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Sonic the Hedgehog Community Thread: Green Hills and Laughing Iizukas

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Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
No, this should've been Sonic in Mario levels. This is just strange. :lol

Jak 2 may have the WORST checkpoints of any video game made in the last 10 years. There are times when you have to re-do the ENTIRE FUCKIN' MISSION, including the cutscene/dialog before it begins.
The worst part of Jak II's shitty checkpoints. Sometimes I feel like the narrative got in the way of them remembering how to design a platformer.

Like.

Jak II has to be so bad that AniHawk's given it its own tier in terms of games he dislikes.

Wait...people hate Legaia?

Or do you mean people have never played it?
I dunno. I hope people don't dislike it. Otherwise I'll be sad.
 
I have listed ten games

Screw number they don't mean anything, they all sit on a cloud, a cloud of love.

Starfox 64
Final Fantasy VII(Yeah yeah yeah, , look the game changed my life as a kid)
Def Jam: Fight For New York
Star Ocean: The Second Story
Mass Effect 1
Shadow Hearts 1 and 2(I put them in the same slot because reasons)
Starfighter
Parasite Eve

I feel like I should put Suikoden in there somewhere but I want to play the second one before I can grasp there true merit

This isn't ten...whatever I quit.

I haven't played the Crash Bandicoot games

Well see there's your problem.
 
Crash 3: Warped was my shit back in the day

I can't believe how bad Wrath of Cortex was in comparison. How did a GC/Xbox game end up lookin' WORSE than the PS1 predecessor!? The controls were worse, too! How do you fuck that up!?

And pray to god you aren't playing the PS2 version, unless you want to sit through 30+ second load times!

edit: oh shit, somebody besides me and Beef realize the brilliance of Def Jam: Fight for NY
 

Noi

Member
Seriously though, I thought I'd played some shitty games, but Jak II is driving me up a wall here. I'm afraid that I'll never want to boot it up again once I stop playing today.

Yoshi's Island? Arc the Lad II? Sora no Kiseki The 3rd? Devil May Cry 3: SE? Ninja Gaiden: Black? A Link to the Past? Tales of Destiny R: DC? Tetris Battle Gaiden? Terranigma? I'm seriously looking around at some of the games I have and I'm not sure what to say. I'd put Suikoden I on the list for nostalgia reasons.

List all of them! We aren't asking for a dissertation on why you love X game, a throwaway name is fine too from time to time.

The baby the baby the baby the baby? I remember being so psyched that it was a blend of first-person and third-person but I don't think the mechanic was that cohesive at all. Forget the story because I thought the gameplay could have been tightened up more.

That game should have allowed cutscene skipping on your first playthrough. Between the awful story, pixel hunt sections, forcing you to walk very slowly with the camera panned behind you for no reason sections and fuckin' having to aim the remote to fire missiles, that game is not Team Ninja Dog's best work.

I was thinking of putting CV4 on the list until I remembered how broken it could be. While some of the additions that CV4 adds make sense for making the game easier to pick up for newcomers, I just like Rondo a lot better because it uses the classic design in a good way. I liked being able to use more than one character, though. But I forgot to mention that I liked how there were untimed stages, meaning you could go around the level at your own pace.

I'm really not a fan of 8-way whipping. I always felt that holding down the whip to wiggle it around was a good enough compromise which had it's own risk/reward without just outright nulling the use of subweapons a lot of the time. Why bother using an axe if you can just whip up?


I know some people that won't give it the light of day simply because of the slow worldmap walking speed. I wish I could fix that myself just so I could get more people to play it.

Songi. <3 His theme is pretty much the first thing I think off any time a rival show ups in any game ever.

Oh well, a lot of people I know don't even know it exists! I love the battle system a lot in terms of experimenting with different combinations and figuring out what yielded Super Arts and random other Arts yourself. While bosses have a pattern they adhere to which makes it easy to respond to them, you still have to be aware that they can launch criticals on you. I love hunting down Lapis towards the end and playing all of the minigames in Sol because they're addictive (Baaaaaka Fighterrrrrrrr). And the voice clips are awesome.

The narrative isn't anything much to write home about outside of Noa's substory, but it's serviceable. The music is phenomenal and addictive as well.

I still don't think any other RPG has done the whole "equipment you use shows up in battle" as well as Legaia does. Like, some games will have whole costume swaps at a time, but changing individual weapons, headgear, boots, clothing and armguards? It's just awesome stuff.

The best part of the Arts for me was how, after learning them, normal arts were executed snappily and without any delay. I can understand the "charge" for super/hyper arts to load the special effects, but seeing how smoothly normal arts are chained one after another will never stop being great to me.
 

TheOGB

Banned
Def Jam: Fight for NY was fucking awesome. Had a friend that used to consistently whip my ass with Warren G and Lil Kim.
I have a cousin that had Def Jam: Fight for NY. I only played it with him like 3 times, didn't know the controls, and always lost despite somehow coming close.

We were too busy playing NBA Street V3
 
I have a cousin that had Def Jam: Fight for NY. I only played it with him like 3 times, didn't know the controls, and always lost despite somehow coming close.

