After watching that video with the Iizuka interview, I became kinda worried to be honest.
It's not that I doubt the game will be good or even great, I just wish they went a lot of steps further for sonic's 20th aniversary.
Sonic generations seems to becoming 2 gameplays catering to both fans. Iizuka is saying in the interview that in his opinion, there are old fans that only like 2d gameplay and the fans that like 3d gameplay. Reading these words allready made me feel like hitting my head onto a wall. He's missing the point once again. As if were dealing with someone from the countryside with no logicial sense whatsoever. The game seems to be based around this idea so I assume this was one of the great masterminds idea himself. He has said it before so I am almost sure about it. I'll get back on this in a minute.
The m.sonic gameplay looks bad imo. I really dislike how they totally forgot about sonic colors and went with unleashed, which scored bad on even the daytime fronts. This is so mindboggling to me, as if they were not aware of the succes of colors. How the hell...? The majority loved colors, almost everyone did fgs. I guess maybe the "storybook team" are seperate from the unleashed team. Making the unleashed style engine bearable by adding platforming and good level design still didn't make it "excellent". 3d Gameplay was mostly automated. Some people complained that unleashed engine doesn't work for good platforming. I mean I personally loved the game but I gotta be honest that they were right to an extent. The physics engine of unleashed, while adjusted in colors, still does not have the precision of the adventure sonic engines.
While sonic colors was great, I would have rather had them overhauling the physics engine into something similar to the adventure series. I would agree that the adventure games are dated, but honestly the adventure formula could do so much win if it just got the right treatment(please don't come up with sonic 06), if it got tweaked and tuned the right way.
It's like with super mario galaxy building upon mario64 and feeling similar, but yet 1000 times better.
So that's for modern sonic, now what do I think about c.sonic? After a closer look I noticed that c.sonic's physics are adjusted but still based on the colors/unleashed gameplay engine. You can see it in how stiff he moves and the jumps. He does not slow down when going up a hill and does not get more momentum by going down hills. Noticable too is how he uncurls when going off ramps. This happens in sonic colors as well, as if the ramp is programmed to push him off a ramp depending on the speed he touches it and uncurls him into a vulnurable animation when detecting so.
I would have also loved running around in 3d. Iizuka is wrong about classic fans only liking 2d. We love 3d too :S:S. Classic sonic freely moving in 3d would be friggin awesome. The hell Iizuka?! That was actually one of the things I was looking forward most to! Which fan of the classics wouldn't want to move freely in environments with classic sonic? I am sure most would.
I don't wanna come off too negative, because I know I do since even the folks at sonicretro are liking this very much. But for a 20th aniversary game, I didn't expect a recycled unleashed engine where they chose the inferior unleashed as example(he's "too" fast again) and adjusted that same engine for classic. At first I was like, yeah classic bouncing, that must be a sign of good physics, but looking closer you can see that this is another game made without passion.
Is it really weird wanting a sonic game to be finally even better then than the classics for the 20th aniversary?
I expect it to be okay.
