Between Cybershell's rundown of Sonic Adventure DX's problems and "The Ultimate Guide to SADX Sins," I think the book has been written on why this is such a bad port. I'd tell you to just watch Cybershell's video, but he'd tell you to read the Dreamcastify article, and that means I'm already too far down the chain to add anything new when it comes to this game's busted lighting, plasticy characters, or its issues with sound scripting. Most reasonable people playing SADX in the Year of our Jericho 24 will address these issues with mods, like PkR's Dreamcast Conversion, which is pretty comprehensive and can be paired with other mods like SonicFreak94's Lantern Engine and ItsEasyActually's Character Restoration mod to bring DX closer to the Dreamcast release.
I am not a "reasonable person," though. In fact, I'm pretty god damn unreasonable, which is why I decided to play SADX off my Wii's hard drive. Call it tradition, or laziness, or whatever, but I needed my Sonic Adventure DX raw, just the way grandma made it back in 2003. Twenty years later, nothing has changed.
Obviously, I agree that all the issues with lighting, textures, and models are detrimental and make the game look substantially worse both from the perspective of fidelity and aesthetic charm. What I have a larger issue with is the amount of collision detection issues that I'm pretty sure are introduced in this version of the game. Perhaps it's just dumb luck, but I played the original Sonic Adventure not too long ago and did not have nearly as many issues with Sonic getting stuck on walls, clipping through barriers, or breaking out of scripted events and flying into the void.
What I'm pretty sure is less an issue with DX and more integral to the Sonic Adventure experience as a whole is the game's rancid camera, which much like Sonic has a tendency to hang on geometry and disobey your commands. The travel distance on the Gamecube's shoulder buttons is ridiculous, and the extremely slow pan of DX's camera really makes it feel like you're operating a heavy piece of machinery, like the lens has been loaded onto some huge industrial crane. It fights you every step of the way too, constantly trying to jerk back into position, and God help you if you took a shortcut or broke off the standard path, because the flag to change the camera's position probably won't trip and it'll just lock into position under the floor or something.
It's never so bad that it complicates beating levels normally but does become annoying in the mission mode and more broadly through sheer prevalence. The missions added to SADX really run the gamut from being braindead easy and dull to functionally broken and badly designed. Special shoutouts to collecting the flags during the boulder sequence in Sonic's Lost World, an act of rote memorization and praying Sonic's shoulder doesn't clip into the side of the wall and slow him down, and Tails' flag collection in Windy Valley which I had to look up a guide for because bad draw distancing never rendered in a single flag while the camera was trained on it.
Nothing is worse than Mission 53, which tasks you with hitting a line of rings near the end of the snowboarding sequence in Sonic's Ice Cap by landing a frame perfect input on the final three ramps. If your timing is off, you'll shoot under or over the row of rings you need to hit, requiring you to restart from the checkpoint and sit through 2-3 minutes of the most dogshit snowboarding I've ever experienced in a video game. I had a bunch of episodes of Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak playing in the background while attempting this and now the Beef Log song has been stuck in my head for several days. it broke me, it fucking broke me, i am broken
I did all of these because at some point, probably while Freddie Prinze Jr. was snorting like a pig, I got it in my head that SADX is the only way for me to play all of the Game Gear Sonic games on my CRT, since Sonic Gems has an incomplete set. This of course meant fucking around in the Chao Garden, and I just happened to roll a Chao with the worst luck imaginable - a hidden stat! - so he constantly tripped and fell asleep during every race despite having the running, power, and swimming stats of a god. Catch my ass at 1am shouting "STOP DANCING!" because this little idiot had to do a jig every time he ate a nut in the Emerald course. Suffering through this and getting hit with "TAILS' SKYPATROL UNLOCKED" felt like getting stabbed directly through the heart, and I have nobody to blame but myself.
The only nice thing I have to say about SADX is that it runs at 60fps, but I'm not sure the hefty amount of graphical compromises was worth the bump in performance, and I'm the kind of guy who typically will turn off superfluous graphical enhancements to buy a few extra frames. Apparently the Gamecube version is the better release, and some of DX's problems have only gotten worse with subsequent ports. The real unfortunate thing is that Sega, much like they do with the Game Gear games, seem to be treating the demonstrably worse version of a game as the document of record.
Anyway, sound off in the comments! Are you a beef log boy or a cheeselogger? Me? I like a good cheese log. It's my favorite saturated fat.
I am not a "reasonable person," though. In fact, I'm pretty god damn unreasonable, which is why I decided to play SADX off my Wii's hard drive. Call it tradition, or laziness, or whatever, but I needed my Sonic Adventure DX raw, just the way grandma made it back in 2003. Twenty years later, nothing has changed.
Obviously, I agree that all the issues with lighting, textures, and models are detrimental and make the game look substantially worse both from the perspective of fidelity and aesthetic charm. What I have a larger issue with is the amount of collision detection issues that I'm pretty sure are introduced in this version of the game. Perhaps it's just dumb luck, but I played the original Sonic Adventure not too long ago and did not have nearly as many issues with Sonic getting stuck on walls, clipping through barriers, or breaking out of scripted events and flying into the void.
