Some of our older readers may remember I used to write rants quite a lot for the site. I kinda stopped doing it because as I matured, I became less angry, and/or stopped caring. But recently something just annoyed me a to warrant a rant.

As the art style indicates, all the members of EN have an affinity for Sonic the Hedgehog. Big shock. The comic in fact got it’s start because we all met up on the Sonic HQ forums, before East got banned for not believing in God (not an exaggeration), I got banned for calling all the mods fuckers for banning him and Virus and Silv just kinda outgrew the place afterwards. But anyway, it’s fair enough to say that we all liked Sonic the Hedgehog.

Note the past tense It will be important later.

As any gaming fan knows, a while back SEGA announced “Project Needlemouse” a new High Definition 2D only Sonic game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 (possibly a download only title). Recently, gamers were presented with this image:

Basically, it was a “trivia contest” people were given five days to guess which characters would feature in the game. If you were able to rub two brain cells together the outcome was obvious:

For those not able to do the above, let me explain. One of the major complaints about pretty much every Sonic game since Adventure has focused less and less on the blue bastard and the game forcing you to play as Sonic retarded friends, like Cream the Rabbit, Big the Cat, Dickhead the Flamingo, and Arse Bandit the Snake.

Some of the above are fake but you get the point.

The “trivia contest” was SEGA taking the mickey out of itself for having those characters in there. It was then accompanied with some text, including the following quote found at this blog post:

“Today, we are about to break the trend that has continued on for many years. To the thousands of you out there asking for a game where Sonic is the only playable character – rejoice.”

Rejoice? That it took you TEN FUCKING YEARS TO FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGE THIS? WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HAPPY ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOU LET ONE OF THE FLAGSHIP CHARACTERS OF 90’S GAMING TOIL IN SHITE GAMES BECAUSE YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN MADE SONIC FUN!? Just fuck off.

I will admit, it took me about 9 of those ten years to realise this myself. I mean I bought Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog on 360, Sonic and The Secret Rings and MOTHER-FUCKING-SONIC UNLEASHED. And they were all shit. Hell the only half decent game you released in years was the 2D GBA games and Sonic Rush, but since they focused on speed more than anything they simply weren’t as good as the original games.

Don’t even get me started on Sonic Rush Adventure. You dicks.

I remember you announcing Sonic The Hedgehog 2006, that it was gonna bring sonic back to it’s roots. I was excited, Sonic in HD! I even got in trouble with Raye when I was playing the demo when I said I needed to sleep and went to bed early. But what the hell did you do? You made him have a bestial relationship with a human girl, had his colour swapped twin take up a third of the game (yes I appreciate the hypocrisy with Lothar, if I could redesign the fucker and get away with it I would all right?) and had the other third ruined with a slow, crappy, other recolour with some of the worst controls for psychic powers I’ve even seen in a game. Seriously, Midway managed to have better ESP powers in their game Psi-Ops and that was released two years before your disaster. When Midway can make a better quality game than you, that’s trouble. You also had side missions which could have ten fucking loading screens in them, all of which were over ten seconds long. I would show you the infamous youtube video but it seems SEGA had it taken down.

At the same time, you had Sonic and the Secret Rings, which was just horrible to control, had dull mission structures and a just plain odd story. Although I guess we can be thankful you didn’t have him bone the genie.

Then you had Sonic Unleashed, which had the 2D sections we apparently loved, which were just incredibly long quick-time event roller coasters, and Sonic turning into a “Were-hog.” Which had even WORSE controls than Sonic 2006 and just plain stupid everything else. Sonic and the Black Knight was apparently somehow worse than Secret Rings but I never bought it, by that point I had given up. That said I still own a copy of Sonic Mega Collection on GC that I play on my Wii, and god knows how many times I bought Sonic 2 on various other collections and downloadable versions over the years but again that’s down to me being a fucking retard about this horrible series.

What gets me is that the company just seems to have forgotten how to make a fun Sonic game and turned to cranking out a yearly game no matter how bad it is, because the series is targeted at kids, and kids will buy anything. I can at least understand why they do that, after all the games sold well enough, because stereotypically speaking, most young kids we’re talking ten and under) aren’t very good at noticing shit games. What I just can’t understand why SEGA is confused as to why their games review horribly. They always act like the reviews just don;t get the games and they’re being overly critical. No it’s just that you made shite games.

You know what made Sonic 1 – Sonic 3 & Knuckles so good SEGA? It wasn’t the speed, as you seem to think in the 2D sections of Unleashed, and Sonic Rush to an extent. It was a myriad of things.The level design was good and interesting, allowing you to yes run like a numbnut if you wanted, or explore a little if you wanted as well. It was the great boss fights, the epic end levels, the enemy design, the mother-fucking music, it was all of these. It was the fact that you focused on the gameplay instead of trying to shoe horn the fucking giant blue hedgehog into an epic soap opera plot.

You want plot in a Sonic game? Here it is. Sonic is a good guy, Robotnik is a bad guy. Sonic wants to stop Robotise END OF STORY. You know why Mario very rarely trapes away from the Bowser kidnapping Peach angle? Because nobody gives a fuck about anything else. The only reason they have Bowser keep doing that is because it gives the bare minimum motivation needed to play the game, and then Nintendo spend the rest of their budget actually making the games fun! Did any of you idiots at Sonic Team play Mario Galaxy? It’s superb! And I never liked Mario games as a kid! I hated Nintendo back when I was a dickhead 90’s console fanboy.

And the whole multiple character thing that started this rant? Personally, again I think SEGA forgot why they added Knuckles and Tails in to the games, because in Sonic 3 onwards, they played differently enough to Sonic to justify it. Tails could fly and swim giving him access to hard to reach areas, and Knuckles could climb and run through certain walls, again giving him access to places Sonic couldn’t go. Sonic was left alone to focus on being the fastest and using his speed get to places more creatively. What happened after that was a complete joke. They kept adding characters who were just variations on the original trio. Hell that’s Sonic Heroes entire premise.

I just don’t get the big fuss about it being in 2D either, as from my angle, modern SEGA can’t do Sonic in 2D or 3D. In 2D they make it about the speed and nothing else, in 3D they let some monkey with one hand design the camera. The latter is especially disparaging considering that, despite all their other faults, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2’s Sonic/Shadow stages were actually damn good fun…and then they suddenly completely fucked them up after that,

I dunno, It just boggles the mind how the company can just forget what made it’s own series so great in the first place, and expect the more hardcore gamers to suddenly rejoice at the fact that somebody made a funny. Fuck off SEGA, until the reviews start coming in I’m just gonna think the following about Project Needlemouse. Not that it’ll make any difference to what happens with the game or that anybody out there on the interwebs gives three shits:

Sonic Team have fucked up for ten years straight, why should we think any different? For fuck’s sake he’s in a kart racer. AGAIN.

This is what SEGA did to me, this is the character I loved:

Then I turned to games with these sort of characters:

So basically what I’m saying is that the lack of quality in the Sonic games turned me from a furry into a homosexual.