I’ve ragged on Sonic Adventure DX so often while discussing other things that you’re probably sick and tired of hearing about it, but it seems like I’ve never actually dedicated the time to examine the game on its own.
I got the urge to replay it recently, and after installing a few hacks to get the XBone controller working I was able to begin. Time to give SADX its chance in the spotlight.
As far as I’m aware, this is the first Sonic game that’s come out on PC since Sonic Heroes. Which means I miss about a third of the references in Sonic Generations.
Minor spoilers may be hinted at but there’s not really much to spoil. Except, perhaps, the assertion that it’s actually quite good.
I never actually played any Sonic games as a child; we were too poor to own a real console (the best we could get were GameBoys). Instead, I absorbed him by the collossal pile of merchandising that surrounded him — cartoons, branded clothing, all that nonsense.
So I don’t have any nostalgia about the games. Sonic 1 is, to me, a bit floppy, and Sonic 2 just feels like an embryonic version of the blue blur’s finest hour: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. The masterwork.
I bought the Sonic Mega Collection Plus a few years ago, as a grown man. I wasn’t rediscovering the past, I was discovering something new that I had never truly experienced before.
There is no “retro” here. There is only a bloody good game.
Continue reading “Blog 462: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles”
If you can respawn infinitely, and with no (or negligible) penalty, then there’s no real challenge — you cannot lose.
The way all the numbers are set up in Project Y4, your hit points are pretty low and attacks are good, making combat a lot snappier — but increasing the risk of death by a considerable amount. So I decided to implement a revival system whereby the AP-AM is reconstructed at a designated repair pad on death, giving the player a bit of a safety net.
Right now, there are no limits on reconstruction… But this cannot hold forever. So what’s the best approach?
Continue reading “Blog 416: The Question of Infinite Respawn in Y4”
My hi-fi has an sD card reader in it.
I never cared about this when I bought it; I was more concerned about it having the ability to switch itself on in the morning, and the ability to switch on at the same volume I last disabled it with (my last hi-fi had neither of these abilities; I had to race to the volume control to damp it down from a horrifying 14 before the digital radio managed to tune in every time I switched it on).
So I didn’t care much for the fact of a card reader’s existence; the rest of the hi-fi satisfied my criteria. But recently, I have found its presence… Rather liberating.
Rao Dao Zao 