okay actually what the fuck? what the dog doin

This games fuckin weird bro. Pretty much every individual part of this game goes for a completely different tone, and it all comes together as the gaming equivalent of eating paste made out of bananas, peas, and sardines. The visuals are made up of reasonably solid looking (albiet framerate-chugging) levels populated by uncanny-looking people. The writing is immensely crass and immature, with a wise-cracking snarky dog interacting with a myriad of cheesy stereotypes with enough poop/fart/sex jokes added in to make any middling dreamworks movie blush. The soundtrack ranges from bumping techno jingles to ambient music that straight up astral projects me to another plane of existence. Our doggy protagonist moves and animates with a shockingly realistic attention to detail compared to other cartoony platformers. It really does feel like the games director, writers, animators, composers, and designers all misunderstood the assignment in their own unique way, making the game an absolute tonal rollercoaster. And that's not even considering the unfittingly eerie and morbid ending.

The thing is though, the actual core game is a pretty solid collectathon, and the more I played it and got used to the serial-killer vibes the game has, the more I honestly enjoyed it. It really did feel like there was a lot of genuine thought in analyzing what dogs do and how to convert them into palpable game mechanics. Like dogs usually just beg, retrieve stuff for people, piss and shit everywhere, dig around in the mud, bark at things, sniff around random places, and eat potentially questionable food from god knows where. All of those aspects of being a dog and more are covered in this game, and the main gameplay of doing dog things to accomplish tasks to earn bones to progress is just as fun as collecting progress mcguffins in any other collectathon.

The game is weird, but it's not half-assed shovelware. If anything, the bizarre vibes make this game certainly hard to ever forget, and I could definitely see this game leaving an impact on me in many different ways if I had played it growing up. It definitely has a cult following, and I can honestly see why. Give it a shot if you enjoy some absolute strange fuckshit. Sasuga europe

Highkey a banger video game. It's basically a game where you run around these circuit-like levels leaving behind dominoes to make them fall on specific designated trigger points, and when all the points have been activated, the levels are over. Linger in a level for too long, and Mr. Domino perishes. Each trigger spot has a designated space that knocks over any dominos that happen to be on it, so the sauce in the game comes from trying to manage the perfect run of setting everything up perfectly on one lap and watching the fireworks unfold on the second. There are also spaces on the levels that do things like change Mr. Domino's speed, replenishes some time, or hard resets the entire level. My only major gripe comes with how Mr. Domino controls; the levels are laid out on a grid and theres a sluggish heft in how he shifts between lanes and lays down dominoes, and if you don't grasp both the learning curve of how the game works and how to actually handle Mr. Domino, the game can certainly be frustrating. Once it all clicks though, this game rules and is incredibly satisfying to learn the levels and play through. I'd normally be upset about how this game has a limited continue feature, but since the game is for the most part entirely about memorizing the level layouts and there are only 6 levels it's not hard to get back to a previously game-overed level. If played well this game only takes like 30 minutes to clear.

Some might wager that this game has a misleading title, as in playing this you will find that through the myriad of obstacles that can and likely will slip you up, Mr. Domino is in fact actually one of the most stoppable characters in video game history. I wager that the title isn't necessarily a statement but rather an end goal; by learning and getting good at the game, with your efforts nobody will ever be able to stop Mr. Domino. If the ending is anything to go by, the only one that can truly stop Mr. Domino is himself. May he live on in our hearts forever as a true pioneer of dominokind. dominento mori

The developers of the Doko Demo Issho series finally realized what the world needed: Suika Game in 3D. And unlike a lot of other game series, the jump to 3D is extremely smooth here, as all the same core mechanics are the same. The original Suika Game was a fun addictive time waster, but add the existence of an entire third dimension and it becomes crack cocaine, with every "one more try" sinking me deeper into the depths of my fruity prison. Instead of the bucket-like play field of Suika Game, Fruit Mountain has you rotating around and aiming fruit onto a platter to join them together. It allows for some really cool setups to get fruit to combo into one another as well as the potential for sweet trickshots to get fruit right in that nook where you need them. There's also a combo system for linking fruits together in succession, so even score seeking players will find more depth here than in regular Suika Game. Theres also a cute anime girl painting in the background the entire time, a feature that should be in every video game and I want to know her name. I'm not an artist though, but i do wonder what she's actually painting since her subject is a constantly-transforming pile of fruit that keeps getting added onto. Not very still of a "still life", imo.

