Friday 29 June 2007

who saw this one coming?

Apparently Bioware, company involved in things I've both enjoyed and whined about, are now making a new RPG.

A new RPG about Sonic the Hedgehog.

For the Nintendo DS.

This is bizarre on so many levels. First, while I know that Sega has crashed and burned in that regard, I am old-school enough to feel weird about Sonic whizzing around on a Nintendo system. Sonic belongs on my Genesis. For one thing, he sucked pretty much everywhere else. Sonic cartoon? I can't take this seriously. Pointless 3d Sonic games because 3d is the hip thing nowadays? Tanked. Sonic is not about 3d. Sonic is about running REALLY REALLY FAST on a 2d platformer and whirring around loops and flying through the air not being entirely sure where you're going and getting there anyway. Because it's not that hard to charge blindly forward, in 2d. You're starting on the Left Side Of The Level. You want to get to the Right Side Of The Level. Those sides don't generally move around. In a complicated level you'll have to go left in order to go right, sometimes, but you know where you're headed in the end. You can't get lost. So you can GO GO GO! SUPER SONIC SPEED! And that just doesn't work in 3d.

So now we're going to have an RPG? Which may involve trying to take the plot involving a wisecracking hedgehog seriously (a tough call - although I suppose they could be trying to build a My First RPG for kidlets who think the cartoon is cool) and going really really slow, because whoever heard of a blazingly fast RPG?

This does not bode well.

On the other hand, if they did manage some divine synergy of game design and created an RPG in which you ricocheted through levelups so fast you could barely tell what skills you were gaining and yet came out triumphant in the end... that could be fun, I suppose.

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