Yes, we still have a forum.
Cool, can you provide a source for the rumour?
http://www.tssznews.com/2015/12/30/source-at-least-2-sonic-team-titles-intended-for-2016/Take it with a grain of salt since it's purely rumors, and that site has had rumors wrong in the past.
Thanks and don't worry, I've worked on SEGA sites for long enough to take literally everything with a grain of salt. ;p
Wasn't TSSZ looked down upon by the Sonic community for bad track record with rumors, though?
Say what you will about the man in charge of Sonic, Iizuka, but he sure knows how to keep people never knowing what he's going to do with Sonic next. Most other companies you can predict what's going to happen with their franchises, but not Sonic. That is something I find to enjoy and makes Sonic anniversaries all the more exciting. Iizuka can do some pretty insanes stuff sometimes. Never know what to expect.
Thats one way to look at it. Another would be that this man has no idea what hes doing and has been slowly murdering the franchise for years.
I disagree. It wasn't until 2010 when he became the head of Sonic Team, and that's when we had games like Sonic 4, Colors, Generations, and Lost World. The series has different people working on them before that, so it's not fair to fully blame him for other people fuck ups.
In Colours and Generations, both games blended the forward-view gameplay with the side-view gameplay, often in the same stage. It was solidified as a play style and really worked quite well. But if we carried on like this for the next 20 years we wouldn't be providing a new experience to the users, and we wanted to carry on innovating and providing new experiences for players, so we wanted to really challenge ourselves to do something new and be innovative.
Sorry, but the man who directed Shadow the hedgehog and Journey of Dreams should not be in charge of anything. His ideas are always way too ambitious and his quality control is always way too loose. This can been seen as early as Sa2 and Heroes as well. Plus, anytime he's interviewed he spouts absolute nonsense. I would argue that it's his prioritizing of cinematics and dynamic camera angles in Sa1 that set the franchise on the terrible path it went on for the next ten years. He should have always focused on a technically tight, solid gameplay design that could be built upon in future games. Instead we get sloppy title after sloppy title. Colors and Gens for all their successes still have sloppy and unrefined gameplay. I believe he even once said in an interview that he likes to change up the gameplay of Sonic titles so that people never got bored. If that's true, he's pretty much responsible for all of our current woes. EDIT: found the interview http://www.sonicretro.org/2013/08/sos-2013-takashi-iizuka-interview/
