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Sonic the Hedgehog Community |OT2 Battle|

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Sciz

Member
I remember those. Good stuff. IGN was also the place that got all that Silver concept art, so someone there must've known someone at Sega at the time.

Speaking of Unleashed,


SonicGAF's Song of the Day - #67

Song: Dear My Friend
Game: Sonic Unleashed
Composer and Arrangement: Mariko Nanba
Co-Arrangement: Takahito Eguchi
Lyrics: Candie Y

Vocals: Brent Cash
Backing Vocals: Yoshihiko Chino, marhy
Piano: Takahito Eguchi
Guitar: Naganori Sakakibara
Strings: "Daisensei" Muroya Strings

It's vocal track day and the first day of December, so today's the perfect time for a sweet, subdued, wintery piece.

I'm a big fan of these melancholy ending themes. They're one of the series' older traditions, dating to Sonic 2, and I enjoy the quiet, reflective tone they bring in before the medleys and big rock finishes kick in. It doesn't hurt that they're a great excuse for the sound team to break out the piano either; Eguchi's the one tickling the ivories over in Lost World, but he was doing it here first. The lyrics are saccharine as can be, but they come off a lot better as filtered through Brent Cash's Chip, who's delightfully light and lilting and catches the beat just so, compared to the writer's previous efforts with Donna De Lory half-heartedly belting out "LOVE LOVE LOVE MY LOVE" back in '06.
 

Pietepiet

Member
Reading those Dev Diaries makes me feel sorry for them that the game got so much hate from everyone. The production values on Unleashed are through the roof. Even the Werehog levels, while they can drag on a little, were pretty fun and audiovisually stunning.

Feels like they really hoped that game would be the return to form everyone's wanted for years. For me it was, anyway
 

Razzer

Member
SonicGAF's Song of the Day - #67

Song: Dear My Friend
Game: Sonic Unleashed
Composer and Arrangement: Mariko Nanba
Co-Arrangement: Takahito Eguchi
Lyrics: Candie Y

Vocals: Brent Cash
Backing Vocals: Yoshihiko Chino, marhy
Piano: Takahito Eguchi
Guitar: Naganori Sakakibara
Strings: "Daisensei" Muroya Strings

The slow vocal themes are way better than all of the cheesy rock ones in my opinion. In any of the games really. The rock is enjoyable as a guilty pleasure but these I can listen too and say I honestly like them musically. The pitching of the vocals here are perfect, with the high notes fitting the airy piano exactly so, making a great synergy between the two. The piece floats along gradually in a peaceful way, with some hints of grandeur towards the end that show you what it could go into, then showing the restraint to rein it back in. It's a lovely piece overall.
 

qq more

Member
Reading those Dev Diaries makes me feel sorry for them that the game got so much hate from everyone. The production values on Unleashed are through the roof. Even the Werehog levels, while they can drag on a little, were pretty fun and audiovisually stunning.

Feels like they really hoped that game would be the return to form everyone's wanted for years. For me it was, anyway
As someone who didn't like Unleashed, I actually appreciated a lot of the effort was put into the game. The presentation, the music, the visuals, etc were so great. I really won't mind another Sonic game with that kind of production value as long as they continue to nail down the gameplay (the boost games that followed were a huge improvement on the formula, I hope they revisit it)

The lengthy werehog stages was the only thing that killed the game for me. But I was fine with everything else.
 
Brainscratch Comms is staring up their Sonic Lost World playthrough.
no!!!! such dirty liez
It's ok, they love you, too. They really do.

Though seriously, thanks for reminding me I still need to nab Project Diva off of PSN. As creepy as Miku is, the games are legit.

In case some of you didn't know, a few years back, there was a development blog for Sonic Unleashed a few years back hosted by IGN. It has a few pretty interesting bits in it, but changes to IGN's web site over the years have broken it and lots of the contents of the articles are missing, so I made a site to preserve the full articles and maybe make them look a little nicer. If you haven't read the Unleashed dev blog I do recommend it, there's some neat information, and it's one of the only times Sonic Team has shared a damn thing about their development process publicly.