We were too busy playing NBA Street V3

NBA Street was godlike. I can practically hear the Gamebreaker music now.

V2 was better
 

Nert

Member
Also way to put all our throwaway lists to shame. :V

Yeah, my list was a throwaway thing I put together before eating dinner. I wrote about Paper Mario: TTYD and Final Fantasy Tactics at length here, but I'll elaborate slightly on the other games below:

Metroid Prime: My favorite game that I've ever played. I've gone back to the game many times, but my first playthrough was revelatory. The visual design in the game is intricate and lush, the soundtrack is one of the best ever, and the world is brimming with secrets to discover and powerups to collect. The first person platforming and the elaborate morph ball segments were wonderful directions to take the series in, too. I even remember being legitimately terrified when I was going through the pitch black biotech research facility where you first find the Thermal Visor
I was only 12 at the time, but it's still the only time that a game has had that strong of an effect on me
.

Super Mario Galaxy: Super Mario Galaxy 2's level design is better, but I highly value original experiences, so I have to give the nod to the first game. After the first moment that I performed a long jump on a planetoid and went on to orbit around the planet a few times before landing, I was completely hooked. Battlestation's Purple Coins is my favorite level/challenge/whatever in any game.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: I think that this is the most consistent 3D Zedla experience. Entries after it reached higher highs (Majora Mask's atmosphere and sidequests, Twilight Princess's dungeon designs, Wind Waker's visuals, all of the Lanayru Desert stuff in Skyward Sword), but I enjoyed pretty much everything that I did in Ocarina. This game is a rich and timeless adventure.

Team Fortress 2: My favorite multiplayer game. The art style is phenomenal and the different classes have more personality than almost any other game characters without saying almost anything. I lost an entire summer to this game and I'm glad that I did.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 By far my most played game of 2011 and 2012, I see myself playing this for a long time to come. I wrote more about it for 2011 GOTY stuff.

The Binding of Isaac: This is technically the smallest game on this list, but when you're playing it, it can feel like the biggest. Each randomly generated playthrough can bring about entirely different experiences, items, and challenges. The savage difficulty and the presence of permanent death fills each run with tension and makes your rare victories feel all the more significant.

Warcraft III: The single player campaigns for Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne are very inventive and fun to play through, but the real meat of the game for me was the endless selection of surprisingly deep custom maps built by the community. Everybody knows about Dota, which was so successful that it created a new genre out of thin air, but I played more Footmen Frenzy than anything else. In my younger years, I even lead a clan dedicated to this game.

Resident Evil 4: Another mention for the "perfect games" sorts of discussion, just about everything that this game does works for me. The pacing in particular is incredible, with nothing feeling out of place or too repetitive for me.

Jak II is terrible

I never played this game, but I was baffled during the GiantBomb Quick Look of it (when they looked at the HD collection). Brad and Vinny seemed to have pretty positive memories of it and I couldn't fathom why. Everything they were doing on screen seemed terribly boring.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
VIII taught me how to read at 5 years old.
why does this forum like making me feel old

I'm joking. I was 11 when FF8 came out.

List all of them! We aren't asking for a dissertation on why you love X game, a throwaway name is fine too from time to time.
But I wanna say why. Just when I start writing, I feel like, "well, this game feels like one of my top games of all time too, but this one doesn't; hmmmm." I won't deny that I like those games very much.

That game should have allowed cutscene skipping on your first playthrough. Between the awful story, pixel hunt sections, forcing you to walk very slowly with the camera panned behind you for no reason sections and fuckin' having to aim the remote to fire missiles, that game is not Team Ninja Dog's best work.
Ohhh myyyy gawd... seriously; that game reeked of outright weird design, and surprisingly no one from Nintendo who was supervising it said anything? :|

Why bother using an axe if you can just whip up?
That's one of the reasons why I become lukewarm towards CV4 outside of the music and presentation as well. It renders a lot of the subweapons null and void.

I know some people that won't give it the light of day simply because of the slow worldmap walking speed. I wish I could fix that myself just so I could get more people to play it.

Songi. <3 His theme is pretty much the first thing I think off any time a rival show ups in any game ever.

I still don't think any other RPG has done the whole "equipment you use shows up in battle" as well as Legaia does. Like, some games will have whole costume swaps at a time, but changing individual weapons, headgear, boots, clothing and armguards? It's just awesome stuff.

The best part of the Arts for me was how, after learning them, normal arts were executed snappily and without any delay. I can understand the "charge" for super/hyper arts to load the special effects, but seeing how smoothly normal arts are chained one after another will never stop being great to me.
But the World Map isn't the biggest part of that game, just because you can buy Doors of Wind a little later on starting in Jeremi. It's a bit of a weird deterrence in the first part of the world, but even then I don't feel like the encounter rate is large enough to detract from the game overall.

(Songi Battle 2 spoilers) Songi's the besssst.

