52 reviews liked by Oxy_acetylene


The self-care Instagram stories of some girl you talked to once at a party a year before the pandemic and never saw again: the official game.

I really feel like, instead of climbing a demon mountain that’s trying to kill her, she could just, I dunno, get a hobby. I had depression and anxiety too, and that helped me a lot, so

A free to play mobile game disguised as a fun little $5 indie project someone just accidentally did, but in reality is meticulously designed to be as addicting as possible despite there being literally 0 point or goal, not even in a meta sense. I saw a review or comment that sums it up the best, "I only died because I stopped moving for 20 minutes."

Cookie Clicker without the chocolate chip flavored lore.
Wallpaper Engine but it only has one wallpaper.

To call it shallow would be to praise even the thinnest puddle.

Pure, unadulterated dreck. This slot machine designer's glittered up swirling turd being lined up alongside the likes of Tunic in running for Best Indie 2022 is a fucking travesty. Video games are better than this, I promise.

UPDATE: I've been informed I missed the point of the game, it's not that you just waggle WASD pointlessly, you can also tick some boxes between runs before pressing continue to go back to mindlessly waggling WASD.

maybe I'm just sour at the moment, but what was the point of this? why did we need to replace the puzzle solving and multitasking of the original with rote lock-and-key style challenges? all I did for hours on end was color matching: blue is water, yellow is electricity, red is fire, white is poison, etc. etc. etc. slowly moving around and disarming traps and then picking off enemies one by one until I could clear a path from the treasure to the ship. totally draining for me past the 10 hour mark especially when it came to the caves.

the real issue here is that pikmin 2 sidesteps many issues with the original instead of attempting legitimate improvements. combat, for example, was originally clunky and imprecise, especially on gamecube (I'm assuming the wii version is better). pikmin 2's solution is to attempt to trivialize it both by supplying the player with purples and adding the ultra-spicy and ultra-bitter sprays. for the latter there's the added annoying process of grinding berries for the sprays, which generally means keeping a leader near the berries waiting around for the pikmin to deal with cobwebs/knock off worms/harvest the fruit; a constant distraction while your other leader is doing the more interesting work. the purples as well add unintended annoyances by being both sluggish and rare, meaning that they die often and you rarely have as many as you would like. these are well-deserved drawbacks, as purples can butcher nearly any standard enemy in the game with no fuss, but losing too many and needing to fall back on your regular troops makes the return to clumsy combat all the more bitter, and it's not like mindlessly massacring hallways of enemies in caves with purples is exactly stimulating either. the day system as well is sidestepped by having the caves exist outside time. these areas totally remove time management for the player and in the process throw a lot of pikmin's natural strategizing out the window in favor of the aforementioned methodical dispersal of all noteworthy obstacles on each floor. some of these elements still exist in the main areas to the game's credit, but given that the levels have been scaled back in complexity from the original and that the day limit has been excised, it feels overly simplified. there were ways to fix this: perhaps make certain key items or enemies only show up periodically for a set of days, pushing savvy players to carefully lay out their day-to-day schedule to catch each event as it comes. that's an approach that has problems of its own, but could still attempt to realize the time management aspects inherent to the original while addressing common complaints.

the aforementioned level design changes are really indicative of the whole package here. the original game's levels felt explorable and flexible in the sense that the tools the player chose to use could vary while also having clear bounds. for example, it's not feasible on a first playthrough to tear down every breakable or bombable wall, so choices must be made via prioritization of objectives; no right answers, and it forces the player to follow their gut instincts and live with potential mistakes. the need for this planning in pikmin 2 is entirely absent. treasures in the overworld tend to be in much more obvious places, and enemy layouts are such that you're expected to clear pathways proactively rather than encouraging risky treasure-carry-paths around sleeping or slow enemies as in the first. as for gates, they all boil down to "match the element to the type of pikmin and then let them rip," and any gate that exists absolutely must be taken down if you're interested in the all treasure ending. presumably the debt repayment is meant to allow some level of player choice in how they pursue objectives, but the 10k coin threshold is so low that there's no impetus to do anything other than wander around and grab whatever is close. the caves just exacerbate the above issues, as the cramped spaces restrict freedom of movement and they are littered with cookie-cutter traps that will send you running back and forth to the starting area with different colored groups of pikmin in your wake. I could go on and on... I got tired of the caves very quickly.

