All the S@nics - the end

[Shard1697]

the issues that came up fighting cerberus here are mostly because raocow kept trying to get onto cerberus at times other than "cerberus does his charge attack/big jump from up on the wall".

those are the only times you're intended to jump onto him, and as both sonic and shadow you'll run into issues with just falling off or not grabbing the horn when you try to grind up him whenever. it's just more of the era of sonic bosses that are designed to make the player wait until the boss does the thing that lets you hurt it

[Kilgamayan]

hey

why was 6 afraid of 7

[Grounder]

Shadow? Doing what everyone tells him to?

Yeah, seems about right.

[Dragon Fogel]

Buggy Ring Race?

Isn't that all of them?

[Crow]

I'M SO MAD

[kitikami]

The level of mathematics reached in Soleanna explains why the towers are so easy to knock over.

[Paragraph]

Heads up for future Town Missions involving the buggy: there's a poorly-tutorialized feature it has, a boost. You activate that by double-tapping A. I does tell you that. What it doesn't tell you is that it requires you to MASH the A button extremely quickly, like way faster than you'd think. Then you can chain boosts together. I assumed that it was on a cooldown or something originally, but that's not the case.

Two of the missions are practically impossible if you don't use the boost, so, you know, just putting it out there.

[Bean]

In almost every playthrough of Shadow's Kingdom Valley I've watched, when one of those towers falls, it lands right on Shadow and instantly dunks him in the water. By not taking things cautiously, you avoided that nonsense. Other than that, yeah, the climbing characters get stuck on the walls way too often.

[Shard1697]

the goths have things way more figured out, as usual

[KobaBeach]

Heads up for future Town Missions involving the buggy: there's a poorly-tutorialized feature it has, a boost. You activate that by double-tapping A. I does tell you that. What it doesn't tell you is that it requires you to MASH the A button extremely quickly, like way faster than you'd think. Then you can chain boosts together. I assumed that it was on a cooldown or something originally, but that's not the case.

Two of the missions are practically impossible if you don't use the boost, so, you know, just putting it out there.

Ah yes I remember when I got my Sega Visions Issue 350 on the mail last week, it came with a tape on the development of Sonic the Hedgehog: Awakening.


This image of Yuji Naka always brings me back to the many secrets in this game. I'm glad raocow's enjoying Arcueid's story, though the FMV Night Trap-like sequences in Bowser in the Fire Sea are gonna be a pain in the next episode, SEGA-Sony-Square-Enix still haven't learned that FMV titles don't work very well on the Jupiter. brb gonna wish rec.games.video.sega a Happy Winter-een-mas on The Year of the Gamer, 2005. Happy Winter-een-mas everyone ^_^

i have never heard of this before

[Paragraph]

raocow's ability to speak 06 remains utterly confounding. This used to be my most hated level until I got a handle on how 06 works, and it's still very janky even for this game. Issues:
- Rouge has no checkpoints and her controls are...you know
- that you have to break through the stained glass window is imo not obvious at all, took me forever (or a guide?)
- the hovercraft section, as Bean said, can easily kill you via offscreen dropping towers, not much you can do
- it's also much longer if you stay ON the craft until you're on solid ground (I used to be too afraid to dismount over water)
- Shadow's homing attack goes way further than Sonic's, which can easily propel you way off if you don't already know to never trust it. Regardless, there's some dumb moments wrt homing (see raocow's death around 12:10)
- the trap stairs
- getting on the wind rail after the homing attack on the glowing handle is terrifying

And raocow:
- gets stuck once with Rouge and finds the solution quickly, dies only once, early
- just gets the window thing immediately
- drives the perfect route to only be in danger by one tower, which he easily avoids
- finds the shortcut to skip like 50% of it
- ofc he knows how to home, and knows that you have to drop to hit the rope
- did fall for that, but only once
- felt bad but he got it

I have to agree though that this level is super disjointed, a prime example of Shadow's levels often being just slapped together from other characters' levels, but backwards, and This Time With Vehicles. It kinda works individually, though? Like, Sonic's portion of the first part you played forward was very vertical and had a lot of open air, so the glider can use the bridges as obstacles. Rouge's section used to be Silver's part (both for Silver's AND Sonic's story), so it's naturally more open. The glider part used to be completely skipped over with springs and stuff, or hover segments up high, so it's even possible that - gasp - they made this first for Shadow, and the OTHERS reuse it as platforming.

Finally, one interesting thing about this level: the Hard Mode is for once not only "lol more enemies" - the keys are actually in different spots, e.g. in the cages where raocow found medals now, and the homing attack chain raocow liked is truly horrific now with enemies way off to the side, forcing you into bad camera homing attacks, but also opening new paths with formerly decorative ropes connecting lower towers.

[KobaBeach]

shadow really said

[Paragraph]

Another prime example of Shadow's levels being just that tiny bit more jank

The part around 5 minutes where you kept dying on nothing is extremely consistent. It might be an invisible wall, or rather a bad hitbox, but it's also possible that the bird always happens to be timed such that you hit its projectile with the homing attack instead of the bird itself, and because the momentum is fucked, well so are you.

