Sega had a rough transition to 3D.
It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.
The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.
The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.
It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.
With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.
The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.
Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.
It wasn’t. The game is bad.
Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.
Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.
I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?
Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.
Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?
Well.
It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.
The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.
I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.
Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.
What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.
Killer soundtrack, though.
It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.
The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.
The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.
It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.
With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.
The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.
Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.
It wasn’t. The game is bad.
Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.
Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.
I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?
Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.
Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?
Well.
It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.
The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.
I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.
Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.
What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.
Killer soundtrack, though.
5 Comments
@moschidae thank you i was insanely mad while writing it 🫡
By the pricking of my thumbs, something buggy and undercooked this way comes...
sounds like a game you either love or hate (looks pretty cool tbh im fine with some jank)
"or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter"
I'd be fine with that tbh
I'd be fine with that tbh
moschidae
1 month ago