You know, if there IS a silver lining to this whole movie mess?
You can officially disregard ‘But Sega!’ when it comes to arguments regarding spinoff media and fanworks.
I’m serious- there’s a particularly noxious strain of fan out there that tends to invoke SEGA and Sonic Team at every given opportunity to basically put down anything that isn’t the games and the games alone, citing that deviating from SEGA’s approval and vision is inherently a bad thing.
Well you know what? This incoming Sonic movie can only exist with SEGA’s oversight and approval. Every single atrocious decision regarding this movie, from it being live action to being a buddy cop film co-starring a human, none of it could go anywhere unless SEGA gave the thumbs up, and that includes the odious Sonic design we’ve seen.
I’ve heard word that, evidently, SEGA themselves aren’t happy with that last one. To which I say… if that’s the case, why’d they okay it? Why’d they approve ANY of it? Even if you were to somehow believe the deeply far-fetched notion that SEGA somehow signed a bad contract that put this film out of their hands despite it being their intellectual property, then you can still trace everything back to bad decisionmaking by SEGA.
So, the point being? “But SEGA” is no longer really a valid argument for/against anything within the franchise or fan made stuff. While SEGA’s history of deeply terrible decisionmaking might make this seem obvious (Shadow the Hedgehog the Game, Sonic 06, Rise of Lyric, etc…), this one is so radically different from the ‘SEGA Standard’ while being overseen by them, it just kinda verifies that maybe, just maybe… you shouldn’t rely on SEGA as an end all, be all argument regarding anything that exists in Sonic, nor in what you do as a fan.
For me anyway, that’s the one silver lining in this mess of a film- it demolishes the pretense that SEGA Knows Best, and it makes the attempts to invoke them as a means of dismissing other parts of the franchise all the more weaker an argument.
How would you feel about a difficult Sonic game? "Difficult" meaning, something like the KONG temples in Tropical Freeze, not a brutally unfair ROM hack.
We’ve had difficult Sonic games in the past. Sometimes, they’re remembered as some of Sonic’s best games, when they’re done properly.
Case in point: Sonic Rush. Your first time through Sonic Rush is probably going to be a nightmare, because it’s a game that expects you to play it in a very fast, stylish way, and the only way that’s possible is to practice levels and get good at them.
But that means you have to finish the game multiple times. Until you do that, the game is going to be using you as a doormat, because if you aren’t boosting or doing tricks or whatever at the right times, you’re going to be dropped in to bottomless pits, or beds of spikes, or run head first in to enemies. Sonic Rush actually kind of sucks until you learn how to play it the way it wants to be played, and it’s not afraid to kick your ass for it.
I’d also argue that Sonic Unleashed is a tremendously difficult game, and for kind of the same reasons that Sonic Rush is. I’ve said it before, but some of those later levels in Sonic Unleashed left me with my hands trembling after I finished them because they were so stressful.
Obviously, though, difficulty balancing in games is something I think about tons and tons, so I’m not really advocating for harder Sonic games overall, because it needs to be in the proper context.
Because, like, Sonic Lost World was a pretty difficult game, too. But it certainly wasn’t better for it. Balance, as always.
You mentioned Sega may have tried to buy better review scores for Sonic '06, and mentioned there was one magazine where that likely did happen. What was the magazine, and how much did they adjust their review of Sonic '06?
The magazine in question was Play Magazine, run by Dave Halverson. For those of you who don’t know who that is, Dave founded GameFan Magazine back in the day. It started as a fanzine/catalog for the “Game Club” store he ran with friends, but the review blurbs and side coverage they began to add to the catalog eventually gained enough traction that they spun it off in to a professionally distributed magazine.
The “Game Club” store sold a lot of import games, and GameFan’s focus on games that would never come to America (or would release in significantly different forms) is what gave it an advantage over its competition. They were also one of the first publications in North America to really start talking about Japanese anime, right at the dawn of the big anime boom in the mid 90′s. For a hot minute, GameFan was in the right place at the right time.