Also this level:

Tutorial: hey use the buggy it's super awesome
Level design: absolute lmao if you do tho

[Grounder]

just wait for little planet to appear again and time travel once or twice, problem solved!

[KobaBeach]

Fun Fact: The invincibility actually lasts slightly longer than the jingle, but ALSO the particle effects, like the gondolas in Castle Town, only show up in one of the versions, considering this is the 360 version on an in progress emulator, it should be the PS3 version that has it (don't have much memories of that part of my playthrough), so good luck with that in the 1 out of 1 million chance you actually run into an invincibility box, because they forgot about them mid development.

forgot to post this earlier

Also this won't be the only time Sonic Team abuses 1UPs instead of balancing level design, most likely due to rushed development.

cough cough ps3/360 unleashed

[Matt is me]

There was a moment today where rao said "being iblis is having a bad time". Am I the only one who thought
?

[Paragraph]

raocow being a savant at wallrunning as usual. That part where the worm just pops out of nowhere has killed me so many times; I simply cannot course-correct gently enough after the booster sets me on the path to doom without falling off and into the lava. Solution: skip the damn booster and slow walk at 90°.

imo this is the worst Flame Core (and it's a bad level to begin with) because of all the ambushes. From a pure "don't do this" level design perspective, it's trash - apart from all the enemies raocow ran into he couldn't see coming, it has the typical Shadow level jank with homing attacks just not hitting well, his signature ability making it even hard to chain the bounces, and I dread the part where you're over the crystal pit because it's super easy to home to a projectile instead of an enemy and drop like a rock.

Also I don't like Shadow's combat and am surprised raocow does, but I'm happy for him. He's taken to it quite naturally though, I remember my first time around just flailing in dead air forever and getting hit out of my hover state. Sonic can anti-grav or bounce enemies dead much more efficiently, and Silver has the groundpound of megadoom, Shadow HAS to keep mashing that button and it sucks imo


btw raocow, there IS rail tech in this game, you just have to hit the attack button as usual, it does speed you up a little, works surprisingly well. Though often the game wants you to jump off rails and homing attack enemies for secrets, if you're too fast that's hard or might break. Generally rails are not bad in this, especially because you can home to them. Game does fun setups with them for sure!

[Grounder]

Mercifully, this is the only game to have this weird Omega voice.

At any rate, he's pretty spry for being 200+.

[thatguyif]

Mercifully, this is the only game to have this weird Omega voice.

At any rate, he's pretty spry for being 200+.

It's actually the same voice actress as The President in Shadow the Hedgehog.

[Bean]

The secret to filling up your special meter quickly in the Shadow half of the fight with Mephiles is to breakdance (keep pounding that kick button). Those mini-devil dudes will go down super quick and your bar will be full in no time. Omega's half goes pretty much like how you do it. The lord of dorkness here can't handle a barrage of machine gun punches.

You probably would've S-Ranked Rouge's stage had you have fought the enemies guarding the exit immediately. Made for a funny moment though. Tropical Jungle is trying!

[Shard1697]

I don't like the VA but I do like that Rouge saw Omega completely intact and functional(checked him and said he's in standby mode, so I guess she could tell he still had power) in the future

and then put two and two together and decided that the immortal robot could help shadow by literally sitting his ass down for 200 years

[KobaBeach]

Mercifully, this is the only game to have this weird Omega voice.

At any rate, he's pretty spry for being 200+.

It's actually the same voice actress as The President in Shadow the Hedgehog.

and meowth, may she rest in peace

EDIT: dance water dance

[Paragraph]

Gotta say, this absolute nothing of a jungle level improves massively if you're looking for medals (both Silver and Rouge, but ofc especially the latter).

The boss is...okay. Much like a lot of other 3D Sonic bosses, actually. Biggest problem is that you have no idea how Omega works. raocow immediately realized that air attacks are the way to go. On the ground, you have to hold the button to charge up a lock-on blast, but it doesn't lock-on well because ofc, and you don't have a reticule to target, like you'd have in Adventure 2. Without charging, I'm convinced the attack does nothing.

Overall, Omega is extremely clunky in combat but kinda effective if you align him properly and just throw bombs from the air. He is, somehow, the fastest character walking-speed-wise. The hover is nice.

[Grounder]

DO YOU LIKE

MY CAR?

[Dragon Fogel]

So I think the thing you're supposed to notice with the last part of the intelligence test "puzzle" is that each 2-by-2 block adds up to 15.

Mind you, I had to stare at this for a good half-minute after already knowing the answer to catch this. This is just an inherently bad puzzle type - once you add any complexity there's going to be excess information and it might even lead to a perfectly logical alternate answer. Although it's not the worst example of it I've seen, which is as follows:

Fill in the blanks with the missing numbers:
1248 __ 4096
428 _ _
4812 8 _

Terrible answer within:

The entire middle column is 8 and the entire right column is 4096.
The explanation offered is that the digits of the left-column numbers multiply to 64, 8 is the square root of 64, and 4096 is 64 squared.
In the book where I saw this, it was presented seriously as a puzzle and not as some kind of joke.