It's suika game but better and in 3D and there's a cute girl. I think the suika fad has already mostly died out, so I don't know if this'll make the same waves again, but if I need to kill hours with fruit, this is the absolute go-to.

I remember seeing this game way back in middle/early high school in all those sites and youtube videos showing "japans SECRET hidden gems that english speakers are TOO LAME to ever experience", and this game was one of the poster-games that kickstarted me actually getting off my ass to hit the books and learn Japanese. The game does have a fan translation, and ironically, that's actually what I ended up playing so the people watching me play could follow along in english.

Firstly, that fan translation. The website says that it's "95% complete" but imma be real with yall and say it's a good thing I actually knew how to read Japanese for when it shows up, because it really felt 75% complete at best. There were all too many times where the english text just gave up and just went back to JPN characters, and while I feel like enough is translated for someone with no japanese understanding whatsoever to fumble through the rough bits, it's certainly not ideal. The translation itself is also quite rough, there's a fair amount of typos and formatting errors. I can't really fault the game for these things, nor can I really dismiss the large amount of work that goes into fan translating a game in the first place, but it is worth pointing out for those that want to try this game out for themselves.

The premise of the game is absolutely me-bait. A game made by the chibi-robo developers that takes place on an island of misfit nintendo characters and you need to help them solve their problems and make their dreams come true as the titular captain rainbow.

The gameplay is quite unique, typical of skip games. There's like two gameplay modes; one where the game is a typical adventure game where you use your items and abilities to interact with and help the islanders with their various troubles. Eventually, once a problem is solved with an islander, a strong bond will be formed with them and they will give you these star collectables, which can also be found throughout the map. Collecting 20 stars will activate a starfall night, where a large star lands somewhere randomly on the island, and if you can find it, bring it to an islander that you have a strong bond with, and take them up to the heavenly star altar, you can ascend them to the stars, where whatever wish they have will come true. While ascending a character does remove them from the game permanently, the game is structured in a way where it both won't ever run out of collectable stars to activate the starfall nights with, nor will ascending a particular character get you stuck in a dead game. Ascend every character, and you get the good ending! Ironically outside of using the occasional ability and his quicker movement speed, there's not actually much use in playing as captain rainbow instead of his alter-ego, Nick, and the Rainbow transformation is on a timer that kills you if it runs out so I really spent most of the time in Captain Rainbow not actually being Captain Rainbow.

And as for the characters themselves, what a lively roster! There's Hikari from Shin Onigashima, Mappo from Giftpia, the soldiers from Famicom Wars, Takamaru from Nazo no Murasamejo, among other weirdoes and wackjobs from Nintendo's back catalogue. They all aren't the deepest of deep cuts, Birdo is a pretty popular Mario character and Little Mac has found new employment in Smash Bros, but most of the pulls are certifiably B-list. Despite the fact that every character has their own legacy's worth of history and background to pull from, surprisingly enough none of it really matters. You could pretty much replace the entire roster of wackjobs with generic equivalents and literally nothing would change whatsoever. You don't have to have played Golf on NES to know the old golfer mans unhygienic lifestyle, or read up on hours of Link's Awakening lore to understand what Crazy Tracy's deal is. It's incredibly beginner friendly for any newcomer to get into without needing to do piles of old Nintendo research, as the links between the characters and their mother IP is, quite literally, trivial. Did you know that Lip, the genki allergy-ridden magical girl in this game, is from Panel de Pon, the Japanese version of Tetris Attack? You don't need to. It doesn't matter.

Love-de-lic derivative games like this usually have some kind of greater message and theme in them, and I'm not entirely sure what this ones message is. The game is mostly about vibing on the island with a bunch of fellow misfits, all with unfulfilled dreams in their hearts and a whole lot of time on their hands. As the game goes on and more and more characters get ascended, things start getting really empty and lonely as there's just nobody around to give the island its energy. But the islanders have goals they want to accomplish, and while it's nice to appreciate the vibes of just being in that stagnant in-between part of life, by the end of the day it's better for everyone to go and make their dreams come true. And if you send someone out to make their dreams come true, they will inevitably come back. I think that's the kind of message the game is trying to convey.