Even if it's sometimes palette swaps, I always liked how Legaia did armour/weapon swaps as well. It was the type of thing I'd seen in Zelda before and I was delighted to see it in Legaia. Sometimes this type of thing was limited to just weapons alone. I'd love to see some of the armours I'd equipped on characters (FFX kind of did this, but it was only limited to armlets and weapons). And the regular arts themselves were so nicely integrated into the final arts that it's nice to see them come up and get executed fast. And I liked that the game had respect for the player's time in that fashion.

Hyper/Super arts make sense in that they're kind of like special attacks/limit breaks so they should get separated.

And I love how magics kept evolving and getting better and better with each subsequent use. You don't often see that, and magic in other games generally stick to the magic stat to determine strength, while this sticks to both its internal growth and somewhat your stat.
 

GAMERG0D

Member
Metroid Prime: I even remember being legitimately terrified when I was going through the pitch black biotech research facility where you first find the Thermal Visor
I was only 12 at the time, but it's still the only time that a game has had that strong of an effect on me
.
I get really nervous whenever I enter water in Prime, it's just scary.
 
Ohhh myyyy gawd... seriously; that game reeked of outright weird design, and surprisingly no one from Nintendo who was supervising it said anything? :|

IDK how much was Nintendo and how much was Team NInja Dog, but I do remember hearing Sakomoto INSISTED on "The Baby" translation. Not the child, or infant, or young metroid, or whatever the hell. It had to be The Baby. And the acroynm of the game had to be M:OM. And the ship had to look like a baby bottle. AND HEY DID YOU GET THAT SUPER METROID WAS ABOUT MATERNAL INSTINCTS WELL IT IS NOW.

He also insisted on the whole game being played with one controller. So you got these awkward ass 2d-to-3d transitions with the slowdown to try and make up for it.
 
Metroid Prime really is so good. Need to set aside more time to run through it some more... only just got the Wave Beam in my most recent replay (this time using the Trilogy verison).

Debating whether I should go forward, deeper into Phendrana Drifts like I'm pretty sure the game wants me to, or double back through Magmoor Caverns and Tallon Overworld to return to Chozo Ruins and unlock the one Wave Beam door I can access for the helluvit. (Man, I would really like an elevator from Tallon Overworld to Phendrana Drifts. I forget if one actually exists and I just haven't reached it yet, or what.) On the other hand, if I keep going forward, I get to fight the Space Pirates for the first time real soon :>
 

Noi

Member
I was literally seconds away from actually posting something positive about Jak II, then shitty level design kicked in and now I'm right back to saying fuck Jak II.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
Why are you playing Jak II, anyway? :p

IDK how much was Nintendo and how much was Team NInja Dog, but I do remember hearing Sakomoto INSISTED on "The Baby" translation. Not the child, or infant, or young metroid, or whatever the hell. It had to be The Baby. And the acroynm of the game had to be M:OM. And the ship had to look like a baby bottle. AND HEY DID YOU GET THAT SUPER METROID WAS ABOUT MATERNAL INSTINCTS WELL IT IS NOW.

He also insisted on the whole game being played with one controller. So you got these awkward ass 2d-to-3d transitions with the slowdown to try and make up for it.
Subtlety isn't his best suit. Holy crap. He really insisted on "the baby"? But it sounds awkward sometimes in dialogue.

Super Metroid's about being creeped out by the atmosphere, and fighting aliens. Atmosphere, tight controls, and going through things at your own pace has been Metroid's strongest suit. Not narrative. That game's the opposite of what I'd expected it to be.
 

BlackJace

Member
IIRC, Magmoor Caverns is the only way in and out of Phendrana.

Yep.

mp_map_haffner.gif

Aside from Dark Souls, MP has the best interconnected world in video games.
 

Noi

Member
Why are you playing Jak II, anyway? :p

I paid good money for this HD collection so I'm seeing this through to the end! That and trophies, though anyone who looks at my PSN profile should have figured that one out. I always felt bad that I never got around to playing the Sony PS2 Platformer mascots, so I've been fixing that with the collections. So far Ratchet & Clank seems to be the only series that managed to get away with no awful games in the process.

I have a pretty high tolerance for bullshit as long as I have a place to vent about it (like here).
 

qq more

Member
Day 1 of the no swear challenge


DOING GREAT SO FAR


Also, does it matter if I swear in the IRC chat? Just want to be clear about that.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
also stop acting like i already swore >:[
I didn't?

Sounds like someone's got a guilty conscience. :p

What's everyone ten favourite games of the generation, then? I may be behind in some of the stuff I've played, but I'm wondering if there're a lot of games that people like in this gen? (This is mostly for DS, PSP, Wii, PS3 and 360.)

Like, it's not my favourite generation, but it's kinda decent, at least for its role in reviving the platformer genre.

For example, I'm incredibly tempted to put Red Seeds Profile in my top 10 of the generation even if it's janky as hell, but it's a game that I remember fondly. But then you have a game on the other end of the spectrum like Super Mario Galaxy 2 which I think it one of the best platformers of this generation, but I don't know if I'd throw it in my top 10 at all. Something like Colours, though, would probably make it.
 
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