has an industrial harbor level but features zero intermodal containers. if you put meteor herd OR mad space in a 10/10 game, either would drag it down to a 7/10. the tails stages are like filing unemployment paperwork and the knuckles stages are like having dreams about your old department store job, which makes the sonic stages like the distant dying memories of your fondest ten minute smoke breaks. ive watched SOV basement gore movies with better audio mixing. anyway its pretty good. i like rouge the bat.

first of all: this IS the superior version of the game. sonic r was made FOR the saturn and i adore it in all its graphical crust and cascading render distances. seriously, the way they handle the low render distance in this game is gorgeous and amplifies the look of tracks like radiant emerald. i'm getting aside of myself though

sonic r is a misunderstood gem. i was thinking about this a lot in my free time the other day- i've been on a sega saturn binge lately and i played sega rally championship back to back with this game. intentional or not, sonic r and src are definitely similar games, yet sonic r has a 2.8 and sega rally has a 3.7.

"well, sonic r has slippery handling and inconsistent physics!" yeah, so does sega rally. stop playing sonic r like a kart racer

"well, sonic r barely has any content!"
sega rally has 4 stages, yet nobody complains. i guess cuz its an arcadey racer and you're supposed to master high scores? i'd definitely argue that's what sonic r goes for as well.

"the music is bad!"
nobody says this about either game i made it up

so the biggest complaints about sonic r come down to misconceptions. i think this is also why people complain about the "difficulty spike" for 100%-ing the game! the game demands mastery of the few stages it has for the same reason any arcade racer would. it provides a solid testing grounds for your fastest pathways, and the shitpost-tier ai in the standard races makes it less of a pain in the ass to get back to the challenge again. i don't know what design decisions were legit decisions here, but it all flows together quite nicely. though, obviously, the greatest part about this game are the track layouts and the MUSIC. i cannot say anything about sonic r's soundtrack that hasn't already been said. just listen to "work it out". it is the most bright, bubbly energetic music that fails to ever get old when you're practicing routes through those stages. and those stages do have hella routes- they're essentially 3d sonic levels that loop. it's super fun to use each character's power to "exploit" things. the speedrunning scene for sonic r is probably insane. maybe that physics engine was good all along? the artstyle is damn perfect too, featuring signature sega sunny skies as well as sparkley space voids and shiny metallic sheens. exploring is fun and satiates my need for a 3d platformer on the sega saturn, cuz this is way more interesting as a genre hybrid.

so yeah sonic r is basically perfect. best racing game i've ever played

"haha car go crhsrhshfshdh" is the most atrophy-brained ass take i've ever seen on what is ultimately, the most thorough simulation of vehicles, not just their operation, i've ever seen. it has become the ultimate "going for a drive to clear my mind" simulator as far as i'm concerned, and it doesn't have the risk of death along with it. i haven't needed to get any racing/driving sim since i got this back in 2016, because it does everything it needs to and then some.

(the following is copy-pasted from my steam review, still relevant, still how i feel)

at some point in my lifetime, it is likely that the internal combustion engine and its use in transport will be phased out. beam.ng will likely remain the most complete simulation of such explosive machines and the deadly carriages of metal (or plastic if you're saturn), not just a simulation of merely operating them. the entire machine, and its hazards, simulated. by the time most pistons are replaced by massive lithium heaps that stop holding a charge after 3 years, beamng might still be around, possibly still in development. i will likely be dumping photosynthesized oils into a soot producer to get a nice 0-60 of 20 seconds, and still be just as enthused about the simulated machines in beamng.drive then as i was 5 years ago.

this game's soundtrack has to be one of the biggest formative pieces for my music taste after i found out about it via the caddicarus video when i was like 14, though somehow it took me until yesterday to actually go and play the game. i think it must have settled in the "fact of life" section in my brain rather than the "games i want to play" section just from the soundtrack being so outstanding.
Anyway, goated game. classic easy to learn hard to master, and finally another good use case for me having a CD collection in 2023.

Hell yea! This one's also great! Sure, it hasn't been localized so the dialogue definitely went over my head, but there was a handy english guide I found that explained what was happening in all the cutscenes which made me appreciate what this game was going for story wise. And yea, while Badass Rumble lasts maybe 6 hours, this one was nearly 20 for me! Story wise, it's much bigger in scope, and there have been many gameplay tweaks to make combat and such more fluid. However, due to the world being scaled back a bit, I ended up not enjoying this one as much. However the school was super fun to explore, that one area was massive.

This was a really unexpected hit for me! I kinda knew I would end up enjoying it, but I loved this. It's such a cute, bite-sized experience full of charm and personality. The world is shockingly big, with tons of areas each with shops and people to fight. The combat, while stiff, is satisfying and fun to get the hang of. And I love the little romance-tinged plot. Trash talking your opponents is a fun mechanic, even if it's easy... idk, I feel like it doesn't sound like the greatest, but I had an excellent time with this! It's a shame this is the only one in the series that got localized... I'm gonna still try the other ones out and see if the language barrier is too much.