Despite this, GameFan always kept a kind of “indie charm.” Page layouts were messy, cover art frequently was done by fan artists, etc. It had all the positives and negatives of being “the last true enthusiast magazine.” It was passionate but often unprofessional. One time, racial slurs were published in the magazine because they were apparently used as “filler text” that never got removed.
The publication suffered a lot of financial strife. The magazine was expensive to produce (it was printed on higher quality materials than most), and advertising dollars were starting to dry up. On top of that, it was apparently haunted by legal problems; Wikipedia isn’t specific, but it sounds like the investors that helped launch the magazine never got paid back, and sued for damages. All of these factors combined ended up bankrupting GameFan.
After leaving GameFan, Halverson picked up at a short-lived gaming magazine called Gamer’s Republic, which also quickly folded. Halverson then used his connections to hire former coworkers from both GameFan and GR to form Play Magazine.
Dave Halverson earned a reputation for being a certain type of character. He went against the grain a lot. He was loud, dumb and frequently patted himself on the back for being such a hero for writing about video games. There are many cited examples on his Wikipedia page. A good collection of colorful quotes from his various reviews can be found at GameSetWatch.
When Sonic 06 came out, Dave himself personally reviewed the Xbox 360 version and gave it a surprising 9.5 out of 10, a nearly perfect score.
Play Magazine obviously stood alone in this praise.
As you can imagine, some called shenanigans. This was only a few months before Jeff Gerstmann would be fired from Gamespot over saying harsh things about a game tied to an advertising partner, so we were smack in the middle of the early days of game press distrust. For Play to be such an outlier was definitely suspicious and it got a lot of people talking about Halverson and his credibility.
The very next month,
Play
issued a correction for their Sonic 06 review, clearly feeling the heat: the 9.5 out of 10 was dropped to 8.5. The bees only buzzed louder. Something WAS going on.
Two or three months later, the Playstation 3 version came out, Halverson once again took review duties, and this time savaged it. He gave it like a 6 out of 10. It’s harder to find an archive of this given most review aggregate sites did not archive his PS3 review, but as I recall, he straight up admitted that Sega promised them “the problems would be fixed” and his review score for the PS3 was to reflect that they had not.
(It was still higher than most.)
What this means is that, at the bare minimum, Dave Halverson either:
Wrote a review for a game he did not actually play and just toed the line for Sega.
Played the game, but unrealistically fudged the review score at Sega’s request.
Either way, it probably wasn’t honest.
And it wasn’t even the only instance of Dave Halverson unrealistically heaping praise on to a Sega game that was generally considered mediocre by the rest of the press. Most famously, he went to bat for the abysmal Golden Axe: Beast Rider in 2008, even going so far as to call out other game critics for “sucking” at the game (among other things).
It definitely seems that at some point he had a deal with them, officially or unofficially.
Play Magazine did not survive 2009. Halverson tried to reboot GameFan magazine in 2010, but it limped along, only producing 11 issues in its five year publication run.
The moment the rebooted GameFan disappeared, so too did Dave Halverson. He hasn’t been heard from or seen since.
Dude this is the Sonic fandom, do you really think there going to forget these movie, people still don't shut up about Sonic 06, and i don't see them shutting up about this movie.
People won’t shut up about Sonic 06 because:
It was the 9th “main line” game in a long running franchise.
It was a game made to celebrate Sonic’s 15th Anniversary.
It was pitched as a next-generation reboot of the entire Sonic franchise, and a chance to wipe away past sins and start over on more solid footing.
Sega PR was blanketing the press with a smoke screen to hide the game’s worst faults and made promises that were never fulfilled.
I know it’s been 12 years, so people might forget these things, but Sonic 06 was way more than “just another bad, glitchy Sonic game.”
On the other hand, video game movies are almost always universally terrible, and it was pretty obvious a mile away that you shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up for the Sonic movie. It wasn’t impossible for it to be good, but it’s not a surprise that it might be bad.
