his new weapon
Important: the new robot is actually super sassy and makes fun of all the main cast for all the things that are ridiculous about them, and they make fun of him right back. Thus establishing him as a comedy villain. When you fight him outside of the robo suit it turns out he's actually really strong though.
Metal Sonic returns, once again under Eggman's control, as a more dangerous enemy who appears in later stages.
Knuckles' introduction has him chilling in his house watching TV when it's interrupted by Eggman, broadcasting a demonstration of his new weapon, a Chaos-Emerald-powered cannon which he uses to blow up the ARK while E.G.G.M.A.N. plays. At the end of the broadcast Eggman mentions that with his new weapon's targeting system, he will be able to hit any target, anywhere, no matter how fast it's moving. How will he do this? Well, the Great Emerald's power will allow him to feel. He's going to use the Master Emerald.
Knuckles is given a split second to react before a robot smashes through the wall and steals the Master Emerald, gameplay resumes and Unknown from M.E. starts playing.
(Later in the game a newspaper is visible stating that Shadow the Hedgehog was the guardian of the ARK and has not been seen since its explosion, and a worried kid - there are optionally interactive NPCs in some stages - at one point wonders if Shadow is OK.)
On the whole though the idea is to make something that's fun, that won't actually offend Sonic fans or piss anyone off. Shadow is absent not because he's dead (that's just playing) but because he's far too much of a sensitive soul to get in on the banter, and his fans seem like they'd take it personally.
Anyway in the last part of the game Sonic destroys the cannon and Eggman absorbs the power of the Chaos emeralds and becomes Super Eggman. Sonic is able to use the recovered Master Emerald to turn Super and the final boss fight happens.
So you beat Eggman and a short cutscene plays in which Eggman is arrested for "attempted murder of Sonic the Hedgehog". The gang decide to celebrate their victory with a BBQ and some chili dogs. At this point a motorcycle can be heard in the background, and then Shadow walks onto the screen wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a novelty swim ring, and carrying a pina colada with an umbrella sticking out, while the opening riff from All Hail Shadow plays. "Hey guys what did i miss?" Roll credits.
The design philosophy behind all this would be to make a game that would be fun and enjoyable to people nostalgic for Adventure/2/Heroes/etc. while also being, y'know, actually a good game and funny. Levels would be designed with replay in mind, and speedrunning would be encouraged by the inclusion of a variety of routes and the ability to bypass large parts of the levels with skillful platforming and sufficient momentum, but for players who prefer to take their time and explore there would be enough hidden Easter eggs and secrets in the levels to keep things interesting. Optional extra missions would ask players to complete harder versions of stages, or complete them within a particular time limit or with a particular character, rather than collect x many ys or whatever.
Gameplay would be high-speed platforming, throughout, but different characters would have different abilities that made them distinct. Sonic is obviously the fastest, Tails can fly, Knuckles is slower but can climb and glide and his punching attack has the highest DPS of any character, Amy can launch herself into the air with her hammer which also delivers the most damage of any single attack, and Blaze has ranged attacks and can set robots and obstacles on fire to deal continuous damage over time.
so there was a discussion on /r/eu4 today about how basically every continent in the game ends up all fucked up less than 100 years after start (usually) but people tend to only notice how fucked up Europe specifically gets.
Someone made this post:
Everywhere outside of Europe is almost completely unrailroaded so it never develops anywhere close to how they did historically. Manchus never conquer Ming. Timurids never evolve into Mughals. Vietnam either disappears or conquers all of Southeast Asia. Korea annexes Manchuria. India becomes a game of blobs rather than a multitude of states all competing with each other, the lack of which negates the possibility of a natural Mughal forming. Ming bitchslaps all the nomads despite its emperor being captured a few years into the game irl. Ottomans never decline and eat Europe rather than Arabia half the time.
The default state of Asia and any other non-European place is absurdity because Paradox doesn't have the historical knowledge or background to model them properly. This is not to say Europe is perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than anywhere else. People are AMAZED when events in Asia occur with any resemblance to history. That one time when Qing actually beat the Ming blob would be an occasion to take a screenshot and post it here.
The most historically accurate area outside of Europe is probably Japan because it operates like a miniature Europe where one nation becomes more and more powerful until it swallows everything else. In a sense, this is the only story EU4 is capable of telling: a linear rise to power.
I responded, and in doing so I think I finally kinda articulated something that's been sort of lowkey bugging me about grand strategy game design since....well, since I started thinking about such things basically.
As I said in my reply, most 4Xes to this day boil down to "Risk, but with some extra stuff stapled on top". Obviously that's a massive oversimplification, and even within that framework you get games that are very different (compare, I dunno, Europa Universalis 4 to Endless Legend) but, all of these games ultimately boil down to, by whatever means, acquisition or exchange of territory.