The game certainly has a few qualms (why the hell is that stupid 50 hidden mimin easter egg hunt mandatory), but I did have quite a fun time playing through this game. It has that style of charm that skip/love-de-lic titles usually have, but without very many of the love-de-licisms that drive me crazy. It's just a very comfortable game to just be scooting around helpin people out on mimin island, and I'd definitely recommend giving it a try, jank enough as the English translation may be.

NES sequels are always hella interesting because you really never know what you are gonna get. Sometimes ya get a mario 2, sometimes ya get a zelda 2, sometimes ya get a mega man 2-6. The first Wai Wai world game was a fun adventurey romp gathering playable friends to explore levels and solve puzzles and whatnot, and this game throws pretty much all of that away to just be focused on linear action. You play as some robot named Rickle or something and rather than being able to switch between different konami characters, the characters work as limited power-ups where you transform into them for a brief period of time, with their health working as a timer. It's neat, but it loses the whole ragtag "getting the gang together" vibes that the first game had, and even then the roster here is nowhere near as insane as the first game. The levels are still fun homages to Konamis output at that time, with goemon, bio miracle bokutte upa, castlevania, contra, twinbee, getsu fuuma den, frogger, gradius, and more all getting some time in the spotlight. My only gripe is that there are a lot of mandatory auto-scrolling levels that just go way too slowly to be interesting, and it makes me not want to replay the game to try the other level paths or character selections, and the game for the most part is quite easy with the exception of the shmup sections which are your typical bouts of gradius-isms. Overall it's pretty bland but still a good time especially if you are a konami fan. The whole game is also playable in co-op, too!

I wish konami would make a waiwai world 3 with all their modern IP but that would require them to actually have to do something. Where's my fan-made doujin Wai Wai world game where all the konami characters have to break into the konami HQ and defeat the people preventing them from getting new games? ill direct it lemme at em

eh. Interesting concept with a scrolling multidirectional shooter, but as a consequence of being able to shoot in any direction it basically means ya get floded with enemies and projectiles from every which direction, and that can be really overwhelming. You do have a satellite that you can lock by shooting and it does function like a shield which can help in some situations, but I feel like the games pace is way faster than the positioning speed of the satellite so I couldn't really use it to the best effect. There's also a money system for upgrades too! It's very mechanically dense, but idk I couldn't really get into it ngl. The game has a strange "kill the gods" theme to it and the visuals can get quite grotesque at points which ain't really my thing. It's a game!

Definitely a personal favorite of mine out of Midways 80s arcade lineup. The game is just so goddamn hectic with having to juggle counting shots to send the right number of beers and catching empty glasses while scanning the screen to course out the next plan of attack, it hits that ADHD multitasking brain real good. It definitely seems like there's an amount of luck to the game, as it seems like its entirely RNG how far a customer slides back and how quickly they finish their drinks, and that can just sometimes put you in a bad state where there's just too much going on to feasibly handle. But hey! It certainly gets me wanting to keep trying again and again to see what happens every run. If this is what actual bartending is like though imma start praying for every barkeep on earth out there. And also the ones in space too, apparently, as this game proves that even aliens need their fill of Bud.

If I ever see this at an arcade you know that's an on-sight play. I think there used to be an arcade around me that had this game, but they died a few years back...

Definitely has a more interesting backstory than game itself tbh. So Sega made those Astro City-style arcade cabinets in Japan that are designed to be a one-size JAMMA machine to throw whatever PCB into to play games on. Thing is, there's a law in Japan which mandates that all arcade machines come with at least one game, so this game was made essentially to comply to that law and be the default game that comes with every interchangeable arcade machine made by Sega.

Because of that, this game was designed to be as cheap and disposable as humanly possible. You get NO sound hardware, NO colors, 256x192 resolution, it's literally just a head-on clone using the most primative graphics imaginable. I will say that compared to head-on, there's at least some sauce in movement as you essentially have free movement in any direction (except backwards) and the AI isn't as hell-bent on smashing into you to make juking enemies out more possible. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI programming follows a seemingly random path with as little lines of code as possible though. There are also no continues, or even credits to begin with which is honestly a bit surprising, if you were a cheapass arcade owner that couldnt afford any actual games for your cab you wouldnt even be able to make any change back on just dottori-kun.

