dark10x said:
The game has issues, but the visuals are generally quite good.
You need to play it more and pay attention to the details.
Put the game back in and wander around the town. Look at the NPC's, how their shadows are just not rendered until you get quite awfully close to them. Look at those two giant trees in the hallway that passes in the middle of the town and pay attention the the nice shadow they progressively generate (it really is a nice shadow once it is fully rendered, I am not kidding).
Or let's talk about Tails' A.I. (ok, we were supposed to bitch about graphical issues
), but the way you can get him to commit suicide and the ways he comes back to life or comes from the sea just to die in front of you and come back to life after 30 seconds or so... etc... ok ok... graphics... graphics...
My issue is not the lack of skill of the individual programmers (the way the trees' shadow in the city [not the action stages, which is actually weird!] are rendered and then faded out progressively as you get closer to the trees and then move farther away from them is not something that trivial to realize, btw), but lack of polish of the title and the sense that something somewhere fell apart really badly and people tried to patch things together to keep the game engine running along well or simply the City stage/area does not use anywhere near the performance the engine is capable
Or maybe the City somehow was designed/created in a way that bring the engine down on its knees (maybe wasting lots of cycles rendering unseen objects/areas) and forcing the developers to cut corners.
The game has plenty of issues with the visuals too, but it is in places where you would last expect to see issues and probably the part of the game the developers spent less time working on or polishing it up.
The issues with loading times is another alarm sign IMHO that indicates that something along the project was completed went really bad and in a really ugly way.
