Sonic Generations

Sonic Generations came out in the United Kingdom on Friday, and since it falls into the category of being either a Sonic Game,  GTA Game, or 12 years in the making, I’m going to do a review, like those ones I used to do in them there olden days on the FileFront.

So, the famous blue blur is 20 years old. Makes me feel younger in a way, since Sonic is the first thing I really remember about being a child, it feels like it’s my 20th birthday too. Meh, who am I kidding? I’m turning into an old fart. Sonic, on the other hand, is looking better than ever, and this title is the final return to full form that has been building now for the past few years.

The turn-around for Sonic came in 2008′s Sonic Unleashed. Moving away from pointlessly complicated storylines, overbearing new characters and glitch-filled gameplay, Unleashed showed us that Sonic could be cool again. It introduced the new standard Sonic gameplay which has been carried through to Sonic Colours, and now Sonic Generations:  apart from that nasty ware-hog business, Unleashed was amazing.

Then came Colours, taking the Unleashed daytime formula and making it even better – with levels designed around an interplanetary theme park, we saw a return to the crazy, colourful level styles of the original Sonic games. Not to mention Wisps, those guys are so cute.

Now we have Sonic Generations – which is the good, the bad, and the rather ugly outings  of the past 20 years rolled into one. On paper this sounds worrying, so, does the game correct the past 10 years of Sonic mistakes?

The answer is, sort of.

The storyline for this game is almost entirely absent, there is a vague plot that runs through the game about the “Time Eater” and whatnot, but there are 12 cutscenes in the entire game, and most of them are short and inconsequential.  In a way I’m a bit disappointed by this, since Sonic Colours had a fairly okay plot, that progressed the story and had lots of humor in it. There is humor in this game too, but there’s so little done in the cutscenes and they’re so few that, really, they feel out of place even being there at all.

The levels themselves are largely great. You play through one level from every major Sonic game, both as “Classic” Sonic (the cute round one) and “Modern” Sonic (The tall retarded one) – Classic plays pretty much 1:1 as he did in Sonic 1 through Sonic & Knuckles, while Modern plays as he did largely in Unleashed, with a few minor tweaks. The actual level designs are largely faithful to the originals with one or two little new bits thrown in, but overall, nothing substantially new here.

There are two main reasons to play this game;

1: Playing classic Sonic levels in awesome 2.5D
2: Playing Dreamcast & Sonic 06 levels with gameplay that isn’t totally fucked.

The further you get into the game, the more recycled things seem to become, with obvious reasons. Playing the classic levels was a total joy and you feel like these levels  have the most effort put into them. The Dreamcast era levels feel like they’ve been upgraded but, since the original versions where 3D already, you can’t help but feel it’s the same stuff presented in a much nicer way. The modern era levels, apart from Crisis City (it was nice to play this one in a less broken way, shame though, just shows Sonic 06 could have been decent) – just feel like harder versions of levels I’ve already played.

A nice touch is the fact that you can unlock music tracks to use in different levels – including remastered and remixed tracks from classic Sonic games. This adds some nice little touches, for example, playing Speed Highway as Classic Sonic with Starlight Zone as the music does feel like you’re playing the latter instead. There’s a few other nice matches in there, i.e. playing Toxic Caves from Sonic Spinball over Chemical Plant or Marble Zone over Crisis City. There’s also a ton of artwork to unlock which is quite a cool thing to have, as it spans the entire 20 year history of Sonic.

Each level comprises of one main act and five side mission acts for each Sonic. There are also rival battles between Metal Sonic, Shadow and Silver. We also have the Red Ring hunt returning from Sonic Colours – but despite all this, I am afraid this game is far, far too short. This game takes, roughly, from putting the disc in to completing everything the game has to offer, one weekend. Compared to Sonic Colours, this game falls completely flat in this department.

Infact, if you removed the nostalgia element from this game, it would be a rather poor outing when compared to Colours, which had far more to see and do. Each level in Colours had it’s own set of red rings to collect, and each level had 6 full acts and a boss to complete. The side acts in Generations are normally quite short, mission based and take place in the same level as Act 1, unlike colours where each act was completely unique and mostly of a decent size. Colours also had the Sonic Simulator for even more fun.

The bosses in this game are also stupendously easy to defeat, even on “hard” mode. The final boss was hard, but only because I was expecting something harder and was trying to figure out what I had to do – imagine my surprise where the aim of the final boss is to just boost, and thats it. Infact it’s completely fucking appalling, and that isn’t a phrase I should be using for this game.