It's certainly fascinating to see a game designed with the purpose of being replaced. Sega told their team "don't try too hard with this one" and they followed through. It's mid by design, but i guess in that case then mission accomplished? It also kinda makes this game extremely rare out in the wild, since the only way you'd be able to find this would be if an arcade operator fucked up and didn't actually put an actual game in their machine, or if its intentionally left inside a cabinet as either a historical curio or gag or something. I do appreciate how it is included in the astro city mini cabinets, giving people at home the wonderful experience of playing something that you'd really rather be best off playing anything else over.

It's a solid time, definitely is a more interesting use of physics than stuff like asteroids imo, especially since it gives you the direct info on how fast you are going in each axis so you know how to adjust and land safely. I don't know if the emulated versions I've played are just simplified in controls or if I'm just cracked at lunar lander, but I always felt like the game is either too easy to land on the high-scoring targets. The main objective is to score as much as possible, but since the game lets you add extra fuel at any time simply by throwing more quarters at the machine getting a high score is trivial. Truly the first pay-to-win video game. But I guess the real fun comes from the simple act of moving the lander and playing the game, so really who cares about score. If you find it at an arcade, I'd suggest throwing a quarter into the machine, it's def worth a few plays.

Sasuga Arzest. I definitely have to admit, this game reminded me a lot of their previous works, notably Balan Wonderworld and the Blinx series in just how stupefyingly confusing they are in design. Not due to the game having any obtuse mechanics or anything, but instead just from having design choices that leave me scratching my head wondering why the hell certain things even led up to how they are in the final game.

It really all just boils down to the level design, the pacing, and the boss fights. The levels have like 3 flavors; some feel like dimps-style 2D sonic levels with mostly an emphasis on pushing you forward through as many speed setpieces as possible, some feel like they are regular classic sonic levels yet designed with Sonic CD assets that are more served for exploration and backtracking (which this game doesn't particularly encourage, nor do they do it in a particularly smooth way like how Mania's CD levels handle things), and there are some levels where it genuinely felt like they had nothing so they just kinda whipped some stuff up and called it a day, truly nothingcore. I definitely felt like I was going through the motions playing through the levels, as they really just didn't feel like they had anything particularly distinct going on in them most of the time either in a level design or spectacle sense to make anything stand out. The levels lasting in the 8-10 minute range certainly doesn't help things either lmao.

The pacing is all sorts of messed up. Typically in 2D sonic games theres a nice rhythm to how acts work; there's usually like the first act to establish the level theme and any specific gimmicks, and then a second act that expands upon said theme and gimmicks. Throw in a boss at the end, and badda bing badda boom. In Superstars there's no set standard to ANYTHING. Some levels might be two acts of mostly the same thing, some levels have bonus optional acts that are character specific, and some levels just have one big act with a boss at the end, which just really feels underwhelming to go through. Why in the hell is there no consistency?? It makes the entire game just feel cobbled together, like they only had so much time to make so many levels so some zones just had to get their second acts cut. It just doesn't flow very well.

Lastly, the bosses. Definitely this games most controversial aspect, the bosses in this game are horrendously designed. Most of them have a very stop-and-go style of design to them where they are only vulnerable for one very specific window of their cycle, essentially having you wait through their whole attack patterns over and over again, dragging shit out to a ludicrous degree. Add the fact that some bosses are more than happy to use instant kill attacks like crushing attacks or bottomless pits, in which getting hit makes you have to do the whole contrived boss fight all over again from the very beginning. The Death Egg Robot was particularly egregious, that shit took me over an hour of attempts to beat just because that mfer won't die and getting back to the stupid platform-breaking death pit takes way longer than my patience can handle. Did I also mention that boss fight is also tied to a timer determined by how quickly you finished the death egg level, essentially making a last sonic level where going fast actively punishes you in the long run. In their infinite wisdom, Arzest decided to rectify this problem by just making the timer for the boss fight do nothing when it reaches zero, instead of, oh I don't fucking know, maybe LOWERING THE BOSS HEALTH TO MAKE THEIR ARBITRARILY LONG FIGHT A LITTLE LESS ARBITRARILY LONG???