There are some games that allow cut-throughs (such as the science victories in the various Civ installments) but the general thrust of the game design is very obviously usually built upon the idea that you're going to be slugging it out a bunch over parcels of land, be that with weapons, words, magic propaganda beams (s/o the RTS portion of Spore), whatever. To a point that makes sense. A lot of these are either proudly "historical" in a simmy way (again: Paradox stuff) or at least use it as a base (Civilization, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, etc.) and throughout human history land has been a source of conflict. It still is today, as I'm sure anyone who can remember a few years back to the Crimean annexation can attest to.
But here's the thing. In all of human history, generally, empires rise, reach an apex, and fall. Strategy games are good at simulating those first two parts, but tend to end before that last one actually happens (unless of course you make it happen yourself, which often requires some genuine effort on your part). I get it, more or less, most people don't find watching their hard work fall to pieces particularly rewarding, but, it gets at the core of my issue.
Which is that strategy games are terrible at simulating anything that's not specifically linear conquest that then stalls out indefinitely after hitting a certain point.
Like, take the Roman Empire, right?
Rome started as a fairly small republic, became an empire, blanketed most of Europe at one point, and then slowly collapsed. But we still feel the repercussions of Roman hegemony to this very day, long after the actual territorial breadth of the empire has dissolved. Many people speak languages derived from Latin, and a fair amount of architecture and law comes from Roman traditions. So I guess my question is, wouldn't a game that simulated that part be much more gratifying than one that just stalls out?
If you've been following my Paradox thread you know I've been playing a game of Crusader Kings 2 as The Empire of Al-Shamal, which is a nation that culturally is a mishmash of Viking (Viking raiders founded the kingdom that would later become Al-Shamal) and subjugated Italians, Lombards, Greeks, Berbers, and Arabs. They're also Muslim, religiously. I'm sure this place has a deeply interesting culture, but the game doesn't--can't, even--simulate it. CK2 just isn't equipped to figure out what Norse-Lombard-Italian-Greek-Arabic would sound like, to try to come up with names (either for people, places, or titles) that would make sense within it, and so on. That's why 300 years into the game if I don't name my character's sons myself they'll end up being named Thordir or something even though being named after the viking god of thunder makes zero sense if your father is a devout enough muslim to have memorized the Quran front to back.
And I guess...that kinda bothers me? I don't know how you'd begin to program a game that could account for all possible permutations of culture crossing in CK2 (there's over a hundred of them) but I'd like to see that sort of thing more often in these games. Here's your empire Fuckoffistan's cultural, political, linguistic legacy, instead of just "you own the whole world! Congratulations! You made the entire map blue or pink or red or green or whatever the fuck!"
Another thing: I hate how it's impossible to ever be the good guy in these sorts of games. Paradox games in particular have a mean streak in them that I'm not usually in the mood for. I get it, right? it's "dark humor" or whatever. You know what's not at all funny? The fact that if I execute a prisoner sometimes the game will just decide to throw him in a drowning pit, to poisonous snakes, crucify him, or some other fucking twisted-ass thing instead of just hanging or beheading him like people mostly actually did back then. I just feel like my enlightened, poet-writing emperor probably prefers some kind of at least nominally humane form of execution, you know? I'm not saying it has to be sunshine and rainbows but when you literally sell a DLC focused around joining a (completely fictional) satanic cult so you can sacrifice your wife to satan and dance around wearing her face as a mask (this is a real fucking event in CK2, as of the Monks & Mystics expansion, and it's not even that hard to come by), something went wrong somewhere.
Even in non-Paradox games, if you're always conquering you're always making *someone's* life miserable. Usually not *just* your enemies' either.
Which brings me to another thought. Why are you always playing as just *one* nation/country/faction/species/fucking whatever in these games? I feel like a game where you had to balance a number of competing world powers--either just to keep one from getting too strong or in order to keep the planet above/below some kind of happines/disaster threshold/I don't know, something--would be really cool!
So would a game like this where you could do something other than conquer, pillage and plunder. Like I get it if you're a viking you're gonna want to carve out some kingdoms, but at the same time the complete lack of *any* cultural stuff in any of these games, it grates on me. And I'm talking in circles now but I don't know, am I making any sense?
i don't play those kinds of games, and wouldn't have the first idea how you'd begin to go about simulating culture in a game of that type, but your post was interesting and definitely makes sense, and i feel like i'd probably have more of an interest in those games if they did simulate culture in a more interesting, believable way.
jsyk the crimea thing isn't like, past. the latest ceasefire started and more or less stopped three weeks ago.
aaaaanyway. i'd say one reason the game doesn't do that is that we don't know how to simulate those things. risk is easy. whatever happened to the roman empire is less so. how many causes for the collapse have been promulgated in the last centuries? even if there's some kind of consensus now, is it something you could bottom line in more than a page? doubtful. and if a historian needs that much effort, a programmer is absolutely hosed.