(Any typos in those articles are in the originals, by the way.)
Goddammit, all this Unleashed talk always makes me depressed.
 

Refyref

Member
Reading those Dev Diaries makes me feel sorry for them that the game got so much hate from everyone. The production values on Unleashed are through the roof. Even the Werehog levels, while they can drag on a little, were pretty fun and audiovisually stunning.

Feels like they really hoped that game would be the return to form everyone's wanted for years. For me it was, anyway

That just goes to show that production levels aren't the most influencing source on people's opinion of games. Sometimes, even extreme highs can be ignored if people are frustrated for too long. And that's one of the faults of Unleashed. For all the highs it reaches, most of the game wasn't there.
 
Reading those Dev Diaries makes me feel sorry for them that the game got so much hate from everyone. The production values on Unleashed are through the roof. Even the Werehog levels, while they can drag on a little, were pretty fun and audiovisually stunning.

Feels like they really hoped that game would be the return to form everyone's wanted for years. For me it was, anyway

I get the feeling that Lost World is supposed to be a counter to that. They only have to worry about rendering exactly what the player can touch, while everything else is a big bottomless pit. And even what the player can see is rendered very simplistically.
 

OMG Aero

Member
A3PKnnl.gif

well it's been cool guys
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I'm glad someone made a move to preserve those dev diaries. Those were some good stuff.

SonicGAF's Song of the Day - #67

Song: Dear My Friend
Game: Sonic Unleashed
Composer and Arrangement: Mariko Nanba
Co-Arrangement: Takahito Eguchi
Lyrics: Candie Y

Vocals: Brent Cash
Backing Vocals: Yoshihiko Chino, marhy
Piano: Takahito Eguchi
Guitar: Naganori Sakakibara
Strings: "Daisensei" Muroya Strings
I think we'd talked about how mushy the song made me feel. I said that I liked Brent Cash's vocal colour in relation to the rest of the mood of the song. Even if the song's incredibly cheesy and the lyrics are incredibly saccharine, I'll still say that it's one of the best pieces of the game's soundtrack. And that soundtrack was filled with a ton of highs already. Again, it's one of my favourite soundtracks of the entire generation, really. Very ambitious and very genuine.

I mean, you all know my opinion on Sonic Unleashed. It's one of my favourite Sonic games. For someone who says, "well, this isn't designed well" or "this should be improved by..." a lot, it's fairly significant to say that the game that has a lot of odd developmental and design quirks is one of my favourite Sonic games. Even if a lot of it is in terms of its visual design and musical direction, I still had lots of fun with it. It's just really awesome learning how a lot of the levels are constructed to try to speedrun everything or do something no-hit-wise. I'll still maintain that they balanced the stats fairly horribly.

I get the feeling that Lost World is supposed to be a counter to that. They only have to worry about rendering exactly what the player can touch, while everything else is a big bottomless pit. And even what the player can see is rendered very simplistically.
And I feel like they missed the boat in some respects by going out of their way to do that. Their art direction is usually incredibly phenomenal, even when they're doing the bare minimum. I like the clean look in some places, but when you get something messy like the circus stages, you wonder if they just didn't remember how to distinguish the player character from the fore/backgrounds despite doing it in previous games.

I mean... it actually says something when I'm enjoying Super Mario 3D World in almost every single respect in terms of audio, visuals, mechanics, speed, etc. over a Sonic game that came out in the same year for once.

(Also, ALBW is the dopest, yo. Impressions will come when I feel like posting on GAF more again.)
 

TheOGB

Banned
I remember those. Good stuff. IGN was also the place that got all that Silver concept art, so someone there must've known someone at Sega at the time.

