Goffers
I don't like this revisionist history I'm seeing with regards to this project that tries to paint Sonic '06 as something that can be salvaged with "better core gameplay". Sonic 06 was a fundamentally broken game, in every single aspect of its design. It's not something so easily fixed, and after all these years of it being one of the most laughably bad games of all time, one that even the most die-hard fans seemed to have trouble defending, it's very strange seeing people online saying stuff like "it had good ideas!" or "it just needed a bit more development time!" or "It has a lot of potential!". My knee-jerk reaction is to say this is nostalgia talking for a lot of people, wanting to believe this game they felt so disappointed by as a kid could've ended up as a masterpiece, but the reality is that the game never stood a chance. You'd have to go back to the drawing board with Sonic 06 to pull out something decent, not just give it more time in the oven.
No hate to the project's creator, because I think it's a genuine show of love for the series that someone would undergo trying to salvage one of the most infamous games of all time. If I'm judging just his work I'd be praising him, but unfortunately his great work is still being built upon, well, Sonic '06. If the myriad of tweaks is enough to make this game enjoyable for Sonic fans, all the more power to them. But playing this project just crystalized for me how much Sega absolutely failed with Sonic '06. The level design is boring, frequently includes frustrating mechanics and the additional characters outside Sonic, Shadow and Silver still feel tacked on and never as fun as the primary trio, and focusing on half-baked physics puzzles and vehicle combat for the Shadow and Silver campaigns is still completely misguided.
I fully admit the game controls much better now, and would love to see people take this framework and do something new with it. But good core controls doesn't suddenly make Sonic '06 worth playing, it just shows that game development is complicated, and the fixes we propose as fans often aren't enough to save the games we want to love. I wanted to love Sonic '06 when I played it as a young kid, but even then, when my standards for games were so much lower, I still felt that this game was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately after playing P-06, I still feel that way.
No hate to the project's creator, because I think it's a genuine show of love for the series that someone would undergo trying to salvage one of the most infamous games of all time. If I'm judging just his work I'd be praising him, but unfortunately his great work is still being built upon, well, Sonic '06. If the myriad of tweaks is enough to make this game enjoyable for Sonic fans, all the more power to them. But playing this project just crystalized for me how much Sega absolutely failed with Sonic '06. The level design is boring, frequently includes frustrating mechanics and the additional characters outside Sonic, Shadow and Silver still feel tacked on and never as fun as the primary trio, and focusing on half-baked physics puzzles and vehicle combat for the Shadow and Silver campaigns is still completely misguided.
I fully admit the game controls much better now, and would love to see people take this framework and do something new with it. But good core controls doesn't suddenly make Sonic '06 worth playing, it just shows that game development is complicated, and the fixes we propose as fans often aren't enough to save the games we want to love. I wanted to love Sonic '06 when I played it as a young kid, but even then, when my standards for games were so much lower, I still felt that this game was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately after playing P-06, I still feel that way.