What I'm pretty sure is less an issue with DX and more integral to the Sonic Adventure experience as a whole is the game's rancid camera, which much like Sonic has a tendency to hang on geometry and disobey your commands. The travel distance on the Gamecube's shoulder buttons is ridiculous, and the extremely slow pan of DX's camera really makes it feel like you're operating a heavy piece of machinery, like the lens has been loaded onto some huge industrial crane. It fights you every step of the way too, constantly trying to jerk back into position, and God help you if you took a shortcut or broke off the standard path, because the flag to change the camera's position probably won't trip and it'll just lock into position under the floor or something.
It's never so bad that it complicates beating levels normally but does become annoying in the mission mode and more broadly through sheer prevalence. The missions added to SADX really run the gamut from being braindead easy and dull to functionally broken and badly designed. Special shoutouts to collecting the flags during the boulder sequence in Sonic's Lost World, an act of rote memorization and praying Sonic's shoulder doesn't clip into the side of the wall and slow him down, and Tails' flag collection in Windy Valley which I had to look up a guide for because bad draw distancing never rendered in a single flag while the camera was trained on it.
Nothing is worse than Mission 53, which tasks you with hitting a line of rings near the end of the snowboarding sequence in Sonic's Ice Cap by landing a frame perfect input on the final three ramps. If your timing is off, you'll shoot under or over the row of rings you need to hit, requiring you to restart from the checkpoint and sit through 2-3 minutes of the most dogshit snowboarding I've ever experienced in a video game. I had a bunch of episodes of Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak playing in the background while attempting this and now the Beef Log song has been stuck in my head for several days. it broke me, it fucking broke me, i am broken
I did all of these because at some point, probably while Freddie Prinze Jr. was snorting like a pig, I got it in my head that SADX is the only way for me to play all of the Game Gear Sonic games on my CRT, since Sonic Gems has an incomplete set. This of course meant fucking around in the Chao Garden, and I just happened to roll a Chao with the worst luck imaginable - a hidden stat! - so he constantly tripped and fell asleep during every race despite having the running, power, and swimming stats of a god. Catch my ass at 1am shouting "STOP DANCING!" because this little idiot had to do a jig every time he ate a nut in the Emerald course. Suffering through this and getting hit with "TAILS' SKYPATROL UNLOCKED" felt like getting stabbed directly through the heart, and I have nobody to blame but myself.
The only nice thing I have to say about SADX is that it runs at 60fps, but I'm not sure the hefty amount of graphical compromises was worth the bump in performance, and I'm the kind of guy who typically will turn off superfluous graphical enhancements to buy a few extra frames. Apparently the Gamecube version is the better release, and some of DX's problems have only gotten worse with subsequent ports. The real unfortunate thing is that Sega, much like they do with the Game Gear games, seem to be treating the demonstrably worse version of a game as the document of record.
Anyway, sound off in the comments! Are you a beef log boy or a cheeselogger? Me? I like a good cheese log. It's my favorite saturated fat.
6 Comments
finally, an accurate sonic rating
also i'm all about the beeflog. i even eat the cellophane!
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mission 54 which takes place on Tails' version of Ice Cap, and ALSO conveniently comes at the very end of the stage. It's the one where you have to run into 13 flags in a row with extraordinarily thin hitboxes while on the slippery snowboard controls. If you miss even one then you essentially have to restart the entire goddamn snowboard sequence because any struggles to save your attempt by limping backwards to the flag you missed are promptly and brutally stomped out by Sonic incurring a sort of indirect time limit for this as he'll almost certainly end up prematurely ending the stage if you even try.
I've held a grudge against this mission for years ever since I had to do it for 100% completion and I'm not so pleased that me doing it again in the Gamecube version to unlock the game gear games in that was rendered mostly unnecessary by the release of Sonic Origins Plus.
I've held a grudge against this mission for years ever since I had to do it for 100% completion and I'm not so pleased that me doing it again in the Gamecube version to unlock the game gear games in that was rendered mostly unnecessary by the release of Sonic Origins Plus.
@LarryDavis Larry, I beg to disagree! Cheese log is the log for me.
@XenonNV Yeah that one is really bad, too, but 53 gave me way more trouble. I was able to navigate 54 by pause buffering and gently tilting Tails in the right direction, but the narrow hitboxes on those flags and the fact that they don't provide any to spare and expect absolute precision is ridiculous considering how bad the controls are. But given how poor some of the easier missions are, I don't think anyone really put any thought into the mission mode to begin with. It's really slapped together.
@XenonNV Yeah that one is really bad, too, but 53 gave me way more trouble. I was able to navigate 54 by pause buffering and gently tilting Tails in the right direction, but the narrow hitboxes on those flags and the fact that they don't provide any to spare and expect absolute precision is ridiculous considering how bad the controls are. But given how poor some of the easier missions are, I don't think anyone really put any thought into the mission mode to begin with. It's really slapped together.
@TransWitchSammy I knew you'd get my back on this, you always struck me as a cheeselogger.
TransWitchSammy
3 months ago