Speaking of Unleashed,


SonicGAF's Song of the Day - #67

Song: Dear My Friend
Game: Sonic Unleashed
Composer and Arrangement: Mariko Nanba
Co-Arrangement: Takahito Eguchi
Lyrics: Candie Y

Vocals: Brent Cash
Backing Vocals: Yoshihiko Chino, marhy
Piano: Takahito Eguchi
Guitar: Naganori Sakakibara
Strings: "Daisensei" Muroya Strings
This was a bit of a pleasant surprise, as it didn't piss me off or annoy me at any point, and it had a lot of time to. I say that because about a minute into Elise's theme I don't feel like hearing Donna De Lory anymore and Speak With Your Heart, despite its catchiness, always get me with that cheesy fucking ending (I'm groaning at the thought of it). Dear My Friend is a treat the whole way through and caps off a nice adventure with a friend that really wasn't all that bad in hindsight.
 

Regiruler

Member
Have we done Endless Possibility as the SotD yet?
That was the greatest thing to come out of unleashed.

On the song itself, that was all versions in all countries, correct? I don't remember it but I haven't played unleashed in a long-ass time so it's possible I've forgotten it. Speak With Your Heart was a more memorable song anyway.
 

Pietepiet

Member
Oh man, I loved Endless Possibilities. It's my go-to song in Generations when I keep sucking at a level and need to focus, haha. For some reason it always helps!
 

Sciz

Member
Have we done Endless Possibility as the SotD yet?

Not yet. Eventually. It's part of the top tier of my very rough mental hierarchy of all the series' music, which I try to keep spaced out.

I miss Crush 40. They doing much in the way of recent Sonic?

Not much. In the last three years there's been Free, a cover of Sonic Boom, and a small album of four original tracks. Odds are Senoue will be the sound director of the next mainline game though, so I'd expect to get a few songs out of that.
 

Tizoc

Member
I can't watch videos at work, and gonna start reading the review for the Wii U, but overall would you guys say that the Wii U ver. of Lost Worlds is better than 3DS?

Also is it me or is the Wii U cursed for SEGA?

EDIT: Sega1991, would you hve enjoyed Sochi 2014 more if it had an option for just the regular controller?
 
I can't watch videos at work, and gonna start reading the review for the Wii U, but overall would you guys say that the Wii U ver. of Lost Worlds is better than 3DS?

Also is it me or is the Wii U cursed for SEGA?

EDIT: Sega1991, would you hve enjoyed Sochi 2014 more if it had an option for just the regular controller?

Probably, but even then, the race events are incredibly bare bones. There's no way to accelerate, you just turn and you get short boosts for drifting. That's literally it.

And yeah, the Wii U version of Lost World is better, though that's not difficult to be when you're talking about the 3DS version. Some people I've spoken to have likened the 3DS version to Sonic 06 (which I think is a bit of a stretch, but whatever)
 

Tizoc

Member
I would never compare 3DS Lost World to the mess that 2006 was.
2006 was a beta. 3DS LW is a complete game that has irritating level/stage design.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
...but overall would you guys say that the Wii U ver. of Lost Worlds is better than 3DS?
That isn't exactly a high bar, though you're essentially comparing Sonic: Dark Brotherhood's Nocturne with Sega's shitty cake in this circumstance.

Edit: Oh, and I played the Lightning Returns demo a lot (and streamed it once). I don't like it. It feels like Dirge of Cerberus where I'm not sure what the game wants to be or do. Also the ranking system is fucked up. And it's inconsistent. And it's slow as fuck in terms of movement. The battle engine is basically the same as XIII/XIII-2's but with one person, which makes it worse to me because it doesn't usually -work- cohesively. And the dialogue is terrible. And the animations are terrible. And I get the feeling that it was supposed to be a different IP. Awful. Glad I didn't import that. It's basically everything I did in the previous two games only for one person at a slower rate with attack spamming and it effectively makes it boring.
 