controversial opinion, I know, but this one really seemed mechanically dead to me compared to the first, which already had plenty of issues on its own. perhaps improvements to the pikmin AI or controls could've smoothed things out, but adjustments are so subtle in these areas it's hard for me to give out points. that's not to say there aren't parts I like of course: the world is much more fleshed out in terms of both the denizens of hocotate and olimar's personal journal entries. his mixture of empirically-minded curiosity and existential boredom makes him much richer than he has any right to be, and the letters from home accentuate this, especially with their corner-cutting boss and the just desserts he gets while destitute and on the run from debt collectors. there are also still puzzles here and there I did legitimately enjoy, such as the block-weighing ones that required careful allocation of pikmin to each platform in order to elevate olimar to a higher platform. it's on a strong core, but I think it really misses the mark in trying to improve on the weaknesses of the original. I couldn't even push myself to get all treasures, as I'm writing this after finishing dream den and have no intention of doing much clean-up past that. that final boss was excrutiatingly boring... they really need to put HP indicators on each of his weapons, and killing pikmin with the water cannon off-screen is such a low blow. the fight music was terribly repetitive as well... I could continue on this tangent but I think it's basically clear this game didn't align with me like I was hoping it would after the much more unapproachable first game.

This review contains spoilers

“I think I’m done with the Sonic series.”

This was something said around the year 2020 by me. I just didn’t really have much hope in the franchise for many years. Thought Forces was mediocre, thought TSR was mediocre, thought the first movie was decent at best. When Sonic Frontiers was first shown off it would just be another dud trying to copy what others were doing. Surprisingly it was a good game though my opinion has gone down on it over the past 11 months I think it’s been out. Still it gave me some hope and while the second Sonic movie was still just decent I did see it as a better movie. Which now leads into Superstars. (Warning big spoilers will be in this).

When the game was first revealed I was curious but not hyped especially due to the questionable presentation and $60 price tag. I also had no hope the Switch port would be good considering every Sonic game after Forces have had some downgrades besides maybe Origins. I never bought it so I’m assuming it’s basically the same besides worse resolution on the cutscenes. It was also revealed Arzest was making it and I hate them. They were the ones responsible for some of the most mediocre games out there like Hey Pikmin, Yoshi’s New Island and Wii Play Motion. (Edit again umm IDK why I wrote Hey Pikmin here because I haven't even played or seen the game outside of trailers, so apologies to anyone who likes that game). They are in the same tier as ND Cube for “Please no.” Despite it all, I had confidence we would have another Mania on our hands especially with some hyping it up.

I wanna make it clear, this won’t be detailed. This will be the story of how I now have trust issues buying new games and how Sonic Superstars is one of the biggest examples of Buyer’s Remorse I’ve ever had.

Let’s start off with the fact that the game gives a good first impression, the intro cutscene is nice, the first few zones are fun and the physics are mostly accurate. They at least seem to be very close or identical to Mania. (Edit here uhh I don't think this is actually correct, sorry for the misinformation). I was having a good time for a lot of the journey thinking that while it’s not the best game ever, it’s still good. Maybe I’ll warm up to it more on later playthroughs. Then the last quarter of the game arrived and I was pissed. I was angry. It was a feeling that shocked me and kind of made me depressed afterwards. Level design in the later zones is terrible and just doesn’t have the same good flow it was having before. But there’s a lot of other things to go over.