this is true to a more boringly mechanical extent with your language question. we really don't understand how languages change in that much detail, especially for something as specific as rulers' names. just not going super amazingly here.
of course, the fact we try to make games with mechanical rules concerning these things we don't understand results in caricatural situations like you describe. imagine if we made video games about, like, current conflicts! that would not end well
aaaaanyway. i'd say one reason the game doesn't do that is that we don't know how to simulate those things. risk is easy. whatever happened to the roman empire is less so. how many causes for the collapse have been promulgated in the last centuries? even if there's some kind of consensus now, is it something you could bottom line in more than a page? doubtful. and if a historian needs that much effort, a programmer is absolutely hosed.
this is true to a more boringly mechanical extent with your language question. we really don't understand how languages change in that much detail, especially for something as specific as rulers' names. just not going super amazingly here.
of course, the fact we try to make games with mechanical rules concerning these things we don't understand results in caricatural situations like you describe. imagine if we made video games about, like, current conflicts! that would not end well
I mean I guess that's so.
Still. It doesn't have to be historical. Say you set it on a planet with only like, I dunno, four possible cultures. That seems more manageable.
Still very simplified obviously, but, I dunno, it'd be a good first step I'd think
four possible cultures? that sounds like a view in which cultures remain unchanging for centuries and act as discrete enough to act like nations fighting over mental territory. which is (a) nazi, not that you had that in mind (b) still way over simple and basically reintroducing the fundamental problem.
as far as i understand, paradox games treat cultures in this way. i would guess that they stave off nazi shit, to the extent that they do, just by having them be much smaller cultures than we tend to deal with in ethnonationalism (like saxon, i mean, i'm somewhat anglo-saxon and yet have never once given a shit about weregild) and also a lot of them.
Really I guess the usual game mode of that you have absolute control over your thing and you can keep it indefinitely is basically opposed to any serious understanding of history. And it's kind of hard to imagine a game that does something else.
I gather Paradox games have some way to deal with this, like pressure from nobles or something, but I don't know.
Really I guess the usual game mode of that you have absolute control over your thing and you can keep it indefinitely is basically opposed to any serious understanding of history. And it's kind of hard to imagine a game that does something else.
I gather Paradox games have some way to deal with this, like pressure from nobles or something, but I don't know.
you have your noble council if you have the Conclave DLC and you have noble factions (less organized but conceptually more or less the same thing) if you don't, so yeah
hypothetically they're supposed to break up your empire if you don't keep them happy. In practice it's pretty easy to just whackamole them into submission even if you piss all of them off, so.
also he is apparently coding racism into the game, in that NPCs will be able to make a reasonable guss at where your character is from and use it to make judgments about them....y....yay ? ? ? ?
So a while back I mentioned an indie game called Goocubelets, which I ended up panning because physics collisions made its grid-based puzzle wildly inconsistent and forcing you to reset often at a moment's notice.
Apparently the developer threw a shitfit recently and put in 400+ achievements for completing a level over and over again.
It's kind of sad, because I wouldn't call it a fake game. It had serious structural problems and an abusive dev, but the puzzles themselves were pretty good in the third game. I wouldn't have even noticed if it didn't just show up in my library.
EDIT: Apparently it's just a flat turnover of a Unity starter kit. Alright then, fuck them.
Theory: Final Fantasy games are (for the most part) more about interesting progression systems than interesting combat.
This is at least true of II, III, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and partially true for X (which had really good turn based combat as opposed to the usual FF passable combat)
FF retained my least favourite aspect of RP combat, the purely menu screen-like interface that is imo the least exciting way to simulate a fight, but took away the aspect i most liked about that, which is that in a turn-based fight you do at least have as much time as you want to think things through strategically and plan the best course of action
so i'm not the biggest fan
RP combat styles i especially liked: Paper Mario: TTYD, Mario & Luigi, Undertale
Wait mode exists but doesn't (usually? maybe it depends on the game?) work the way you would expect. Like it only pauses when you're in a submenu and not when you're on the Attack/Magic/Items menu, or animations will still play even when time is ostensibly paused (which then affects timing of later actions since the character can get back to filling up their ATB bar sooner and such), etc.
also disclaimer: i've only played 2 games in the series, of which one of them was X
so what i'm actually saying is i didn't get along with the combat in FFXIII, but that leads me to suspect i won't particularly enjoy the combat in the other titles in the series, either
Also all the ATB games have a battle speed option, too. (Which leads to a funny pseudo-bug in FFV, where there's a spell that is supposed to slow down battles... except it sets the battle speed to 5, even if you've set it to 6, which is slower.)
Comments
The studios got merged back into Sega when they went third-party.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Just want to make that clear.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I don't like how it got rid of Blaze, who is like, one of the only female characters in the series who isn't completely two dimensional.
Also Jake is an amazingly bad father.