Tizoc

Member
Edit: Oh, and I played the Lightning Returns demo a lot (and streamed it once). I don't like it. It feels like Dirge of Cerberus where I'm not sure what the game wants to be or do. Also the ranking system is fucked up. And it's inconsistent. And it's slow as fuck in terms of movement. The battle engine is basically the same as XIII/XIII-2's but with one person, which makes it worse to me because it doesn't usually -work- cohesively. And the dialogue is terrible. And the animations are terrible. And I get the feeling that it was supposed to be a different IP. Awful. Glad I didn't import that. It's basically everything I did in the previous two games only for one person at a slower rate with attack spamming and it effectively makes it boring.

Hmmm....
 
That isn't exactly a high bar, though you're essentially comparing Sonic: Dark Brotherhood's Nocturne with Sega's shitty cake in this circumstance.

Edit: Oh, and I played the Lightning Returns demo a lot (and streamed it once). I don't like it. It feels like Dirge of Cerberus where I'm not sure what the game wants to be or do. Also the ranking system is fucked up. And it's inconsistent. And it's slow as fuck in terms of movement. The battle engine is basically the same as XIII/XIII-2's but with one person, which makes it worse to me because it doesn't usually -work- cohesively. And the dialogue is terrible. And the animations are terrible. And I get the feeling that it was supposed to be a different IP. Awful. Glad I didn't import that. It's basically everything I did in the previous two games only for one person at a slower rate with attack spamming and it effectively makes it boring.

Schala with the boxing gloves off!

So you understand Japanese (referring to the dialogue comment)? How is the dialogue compared to XIII/XIII-2?


Edit: Damnit, double post.
 
All I know is that
Lumina is redundant as hell
and holy shit at that ending. I still don't know what to say or how to feel about it. Gonna have to wait till Feb before I can form a full opinion. Hopefully full context will help if only in the slightest.
 

Riffled

Banned
I get the feeling that Lost World is supposed to be a counter to that. They only have to worry about rendering exactly what the player can touch, while everything else is a big bottomless pit. And even what the player can see is rendered very simplistically.

I think it might be kinda low-budget.
You might be able to gauge it, with the amount of composers. Like the Sonic 4 OST, only really one guy worked on it and composed the songs...
 

Zen

Banned
So... any hypothesis as to why Sonic games have gone down the crapper? I can understand a misfire from Sonic Team, they aren't exactly perfect to say the least, but seeing M&S2014 being so inexplicably worse than the original raises some flags and makes me thing that maybe Sammy's leaning up and tightening of Sega has resulted in some unreasonable deadlines or budget restrictions?

Hopefully the successor project to Generations doesn't disappoint... Even when quality was good (Unleashed -> Colors -> Generations stretch) sales didn't seem to improve much... it would really suck to see Sonic just... die.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
My Sonic Lost World soundtrack's in the mail.

I don't know if I'll enjoy it as much as I did the last three soundtracks in the series, though looking at the listing on VGMdb, it should have lots of stuff.

I saw what you guys said on Twitter. :mad:
Nuh-uh. I wasn't the one who said it.

You still owe me the Mario & Sonic and the Olympic Games story where you apparently did something terrible when you were demoing it for people on Black Friday so shoppers wouldn't get mad at you.

You played as Sonic and hurt lots of chao didn't you?

Schala with the boxing gloves off!

So you understand Japanese (referring to the dialogue comment)? How is the dialogue compared to XIII/XIII-2?
Yeah, I import a lot. I played FFXIII in Japanese, and the dialogue was still bad in that game. LR's is just as bad/boring/cheesy at points. I guess they wanted to give this sense of grandeur and seriousness, but I can't really... take it that seriously. Not when I have Lightning running around in some outfits to create some sense of dissonance (even some of the demo outfits, yeah). I just feel like it's completely devoid of passion.

And that's the thing. I don't feel a sense of passion when I look at these FF13 games. It's either all focus grouped, throwing in everything to make everyone happy, trying to design a game despite spending a lot of your dev time on an engine, etc. There is no sense of ambitious passion that I feel being communicated here at all.

I could go on and on about how I can kind of gather that familiar sense of a lack of passion and ambition in various games--even Sonic games--but alas. I'm not pushing that envelope just yet.