First those special stages, they are all mostly easy except that 5th one until you figure out holding left for most of it makes it pretty easy. You’re swinging on items to reach the emerald and while it’s confusing at first, you’ll understand it quickly but they have such little depth. I appreciate the new idea but it needs work. There’s also the emerald powers that range from don’t match the level design well or so situational they feel like a waste of space. I like the idea of it but the game doesn’t make level design well around them for both of the wrong reasons.

There’s also medals that you can get from special stages you’ve beaten, inside levels and even in checkpoint bonus stages where it’s the Sonic 1 special stage again. Why? But oh wow there’s a shop, maybe I can buy cool stuff like elemental shields, I noticed they weren’t in levels yet-oh it’s battle mode stuff. Sigh. Wait, didn't Fire and Ice do something like that too? So why even go into the boring Sonic 1 special stages if the reward is so lame. There’s also this bonus act if you have this weird fruit but again I don’t really care.

Then you have the bosses. Omg the goddamn bosses are some of the worst in the series. What the hell happened here?? You got bosses with a ton of I-frames and bosses that love to waste your time being in the background. How did they do what made the Sonic Rush bosses not good and made it even worse!? This is especially bad by the last quarter and the final boss is so long and tedious and me dying on it constantly was driving me up a wall. Yes they’re not hard but this crap is tedious man! There’s a reason Mania never did this. I’m almost convinced the last few bosses are designed the way they are so you couldn’t cheat them as Super Sonic. The only bosses I really liked was in the tribute stage to Fantasy Zone where the bosses are just literally bosses from Fantasy Zone. That was still easily the best part of the game tbh and I’m not even a big fan of FZ.

Once you beat the story mode you can play a new harder mode with a character and they somehow made the level design even worse and frustrating. It also just feels like it’s not play tested well at all and for some reason my playthrough of it kept having music glitches like the act clear not playing and having the background music play twice at the same time. They also gave the bosses more health COOL I LOVE WHEN MY HORRIBLY MADE BOSS FIGHT LASTS LONGER! GOD I LOVE VIDEO GAMES! The new final boss was cool but my god it lasts too long STOPPPPPPPPPP!!! Though I want to just scream.

F*ck everything about the Super Sonic final boss. It lasts too long, the design of the boss is terrible and I COULDN’T BEAT IT! That’s right I gave up! Now if someone can actually tell me what I did wrong I’ll try again but right now I can’t do it anymore. Sonic just faces the boss and he throws these meteors. I press the button he does this animation and it does nothing, I do nothing and I still get hit. Like wtf am I supposed to do?? I see people doing this spin move but I can’t figure out how to do it! Am I stupid?? Yes. I JUST DON’T WANNA DO ANOTHER 7 MINUTES JUST FOR 20 SECONDS OF AN ATTEMPT!!! Listening to Anime music to help the pain only can help so much. It was already a garbage fight but that ending part still makes me furious. I swear I just can’t mentally handle it anymore.

Really I could go on. I could say how visually uninteresting the game is. I could talk about the Switch port and how people on Twitter lied about it always being 60fps cause it is definitely not consistent at the very least. I could have brought up how much I’m sick of this Digital Deluxe BS. I could rant about how I’m sick of seeing Sonic LEGO. I could mention how apparently the multiplayer sucks and how I couldn’t play it because I’m a LOSER! Do you really think I’d ever have people to play with? They don’t even play the Segaaaa jingle like wtf game!? It doesn’t even have their modern Sega sound. Seriously for god's sake this game pisses me off!

If I had to be blunt. I’m depressed. I mean I’ve been depressed for 2 months with stuff like the thought of being dead one day or just how I’m getting older and less chances to look nice. Just personal stuff no one probably cares about. I don’t have much money and I kind of just expected this to be at least very good. This has changed me about how I feel about buying games now. I don’t feel confident buying anything anymore. I’m being serious, I just don’t know anymore. I honestly now have regrets buying Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I’m tempted to go hope for a return knowing it probably won’t be good either. I’m sick of buyer’s remorse man, I just wanted a good game and I’m so upset about it.