The Good;

• Great graphics and music
• Great levels to play
• Gameplay is spot on in main levels

Tbe Bad;

• Storyline isn’t very in-depth
• Cut scenes are rather badly rendered
• Game is very short, takes no time at all to 100% it

The Ugly;

• Shockingly easy boss battles
• No real love or attention to the menu system compared to colours
• Online play is rather basic and suffering from the usual leaderboard hacking rendering it worthless.

Yeah, it’d be unfair for me to say I’m totally disappointed in this game, it does bring joy to the 5 year old who played the Classics, and the 15 year old who had a Dreamcast, and it brings some closure to the disturbed 20 year old who was forced to suffer through Bestiality and Silver the Hedgehog a couple years back. I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t expect more. This game is over far too soon, it leaves you wanting for more. God, I hope there’s more. I hope there’s some cracking DLC levels coming out for this in the future.

Sadly, however, I doubt this will be the case. Shame.

Duke Nukem Forever Dissapointing

It’s been 12 years in the making, but finally, after all these years, Duke Nukem Forever has released to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I picked up a copy of the game on Saturday afternoon, and after a few days of play, I can’t escape the conclusion that this game has some disappointing downfalls.

Lets focus on the positives first. The game is incredibly interactive, Duke can interact with almost any item in the environment, often with hilarious consequences. This isn’t just a gimmick, using items boosts your overall “Ego” (Duke has ego instead of a health bar) – the game starts off teaching you how to piss in a urinal and draw on a whiteboard (start as you mean to go on, that’s what I always say. This is the level we’re working on here, folks).

Duke’s one liners are as classic as ever. All the classic lines are there, but a lot of new material is in there too, keeping funny. That’s about all the positives I can think of, though. The rest of the characters in this game are dull, lifeless and boring. They also have a tendency to look in one fixed direction when talking rather than facing the player. The non-playable characters in this game feel like they’ve been through several engine changes, a lot of them seem retextured several times. In fact, a lot of the textures in this game seem poor by modern standards, you can’t help but notice how pixelated and grainy they can be. Weather this is intentional or not for the “retro” feel, I don’t know.

The storyline isn’t exactly a classic either. Okay, I wasn’t expecting much in this department, but the storyline is neither engaging nor particularly funny. Duke’s lines are the only real source of humor, but the setting, situations and characters merely exist for the sake of it. In many ways this makes the game feel like it was born out of the 90′s (which it was) – games have moved on a lot since then, and this feels different from any game you’d expect to pick up these days.

For anyone looking for a classic style First Person Shooter, this game will be worth getting. It’s been a while since a decent FPS that was simple and fun to play like this was created, and the old mentality of levels that have small puzzles of where to go next and what to do next are something that you seldom get in games these days, which seem to increasingly play themselves with set pieces and cut scenes.  What this games does is bring nostalga value, and that isn’t a bad thing.

There’s one unforgivable sin, however, one that this game cannot and will not be allowed to live down – the loading times. When you look at games like Fallout, you see a game where you have massive scale environments and activity with minimum loading screens and loading time – this is the complete opposite. Levels are relatively short and loading times between them excessively long. This would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that, every time you die, the entire level loads again. When you’re on a high difficulty setting, this means you can spend 30 seconds playing and 75 seconds waiting for a load. This is frustrating beyond belief.  There is no need in this day and age for a game to reload the entire level for a checkpoint.

All in all then, this game does not even remotely live up to the hype. It never could, but it falls a lot further flat than I ever expected it would do. As a famous reviewer once said, “Duke Nukem Forever is going to have to cure at least two different types of cancer to live up to the hype after all these years.” – crying shame. If only it were 1999.

Day 17 of the great PSN outage.

First of all I would just like to point out that, according to Google AdSense’s terms and conditions, I am not allowed to make any requests for clickthroughs on the above advertisements. As such, I will not make any such request, and won’t even mention the subject.

It’s been 17 days since PlayStation 3 users across the globe were sent into the dark ages, and reports have been circulating that several of their users have now reverted into a pre-historic state. Run down estates such as Clifton and The Valley have decended into war, as those who can’t afford to pay for a proper service struggle to find anything to do except stab each other and burn cars.

Few lucky enough to afford £5.99 a month have upgraded to a proper gaming network. Unfortunately this price is beyond that which the average PS3 user can afford, and as such I’m launching a new charity, “Live for Live”, to help get those suffering onto Xbox Live.

