Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2

I think at this point, there are three regions of thought in regards to Sonic nostalgia. There’ s the camp of people that just don’t think about Sonic the Hedgehog in their day-to-day lives; they are the great scientists, artists, leaders and free thinkers of the world. There are the people who actively curse Sega for ruining their childhood memories with images of interspecies relationships, bad camera angles and multiple anthropomorphic creatures not named Sonic in Sonic games. There might be a few scientists, artists, leaders and free thinkers in this group, I’m not entirely certain. And then there’s people like me, who are perfectly content. There was that Sonic Generations game from last year, and it was actually a well-rounded, very sound piece of Hedgehog self-celebration. One that allows me to glance at the Sega and think “okay, we’re cool, I forgive you guys a bit for Sonic Unleashed.”

Having Sonic Generations both exist and deserve to exist makes it weird for another Sonic 4 episode to co-exist. You know, a year and a half after Sonic 4: Episode 1 was released to a unanimously piss-poor response. Not the newly released Episode 2 is a lousy game; nooooo they’ve actually went ahead and pieced together something a bit more respectable.

Well, respectable if you’re already into the idea of a blue, big-eyed  creature that moves at an accelerated pace from the left side of the screen to the right. If you’re the kind of person that thought those silly Genesis games were pretty dumb, you should just click away from this page. Go be a good sport and buy Rayman Origins instead.

Many of the problems people had with the pilot episode of the Sonic 4 Comedy of Errors is largely corrected. Controls feel more res…well, more responsive for a Sonic game. Sonic still has a bit of his floaty, not-all-the-way agile leaping prowess that one associates with a Mario or a Meat Boy. (Yup, slab of meat is the leading mascot for a new generation.) But Sonic seems to be, for his own lowered standards, more capable of making specific jumps and picking up speed. Blasphemously enough, this version of Sonic doesn’t seem to run as fast as years past; age and arthritis had to catch up at some point. But while certain psychotic fans may cry foul, I at least found it to be a pleasant change in that I could now reasonably react to oncoming obstacles. The days of running really fast and losing all my rings from a cheaply-placed spike trap are gone.

The visuals feel more organic. Sonic, Tails and the all those woodland creatures transformed into adorable robot animals of death now feeling like living beings and not just sprites imposed on a background. The music feels like it would have come out of a Sega Genesis, minus the tinny audio quality of everything that came out of a Sega Genesis.

Also, Tails is back to being the indestructible-yet-helpless force that is largely helpless to whatever it is Sonic needs at that given moment. The only difference is that now wires spread across the nation allow that indestructible-yet-helpless force to be controlled by someone else over the internet. There are new double-team moves, such as a helicopter tactic for jumping, a submarine navigation attack for making the underwater sequences not suck for once in a Sonic game, and a dual-wheel spinning 69 move right out of an old SNL cartoon of certain notoriety. These new abilities add, well, they add something. Whether that something is enough to make this game feel unique is another matter.

Really, the biggest issue with Episode 2 is the same problem that seems to haunt every other Sonic game, in that there isn’t a whole lot to it. I finished the game’s 24 levels in about two and a half hours. This is a $15 dollar game.

So my problem becomes one of value. I can admire a short, pricy experience if I truly got something out of it. Limbo and Journey are clutch examples of games where the emotional resonance of the experience carries on well past their own limited play time.

No one is going to be mistaking this for a Journey or Limbo. Well, I’d like to think so, anyways. The closest thing Sonic 4 has for an emotional hook is 16-bit, blast-processed nostalgia. Nostalgia that has already been considerably mined, excavated and exploited by Sega.  And even if you are someone that still has a wealth of goodwill for this long-desecrated franchise, I can’t help but feel your money and time will be better spent on Sonic Generations or even revisiting those Genesis games. Alas, Episode 2 is an inefficient way to spend your time, but at least it isn’t a total waste. If you are desperate to part with your fifteen dollars, you won’t entirely hate yourself for doing so.

3 ½ stars

The Sly Collection

So these last few months have been a decidedly weird malaise for me. I feel like the medium of video games as a whole is failing to provide me with any kind of satisfaction. The big blockbuster disc releases are too mindless and unintelligent for my cerebral cortex, but the smaller arthouse games are too intelligent and complex for my mushy skull. I need some kind of middle ground. Intelligent murder games, maybe? Unintelligent adventure games? A new Kirby game? I don’t know. Thus, I’ve spent the last little while catching up on odd bits and pieces that have slipped past my notice from the years of intelligent murder games and unintelligent adventure games in my wake.

