this game sucks compared to kart, bunch of overly complex changes made to the game making it extremely overwhelming, the tutorial it makes you go through doesn't helps with that feeling neither, and this is coming from someone that has been playing Kart v1 since version 1.2

also, to the dev that thought changing arle's voice to the puyo pop english voicelines was a good idea: go fuck yourself

oh, did i forget to mention that most basic stuff that wasn't locked in kart is now locked behind dumb challenges? THE ABILITY TO LOAD MODS AND PLAY ONLINE IS LOCKED BEHIND CHALLENGES, WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT??? anyways here's a save that has most of the stuff unlocked, grab it while it lasts
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/857867797874212865/1232898299904786462/ringdata.dat?ex=662b2184&is=6629d004&hm=84eb18fc0dbedeae71ae4cc0fd91506e8a705f28243eaf92bafe818c2e8ed22b&

Ceroba darling I think I love you more than my wife but I've been married for 26 years and unfortunately marriage is just a bond that cannot be broken. Please oh please come on down to Bobs Burgers it is my restaurant and you will love it I will make a special burger of the day just for you... we can call it the Yellow burger not that in context you would ever really understand what that means but I'd lovee it because the video gaem is called Undertale Yellow. Ceroba you're in fucking Undertale. I think my male pattern baldness is starting to worsen

Shigeru Miyamoto has gone on record saying that Mario “isn’t the kind of game you necessarily have to finish, it should be fun to just pick up and play,” and as a kid I often really would boot it up solely to jump around Bob-Omb Battlefield for a bit and feel myself or whatever. A pattern I’ve observed with a lot of gamers is that, as they get older, they slowly prioritize finishing games over simply the inherent fun of playing them — and while I definitely feel that was accurate for my late teens/early twenties as well, I’ve since returned to craving those more innate pleasures.

It’s wild how much Nintendo got right about Mario’s animations and the overall sound design on this first attempt, conveying that perfect sweetspot between weight and nimbleness, something I honestly don’t get as much out of 64's successors. Similarly, the level design also manages to find this nebulous since-unmatched middle-ground between open-ness and tight pacing, with many of the stages presenting you with vertical, spiral-shaped layouts, made up of multiple digestible paths that intersect so seamlessly that you never stop to think about them as anything other than one cohesive whole.

Aspects that feel like obvious limitations, like being booted out of the level when grabbing a Star or the rigid camera, end up aiding the game’s pacing and overall structure the more you actually think about it. The way you bounce between different paintings within Peach’s castle, completely at your own leisure, mirrors how you tackle the obstacles inside those worlds; loose and free-form and whichever way seems enjoyable to you at the moment without even having to think about it. It all seems so simple, and yet I’m still waiting for another platformer that is this immediately fun and endlessly replayable.

This is okay, actually. Bullshit in places, but like, fine? Maybe I'm missing something. I do have a soft spot for this one for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid (I've also always been very fond of the OST, surprisingly memorable when you consider all Game Gear/Master System stuff sounds nearly the damn same). I'll tell you what does suck though, the Sky High Zone chaos emerald is a fucking meme. The hang glider is a bit notoriously absurd, and while it's far from impossible to use, making it go upwards is indeed. You have to maintain your speed somehow and rely on gusts of wind to make it high enough to reach the emerald, and it's really strange and specific. There's a lot of odd design like that, but most of it I find is more manageable than people make it out to be. Scrambled Egg Zone codifies that annoying tube nonsense that appears in all the later Game Gear games though, so fuck it for that. That one is shit. But all in all, I think this one gets a little more flack than it deserves.

You will eat shit if you play on Game Gear, though. If you have the option to play on a platform with a better screen I would simply do so

This game was recommended by radicalraisin and Mellorine, except instead of a recommendation it was more like a "hey this game is short, why don't you just get it over with?"

In retrospect, everything about this game is hilarious. Sega makes a big deal about how they're making the Sonic game fans have been waiting for, a side scroller that will bring it all back to the Genesis, except if it's made by the people who've been making the modern side scrollers since the GBA and not actually Sonic Team or anyone who cares that much. Also it'll have an aesthetic that I would call "XBOX Live Arcade Vomit", and the music will be composed by someone who heard of what Genesis music sounded like and ended up deeply misunderstanding what he heard.

Sonic controls like a boulder, he controls like what people who hate the first Sonic the Hedgehog think he controls like. Takes forever to get any momentum, and anything at all can kill it instantly. The level design is attempting to trick you into thinking it covers Sonic 1-3, but it's all just the worst of Sonic 1. Despite having Sonic 1 level design, the way enemy placement and the homing attack work in this game is attempting to create the fast, quick reflex oriented playstyle of previous Dimps Sonic games, and it doesn't work at all. There is no opportunity for flow here, it feels unnatural. So what we end up with is a game trying to be Sonic 1 but also be a modern Sonic side-scroller, and it ends up being far worse than any of the other games in those categories.

That homing attack might be the worst part of this game. The way it works is that when something has a reticle over it, you can homing attack to it. The problem is if you miss the timing, you don't homing attack it and instead just, flip over to it. This means you'll go from being able to attack an enemy to just, immediately get hit by it. It just constantly sets you up for failure, it's worse than just having a normal jump attack like an actual Sonic game.

I should note that on a slight technicality, I did not actually beat this game. I got to the very last part of the final boss, and then didn't realize what I had to do before I died and was sent back to the beginning of the final boss. I then accidentally hit Reset Act in the start menu and it sent me to the beginning of the boss rush before the final boss. Fuck you, I beat that, I'm not going back just to prove it to the game. That final boss is awful by the way, it takes way too many hits and just goes on forever. An important thing to know is that using the homing attack knocks you back way farther than just jumping on an enemy, so despite the game constantly showing you a reticle in order to make you use the homing attack, it's better to just completely ignore it when it comes to boss fights.

This was a pretty miserable time to be a Sonic fan, huh? Thankfully Colors and Generations are just around the corner from this game's release date, but damn, this was brutal. Sonic-Mania truly was a godsend.

This Tech Demo is kinda fun.

You heard me right. Tech Demo. KINDA fun.

This is not the Second Coming of the Messiah, like half of the fandom used to make it out to be, nor are the developers hidden geniuses that SEGA themselves would bow down to, if only this game were completed. Well - that's not even mentioning the controversies surrounding said developers, but that's a tale for another day.

This game is riddled with extremely surface-level flaws. The map is just one big flat block of grass with the only unique surfaces essentially being stylised blocks placed on top of the flat land, like a level builder in a LEGO game. There's no cohesiveness to the environment, and while yes, the game does an excellent job of providing you everything you need to build up a good flow and navigate the senseless environment fairly easily, that's literally all it has to offer. It has a grand total of one, maybe two secrets, neither of-which hold much of interest, and as much as I like this game conceptually, it does not play well enough to justify its flaws.

My understanding of the goals of this game has fluctuated over time, through various interactions with different people, but I do respect it as what it ultimately is - an interpretation of a different direction through-which Sonic could have evolved out of his classic years. Still, this is just a flimsy tech demo, and from what I've heard of the minimal updates over the last six(?) years, the game is not headed back towards mind-blowing status any time soon.

I wish I could offer something of more substance, but I genuinely don't know what else to say, other than "it's okay, I guess." It's enjoyable, in the same way just about any other fan-game with the slightest hint of effort put into it could be enjoyed. It's just a shame this project is so caked in toxicity from every angle, that it'll never be anything more than that.