Sonic The Hedgehog 4
Yep, it was announced at last. In a desperate attempt to curtail the fan and public indifference to their mascot, Sega did the unthinkable - they actually stopped ignoring every person in the world who liked Sonic The Hedgehog games. Their advice was simple: make Sonic the only playable character, remove the increasingly irritating side-cast (which reached it's nadir with Sonic Unleashed's Chip), make it 2D, and make him shut the hell up. They've even gone back and brought in the old-style robots/badniks. If they go the whole hog (heh) and start properly calling Eggman "Robotnik" again I'll be happy.
Or will I? Let's face it, hope is not on my side. Sonic Unleashed looked like it was going to do this, then at the last minute they revealed that half the game was a crap beat 'em up.
And let's face it, the current Sonic Team could fuck up a whaling mission at SeaWorld. They have no talent left, and even games that should be impossible to screw up they get wrong. The recent sequel to the Saturn classic NiGHTS had a convoluted boring badly-acted story with unskippable long cutscenes, dull platforming sections, didn't save before boss fights, and kept levels featuring the gameplay that made the original a classic to less than half the game. They've also done 2D Sonic recently too, with Sonic Rush Adventure, and managed to fuck that up by again having a pointless craply-acting enforced story, forced you to replay stages a dozen times before you could get a new level, and added a boating shooting section.
Let's not forget the 'Episode 1' in the title, and that the trailer contains less than two seconds of footage.
Aliens Vs Predator
Oh dear. And it was all going so well for the latest AVP. All the other trailers showed it looked incredible, the ultimate... well, game!
Then the multiplayer demo came out (this week, just before the video) and the first rumblings of discontention began. Controls were awkward, crouch was missing, and everything felt very slow, if still nerve-wracking.
Now looking at the single-player in this video, I was astonished. The aliens aren't much different from Doom 3's imps, slowly meandering around the map. The marine at one point turns around and finds an alien just standing there. In the last two AVPs, he'd be dead.
I'm getting it, but I've a feeling AVP2 is still going to be the best in the series - which incidentally I've now added to the Our Favourite Games list on the right. Have you looked at those? Some great videos in there, and a massively blast of hot sweaty nostalgia to boot.
Fallout: New Vegas
Finally, something not to criticise. Well, apart from the lack of in-game footage and the pretty-far-off release date. The evasive new teaser for Obsidian's return to the Fallout world gave just enough information (through some analysis) so make it obvious that this going to contain much the same story that they were going to put into their own "Van Buren" version of Fallout 3. The New California Republic of Fallout 2 will feature. I'm very excited already.
- Chris Capel
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