James Scott
Banned
I was pretty big on anything Sonic Team around the time this came out (I think before heroes and Shadow?) so I decided to give it a go...and I didn't finish it for 13 years.
And it's...pretty good!
It's a 3D platformer based around rolling an egg around, collecting fruit, and rolling over bad guys.
I guess it sounds a bit like Katamari, but it's more Mario than anything.
Surprisingly so, actually. It seems like when transferring to the GCN, Sonic Team wanted to make something for that audience so they made a Mario game and a pretty decent one at that.
You collect emblems which function more like Mario Stars than Sonic's collectable emblems.
The stages are big and you can explore them, most levels are just a small segment of the stage where you need to accomplish a given task to get an emblem.
A lot of Mario's moves are here like a long jump, a slide, a high jump (bounce), stomp, etc.
It oddly feels like the evolution of Mario, somewhere in between Mario 64 and Galaxy with a lot of elements feeling straight out of Galaxy despite coming out first like the green and blue launch pads taking you to different places in the level.
I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I did as a kid. I didn't want to retry it because I remember thinking it was bad, but I think time has been rather kind to that game, and I think a simple HD re-release with a remapped camera (the X-axis is inverted like a lot of old platformers) and better checkpoints/save states would be well received among gamers.
And it's...pretty good!
It's a 3D platformer based around rolling an egg around, collecting fruit, and rolling over bad guys.
I guess it sounds a bit like Katamari, but it's more Mario than anything.
Surprisingly so, actually. It seems like when transferring to the GCN, Sonic Team wanted to make something for that audience so they made a Mario game and a pretty decent one at that.
You collect emblems which function more like Mario Stars than Sonic's collectable emblems.
The stages are big and you can explore them, most levels are just a small segment of the stage where you need to accomplish a given task to get an emblem.
A lot of Mario's moves are here like a long jump, a slide, a high jump (bounce), stomp, etc.
It oddly feels like the evolution of Mario, somewhere in between Mario 64 and Galaxy with a lot of elements feeling straight out of Galaxy despite coming out first like the green and blue launch pads taking you to different places in the level.
I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I did as a kid. I didn't want to retry it because I remember thinking it was bad, but I think time has been rather kind to that game, and I think a simple HD re-release with a remapped camera (the X-axis is inverted like a lot of old platformers) and better checkpoints/save states would be well received among gamers.
I even came up with nearly the entire control method to the game, I'd just have to remember it all! 