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empireomega wrote:

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...some crazy blue hedgehog you can tell is g*y just by listening to him speak...

1) There's nothing wrong with being gay, and if you act like there is again, I will ban you.
2) Gay people are normal people, there's no external way to tell if someone is gay or not. It's like saying there's a way to tell what colour someone's eyes are by listening to their voice.

That issue aside, I have to agree with the points of your rant :/ And it's painful to do so, because Sonic is what made me a gamer and a game developer.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles was where the Sonic series peaked. It had plot, it had depth, it had brilliant art and music. And it came out in 1994. Sonic Adventure was ok, but it really felt like the first little exploratory try at a 3D Sonic game; you expected mistakes, things that didn't quite work, and you expected that they'd learn from the mistakes and never repeat them.
And then Sonic Adventure 2 came out. With all the same mistakes made, again and again. And they've never stopped repeating them. Bad voice acting and charcterisation, half-hearted levels, distractions from the plot, the list goes on.

Sonic games, the good ones, simply do not work in 3D. And that's where Sega, and a lot of other developers go wrong: they see 3D as the progression from 2D, but it's not. They are both valid forms of expression, like music and visual art, or movies and books. they have different strengths and weaknesses, and you pick which ideas match with which kind and go with it.

And what makes this even worse is that I was excited for Sonic 4, but the more I see of it, the more I think: Why not go for broke and remake S3&K? The level designs are all the same as the old games, not progressions of them. The stupid homing attack is still there, despite not being needed in a 2D game. The music is lacklustre. Sega is trying to remake what people loved about the old games without actually knowing what it was; they've distilled them down to "platformer", and it just happens to involve Sonic. It's just sad.

Please, Sega: retire Sonic until you make a genuinely groudbreaking game. If it takes decades, that's fine: just stop churning out crap.

(Side note: If you haven't played it, get an emulator and find Sonic & Knuckles with Sonic 3 locked-on. It's fun and you'll enjoy it, and you'll see how to really tell a story in a game, with no voices or writing whatsoever.)