All the S@nics - the end

[kitikami]

Fun Sonic Facts:

Despite being one of the most prominent and enduring figures in Sonic lore, the Ring Lord had never appeared directly in an official Sonic game until Sonic 06, where they can be found running a shop in town.

[KobaBeach]

Fun Sonic Facts:

Despite being one of the most prominent and enduring figures in Sonic lore, the Ring Lord had never appeared directly in an official Sonic game until Sonic 06, where they can be found running a shop in town.

they also appear in saga frontier but they're a vampire instead of a black dude with some bomb ass fashion sense

[Heavy Sigh]

Fun Sonic Facts!

So! At this point in development, summer has started, Naka has left, E3 is over, and the Tokyo Game Show is looming in September. Sonic Team, shorn of several members, buckles down to get to work on something presentable. The skeleton of the story has begun fitting together and some early platforming levels have been whipped up to test the physics. While the team is fighting to get to grips with the new hardware and have pretty much had to recreate everything from previous 3D Sonic games from scratch, it’s something everyone expected, and was still surmountable by mere mortals. After all, they were only expecting to release Sonic 06 on PS3, Xbox 360, and...the Wii?

Yes, it sounds rather silly, but it’s actually true. As development began, they assumed it would be easy to port a PlayStation 3 game over to Nintendo's Revolution, since the reverse had been perfectly doable back in the Gamecube days with Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog.

Once the team actually got their hands on the specs for the dev units however, things *changed*.

VERY quickly, Ogawa, the director of the entire Sonic 2006 project, saw that getting a PS3 game running on the Wii would need his full attention, and decided to split the development team and take charge of the part responsible for porting the game to Nintendo’s system. In order to do this, the team focusing on core development for the actual launch platform was not only gutted further...It was left without a Director.

Faced with such an idiotic decision by top staff, directorial duties were thrown onto Shun Nakamura, the only person available with even token directing experience. Now, he was faced with not only having to continue his old duties, but also to pick up Ogawa's pieces, wrangle a gutted team into throwing something together for TGS, and keep up steady communications with Ogawa's team, since they were still working on the same game and could thus share at least some notes and resources.

...At least until Ogawa decided that porting to Wii was completely impossible and that he would just make an entirely new game instead of just recombining the teams. One wonders why SEGA higher ups even let this happen in the first place, but it was likely due to both misunderstanding the new scope and required resources of HD development, as well as wanting Sonic plastered over everything possible for his grand 'rebirth'.

[Grounder]

cerberus is well known for having one head

[strongbadman]

You know what I'll say it, this boss is only slightly less functional than a Sonic Adventure boss.

[Paragraph]

You know what I'll say it, this boss is only slightly less functional than a Sonic Adventure boss.

Bosses are always trash in Sonic games, so this is a relatively safe comparison.

iirc Cerberus takes double damage if you manage to wrangle him into one of the statues. This is useless information for

the refight

because there aren't any statues.

Overall, this went extremely well for raocow. It's interesting that he managed to get Sonic to snap onto the horn so easily, especially without doing anything. From the last speedrun I watched, I got the impression that you had to re-do a homing attack, or even that it's programmed in a way that requires you to latch onto the second rail (on Cerberus' back, not tail) first, which is super annoying to do when he fidgets around like that. I usually have the biggest trouble with that. It's just very annoying and super janky to control overall.

[Bean]

Well, was going to say that ramming Egg Cerberus into a statue deals double damage, but I got beaten to the punch. This fight exists.

[TiKi]

You know what I'll say it, this boss is only slightly less functional than a Sonic Adventure boss.

Bosses are always trash in Sonic games, so this is a relatively safe comparison.

dude there is nothing more satisfying than whopping the bosses in sonic 3 with the insta-shield. it feels like sonic is an actual pinball hitting a bumper. fight me.

[Paragraph]

dude there is nothing more satisfying than whopping the bosses in sonic 3 with the insta-shield. it feels like sonic is an actual pinball hitting a bumper. fight me.

