Sonic Adventure

 

Nostalgia can be a strange thing.  I remember owning Sonic Adventure for my Dreamcast back in my younger days and I remember it being quite good.  At least I remember the Sonic sections being quite good and then the rest of a game was sort of a blur.  After finishing it on stream recently I can safely say that while I did have a bit of fun with the Sonic sections it was considerably more jank than I ever remember it being.

In my head Sonic didn't really get completely screwed until Sonic 06 and before that, Adventure and Adventure 2 while not the best games in the world were still solid attempts at making a 3D sonic game.  But I can safely say now that Sonic Adventure is just as broken and also suffers from being really really fucking boring.

When the game starts out and you only have Sonic to play with things are sort of OK.  You run very fast down a path, dash at enemies and then watch a badly voice acted cutscene and everything is great.  But once you finish his stages, in order to see the real ending of the game, you have to play as all of Sonic's stupid fucking friends.  Tails is sort of the same as Sonic, Knuckles is stupid McGuffin hunting, Amy is boring, Gamma has a cool idea that is over the moment it starts to get going and Big the Cat's campaign houses the worst gameplay segment of any game on the system and I say that as someone who loves Sega Bass Fishing.

What really surprised me though is all the weird buggy type things.  Often at points in the game the characters would get stuck on...the floor? I'm not entirely sure what was going on but often I'd being trying to navigate the hub world into the next stage and my character would just start flailing around, unable to move as the game struggled to work out how floors work.  The other big thing that I could have sworn wasn't a problem back in my teen years was loops.  Whenever a character had to go through a loop they would get half way and the forget how their legs worked and they would just stop dead.  This would cause them to fall off and usually result in a death.  Thankfully the game is piss easy and showers you with 1 ups but its still horribly annoying to have to play the same segment 4 or 5 times while the game works out how to get the character around a 360 degree piece of terrain.

So while we all like to rag (rightly so) on Sonic 06 for being a glitchy mess, let's not forget that Sega were practicing those techniques here first, because I sure as hell did.