I just don't get it man. I would love to go out to lunch with an Arzest designer because this company just continues to baffle me with how their games are made, and I'd love to talk with the people behind the scenes to try and understand at least somewhat where they are coming from. Their games always have decent artistic merit and are usually quite solidly coded and bug-free, just the actual games always manage to feel like complete nothingburgers to actually play, like they aren't designed by actual humans. Maybe their office is just full of alien creatures on a different wavelength, maybe they don't have proper ventilation, or maybe they are just a well meaning group of devs that have to work behind the scenes on whatever shoestring budget their publisher/rights holder chooses and never get to develop their ideas to a solid enough level. At least they get credited unlike shadow devs like Tose, for what it's worth. If anything, playing this has made me want to play more Arzest titles in the future, to see if maybe one day I can see through the mid and understand their sensibilities. Can't say I can particularly recommend you join me in that journey.

(I didn't even mention this games inconsistent OST, the fact that the xbox port in particular has a noticeable amount of input lag on it compared to the other versions, and the fact that the emerald powers were certainly cool in concept but were something I completely forgot to use entirely.)

Bro i do NOT remember this shit coming out the same year as the first game, i thought it was like at least the next year god DAMN.

Like the name implies, Wii We ski and snowboard is really more of an expansion of the first game instead of a true sequel. Not only is there the titular snowboarding that is included alongside the preexisting skiing, but the character creator has a bit more sauce to it, and they expanded the game to have TWO maps instead of the singular resort in We ski. There's both a brand new ski resort seperate from the first games resort, as well as a harsh mountain in the wilderness, untouched by the domestication of being ski-resortified. The new mountain map really felt like they took the bonus secret run from the first game and made a whole map out of it, which is hella cool. Since skiing both on real mountains and virtually was quite a family pasttime as a kid, this game and its predecessor def share a very "oh fuck yeah" place in my heart.

The ski resort map still plays namco game music through the in-game loudspeakers, they've made peak once again

Ah, another game from my childhood that i forgot ive done everything in! My family went on a lot of ski trips, and while I definitely liked the vibes of going down snowy mountain courses, I certainly wasn't a fan of the actual activity of skiing very much (especially when all my brother and dad wanted to do was go on the fucking-kill-you black diamond courses, those are NOT vibes)

Wii WE ski is a game that seeks to provide the vibe of going on a fun ski trip without any of the actual annoyances of actually skiing, and honestly, the vibe works. There's really no overarching objective outside of various little side missions and unlockables and whatnot, just explore the resort and go down the different ski runs. It's a good time for folks that have a lot of free time to just explore the resort freely and just vibe, and that's definitely the kind of game kid me was hella into. There are even fun little secrets, like the ultra-perilous secret course that can only be accessed by going off the beaten path into the unknown mountainy wilderness. (Which is a lot more fun than actual perilous ski runs since who cares it you die in the virtual world!) It's certainly a good time! Though I guess it's absolutely surpassed by its sequels at this point.

Oh and the ski resort plays music from various namco games like katamari and ridge racer diagetically through the resort speakers, real ski resorts take note

Gotta admit, there's certainly something humbling about being able to play and easily complete plenty of games on modern consoles with incredibly deep and complex systems and mechanics layered over painstakingly crafted visuals yet get absolutely smacked the fuck down from a 1976 arcade game made out of a bunch of squares and rectangles. This shit is merciless and demands an incredible amount of focus, precision, and pattern recognition if you want to even come close to clearing the board, even with precise analogue controls. You are only granted 3-5 misses to clear 112 blocks where hitting the back 3 rows automatically boosts the ball to fuck-you levels of speed, and somehow surviving long enough to hit the top of the screen shrinks your paddle to nearly the size of the ball. Good luck. It's still certainly addicting to get in a good block-breaking rhythm if you can take the heat, and its really not like theres any real reward or ending for clearing the screen (except for the next screen loading in, which if you manage to end the game on an upwards rebound essentially gives you a free second clear thanks to the ball getting trapped in the top). I def get why this became such a popular title, though i also think i understand why space invaders ended up usurping the block breaker genre (let me shoot these stupid blocks dammit)

(this is a long personal one, borderline life-storycore. sorry for those that dislike walls of text but sonic 06 does this to people. Sonic the hedgehog 2006? more like sonic the hedgehog 2006 word review)

