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schaver's Sonic Adventure (DC)
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| [February 10, 2007 03:09:58 AM]
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Alright, after playing some more I'm ready to keep going with how I feel about this game.
The gameplay is the first thing I said I'd get back to so let's do that. The gameplay is very different between Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Gamma, and Big. A lot of the time, though, the core running and jumping mechanic remains fundamentally the same, so I'll stick with exploring that. The lack of accuracy necessitated by a 3D is pretty well made-up for with the addition of a homing attack. Sonic has two homing attacks, one of which glitched out on a couple of occasions which caused me to die.
Speaking of glitches, that is apparently another pretty substantial part of the gameplay. On the Egg Carrier, there was more than one instance of me dying because of clipping issues, which was less than stellar and something that should have definitely been fixed. However, the game makes it pretty easy to come across extra lives so it never really felt like a huge game-breaking issue.
Although I said before the character mechanics were basically the same, that was actually a big lie. Big the Cat is an especially large derivation from the tradtional path; as Big, you fish. All of his levels are basically just big fishing expeditions, which are sort of amusing but definitely get old if you're just trying to power through his part of the game. The fishing mechanics are also sort of broken and nonsensical for a reason I can't describe other than to say it is almost impossible to do what you want in these damn things 80 percent of the time.
Gamma's combat mechanics are also very different from the other characters, insofar as he uses a lock-on feature to shoot enemies down. He also gets around a little differently; while dashing, he pops out his little treads and goes faster which is sort of a neat thing. Once again, sometimes the differences can be sort of obnoxious at times, but it definitely works better than Big's levels.
Amy uses a hammer and isn't as fast as Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, but I found her story to be the most compelling (probably because her voice actress is the most competent). She also, in my opinion, had the coolest looking versions of the levels, so there was that little aesthetic too.
Sonic, Tails and Knuckles are basically the same as they've been since Sonic 2 and 3: Tails can fly for a bit, Sonic just jumps, Knuckles can glide, etc. The game incorporates some cool items that make the attacks a little different, but all in all it's used to the same end.
The level design is the last thing I'll touch on, but it's probably the best part of the whole game. I really like night life-oriented things, and there are two huge levels that do this really well: Casinopolis and Twinkle Park. All the characters go through these levels, too, so they get a lot of screen time. The rest of the levels are also very well done, except I thought the Egg Carrier was particularly broken in several areas (mainly with the gravity switching and the part where the ships are actually taking off from the carrier), and for some reason Windy Valley just didn't feel especially fun to me.
The main thing I take away from the level design as a prospective game designer, though, is how much variety they have while using the same couple of game mechanics all the way through. That really spoke volumes to me and is something I'd really like to incorporate in games I'm involved with in the future.
To any TA's who notice this was late, sorry about that but I wasn't planning on writing this much! I got really into it.
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| [February 7, 2007 02:05:17 PM]
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For this entry I picked Sonic Adventure because I think it has a lot of design elements that make it really unique from that perspective, and because it gets a lot of things right and some things wrong, it's a good example of a wide array of different features.
This was the flagship title for the DC when it first came out, and it's pretty easy to see why: mascot character in glorious 3D for the first time (I know Sonic was in 3D before, but not GLORIOUS 3D). On that note, let's start with the graphics of the game. The Dremcast definitely helped perpetuate the graphical arms race that was the console market until the Wii, and they did a pretty good job at it. It seems to me that Sonic Adventure's graphics stand up well to the test of time, mainly because they weren't trying to go for realism. There are a couple of anomalies in the graphics, mainly how Sonic's textures become blatantly flat when he's jumping or rolling. Other than that, it actually looks damn good. I've played this game through multiple times, but the models still look good, the environments are bright, and it's generally very aesthetically pleasing. One other minor detail is the length of the draw distance on some environmental objects. It's REALLY short, but usually on with things that don't matter (grass, peripheral trees, etc.) and I've yet to die as a result.
For some reason, the sound seems to be the next logical place to go. This is another one of those games that I consider to have exceptional music, so I may think the game is better than it actually is. The music is also probably the strongest piece of sound in the game, too. The voice acting is just terrible (Tails! You're gonna crash! Ah!), and for some reason it sounds like some of the more important sound effects, like Sonic jumping, were encoded at a spectacularly low bitrate. For my money, I'd say that the sound effects in the Genesis games was better. None of the sound effects are outright out of place, though, so the quality serves as only a minor infraction.
I'm going to do gameplay and level design next, but I need to play a little further to refresh my memory some more. I'll write again in a bit!
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schaver's Sonic Adventure (DC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 7 February, 2007
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