221 reviews liked by XenonNV


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.

It's just worse Battletoads, and I find that really embarrassing. Only half as many levels with a very poor selection that eliminates the rhythmic pacing of beatemup/platforming/gimmick sections the original game had. And most returning levels are worse and harder than they originally were. This game's equivalent of Clinger Winger is probably the worst level in a videogame I've ever played.

Just bad, totally awful, I know Rare isn't a developer to be trusted, but c'mon, what kind of sequel is this?

Pulled all the way through this time after initially running out of steam around world 6 about a year ago. The fundamental gameplay alone is certainly a home run, but the playful music and atmosphere further enhance things and give the game an oddly comforting and familiar feel for me. It might be that it's very reminiscent of games I'd download free trials for off Nick Arcade as a little kid (such as SpongeBob SquarePants Obstacle Odyssey). Either way, really good stuff all around. I can see myself coming back to this several times in the future.

It's not without its hiccups, though. Launchers and Arthropod, for example, are insanely egregious and difficult for the first half of the game's standards, creating a really weird bump in the otherwise smooth, steady difficulty curve. Similarly, in the last world in Story Mode the design philosophy completely changes and noticeably becomes totally obtuse. They're not even necessarily harder than the levels in the previous two worlds, but it's a very jarring shift that doesn't really result in any enjoyable levels out of those last ten.

Would very strongly recommend this game, but definitely don't let your guard down. It gets a lot harder than it initially lets on.

"Set in the fictional country of Kookistan during 1999, players assume the role of Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem from the Doomsday Squad in a last-ditch effort to overthrow dictator General Akhboob and his army of mutants from conquering the world, while also rescuing POWs held by his military force."

Yeah? Yeah? Yeah?? Yeah????

Amazing intersection of absurdist collage artstyles and novel-but-intentionally-awkward joycon gimmicks. Moreover it's so refreshing to play a high-budget 2D game that switches to a random low-fidelity 3D artstyle akin to launch-era gamecube every 5 seconds. I'm shocked this came out 6 years after switch launch, the ideas here should've been in a pack-in game; puts 1-2-Switch to shame (not that it needed comparison to show its cracks)

legendarily bad, maybe a new low for one of the worst shmups i've played

note - if you can't kill something, use a 'Lock-On' powerup, and when you get to level 3, use a video guide to take the right paths

Funny story: My library had this genesis games guide all the way back from 93. I rented it constantly, just out of obsessive fascination with Sega stuff, and Wonder Dog had a walkthrough in there. Always looked odd to me from those blurry black-and-white screenshots.

CDromance jumpscared me with a rom for it today while browsing for more Sega CD stuff to chew on. Turned out to be in a Mega Turrican situation - developed by a primarily Amiga team for Sega first, then backported to Amiga, - and like that game, it's shockingly competent. The star weapon is fun to use, your run and hover abilities and smoothly tweaked, and level design both challenges and rewards your mastery.

The concept is aesthetically all over the place - you start with this sci-fi monologue about a (dog?) scientist injecting super genes into his son and sending him to Earth, he meets a kid and they become friends until his dad says 'no pets', and you'd assume the game would be about finding the family anyway but instead you travel back to your home planet and fight a random dictator there? There's some very goofy puzzle pieces here that don't feel like they align.

Probably the weirdest thing about this game is how easy the bosses are, I even beat the last boss by standing in a corner and pelting stars. I'll take this over the millions of other Amiga platformers that throttle me over the head with unwinnable sludge, but for how well executed the rest of the game was, these were a letdown.

The dog enemies go 'D'oh!' when you hit them and I found it very Hum Of Rous

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

Hard to put into words the power this game has but I know it when I feel it. It's Sonic skydiving out of a cop copter, it's locking onto 9 targets and once and getting that meaty score notif, it's gliding all the way from one peak of Pumpkin Hill to the other, it's the way each character gets their own musical genre, it's the obscenely harsh 100% requirements, the list goes on

Unstoppable apex, unequivocally itself, living by its own feeling.

Kind of exactly what you'd expect from a modern Spongebob platformer: Nice 8th Gen spick span and flow, but sorely toothless in the sauce. Just does everything generally worse than BfBB because it's so scared of being even slightly challenging. The shift away from collectathon structure also makes most of the levels extremely repetitive and forgettable. The PS2 movie game still made linear work by way of Goober Tokens and the objectives tied to them. But like, once you beat the main path of each level, there's basically nothing else to do, and said paths are usually hour-long hikes with the same enemies and platform gimmicks.

Wish the humor was up to par, too, 90% of spongebob's dialouge is him making puns out of random shit and patrick obsfucating that wordplay into some dumb lolrandom dredge. Nick still has the same O.G. voice crew working on this, and I respect it, but I think a lot of these guys are ready to retire from this shindig. You can feel Tom Kenny getting seized by coughing fits from straining his voice so high.

And look man, I wouldn't say BfBB has a 'listenable' soundtrack, but it being VG music in the style of Spongebob's stock music fit like a glove. This mobile game orchestral sludge is ass, and throwing in a Sweet Victory or Jellyfish Jam here and there doesn't fix it.

There was basically nothing for me here but I guess it has a nice comfort food flow to it?