The Rebirth of Sonic the Hedgehog or the nail in the coffin?

2010-02-08T02:16:00.008-05:00

Gamespot announced this week that Project Needlemouse is really Sonic the Hedgehog 4, a continuation of the Genesis era Sonic games. And apparently it's episodic.

As a Sonic fan from the 90's, I'm super excited. I know, this could be the Sonic Cycle all over again. But here me out, this is quite possibly the best idea Sega has came up with yet to redeem itself to the older fans like myself. Lets go through a list of Sonic titles meant to be redeemers though.

Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast: 9-9-99 was a great day for many reasons but for Sonic fans it was the day they got their first (true) 3D Sonic game. In a time when only the Playstation and the N64 were available it was a very fun game to play. At least as Sonic, Tails and even Knuckles but the problems of 3D sonic were there and the annoying trend of new friends appearing in each game was started here. As far as ideas go this was great one time. But since then has become rather annoying to fans of the old series.

Sonic Adventure 2 for Dreamcast: Better story line and added what seemed like a cool character at the time Shadow the Hedgehog, plus a bat with tits, it streamlined the lamer parts (open level selection and boring fishing characters) of the original Adventure and seemed to really try to be a better game. At the end of the day though the Knuckles/Rouge stages were too abundant and the Tails/Dr. Eggman stages were pointless. Seriously no one wants to play as Dr. Robotnik unless he's doing something awesome like destroying Alderan with the Death Egg.

Sonic Heroes: The beginning of the end wasn't obvious at first. But Sega went nuts and decided to vomit as many characters as they could into a game and not only that they had enough space after that to make at least 1 new one. A bunny named Cream to please all the furry fans. Playing through you played as 3 different characters at any given one time. Switching through a strong one, a flying one or a fast one depending on the obstacle ahead. Gameplay wise, honestly if it wasn't a Sonic game might have been fun. But poor cameras and forced cheap replay value on top of all the annoying characters made this an easy loser. Sonic fans didn't loose too much heart for this one. The developers might of gone a bit crazy bringing characters back to life from previous games but maybe they'll tone it down on the next game. Wait thats Shadow the Hedgehog... I'm not even going to bother with that one, here is the wiki.

Sonic the Hedgehog '06: After Shadow the Hedgehog old fans of the series were begging for something more traditional. Sega claimed to be doing so with this game, a reboot of the series in a way, this game is personally not even playable. The controls, camera, and layout of the stages. Everything was broken in this game. On top of that the characters are back and there is now another hedgehog competing with Sonic and Shadow on a motorcycle. Silver the Hedgehog is a white hedgehog and apparently important to the plot. A stupid plot that involved anamorphic characters making out with realistic looking humans. Nuff Said.

Sonic Unleashed: After the massive failure that was Sonic the Hedgehog, they went back to the drawing board and made what was pretty much a great 2D Sonic game. At least for 1/3rd of the time you play it. The other 2/3rds of the game Sonic is transformed into a were(wolf)hog and becomes slow and destroys things over and over again. Not in a fun smash things up kind of way either, but a wow if i bang my head on this wall one more time I might finally go unconscious and end this once and for all kind of way. While most people called this a failure, and it was, it still was better than StH '06 because atleast a third of it was playable.

But now we have Sonic the Hedgehog 4 coming out this summer and it's a part of a game that is a direct sequel to a game from over 15 years ago. I know you can't tell from over the internet but I have my fingers crossed... really hard.

Illustration by Kevin Llewellyn
Sonic Cycle photo by Giant Bomb

FIRST!!!!!1!

2010-02-06T05:00:00.000-05:00

What do you say on the first one? This really is probably the most awkward of post for any blog. Hold on.. I may have to go to a few of my favorite blogs and see what their first post were now:

Kotaku apparently started working on the site back in 2004 on July 1^st. If you look at the beginning (which would be page 1641) the first thing they did was post a little message clarifying that “Stuff about the site goes here”. Fascinating. Their first true post was more along the usual lines we see by the ever dutiful editor, Kotaku.com.

Although on Feb. 11^th Penny Arcade started to add news reports to their already steady stream of web comics. This doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense but I do agree with Tycho. I wouldn’t trade anything for Canada.

MTV Multiplayer started rather appropriately, if you wanna go big that is, with the 2006 E3 which in my opinion is still the most impressive one they've ever had. Although that ol' game industry magic is coming back a bit.

Well that may the the proper beginning. If not it'll have to do.

Welcome to my blog.

Game Dismantler

The Rebirth of Sonic the Hedgehog or the nail in the coffin?

FIRST!!!!!1!