I’m never trusting Arzest with another game, they’re on my blacklist. I don’t care what they do now, if Sega continues to use them for Classic Sonic then goodbye to that. Superstars is probably not a bad game. In fact please don't let my opinion ruin your enjoyment for it if you have any but as someone who has beaten most 2D Sonic games, this is now one of my least favorites. I would rather play Sonic 2 on the Master System, I would rather play Sonic Blast (maybe not as Knuckles), and I would even…god I can’t believe I’m saying this…I would rather play Shattered Crystal-ahaha just kidding! Superstars just…angers me…upsets me. I think about how I was gonna review every classic game to celebrate and tell stories like how much I like Sonic 1 or how Triple Trouble is very good or my bad experience with Tails Adventure or how just so many of them have memories to me. Now I’m here being sad.

I have one last thing to say. I’m done with Sonic. I mean it this time. Unless it can truly be really good someday, I’m out with the exception of finishing Prime and watching that 3rd movie. I just can’t take this anymore. I’ll still replay older games I like and hey if they ever truly do it, I’ll be there. I remember reading Morio Kishimoto wanting one day for Sonic to have the same quality as Mario or something like that. I really hope you one day get that achievement. All I can do now is end it with a cringey reference, there goes the end of my hope for the blue blur.

“Farewell Sonic forever…”

you can buy sonic mania right now for $20

Fumito Ueda didn't die on the cross for you people to say that this game is a "series" of "good boss fights."

i hope eventually nintendo fans find out what good games are so they can start asking for those and not this

[Intro]
If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I'd take back those words that've hurt you and you'd stay

[Verse 1]
I don't know why I did the things I did
I don't know why I said the things I said
Pride's like a knife, it can cut deep inside
Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes

[Pre-Chorus]
I didn't really mean to hurt you
I didn't wanna see you go
I know I made you cry, but baby

[Chorus]
If I could turn back time, if I could find a way
I'd take back those words that've hurt you, you'd stay
If I could reach the stars, I'd give 'em all to you
Then you'd love me, love me, like you used to do
If I could turn back time

[Verse 2]
My world was shattered, I was torn apart
Like someone took a knife and drove it deep in my heart
When you walked out that door I swore that I didn't care
But I lost everything, darlin', then and there

Ever since Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 got the Taxman treatment in 2013, I've been aching for home console ports, just as was done with Sonic CD. For whatever reason, Sega opted to keep both titles strictly confined to mobile phones and Android devices. Nearly ten years later I'd all but written off the possibility of getting the original games in 16:9 on a home console or PC, and it would seem more resourceful fans felt the same way if projects like Sonic 2: Community Cut and Angel Island Revisited are any indication.

With the announcement of Sonic Origins it seemed Sega was finally prepared to fix all that, with a ground-up remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles to sweeten the package. But anyone with as much of an affinity for these titles as I have has probably lived long enough to build a well developed level of cynicism towards Sega, a company that is seemingly incapable of stepping out of its own way. Suffice it to say, Sonic Origins delivers on the bare minimum with so many compromises that you have to wonder if it's worth it at all.

The Taxman remasters are ostensibly here, reworked for this collection by the fine folks at Headcannon. For the most part Sonic 1, 2, and CD play fine and come out the least scathed, though there's some odd things about each. Sonic 1 and 2 feature the upgrades from the mobile game, like the inclusion of elemental shields, or the seventh emerald in Sonic 1, but these options are buried in each game's level select rather than baked into the main menu, which is a frustrating level of obfuscation. CD appears to be a straight port of the Taxman release rather than a rebuild as evidenced by the Taxman version's bespoke menus being present. A consequence of this is that switching between the American and Japanese soundtracks requires you to launch into the anniversary mode and toggle between regions in order for your choice to reflect in the Classic and Story Mode versions of the game. Also, you can't play as Knuckles in CD because he wasn't in the Taxman version, sorry!