Okay, let's duel. I choose Mega Man Zero Bosses as weapon

[Grounder]

oh boy tomorrow's either going to be a nothingburger or a lot of "fun"

[KobaBeach]

oh tonight's gonna be great. i think it's really funny that apart from raocow no one has played sonic 06 as good in the goonsphere outside of post-speedrun tech tietuesday.

as a silver fan in my childhood, raocow's flippant attitude towards silver is really funny. also man hearing him call something cringe feels unreal

[Paragraph]

raocow is supernatural at intuiting what the game wants from him. This level can be an absolute clownshow of "where in the world do I need to go" and "oh so the booster just deposited me into sand, thanks".

Once you are a bit more used to how Sonic 06 operates, Dusty Desert is actually kinda fun to explore. raocow noticed the ramp way off the side - that's actually a huge alternate path you can take right at the start, and the level is chock full of them. You can skip a LOT if you take some light speed rings, rainbow rings and so on. There's some platforming up ruin parts you can do, stuff is hidden nicely behind corners, it's good! Except for being in Sonic 06, of course, and therefore needing at least three more passes of polish.

[Shard1697]

elise's hair looks so oily. she's got like, inkling hair tentacles

[Kapus]

I am immensely entertained by raocow yeeting random objects and level decorations into the horizon with his weird forcefield power.

[ano0maly]

Man each in its own could be good but

Sonic X Soleanna is the worst crossover I've seen in a long time

[Heavy Sigh]

Fun Sonic Facts are NO USE!

Silver's creation was actually inspired by the development process itself! During early development stages, where the development team was making huge levels with multiple paths through them to test out their new physics engine, the idea popped up to include a new character whose special powers let him use the physics themselves to play through the levels. This lead to Silver being given his psychic powers (originally meant to be granted to him by the Chaos Emeralds, but a later rewrite just gave him the powers without explanation).

And yes, the second time travel came up writer Shiro Maekawa immediately and explicitly based Silver off of Future Trunks from Dragon Ball.

However, the mechanics of the psychic abilities actually came from a different action game Sonic Team was working on. According to Shun Nakamura, Silver's abilities were originally designed for a different action game named Fifth Phantom Saga, a (later cancelled) FPS that starred a wraith with powers very close to Silver's. This emphasis on psychic powers also bled over into his design, as the team wanted to really make him stand out from the other characters with special accoutrements. In fact, the design team developed over fifty different concepts for his final look, like a futuristic headset and markings on the hair. One of the team's first ideas was to make a character that had Sonic's scarf-like hairstyle, but with 'even more volume'. This idea led to Silver's first incarnation being an orange mink named 'Venice', a cute reference to how Soleanna was patterned after the real world city of Venice, Italy. However, the developers ultimately scrapped the design, believing that an orange mink would be too out-there to be taken seriously as a character next to Sonic and co., changing his fur to a whitish gray to better suit his position as an antagonist (and to utilize their new HD shaders).

[Grounder]

And so, by not doing the format, rao subverts expectations and has both things and a nothing

[Shard1697]

okizeme

[Blivsey]

never stop spamming dp

(Doanother Psychicgrab)

[helucard]

However, the developers ultimately scrapped the design, believing that an orange mink would be too out-there to be taken seriously as a character next to Sonic and co., changing his fur to a whitish gray to better suit his position as an antagonist (and to utilize their new HD shaders).

Ah yes, Silver the Glitch, a force to be taken seriously, lest you be psychic-crushed into oblivion.
... Sidenote, really like the gimmick of calling him a Glitch for the first few episodes, I kinda wanna see the "All the Silvers" title gimmick as "All the 404s" or something.

[Paragraph]

With a lot more tantalizing blue dots on the map, let's talk structure.

Sonic 2006 has 9 main levels, which each character plays, but not in the same order, and contrary to e.g. Rush, they are actually vastly different. Also, to make things a bit more confusing, Sonic's story has an extra level where you play as Tails. That's 28 stages in total, and of course a final story to round it all out.