If that's supposed to be VP3, consider the series dead/SE doesn't give a shit anymore.

Even when I popped into someone's streams every now and then, I saw stuff that was weird. NPCs interrupting cutscenes in stupid ways, odd clipping, a supreme lack of polish in everything, music misuse which made me think that the music coordinator didn't play the previous two games, incoherent game and dungeon design where they added objects but those objects are rendered useless by how the game is designed (ie: poles/ladders in places but Lightning never takes fall damage), a stamina meter on the field where it shouldn't exist, quests for the sake of quests type of design, odd drop rates, NPCs don't seem to assist you in terms of questing and thus leaves the world rather detached from the player at times (remember how they said it was like Majora's Mask? It isn't), and a slew of other things that makes the game seem and feel messy to me. Sometimes I wondered if they even had QA testers on this game at all.

The running joke is that I'm typically picky and dismissive of a lot of things that miss the mark or don't feel like they link together as well as they should, but for the good that LR does in terms of its customization which is its best feature because you can do a lot with it (and that is, as I discussed with another GAF member, the heart of trying to "pro-play" these games--not what you do in battle), it does so much wrong in the process. But again, people can probably overlook a lot of that stuff and think the game is a triumph. I didn't like FF13-2, while a lot of people did because of its "throw everything in including the kitchen sink" design philosophy, so who knows. Maybe that sort of thing works for people. I don't like Tales of Xillia because of the changes it made to the Tales formula when Graces/Rebirth/Destiny R did a lot right, yet a lot of people love that game. I stopped playing Xillia 2 because I got tired of the repetition and found the game structure incredibly tiring, and yet you have a lot of people saying it's a massive improvement on the original Xillia when I felt like it was a mixed bag.

So I might be in the minority.

Anyway, we're getting too off-topic and it's a boundary that I do not want to push just yet.

So... any hypothesis as to why Sonic games have gone down the crapper?
Sonic Lost World was clearly rushed and we all know that isn't that great for Sonic games (see: Sonic 2006). I can't speak for Sochi 2014, but this all might be a consequence of meeting a quarter or holiday sales, especially when the series does much better in the west.

That isn't necessarily an indication of the games overall going down the tubes, especially with previous games being remarkably good. That sort of assumption seems incredibly hyperbolic to me.

Like the Sonic 4 OST, only really one guy worked on it and composed the songs...
That is not what this says.
 
Sonic games aren't going anywhere. Seems that game sales are down in general for non-Mario branded Nintendo games, so I'm not too worried.
Nuh-uh. I wasn't the one who said it.

You still owe me the Mario & Sonic and the Olympic Games story where you apparently did something terrible when you were demoing it for people on Black Friday so shoppers wouldn't get mad at you.

You played as Sonic and hurt lots of chao didn't you?
I'll tell the story when I have my morning pizza. I have the day off of work, after all. And I didn't do anything terrible, dammit! :lol
 

Tizoc

Member
Dark Schala said:
Sonic Lost World was clearly rushed and we all know that isn't that great for Sonic games (see: Sonic 2006). I can't speak for Sochi 2014, but this all might be a consequence of meeting a quarter or holiday sales, especially when the series does much better in the west.

That isn't necessarily an indication of the games overall going down the tubes, especially with previous games being remarkably good. That sort of assumption seems incredibly hyperbolic to me.
From the looks of it, Sonic
Shouldn't go fast
380.gif
 

PKrockin

Member
And that's the thing. I don't feel a sense of passion when I look at these FF13 games. It's either all focus grouped, throwing in everything to make everyone happy, trying to design a game despite spending a lot of your dev time on an engine, etc. There is no sense of ambitious passion that I feel being communicated here at all.

I got that impression too from watching about half of KFJ's FFXIII-2 let's play
while falling asleep half the time, granted
. It all looks and sounds very nice but it doesn't make me feel anything. I can't find a good way to express it.
 

