We are decades away from the competition of Nintendo and Sega. Today, there is no news of Sega consoles anymore, and this gaming company has obviously turned to software production only. It can be said that Sonic and Mario went hand in hand at the beginning of their work and each had characteristics that the other did not offer, but for years, the name Sonic no longer has its old meaning. In the meantime, one or two different Sonic games have been released, which are head and neck above the rest of the games in the collection. “Sonic Colors” is one of them.
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Making a platform game is not an easy task. The focus of these games is not defining the story and showing attractive cutscenes and presenting stunning graphics. All these instead, the priority of a platformer is always to provide accurate and fun mechanics and systems; So that everything revolves around game design. As long as the games were completely 2D, Sonic had no problem providing perfect and fun gameplay. Sonic shined on the Sega, we mean the Sega Genesis console. Mario’s evolution from issue to issue was admirable, but the feeling that Sonic gave the audience with his fast-paced gameplay was nowhere to be found in Mario.
We can safely say that video games entered the 3D era with Super Mario 64. It was from that point that Sonic that none, but many other games were no longer able to compete with Mario in providing 3D gameplay. Sonic 3D has rarely turned out well.
Exactly at the same time as the release of Mario 64, Sega for a few years puts a restriction on the release of a new issue of Sonic; as if they knew they could not compete with this game. The next Sonic will be released years later and on the Dreamcast console, bringing the Sonic series into the 3D world for the first time. Sega makes up for Sonic’s absence of four or five years with “Sonic Adventures”; A 3D platformer game that brings the Sonic series into the 3D world. Sonic Adventures 1 and 2 both offered an acceptable Sonic experience despite having several problems. The games were by no means on the level of Mario, but they were really well designed and fun.
These two games marked both the beginning and the end of the 3D Sonic games, as the 3D and large Sonic games after that were worse than the other. “Sonic Heroes”, “Sonic the Hedgehog”, “Sonic Unleashed”, “Sonic and the Black Knight” and most importantly, “Shadow the Hedgehog” each tried as much as possible to remove the old name of Sonic from the game industry and this Turn the series into one of the worst platformers in history. In the meantime, some good 2D games from Sonic were released, but no one took delivery of them. After all, Mario had been rocking with amazing numbers like Galaxy, and Sonic, as the series’ old rival, not only had nothing to say, but even better, took back the few words he did say. Let us tell you that in order to maintain appearances, Sega stopped selling all these games that we mentioned a little bit above. These sonics were so bad.
Despite all this, Sega continued its efforts. They stopped offering new and strange ideas and finally looked back at the same Sonic Adventures and classic Sonics. The end result was a very good 3D Sonic game called Sonic Colors, which was released exclusively on the Nintendo Wii console.
How did Sonic make 3D?
When it comes to Sonic, the first thing that comes to mind is his speed. However, if we go back a bit and look at the same old Sonic 1 and 2, we realize that Sonic is not fast at all. Good Sonic games don’t focus entirely on speed. If you have to run for six hours straight at the speed of a jet, the game will quickly become boring.
Maintaining a significant amount of variety and making a good platformer should always be a priority. The design of the excellent control system, which recent sonics such as “Sonic Force” and “Sonic Boom” did not have at all, the design of excellent and diverse stages and the presentation of an integration of the old Sonic and the new Sonic, we repeat again, as a good platformer, It was an issue that only one or two sonic 3D numbers are correct and present.
Numbers play a very big role in designing a good platformer; That our character jumps a few frames after receiving the jump command, takes a few seconds to get up to speed, and stops in a few frames after letting go of the analog. It is the setting of these characteristics that makes a platformer. When you play Mario, you enjoy every jump. But at the same time, it is not easy to perform complex movements, and when you perform a difficult movement, you are satisfied with yourself. You have learned all the control system by yourself and its implementation was your own work from zero to hundred. You want the character to jump to that point in your mind, you quickly give the commands and get the result. 3D Sonics have never followed this trend in the design of their control systems.
If we see the old Sonics, we understand the philosophy of speed in Sonic well. Speed is offered as a reward to the player. In fact, we speed up and feel good when we play Sonic well and correctly. Our reward as a good gamer and as someone who has learned and mastered the game is a few seconds of very high speed. All the time we try to play well so that we can repeat and experience that fast thing again.
3D sonics usually forget this point in their construction. However, Sonic Adventures 1 and 2 found a fairly good balance between pure platforming and offering high-speed titles.
Finally, the Sonic Development Team, officially known as “Sonic Team”, provided the best possible Sonic experience in “Sonic Generations”. There is no doubt that Sonic is the best 3D Sonic game in generations. However, it is precisely “Sonic Colors” (Sonic Colors) that is the basis of the game’s design. The ideas that Sonic Colors raises and builds are finally paid off and implemented in a better way in the next game.
