There's an in-game bookstore in The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa which predictably sells books which Ringo can read. They all have slightly parodic, possibly copyright dodging titles but are all clearly based on existing words of literature e.g Odysseus - > Ulysses, Brothers -> Brothers Karamazov etc.

Reading each of them involves figuring out the slightly obtuse method of finding a bench and using the right shoulder button and letting the slow progress bar fill up. If you've read the speed reading books in the school library you can speed the process up but it will take a significant amount of ingame time to read through the longer novels like Ulysses and Anna Karenina. There is basically 0 mechanical benefit in doing so, negative, if you factor in opportunity cost. Well, there is one female friend of Ringo's who has unique dialogue if you've read any of the russian novels but other than that (and the achievement for reading them all I suppose) like in real life you basically have to read for shock horror its own sake.

It is perhaps silly, but The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa's particular roleplaying, simulation charm had such a grip on me on replay that I sat on a bench in the park on a sunday and would periodically pause reading The Brothers Karamazov to light up a cigarette and continue where I left of, then stopping to put it out. I can't even really put my finger on why, perhaps its because for all the maturity of the subject matter and perceived adult-ness (which is even addressed in one of the conversations with Ringo's bookworm friend declaring that Adults didnt watch anime) its the kind of thing that taps into that dormant desire to make up stories of our toys of childhood; when play and learning went hand in hand.

Its also because smoking in a game is as close as I'll hopefully ever get to it IRL after giving it up a few years ago. Reading whilst smoking brings a nostalgia for one of the worst years of my life when I was 18 and had just started university in a different country.

I don't smoke anymore, but I've been getting back into reading. Reading Rumble Fish recently it was hard not to notice the influence in Ringo's story, a tale of a troubled teen gang leader's deep existential emptiness and misplaced idealism about the "rules" of chivalry supposedly involved. Even the scene in RI of Goro staring off into the lit up city across the river wondering if there's anything greater out there, a naïve hope of escaping the ennui of their hometown into a mythical "other place" smacks of a particular chapter in Rumble Fish; seemingly the only time at which the main character is comfortable is when drunk and surrounded by the pretty lights and party atmosphere of the city, shortly before being mugged.

I'm currently reading through Winesburg Ohio, I suppose I could have waited until i read through all of the books to come back and replay Ringo and do some kind of overlong comparative analysis of the influences, but I can't be assed right now. Maybe I will do that in the future. In replaying Ringo there was the unfortunate realization that the combat is kinda shit compared to Fading Afternoon and a few bugs got a bit annoying, as well as the confirmation that the pacing of the final few weeks was as weird as I remembered it, but everything else about the game was stellar, and I think I enjoyed it even more than last time. Ringo is a bit like Paprika and other works I love to revisit in that it feels like you're finding something new every time. For as obtuse and even abrasive as the design philosphy of Yeo's games can be, they are equally mesmerising.

For example, I discovered upon replay that you can squat to recover health. I also learned that story events do not trigger if you have your gang with you, which is both useful in setting the terms of the progression but thematically appropriate: Ringo's friends are coming apart, him seemingly the last one to realize this, and his various activities calling upon him to be alone and not keeping the gang together accelerates the process. That ending still hits fucking hard man. God. Y'know what? Fuck it, for all its faults, this is a 5 star game for me now. I don't think it will be most people's cup of tea but I humbly ask for everyone to play it at some point, even if just for a few hours

This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!

If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.

While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.

I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.

Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.

For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.

Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)

I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.

Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.

I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.

Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.

Now that I have played Sonic Dream Team, I have no doubt in my mind that Sonic Team needs to be deprioritized as the people making Sonic games. Yeah ok people like Frontiers. So happy for you, queen. Play this shit and tell me what you think. Yeah, you see what these devs are cooking? You wish to see more of exactly this? Yeah yeah yeah.

It's got big ass problems from me de facto declaring this the best 3D Sonic game. It's short. It's padded out. I experienced performance hiccups every so often, but maybe that's just the RAM limits of the Apple TV I was playing on. You can also play this on newer Iphones and iPad but you better have a controller.

It's kind of fucked up that one of best playing Sonic games ever made is trapped on Apple Arcade, a service so few people use that only exists for sheer marketshare value of Apple. It's better than most subscription services for games. But, subscriptions for games still sucks. LET ME BUY THIS ELSEWHERE.

Am I Sonic fan? I claim not to be. I'm 31, an age where I shouldn't be really interacting with this kind of stuff lest I get sus looks. That said, Sonic as a franchise is 35 years old and I've been around every marketing push. Sega doesn't make new franchises with a lot of marketing push. They have only really pumped all their money in making this blue fuck relevant -- with feature films, TV shows, memes, half-baked games, etc. I don't even conceive of most of the characters in the sonic franchise beyond their memes. Chili dogs, gotta go fast, all the really shitty games, Ken Penders comics, Ugandan Knuckles, this song that has been stuck in my head for a year.