Additionally, each character also has Missions, which are given by blue ! people. Some of those are not optional; most are. Winder of a Shoemaker is obviously mandatory, as is finding the Captain. Finding the kids is not.

Sonic has an even 20 missions. Shadow has 15. Silver has 18. Because structure is hard.

The missions range from trivial to super tough to annoying, baffling and...special. They might be worth a look, but you won't unlock anything from doing them.

Speaking of unlocks, here's the collectibles:

Silver Medals are everywhere. For each character, there's 10 in each level, and 30 in the hubs (20 in Castle Town, 5 in New City, and 5 in the last hub we haven't seen yet). Then we have 10 extra for the Final, totalling 130 (Sonic) + 2x 120 (Shadow + Silver) + 10 (final) = 380 Silver Medals. What do they do? Well, unlock Gold Medals of course!

Gold Medals are the final tally of stuff you did. You get Gold Medals for:
Levels:
- finish
- S-Rank
- Hard Mode
- S-Rank Hard Mode
- all Silver Medals (they don't do anything individually, you need all 10)

Bosses:
- finish
- S-Rank

Missions:
- all done (?)
- all S-Ranked (yikes)

Hubs:
- all Silver Medals (again, individual ones do nothing)

General:
- three episodes completed
- last story beaten

There's 180 in total. If the above doesn't add up, don't worry, it's not your math skills: I haven't 100%d the game, so I'm just going off googled info for this, and there's a dearth of good lists adding up things. I think the missing medals are from interlude levels where you play as secondary characters, or maybe I forgot a boss or three, or a general reward that you're bound to get anyway.


So, what do the Gold Medals unlock?

Fuck all.

[KobaBeach]

the thing about silver is that he's tangentially more likeable in his story than in the rest because he's flat as shit in sonic's story due to all of it revolving around sonic and elise's big roger rabbit-ass interspecies romance rather than an actual meaningful plot, shadow's basically the only one doing anything of worth

even then people who don't like cheesy ass sonic stories won't take to him as much as idw!silver who is a huge doofus and a nerd and a friend and actually swears at one point i have no idea how that made it past the censors, then again i'm pretty sure regular show actually had mordecai say "you've pissed me off" before whiny parents complained

i love silver so much



Tomorrow's Gonna Be Fucked Up

[Bean]

Silver's boss fight reminds me a lot of the start to Volt Kraken's stage with the bike in MMX5. You'll be dead before you know it. In this case, it's because you literally aren't supposed to run to the rings right in front of you even though that's what common sense would tell you. It's a stupid fight where you just wait for Silver to pick things up so you can breakdance in and out in one motion as opposed to using homing attacks like the last seven years of Sonic games has taught. It's kind of amazing how this boss subverts expectations in all the worst ways.

Yellow text bubbles mean nothing, orange ones are more important and can sometimes point you in the right direction (pending you know the map), and blue ones are town missions. Some blue ones are mandatory like Paragraph is saying, but they're all worth trying just for the extra rings. That'll be worth it later if spent wisely.

Oh, and another thing worth mentioning is that if you die during a town mission, it's considered an actual death instead of just respawning with no penalty outside of those.

[KobaBeach]

Some blue ones are mandatory like Paragraph is saying, but they're all worth trying just for the extra rings. That'll be worth it later if spent wisely.

I think I just grinded the Sonic levels for the

Gems

. The better Sonic stages are the sole highlight of this game along with the soundtrack when they're not breaking apart six ways from Sunday.

[Paragraph]

Just played a bit of Shadow's story and oh boy I forgot how much more fundamentally broken he and his stages are in comparison to Sonic

luv 2 b deposited right into enemies by boosters all the time

Anyway looked at the Gold Medal list (you can just do that from the main menu) and there's a separate one for each character's Town Missions/S-Ranks, and they have different number of bosses, so that's where the missing ones from my count were.

I'll do an effortpost about ranking high at some point because it's a doozy