Please donate just £1 a month to help a starving and frightened young poor person onto Xbox Live. Your donation will provide;

• Clean servers for a child for an entire year, free of hackers.
• A reliable and functional online experience.
• The comfort that their online service will always be waiting for them when they get home.
• An online store that won’t loose their credit card details.
• Sanctuary from pointless law-suits, illegal data mining and privacy breaches.
• Access to a network run by a company that isn’t entirely incompetent.
• A gift bag and monthly letters from your adopted gamer.

You can make so much difference to a person’s life just by donating toward’s the Live for Live donation campaign. Thank you.

War of the browsers: why Opera’s a superior underdog.

In recent times the web browser wars have started to really get interesting. Each of the “big five” browsers, Internet Explorer, Opera, FireFox, Safari and Chrome, have been making major releases and launching massive advertising campaigns to try and take the number 1 spot.

Now, my browser of choice is Opera. I find it functional, fast and stylish, and although I’m largely happy with the experience, the question remains, why does Opera have the lowest market share of the browsers mentioned above? Looking at the raw statistics right now, we see Firefox leading the way with 42.2% of users, followed by IE at 28.8%, Chrome at 20%, Safari at 4% and Opera trailing behind at just 2.5% of the market.

There are several possible reasons for Opera trailing behind. Certainly speed is not one of them, and it’s perfectly user-friendly, installing and updating is one of the easiest out there, and the interface is clean, simple and familiar. So let’s take a look at the possible issues holding Opera back;

Opera does not have the marketing budget to advertise on the scale of other browsers;

Well, certainly this is true. Opera haven’t got the resources to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft, who have launched billboard and TV advertisement campaigns to promote their browsers. They also have distinct marketing advantages, Microsoft and Apple can offer their products pre-installed, while Google is perfectly placed to market Chrome as the alternative with google.com – but none of those companies are currently in the lead. Who is? Firefox. That’s proof that it’s perfectly possible to make a browser a success on a low to non-existent marketing budget.

Opera’s interface is too confusing;

One of the most common complaint’s I hear when introducing someone to Opera is that they simply don’t like it – and very rarely do I hear a specific reason, basically, they just don’t like the look or layout. Most people don’t like a change, especially in something they use routinely such as a browser. I’m not entirely sure this reason explains Opera’s lack of success though, as FireFox 4, the latest browser, as pretty much taken Opera’s interface and reproduced it like-for-like. FireFox 4′s popularity has yet to fully prove itself but overall, I don’t think this could be the true reason for Opera’s poor performance.

Opera isn’t compatible with XYZ

Opera did have a reputation in years gone past with struggling to cope with certain websites and plugins. The situation today is a lot better, I don’t find Opera to be incompatible with a whole lot. A lot of the problems come from major website developers intentionally ignoring Opera from their sites, a good example being Google’s “instant search” and “background” fuctionality, which is intentionally absent from Opera browsers. Of course, Opera can masquerade as FireFox or Internet Explorer to restore this fuctionality with a few mouse clicks, proving it’s the web developer and not the browser itself, but is this enough to hurt Opera’s reputation and prevent users from migrating? Possibly.

Opera was simply too little, too late.

FireFox didn’t burst onto the scene with instant success, it took many years for the word to spread and for FireFox to gain the market share it holds today. While that success was building, Opera was struggling in a few key areas; firstly, the interface, compatibility and performance was not as outstanding as it is today compared to it’s contemporaries, and secondly, Opera wasn’t free. That’s right, you had to pay for Opera or suffer a banner advert lodged into the interface of the browser itself. This for me is the main reason why Opera today hasn’t got the market share it rightly deserves;  while Firefox was going viral, nobody wanted to spread the word about Opera – why would you want adverts or to have to pay for something the competition offers equally as well for free? This, for me, is the major reason for Opera’s low performance. In the eyes of the general population, there’s simply no reason to go to the bother of switching from FireFox to Opera, and those who are content to stay on Internet Explorer are content to do so.

So why should people switch to Opera?

Well, this is a personal decision, but Opera is the fastest browser out there right now. Opera’s always led the way in browser technology, and you’ll find features in Opera that Firefox will no doubt acquire in the coming years, such as Opera Turbo. Compared to Firefox, Opera is a faster, safer browser that has all the functionality and compatibility of Firefox. On a more technical level, Opera’s rendering engine, apart from being a lot faster, is also a more standard’s compliant, you’ll find Opera leads the way on compliance tests and support for emerging standards such as HTML5 and CSS3.

So, if you’re willing to give it a try, head over here.