before anyone says anything i know this would be better suited to south isle or something but i don't want this thread to be srs bznz or anything, i'm just using it to vent in what's probably the most appropriate place for me to do so, seeing as creoland is pretty dead and the guys in irc are probably sick of my inane ranting by now

so anyway with all the internet love sonic colours has been getting i've gone and ordered it, but it'll be about a fortnight before i get the chance to play it owing to not having my wii at uni with me. i've been playing a soundtrack rip pretty endlessly all weekend and to be honest if it is all that people make out i'm quite excited for it. so excited, in fact, i decided to finally get round to playing Sonic Unleashed which I got over summer for like £2.50. at the time, i only played up to the...third? level, savannah citadel night, since i got a bit bored of spending more time running around hub worlds (which have been lame since sa1) or playing through the oh-so-dreary werehog levels, and then i went and died and got warped back to a really slow blocks puzzle again and i just generally got sick of it.

but anyway, i decided to give it a chance and be open minded about it. i knew that a lot of people thought that the daytime stages where the right sort of way to go for the series, and i thought that the werehog couldn't be that bad, could it? i mean, they wouldn't be so stubborn to keep something in that the fans decried as evidence for the sonic cycle recurring once again the moment it became public if it sucked, would they?

oh boy.

well, i guess we can start with the good; the opening cutscene rocks. seriously, sega would not go wrong making a standalone short film of CG sonic. that said, the in-game graphics are pretty...average. for what it's worth i was playing the 360 version, and while they weren't outright bad, they certainly weren't pushing the limits. i guess the draw distance made up for it, but when you look at stuff like what Rare's pumped out, there's a lot more can be done with bright and colourful graphics styles on this console - i tend to go to banjo nuts and bolts as an example of this. it wasn't a great game but i'll be damned if it wasn't pretty.

anyway i'm digressing. chip was nowhere near as annoying as i had expected him to be, and i think this is the first game in a long long while that didn't try to shoehorn in as many characters as they could. at one point i was a bit disappointed that knuckles had been left out, seeing as he was part of the classic trio, but then i figured, it's not taking place on angel island and they're not recycling the broken ME or gullible plots for the umpteenth time, so i decided i didn't mind so much. that said Tails got pretty damn sidelined for chip and professor pickle. and pickle was a complete waste of space.

anyway, gameplay. i'm not strictly sure why people liked the daytime stages so much. i never played 06, so maybe they were an improvement on that, but...i dunno, quite often it felt like they simultaneously wanted you to go as fast as possible while being omniscient to whatever is up ahead, since you never get much warning. the level design was ok in the majority case i guess, but it was often frustrating where it didn't need to be. on top of that, the controls for these stages were really off - i felt more like i was sort of suggesting where sonic should go, rather than actually controlling him. getting him to turn round corners was a pain in the arse and getting him to stop took ages. the corner drift move thing always seemed to send me in wider arcs than if i had done it on foot, too, which just seemed bizarre to me. there was also the continued issue of mapping too much stuff to one button again. why was homing attack pushed onto x, which is also used for boost, and when there's a powerup that lets you boost in the air? so many times i tried to homing attack something and ended up boosting off the edge instead. what was wrong with double a? the double jump is only available for werehog and the only other time it could be a problem is wall jumping, but you can just have a homing attack into a wall get you into the starting state. it'd be better than the stupid runup you need to have currently.

for the werehog levels, they were just boring and tiring. spending 20+ minutes at a time just going through slow, mundane platforming sections and mashing y at every enemy you encounter (seriously, is there any reason to bother varying attacks?) does not make a fun game. worst of all, even though there are fewer werehog levels than daytime levels, they're all so long that you spend most of your time playing them anyway. i thought i bought a sonic game, not a crappy god of war ripoff.

the level up system was also kind of lame. for the werehog, there's not really any point levelling anything other than strength and health. as for sonic, the ring power isn't that necessary, as anywhere you can get a good long boost streak going is because there's a lot of rings hanging about anyway, while when i first started upgrading the speed stat, i was wondering, won't this just make things even harder to control? turns out it didn't, solely because i didn't even notice it making a difference anyway.

the bosses were uniformly cheap, to be honest. the dark gaia phoenix boss stood out simply because of how long it takes to beat. seriously, i have to wait about 2-3 minutes for you to finish your attack sequence before i can attack you? and it's not changed since the last two or three times you did it? if we're just going to repeat the same crap again, can't we just say i won and call it a day? the running bosses were cool in theory, but the unresponsive controls just made it incredibly frustrating to dodge their attacks, really.

the main thing i wanted to talk about was the endgame. first of all i had to spend ages running around like an idiot looking for sun medals since for some reason you need like 120 to get into the last mandatory level - keeping in mind the last checkpoint was like, what, 60? pretty damn steep. then when i finally got that done and the boss beat i head off for eggmanland. i won't talk about the skychase ripoff, it was kind of decent for what it did i guess. i know eggmanland has been a recurring thing in sonic games recently, but i was a bit disappointed that the eggman themepark thing that's colours' entire plot pretty much existed in unleashed already. anyway, the eggmanland level is crap. took 50 minutes to get through, and was chock full of cheap deaths. so frustrating. after that i had to fight eggman's robot, which was actually easier than a lot of the bosses in the game because of how few gimmicks it employs, and then fighting dark gaia...oh god. first of all, why did all the cutscenes in this section - and there are at least a dozen - have to be seperated by loading screens? for most of the game loading seemed to be not so problematic, so i thought it had been resolved since sonic 06, but while i know this is a lot better than it was back then, it was still jarring to have things interrupted all the time. on a similar note, all the temples combining into like a light gaia mecha or whatever was kind of nifty for the first few seconds of seeing it, after which it just looks incredibly derpish. then you actually have to control it, and it's just sluggish as hell. trying to dodge the attacks coming at you from dark gaia was just luck because of how slow it was to do anything, and then the sonic sections inbetween (more loading screens!) were once again full of cheap deaths and generally unfun to play.

then we get to the (inevitable) super sonic stage...which i have to wonder why he didn;t do it sooner, really. the only thing stopping him for the rest of the game was the fact that the emeralds needed restoring, so why wait until dark gaia has had a chance to become 'perfect' (they seem to like that word almost as much as 'ultimate') before utilizing them? fridge logic ahoy. then we get another boring boss fight which completely ignores the mechanics of super sonic in every other sonic game ever, by allowing you to take damage, rather than just getting stunned and losing rings over time. this section is pretty boring too, and you have an artificial time limit in the actions of chip while you're doing this, which i'm pretty certain are random as you play, meaning that you could be doing a good run but because chip is getting his ass handed to him you're under much more pressure than is necessary. the game then ends on a QTE, of which there had been far too many for the rest of the game. i mean, press x 60 times to win? seriously? who designed this crap?

then in the closing cutscenes (after chip throws sonic through several miles of solid rock and gets buried under the planet surface), sonic finds chip's...necklace...thing and wears it as a bracelet. which is conveniently missing in colours as far as i can see. so...a pretty wasted sentiment, then. either that or they've retconned unleashed out, which if that's the case they should have done so like with 06 and have it handle the retcon before the game is even over.

so, yeah, unleashed really got on my nerves by the end of it. the music, which is often a staple of the franchise, was pretty stale apart from a few minor tracks, and the absolutely boring level design was offputting, including the segments that were needlessly cheap - particularly acknowledged by the designers throwing a one-up immediately before it, which now respawn upon death. yeah, that'll fix the problem of crappy, annoying level design!

i dunno, just felt like ranting i guess. hopefully i'll like colours more when i try it in a fortnight. feel free to let this fall off the page or whatever.