I feel like if you are on the gaming pulse enough to be looking at a website like this, you likely already have at least HEARD of Sonic 06. Pretty much everything that could be said about this game on the internet already has been, it's really quite the overused topic both in the spheres of the sonic fandom and the sphere of bad game critics. Just in the sphere of youtube alone I've seen showcases of the many, MANY bugs and glitches the game contains, reviews of the game that dwell on it for uncharacteristically large amounts of time, personal retrospectives from fans recalling the impact the game has had on the brand as a whole, posthumous optimistic looks at the game dissecting vibes the game manages to retain in spite of its rushed nature, and the more recent phenomena, endearingly nostalgic takes towards the game from those that played it in their formative years. You could say that this game has had just as much of an impact on Sonic's brand as the previous game titled "Sonic The Hedgehog" (of which it has been a longer time between the present day and this games launch than the time between the two "Sonic the Hedgehog" games). It's certainly hard to say anything, let alone anything NOTEWORTHY about this game when everyone already knows what it is and why it is. All I can really contribute to the decades-rotten dead horse conversation is my own personal experiences with the game.

I'm a life-long sonic fan and despite being the correct age to have done so, I didn't grow up with this game. I definitely remember the launch hype cycle for this game, 6-year-old me frequenting the old Sonic Central website and looking at the promotional material for the game. I remember thinking that with the realistic environments and people that the sonic brand must have been taking a more adult turn after Shadow the Hedgehog, and since my family was still rocking the Gamecube as the sole household console, I was fine with sticking to the recently-released (yet equally mature in an incomprehensible sense) Sonic Riders and worrying about the fancy new Sonic game later when I was older. Given that I went on to own a Wii instead of any HD systems and wasn't a part of the greater internet at the time (as I should have been for that age), the release and subsequent car crash that was this games reception entirely eluded me. It wasn't until like, idk 2008/9ish? when I mentioned to a cousin that not much on the PS3 interested me besides "this game called sonic the hedgehog but not like the original one", and got laughed at for it that I realized that there might have been something up with this game, but I never thought much of it. I did always have a fascination with it in a curious way though, and whenever Silver was playable in any spinoff on the Wii, I always only played as him back then because he's from that mysterious sonic game I couldn't play! Imagine a Sonic Adventure 3 where you could play as him and all the other cool sonic characters...

Eventually I would get old enough to be given free roam on the internet and through that I would learn to discover this game and its actual reputation through youtube videos much like the ones I referred to earlier. Watching the game crumble under its own weight and seeing EVERYONE just absolutely tear it to pieces gave me a sense of relief that by owning a Wii I unintentionally dodged the bullet that was this game. (though instead I did have to suffer through Secret Rings, so who really won in the end?) I recall a family friend bought an Xbox 360 alongside this game and in the many times trying it at their house yeah it was just as janky and bad as the internet said it was. We would get stuck in that awesome beginners trap of getting owned by the mach speed section in Wave Ocean from hitting the scripted loop-de-loops at a bad angle and getting launched off of them to a game over, then having to restart from the absolute opening of the game. I saw firsthand that wow, this is certainly an unpolished, buggy, unfinished work that should be ridiculed. I couldn't believe this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3...

Eventually I got a PS3, and even more eventually I ended up buying a copy knowing full well what it was, and then I played it up to finishing Sonic and Silvers chapters before tapping out with Shadow. I felt like I had seen enough by that point, and outside of bringing it out for some ironic laughs in multiplayer with friends or playing it at my dentists office while high as fuck getting cavities filled in (don't ask, but yeah), this game remained on my shelf, uncompleted, for the better part of like a decade. The game sucked, after all. Seeing stuff like Project P-06 try and "fix" the game garnered no interest from me. Why would I want to even play a "fixed" version of this? My relationship with this game remained solely in the ironic "this is the bad sonic game haha" mindset and I couldn't believe that there were people that actually thought the game was good. They had to have just been gaslighted by nostalgia, right?

It was only a few weeks ago where the great almighty wheel of games decided it was time for me to stream a playthrough of this online. I figured that being a sonic fan that completing a playthrough of this was inevitable and that at least if I streamed it, it would be entertaining. Despite already owning the game on PS3 I instead bought the (bizarrely relisted for only 5 dollars) xbox 360 version as not only did it serve the ironic bit of buying Sonic 06 digitally in the modern day but also it gave me a clean save and was the most stable version of the game (as little as that actually means anything). As I played through the game, something very peculiar happened. Something that hadn't happened in all the years I've spent all this time rambling about.