Pietepiet

Member
And that's the thing. I don't feel a sense of passion when I look at these FF13 games. It's either all focus grouped, throwing in everything to make everyone happy, trying to design a game despite spending a lot of your dev time on an engine, etc. There is no sense of ambitious passion that I feel being communicated here at all.

Oh, I feel passion alright. I feel the passion of a man pushing his opinions onto everybody in the staff so his waifu gets a three-game spotlight and crosses over into other (better) games of the franchise as well.
 

Dark Schala

Eloquent Princess
I'll tell the story when I have my morning pizza. I have the day off of work, after all. And I didn't do anything terrible, dammit! :lol
This is what you said the other day when I'd asked and you were still having your pizza.

Beef, pls.

I got that impression too from watching about half of KFJ's FFXIII-2 let's play
while falling asleep half the time, granted
. It all looks and sounds very nice but it doesn't make me feel anything. I can't find a good way to express it.
Because it seems to lack true vision. It looks nice, and they put effort into some aspects of it, but because it basically feels like it was an answer to focus groups and post-release backlash, it felt as though it wasn't a genuine work with some sort of focus and vision. It's substantive without feeling genuinely substantive, and lacks the style to boot.

I'm a little surprised I haven't read a postmortem article for that game in any game developer magazine. But perhaps it's because FFXIII's postmortem was a little... embarrassing.

Oh, I feel passion alright. I feel the passion of a man pushing his opinions onto everybody in the staff so his waifu gets a three-game spotlight and crosses over into other (better) games of the franchise as well.
You help make games. How does this work sometimes? Is it more of a group affair when it comes to game design and game creation, or is it a case where "a few dudes decide what to do, here's the plan, work on a rock for 2 months"? At least the games you seem to work on have some sort of focus and ambition as to what it would like to do.

Because I know that a lot of older development seemed to have been more of a collaborative effort with more communication between departments than anything else. That's why, I suppose, some people feel those games are more cohesive and passionate than the works we get sometimes today.

Ohtani was for all level music. Eguchi, cutscenes. And Naofumi Hataya was one song.

For level music at least some of the previous games, had about 3 or more.
You had said only one dude worked on the soundtrack though.
bSVr5cd.gif


In any case, yeah, it's kind of surprising that Ohtani did a bulk of the level themes without the others chipping in again a la Unleashed/Colours. Sometimes it works, but other times it doesn't. It depends on the composer and general music direction, I guess. Poor Eguchi, though. He did a lot of stuff when he was at Squaresoft, so I'm not sure why he's still stuck doing cutscene music.

Anyhow, weekend's done. Posting because I'm procrastinating has come to a close. :V
 

Regiruler

Member
Sonic Lost World feels like a proof-of-concept to me for the new gameplay mechanics as well as the changed visual style.

If that's the case, I hope they decide to keep the gameplay system as that was one of the game's strengths and could make for a good package if the rest of the game is well-polished.
In terms of visuals I'd like for them to work on the pop-in, but the framerate was fairly good.
 

Razzer

Member
You help make games. How does this work sometimes? Is it more of a group affair when it comes to game design and game creation, or is it a case where "a few dudes decide what to do, here's the plan, work on a rock for 2 months"? At least the games you seem to work on have some sort of focus and ambition as to what it would like to do.

Because I know that a lot of older development seemed to have been more of a collaborative effort with more communication between departments than anything else. That's why, I suppose, some people feel those games are more cohesive and passionate than the works we get sometimes today.

I haven't worked in development myself so this is obviously second hand but in videos describing the making of The Last of Us, some designers mentioned how they get a lot of input into the creation of the sections they are in charge of, and their feedback is listened to by the directors etc, but often they never see entire sections of the game until it gets released and they play it themselves. Just one of the side effects of large scale production I guess. And this was at a studio considered to be fairly good as a development house for it's employees. I imagine it's even worse at studios that are less forward-thinking.
 

BlackJace

Member
Hopefully Lost World's performance reminds Sega that people like sonic because the games are different then Mario.

He was created as the antithesis of Mario, and he should remain that way.
 
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