But what makes Sonic Colors a good 3D Sonic game?
different colors of sonic; Designing a good and fast 3D platformer
For this reason, I went to Sonic Colors to see what it has to offer as one of the most famous and popular Sonic games. For the past few years, thanks to the various versions and numbers of Mario released on the Switch, I have experienced 3D Marios and seen the genius of their game design. Sonic was once Mario’s rival, and although no one puts these two characters together anymore, just as there is no longer a rivalry between Sega and Nintendo, Sonic fans are still not lacking. Sonic Colors is far from a perfect platformer, but it’s a good game.
I said a little above that a good platformer must first of all have a detailed design. This design should be applied both in the process of the steps and in the controls. Sonic Colors does not have this good trend. The game is a number of different stages that have many ups and downs in terms of design quality. Some stages are very well designed and you want to play them one after the other and collect all the items in it, and on the other hand, there are stages that crush your nerves. I can say that about half of the stages are well and carefully designed, and the other half of them exist only to spoil the game.
Sonic Colors has two or three main mechanics that have been in all Sonics; Mechanics such as jumping, speeding up, locking on the enemy and attacking them and things that have been in the collection since the original Sonic 1. All these are used in different stages of the game, same as before. In addition to these, Sonic Colors adds another feature to the game. Sonic can transform into another creature for a short period of time by finding items throughout the game.
The game never really teaches you how to use these features, or even other parts of the game. Of course, you’ll learn how to use features and other game mechanics by scrambling once or twice, but that’s not the right way to design a platformer. A good platformer, every time it adds a new mechanic to the game, first asks the gamer to implement it in the simplest way possible. A step or two later, he gives the gamer a more complex type of mechanic, and then he integrates his new mechanic with the other parts and mechanics of the game that he taught earlier. Now another layer has been added to the game and the game has become more complicated and more interesting than before. Now we can create more and more interesting puzzles and challenges with the help of the many mechanics we have and put them in front of the gamer. Sonic Colors has no such process in designing its stages.
Of course, what we described is the best type of game design. We rarely see anything like this outside of Nintendo games. Sonic Colors is also very far from this type of design, that’s why we will examine it in a few lower levels. As a result, we see that the game is not so bad and sometimes it is very good.
The stages of Sonic Colors are divided into several different worlds. Each game world has seven or eight stages and a final giant. Each step takes between 2 and 5 minutes to complete; Of course, in their most optimal form. You can clearly see that each world has two or three good stages and they added the rest to make the game a little longer. Those two or three good stages that can be found in every game world have a very good design and process. While playing these stages, you can see that a lot of effort has been put into their design and they have been checked and tested many times. These nice stages not only have different ways to finish, but also reward exploration. The good stages of the game have a very good balance in providing speed and accurate platforming. At such stages, after doing a good platforming part, you enter the runner part of the game where the game picks up speed.
Accurate platforming, that too in a way that takes a long time and reduces the speed of the game, has no place in this Sonic game.
On the other hand, we have the nerve-wracking stages of the game; As if Sonic Colors doesn’t have an intermediate stage. In many stages of the game, its phase is not clear. One second you’re running fast, in a way that one wrong key can ruin everything, and the next, you’re stuck in a very difficult platform game. Sometimes the game itself does not know exactly what it wants to offer. If you’ve decided from the start to make a fast-paced platformer, then what do those floating platforms that you have to stand on for thirty seconds to get to another point do in the game? That too at the very end of a very fast section. The interesting point is that the game is full of floating platforms that you ride and stand on for a few tens of seconds, and if you don’t jump from them to the next platform in a certain place, you have to wait again until the next platform goes around and reaches you.
We said that a good Sonic game, first of all, should be a good platformer and speed should be offered as a reward for the player’s skill. Sonic Colors has decided to make speed its priority. The good stages of Sonic Colors work like a rhythmic and keying game. You keep track of everything and try your best to hit the keys in the given time and finish the stage as fast as possible. The ultimate goal of Sonic Colors, with its few and short stages, is to repeat the stages exactly and get the best ranking and score for each stage.
Sometimes in the middle of Sonic’s runs and very fast paced gameplay, the game will stop and ask you to go through such obstacles.
However, these are good stages of the game. Steps to Know Sonic Colors is a fast paced rhythmic game. The not-so-good stages of the game, right in the middle of a fast-paced section that requires precise keystrokes, place a platforming section that does not require action skills, where the player must seek to discover ways to bypass obstacles. This is where the rhythm of the stage is destroyed and the game becomes nerve-wracking.