I was actually having a lot of fun. And we aren't talking laugh-at-it isn't-this-game-so-bad-amirite-guys fun. Genuine, unadulterated, serious fun.

Maybe my tastes have changed a lot in all this time, maybe I'm going insane, but there was just this earnest sincerity that I felt when playing through this game, that emblematic sincerity that Sonic games have where they sometimes do some really REALLY absurd shit yet play it off with the straight confidence that I can't help but enjoy. Seeing all the sonic characters have their semi-winded anime-ass first-translation-draft dialogues with one another and how they handled this heavy-handed plot riddled with time travel and eldritch-horror summoning was the coolest thing ever. The game may be fucking, but I could still feel the games intent through it all. The game isn't even that fucking, honestly. Most glitches that I had heard the game get lambasted for online were things that I usually had to go out of my way to look for and execute, or things that I likely wouldn't have tried to do otherwise had I not already had the pretense knowledge of "check this out, I'm gonna kick in place on top of this box and you're gonna see some serious shit". The game is certainly unpolished and rushed, but if anything it's actually an absolute miracle that the game is as functional as it is to begin with! There's also tons of different characters to play as, which after having like 15 years of main series 3D games that only have you play as sonic and sometimes a variation of sonic, felt like an absolute breath of fresh air to control characters like Silver, Blaze, Omega, and Rouge again. I couldn't believe that this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3!

As I was enjoying my time with Sonic 06, it really had me thinking about it all. Was this game really as infamously horrendous as everyone has been saying, or had it perhaps been a victim of changing times? It was the first Sonic game designed for HD hardware, so maybe they thought it was a good idea to split the main team in half for Secret Rings as they assumed HD 7th gen gaming would only need as much dev resources as the last generation did, and gravely miscalculated how much more is needed from the jump to HD. 2006 was still the first year of these HD consoles, and a lot of the early titles for 360 and PS3 were also coming to grasps with those same problems regarding either total content or overall polish. Hell, that isn't even a generationally exclusive problem, look at how many games today launch in equal or even worse states as this one. Add that half-bakedness to both the facts that the mid 2000s was peak edgy gamer years culturally as gamers demanded the most photorealistic polished experiences out of their fancy new flat-screen displays, developer work be damned, AND that the modern social-media internet seeds had already been planting and sprouting giving viral videos much more weight, and maybe this game really actually was given a bad hand. There have certainly been a lot of people that wanted to see the Sonic brand crash and burn since its inception, and this game releasing in the state it did at the time it did gave those people the exact ammunition and platform they needed to do exactly that. Maybe the younger players that sing praises of this game aren't gaslit by their own nostalgia, but rather people like me have been gaslit by the myriads of negativity that has been surrounding this game since its inception, then only playing the game afterwards to affirm that already-implanted opinion. I honestly don't know, it's never usually as simple as that and it could go either way. It certainly did do a lot of damage, as after the negativity from this games release bled into other titles released in the same time frame, the brand took a more staunchly conservative approach by delisting "bad" games and scrubbing out any remnants of the 2000s era games from more contemporary works as they focused on more lighthearted and 90's oriented vibes before going full ironic meme mode in the mid 2010s, likely still due to the negativity towards the brand that remained from this game. (luckily that doesn't seem to be as much of the case anymore as both the sonic brand and community have been going back to the core of sincerity and have accepted themselves for what they are as a whole.)

I normally rate things off of some mixture of general recommendability as well as my own personal enjoyment, and while those two attributes usually go hand-in-hand, with this game they are at odds. While I may be crazy enough to have gotten a lot of enjoyment from playing this, I'm not crazy enough to recommend it over most other sonic games and you probably should be aware of what you are getting yourself into should you choose to play it on your own. I really have no idea how to end something like this tbh but I feel like I've said all that I can. There are probably many similar Sonic 06 takes and opinions in the vast endless sea of the internet, but this one is mine. There really is something about this game that makes people write a whole ass manifesto. Can't think of many other games that have that same effect, for better or for worse.