There will be plenty more Silent Hill next weekish -- I wanted to take a break from the subject of survival horror, subjective reviews and the game itself for now to give everyone a chance to actually play the thing, and point out that I actually did more than one review in the past week!Given that Nintendo's finally unveiled the long-fabled new DS, it's great timing for this topic, too.
If you were a gamer child in the '90s, you remember the rivalry. Everyone loved the plumber, until a fast, sassy blue hedgehog showed up to make him look like yesterday's news. Sonic's high speed, quick tricks and clever level design fast dated the Mushroom Kingdom and became the mascot, the standard-bearer for Sega's burgeoning threat to Nintendo's throne.
So what happened?
It seems like the very reason Sonic seemed an initial shoe-in to relegate Mario to relic status is the same reason he ultimately stumbled. Mario was a construct, a vague pixel accessory to a world governed by laws, while Sonic was a personality in a hip, modern world. Nintendo seemed to plod along; innovations made on Mario's world were only subtle iterations on a formula. From Sega's standpoint, the path to advancement seemed clear -- work your angle. Make the mechanics even wackier and work Sonic's personality.
Sigh. Sonic's personality.
It didn't work, of course. Sega lost sight of the quintessential fact that just like Mario, the early Sonic the Hedgehog games were popular because of their formula. So while Nintendo excelled at steadily and gently adapting the Mario universe to emerging technologies, Sonic strayed from the path by declining to recognize its own formula. Super Mario Galaxy is a feat for the simple reason that it's what you'd expect Super Mario Bros. to look like on 3D spheres, more or less. We don't have the modern equivalent for Sonic the Hedgehog. Through several past generations, we never had it -- and that's the main problem.
Of course, Nintendo does have the additional advantage of continuing to be a platform-holder, something Sega was forced to surrender with its Dreamcast-capped exit from the hardware market. But it could be argued that, as personal standard-bearer, having a strong mascot in Mario is one of the major reasons that Nintendo sustained while Sega didn't. Instead of trying to be an elaborate personality, each flagship Mario game was no more and no less than an ambassador for the hardware itself, a representative of the tech -- as time marched on, Nintendo simply offered the familiar Super Mario Bros. again and again. The technology evolved, but the game remained quintessentially the same.
Nintendo's striking ability to evolve subtly with the times, to conform fluidly to current tastes and technologies, to iterate without overhauling, is one of its hallmarks overall. Sega may have tried to innovate too much with Sonic; it's likely that some other property should have been the innovation guinea pig, and it should have stuck to what was safe and familiar with its crucial standard-bearer and his games. Even today, through racing titles, the addition of a suite of pals that only furry pornographers could love and other head-scratching decisions, Sonic fans exclaim loud and clear that they just want a platformer where Sonic runs fast. Period.
I have a sister six years younger, who grew up playing games alongside me (or watching me play them, mostly). She kept all the old consoles we used to have, and still plays them. She owns a Wii and will copilot some of her friends' Xbox 360 games, but her steps into the next-gen have been tentative and uncomfortable at best. She never really got used to controlling any kind of game on two axes (she can't play BioShock, for example) -- and moreover, she doesn't want to. She'll make some selective concessions, like for Rock Band or Umbrella Chronicles, but she best likes PSX platformers. Her favorite game to play remains Sonic and Knuckles. For her, nothing new has ever beaten that, and I think that's pretty telling.
Once again we have a slate of new Sonic games on the horizon, and the hedgehog's longtime fans (ahem) who've been keeping the light on for him know better than to hope (too hard) for a return to the familiar. It remains to be seen whether Sega can let us love Sonic again, but I did review BioWare's Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for Variety and, as RPG-lite, I kind of liked it.
As many reviewers have already pointed out, there are a lot of weird flags to the game: A Sonic RPG (didn't Mario get an RPG like ten years ago?). Made by BioWare (are we getting an emotional space opera?) -- on the DS for their first time. Containing Sonic's crappy friends. Sigh.
Probably the only way to make Sonic's friends digestible is to make them necessary supports in an RPG with something useful to contribute, and this game does that. One thing I feared is that it'd be too weighty, fraught with moral decisions and burdensome, over-detailed science fiction -- but it's not. Both the gameplay and the story are exactly as deep as they need to be without going too far, which is good. It's also the first game in a while that I can genuinely say that both kids and adults will actually like -- usually when I say that grown-ups will like a kids' game, what I really mean is that they could, theoretically, like it, but this game truly manages to span audiences.
Even though my review's already up, I still wrestle with one more question -- would it have been a good game if it was not Sonic? Probably not. It's a little bit too shallow and simplistic for that. It's not going to blow your mind. It's not going to give you your childhood back, and it's not going to scratch that blue itch you've had since then. But it's nonetheless decent, enjoyable, appropriate, solid; it's respectable, as I said in the review, and it's fun, and after seeing the mires through which Sonic has gotten dragged in recent years, that's something to applaud.