I can't avoid him even if I wanted to, because I can see the 3D gaming potential of Sonic. It is sad that Sonic Dream Team is a release I didn't even know existed until I was browsing my sister's Apple TV! It ended up being the best official 3D Sonic thing I've played in actual decades! Usually, unless it's a fan game, his games are probably deeply flawed! It's kind not getting that way anymore maybe!?

There are people who are now grandparents out there who were prime demographic youths when OG Sonic dropped. He is like Scooby Doo for Gen X. Sonic went 3D 6 years into his conception and we're just now seeing what potential there is that can be seen and felt; what a truly good 3D game can do beyond having busted or overly linear level design! It's kind of pathetic that we just got here but we are here. Sonic Team wasn't even responsible for making me feel that way. Sonic Team! YOU'RE TOO SLOW.

Sonic Dream Team is good even if you hate this chili-glizzy-guzzling anthro hedgehog. It is my hope for you that a Sonic game will natively run past 30fps without performance issues in your lifetime.

Justice of Galaxy started playing.
The music had a moment- a dramatic sting. In perfect sync with this, the game introduces an enemy type you've never seen before in droves.

All 6 of them begin moving and shooting at the precise second the track kicks in. The rest of the stage never lets up after this.

I haven't beaten this game. I don't know if I'm going to be able to anytime soon. But things like that are what earns 10/10s from me; the understanding that the visuals and audio can be just as important to a game as its mechanics, and just as impactful if used correctly. The impression was definitely made, and now I'm committed to seeing it through.

This game wipes the floor with my ass and I keep coming back just because of that. I don't even care if the background is the same for the whole thing. It's good. And free!

An interesting take on the "kart racer" type game. Is full of a lot of interesting mechanics that work surprisingly well with each other. And although the game's difficulty is more in the head-hurtingly hard territory, it's so much fun that I will keep coming back to it the next day if I rage quit it, no matter what.

Something unique to this game that I think is interesting is the ring system. Having to use ring's that you've collected on each course to maintain your speed adds a very fun dynamic to the races and can make for some interesting track designs.

Before any of the updates, one of the main problems I had with the game is how many of the courses would require impossibly precise turns that the physics of your kart would just not allow for to pull off smoothly. But after the changes made to certain classes' handling, just getting better at the game, and certain changes to the courses (one cup specifically had all of their tracks sized up by 25% WHICH MADE ME THANK GOD FOR LETTING ME LIVE ANOTHER DAY), the issue has become kinda non-existent at this point.

One day I will become cracked at this game but for now I'm okay with just being mediocre at it skill wise lol.

ok the one piece fans were right though it literally does get good 27 hours in

seriously a combination of patch 2.2 and improving my skill over the course of the last while has turned this from a game i was really mixed on to a game i can’t put down, it’s a crazy turnaround. i still can’t say my old review was wrong, though. it’s a real criticism that the experience as a beginner is so rough, and while i got stockholmed into sticking with it, i can completely understand why others would just give up after a few cups, ESPECIALLY on earlier versions. if you did, though… maybe try again? special stages are much easier to get into and much fairer, cpu rubber banding is nerfed, slopes don’t drag you down as much without rings, and the weirder challenges are finally starting to get well documented alongside the game itself making them easier to skip.

…balloon park still exists, though, so it’s not all good news. oh well.

Ring Racers is a gem, the somewhat lengthy tutorial and the mostly fixed single player rubber-banding won't take that away from it.
This game joins CTR in the field of kart racers that just "get it", it's very technical with a lot of inter-woven mechanics making the game a blast to play and get better at. The ring-feeding being a variant of the F-zero boost mechanic adds a lot of strategy and intense moments compared to robo kart, I love that the devs went and honed such disruptive ideas, really ends up being a breath of fresh air in the kart racing field.
On the presentation side I think the game has a pretty strong themeing which really transpires in both visuals and soundtrack, there is a staggering amount of content (like 8 times the amount of tracks in a typical new mario kart) though the circuits still managed to be highly varied but still consistent with the core theme, of course the sonic (& some sega) IP helps with its long history but the fan-service is a given in such a project and if anything makes it easier to love.
I also want to mention the single player progression which I think is really well realized, it uses a similar system to the challenge wall in smash brawl, which lets you play the game as intended but keeping side objectives in mind, it really encourages you to play more of the game and feels good feeding you rewards regularly, also have the option to skip some of the challenges if you feel like it. I also like how many secrets are hidden among the tracks, it's really fun to explore familiar areas in a new light and discover all the effort that went into them (most of them being linked to unlocks too).
Overall this is an amazing fan-project that isn't afraid to push its genre forward, both in mechanics and how it handles progression, and a beautiful love-letter to the sonic IP.