The overall experience of Sonic Colors is like this: you’ve had two or three great stages in the game and you’re thinking it’s a great game, when suddenly you’re faced with some really bad stages. You’ll hit a few good stages again and think the game has made up for it’s problems and you’ve had a good experience, only to be faced with yet another bad stage. The game follows this cycle until the end.
Sonic with a fresh color; Remake of Sonic Colors
The release of the original version of Sonic Colors dates back to more than ten years ago. Obviously, I had not experienced the game on the Nintendo Way, and probably even those who have played the original version, do not remember anything about the exact image quality. The new version of Sonic Colors, namely Sonic Colors Ultimate, is a fairly large remake of the original game; So, if we take a look at the original version on the Nintendo Wii, we can see that the game has been completely improved in terms of graphics.
From the quality of the textures and models and objects in the environment to the overall lighting of the game, all the graphical elements of Sonic Colors Ultimate show a huge improvement compared to the original game. Not everything is made from scratch for this remastered version, but all parts of the game have been worked on to provide more quality. It was really surprising to see the original version of Sonic Colors on the Nintendo Wii, because its console is as powerful as a PlayStation 2 or even weaker, and that Sonic Colors was released with that level of graphics on this weak console, and even today its remastered version. It is really beautiful, it tells about the very good foundation of this game.
The game soundtracks are all amazing and have been re-recorded from scratch and in higher quality for this version. Obviously, this stage has very memorable music.
What makes Sonic Colors Ultimate fun is the cutscenes of the game. The same original interfaces of the unchanged version are placed on this remastered version. The cutscenes are actually video files that were recorded with the quality of the Nintendo version, and the current game itself, Sonic Colors Ultimate, has much better graphics than these cutscenes.
Talking about the cutscenes of the game, it is not bad to add that Sonic Colors also has a story and tells this story with the help of cutscenes and very bad dialogues. It goes without saying that the story and writing is really bad like other Sonic episodes and we don’t know why they still write stories for Sonic. Does Mario have a story and cutscenes that Sonic needs something like that? The cutscenes of the game are sometimes long and several minutes and do not add anything to the game world or to the characters. “Dr. Eggman” is the villain of the story as always, and Sonic is always a few steps ahead of him, preventing him from carrying out his evil plans.
Well-designed levels are enjoyable in every way and you want to finish them over and over again. But it is rare to find a very good stage in the game.
The only part of Sonic Colors that is consistently great and doesn’t drop for a second is the music. The music of all stages of the game is amazing; So many times at the beginning of the stages, I put down the handle to just listen to the music for a minute. The original game music is remixed in Sonic Colors Ultimate and while I don’t know how different it is from the original, I can easily say that the music quality is very good and you can easily tell that all the pieces have been re-recorded in a higher quality.
The remastered version of Sonic Colors also includes a number of new stages and new items. A completely new item has been added to the game that you can collect to personalize Sonic; By spending these items, you can buy gloves, shoes and various effects for Sonic. Overall, Sonic Colors Ultimate works very well as a remake.
Sonic ups and downs in platform game
Aside from the original Sonic games, that is, the Sega Genesis games and other 2D games of the series that are designed exactly like them, Sonic Colors and its next game, Sonic Generations, are usually mentioned as the best Sonic numbers. If these games are Sonic’s best, we can clearly see why the character and brand of Sonic has gradually faded and been destroyed over the past two decades.
With all that said, even considering that Sonic Colors isn’t a good platformer, even though it tries to present itself as a platformer, we can’t call Sonic Colors a bad experience altogether. Reviewing Sonic Colors as a rhythmic and keyboarding game has a much better result for this game. Some of the stages are very well designed and have a great flow. The game is designed with this exact goal to repeat the stages one after the other and memorize each part of each stage to get the highest possible rank. Although there is no reward for getting high ranks, but when you finish a stage well and the game recognizes your effort, you get a good feeling. Of course, as we said, half of the stages of the game are not well designed. You only need to complete the bad steps once to know that you are not going to do them again.
Sonic Colors and especially this new version of the game, Sonic Colors Ultimate, is a great experience for a Sonic fan, but for someone who has experienced two or three good platformers, the game has nothing to offer. A look at recent Sonic issues also shows that Sega still doesn’t know exactly what it wants to do with Sonic, so playing this Sonic Colors Ultimate is the best way for fans of this character to experience a new Sonic.
Game Name: Sonic Colors Ultimate
Producer: Sega
Developer: Sega, Blind Squirrel Games
Genre:
Platformer Platform: PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch