Week 3 - Spinball Has Not Aged Well At All!

 Third week down in my self-imposed Sonic 2021 Challenge and it's been up and down. Down as in we were stuck on Spinball for nearly 2 hours and I lost a stream(that's three hours I need to make up somewhere) and up as in we're now sailing through Sonic Adventure! Let's get right on and get Spinball out of the way and done with before we discuss the rest of this week's blogs contents.

Sonic Spinball (1hr 52mins) - a hard game, but mostly owing to crap controls. If you're expecting anything like Casino Night from Sonic 2, walk away now. The game is slow and clunky even on the fastest speed setting, trying to aim Sonic feels so imprecise I would have had better luck letting my half blind girlfriend play in my place - it almost felt more like luck when it came to hitting targets, and very little in the way of skill. I had seen many videos completing this within 35 minutes and hoped an hour was a feasible target. Alas, that was far from the case. If it wasn't for quick saving with Kega Fusion I would have been there for a very long time. Thank you, Kega Fusion, for saving my hairline from receding any further than it already is. 

Here's the latest copy of the spreadsheet and as you can see there's a lot more colour on it this time(sorry colourblind folk!) as I had need to figure out how I'm actually going to complete this challenge! As always if you click on it, this should make it bigger and easier to view.

To break it down: green are games I've completed; blue are games installed and ready to go, purple are titles I have lying around somewhere and need to confirm where they are for access purposes before turning them blue; red are games I don't have in a streamable format and need to get somehow(example, I have Shadow and Heroes for PS2, but am unsure whether to use a HDMI upscaler or an emulator - either way this needs some work and consideration to get working). A couple of the arcade games are playable in a browser, some I'll need to get extra items(for Sonic Free Riders, I'll need a Kinect and lots of luck because apparently it's shit). We're currently on 9 games completed and I'm actually a little worried I will miss my goal of completing all 65 games within the year(wanna watch my progress? I stream every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday at 7pm UK time for 3 hours, hit that Follow button even if I'm offline, then come on over!) but illness and bad cheaty games won't hold me back. 

Speaking of cheaty games, let's talk about Sonic Adventure(hereafter referred to as SA). The first properly 3D game in the series, originally released in 1998 on Dreamcast, suffered from a common problem that plagued platformers as they transitioned from 2D sprite game to 3D polygon glory - the camera often bugs out. I'm about 4 1/2 hours into SA - we've completed Sonic, Tails and Big and are progressing nicely with Gamma about 1/2 way through. I've given chat the power of choosing which hero we go with next, and I think they're saving Amy until last. Can't possibly imagine why. Thanks, chat. (Want to join my community? Come check out my Discord server - Springyard Palace - for stream notifications, Monday Night GIF Battles, and more - just read the simple rules and answer the question - giving a role out is manually done so be patient!)
Aaaaah, the amount of times we've lost a life because the camera bugged out. Want to jump onto a platform close to a wall? Woops, the camera ate the wall before you got there and somehow threw you down to a fall death - oh yes, we can fall from space, regularly do skydiving from aircraft and other stupid stunts not limited to breathing in space, but if you try to jump down too far to skip part of the level, you die! Feel like bouncing from platform to platform over a bottomless pit? Camera shifted to under a platform blocking your vision, you die! Fighting a water monster on a pond? Camera moves to face away from the beastie, you get stuck and drown, which means you die! Also connected to the camera is slightly twitchy controls whenever running down a narrow corridor, which SA loves to use. Wanna run straight? Nope, you're wall running at a weird angle so you're actually going slow. Try and steer down this corridor? OM NOM NOM WALL. Try and let the character go forward on their own following the pre-defined path? OM NOM NOM WALL or WHEEEE FALL DEATH.

The dodgy camera isn't stopping me from enjoying SA though. When it works, the game is an absolute joy to play - fast, pretty, great soundtrack, and a solid plot(TAILS SAVES STATION SQUARE AND IS VERY VERY BRAVE, TAKE NOTE SONIC TEAM OH WAIT YOU FINALLY SACKED YOUR SHIT WRITERS LOLOLOLOL). Good luck keeping up with it across all six stories though, there's slight variations across each of them - for example when playing as Sonic and you face off against Knuckles, for some reason you replay this when you're going through Tails' story. I don't know whether it's a lost in translation thing or if it's intentional, but it does raise an eyebrow when you're playing through, you think you've already seen it and rather than seeing it from a different perspective you become the perspective. It's a weird shift to keep on top of.

Also, and this will be brief, but Big's fishing mechanics suck.

Roll on the final parts of SA, after completing this it's straight onto SA2. Thankfully instead of seven unskippable credit scenes, it only has the three and it has far fewer camera bugs. It's been a fun challenge so far, but before long I'll have to think about what's next. Cheers for reading, will be back next week to discuss how the end of SA went and whether we're busy swearing at SA2 or not.

Final note before I leave you alone, as part of the #GameOverMND gaming weekend join @ScepticalSquiz, Whipstitch and me for a fun Minecraft building challenge! On Sat 6th Feb 2021, we will be starting at 12pm UK time (that's 1pm for our European friends, and anywhere between 5-7am for our US friends) and going for a full EIGHT HOURS. That'll be 8pm UK/9pm Europe/1-3pm US. You can catch all the action over at https://twitch.tv/scepticalsquirrel. All donations will be towards the bigger charity drive for @mndassoc