The drop-dash has also been added to each game, but the implementation into 1, 2, and CD seems dodgy at best. There's a brief moment in the animation that gives the trick away: for a single frame the moment you touch the ground you can see Sonic curled up, mid-charge for a spindash. It's an interesting way to fake it, but it also causes the drop dash to feel distinctly off, and I found myself disregarding it outside of one specific use case in CD where you can simply drop dash back and forth to time travel more reliably.

The main attraction of course is Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which hasn't been rereleased for quite some time due to legal issues concerning Michael Jackson's contributions to the soundtrack. At this point you've probably heard the whole story and all its twists and turns, and I actually have to wonder if Sega would have remained blithely unaware of the problem if not for the story gaining more and more attention online. The solution was to remove these tracks and instead use those found in the beta version of Sonic 3, which themselves are used in the original 90's PC release of the game. Personally, I don't think these tracks ever fit in the first place. Their melodies sound inconsistent with the rest of the soundtrack's style, and outside of Carnival Night, they don't really match their levels either. Ice Cap is a poppy upbeat tune that betrays how isolated and cold the level is, which is something Brad Buxer's reuse of Hard Times captured perfectly. The audio quality is also piss poor, but really all of Sonic 3 sounds weirdly muffled here, with the exception of the new Super Sonic theme which pipes through crystal clear. This isn't too surprising as it's very obviously not using the Genesis sound font. I am perplexed by why it's even in the game, as the original Super Sonic theme is still present in this collection. Was it to alleviate how annoyingly short the original theme's loop was? If so, replacing it with something that sounds gratingly similar to the music from Sonic 4 doesn't seem like much of a solution at all. I am begging someone to keep Jun Senou away from synthesizers.

Music aside, Sonic 3 is buggy as hell. I had the game lock up multiple times on PS5, and Sonic has a nasty tendency to stop moving entirely when hanging from objects like vines or monkey bars. A couple times I had to restart the PS5 because the game became completely unresponsive. The rest of the games are much more stable by comparison, though Sonic 2 has an issue with Tails failing to rejoin the player after scrolling off-screen, resulting in constant jumping sounds, and an audio bug with the drop dash that causes a high pitched chirp out of the right channel that sounds like a smoke detector beeping.

There's some cosmetic changes to Sonic 3 as well, including an impressive amount of new sprites to fill in some of the gaps present in the original sprite sheet. Things like Sonic facing forward and looking up, and a few tweaks to cutscene animations. They look quite nice and only really stand out if you're intimately familiar with the original. More broadly, special stages are redone in each game, allowing for much smoother scrolling. This cuts down on the difficulty of collecting Chaos Emeralds tremendously and is a welcomed change.

There's a variety of other modes on offer, including a Classic mode that allows you to play each game in 4:3, mirror mode (which isn't a wholly original idea, but a fun novelty), and boss rush. Tying each of the games together is story mode, which allows you to play the Anniversary edition of each game in chronological order with newly animated cutscenes serving as connective tissue. These cutscenes are by the same people who did Sonic Mania Adventures, and they're really great. Humorous, but a bit more serious and true in tone to the games. And if you aren't completely burned out by this point, you can jump into the mission mode, which allows you to take on bite-sized challenges in remixed levels from each game. These aren't terribly difficult and I S-ranked most of them on my first attempt, so don't expect to get much more than an hour of out it.

Rounding out the collection is the museum, which features an audio library, illustration gallery, and movies which can be unlocked when certain conditions are met or via the use of coins earned from missions or Anniversary mode. Most of what there is to unlock you've probably seen by now, but there's a few gems in there. I wish they found more concept and game plan documents to throw in as opposed to style guides, but considering Sega has lost track of a lot of masters over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if their backlog of design docs is similarly limited. The audio gallery is a bit underwhelming, however. There's so many Sonic games with excellent soundtracks, but Origins restricts itself to only songs present or related to the games on offer, unless you pay more for DLC that adds Spinball, Knuckles Chaotix, and Sonic 3D Blast to the track list. You can also set up a playlist if you like, but you can't actually do anything with it.

The pricing and DLC plan for Origins is just as much a mess as the collection itself. The base game is 40$, which is asking a bit much already, with additional DLC setting you back 8$ total, unless you opt for the deluxe edition for 45$. Do not pay for the DLC, it does not add much to the overall package. The quantity of "extreme" difficulty missions is meager at best, the extra soundtracks can just be found on Youtube (and god knows you can do more with a youtube playlist than one that tethers you to your Playstation), and the extra character animations on the menu or borders for the 4:3 mode just aren't worth the price of admission. It is mildly infuriating that some of the menus are designed around Sonic Spinball and Sonic 3D Blast when neither game is included, too. I'm not expecting full remasters of these, the market just doesn't really exist for that, but would it have been so hard to toss in a few extra ROMs as unlockables?

To be fair, just because the presence of Sonic Spinball art and music tricked me into thinking it might be int he game doesn't mean I should've trusted that it would be. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... I'm gonna keep buying this garbage.

Being a Sonic fan is exhausting. A port of the 2013 and 2011 remasters along with a new port of Sonic 3 with widescreen support by Headcannon should have been a layup. But a lack of features, messy user interface, and glitchy compromised titles hold Origins back from being the definitive collection it could and should have been. No doubt this frustration is shared by Headcannon, as their founder Simon Thomley recently aired his grievances with Sega on Twitter. It's a shame Thomley has to jeopardize Headcannon's partnership with Sega, but his honestly and unwillingness for all the blame to be pinned on his staff is admirable. It should come as no surprise that Sega is still mired in self-sabotaging behavior, of course, and I can't imagine it being any different moving forward.

Sadly, the ROMs Sega was offering on digital storefronts for the original Sonic games were all delisted ahead of Origins release, and while this doesn't mean much from a preservation standpoint given how easily accessible they still are off certain sites, digital scarcity is never a good thing. Fans have long been using these ROMs coupled with fan projects to upscale these games legally, and those versions are still the best way to enjoy Sonic in 16:9. Your choices are to mod the games the way they ought to be or settle on a product that is buggy and compromised. When it comes down to it, that too is a celebration of what Sonic is: a series consistently outshined by the efforts of fans.

Correction (6/29): According to Digital Foundry, Sonic CD has some differences that make it clear that it is also a unique build for Origins, so I really have no idea why the 2011 menus are still present in it.

How do you tell a story about the dilemma of adoptive and biological family? Easy! Just let the player escape from all their problems, and give them a pat in the back. Because everyone will receive you with open arms after you betrayed their love. Everyone will accept your shitty decisions as if nothing had happened, and in fact the game will congratulate you for running away, because doing so is THE ZOMG TRUE GOLDEN ENDING!

But the world doesn't work that way. Your decisions have consequences. People get hurt. It's not the fault of some weird invisible dragon that conspires against your universe.

And the worst part, Intelligent Systems, is that you didn't do it because you believe in neutrality or equality. You did so because you wanted the player to bang everyone. You wanted the player to feel cool.

Intelligent Systems, do you remember when Marth had to put a face to his people to hide the pain he felt for the loss of his family? When Alm cried after he realized what he had done to his father? When Seliph and Leif went through a holy war to restore the tainted name of their families? Do you remember when there were heroes and being responsible to your family mattered?

People have complained about this game, about its garbage level design, about its story worthy of a fanfiction, but never at the contempt of its heart. And people have also defended this game, because "yooo, psycho, story doesn't matter in Fire Emblem". Okay, if you think that what you're watching on screen is acceptable and can be ignored, if you want to be complicit, you do you.