I never played a Sly Cooper game before on account if it being the bottom rung of Sony’s marketing strategy of “take what’s popular and make it three times over.” Realizing that a whole lot of people really liked Super Mario 64, armies of programmers were commanded to do-things-like-Mario-and-do-lots-of-them, leading to a trio of Jaks, a quartet of Ratchets and a flock of Slys. And I had collected too many coloured stars, eggs, lums, bolts, jingos and otherwise in other games to be particularly excited about yet another fetch quest platformer. But now that some time has passed and Sony has redirected its cloning efforts from recreating Mario to recreating Halo, this felt like the time to fill in the missing Easter Egg in my collection of Easter Egg Hunt action games.

The Sly Cooper franchise is built around a raccoon master thief, his Milhouse turtle friend and their opposite-of-Milhouse hippo brute friend. Except these games are rated E for Everyone, so these are thieves that only steal from bad people, of course. There’s somewhat of a connecting thread between all three games, sometimes involving Sly’s ancestry of master thieves, just enough that you may as well play through all three of these games in such a format as, perhaps, the Sly Cooper HD anthology for the Playstation 3 Entertainment Netflix Housing system. This HD set features such improvements as widescreen visuals, Playstation Move-supported shooting gallery mini-games, and Sly’s hat occasionally glitching out of existence in cutscenes.

Your tour of the history of mammal robbery begins with Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus. Here, you primarily play as Sly Cooper, a raccoon platform mascot pretending to be a master thief. Despite allusions to being a criminal from a dynasty of thieves, you never really do anything thief-worthy. Sometimes you’ll dodge lasers , sometimes you’ll dodge spotlights, thus meaning the game has as many stealth elements as The Wind Waker. No, this game is more Crash Bandicoot than Splinter Cell.

You mostly play through linear stages of platforming sequences. Sometimes you’ll whack enemies with your hook cane. Sometimes you’ll climb and shimmy objects. I stress the “sometimes” part; Sly, disgracing his raccoon genetics, often has a hard time gripping on to the climbable surfaces you intend him to. Even simple platform jumping can be tricky when you’re not sure what platforms are considered flat surfaces to Sly, and what platforms are too curved for his weak paws. Toronto’s many garbage-can-excavating raccoons would scurry circles around this Sly Cooper’s immobile ass.

You also deal with occasional mini-games, like a basic shooting gallery or a basic racing game, or basically throwing your controller to the ground because the checkpointing during boss fights is awful. Or basically giving up on the story, because the narrative exists solely to explain each of the game’s contrived scenarios. Why do you need to collect yet another pair of identical keys to open more identical locks? Are master thieves not master lockpickers?

Don’t mistake my above two paragraphs of ranting to think I despise Sly 1. It’s just that Sly 1 exists in a post-Meat Boy world, where a slab of flesh raised platforming standards with perfect controls, perfect checkpointing, perfect parodies of NES games and perfect fecal humour. Times have changed since people thought watching DVDs on Playstation Twos was revolutionary tech, and Thievieus Raccoonus has aged the worst of the games in this set. At the least, playing through Sly 1 will give you a fond admiration for the games to come in this HD set.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves is the first Sly Cooper game that establishes what a Sly Cooper game should be. Gone are the linear platforming sequences, in favour of a series of missions within various colourful overworlds. There are a myriad of mini-games too, and the quality of mini-games is solid enough to keep things feeling fresh. Imagine Grand Theft Auto without the autos, the mass murder, and in favour of more Grand Theft. Besides being better in tune with his rodent roots in regards to climbing, jumping and other platforming, Sly has the added, series-defining ability to pick pickets. Slink behind an enemy, and press Triangle to use your cane to empty their oversized coiffeurs. It’s a simple, easy and satisfying mechanic that leads to me being distracted from any given mission because I see the warming glow of a golden watch sticking out of some security guard’s pocket.

There is more confidence in the game’s own cartoonish narrative. The game is comfortable with making its villains the most absolute of ridiculous stereotypes.  Be it a lizard with Andy Warhol-like qualities or a Northern moose that made me come to the horrible realization of what a “Canadian accent” is, the game is delightful in its insensitivity. Most importantly, Sly 2 succeeds at putting the player through the paces of a criminal mastermind, or at least an E for Everyone-criminal mastermind. Each mission is positioned as a thread in a greater scheme, setting Sly and his crew in the direction of an all-too-elaborate Ocean’s Eleven-style heist.

It’s not an entirely perfect experience; the game handles waypointing by making a giant blue/green/purple arrow near your next objective; an arrow that isn’t visible if your character is surrounded by towering skyscrapers. And to an anthropomorphic rodent, two-storey houses are considered skyscrapers. Also, you’re not only playing as Sly. Sometimes you have to play as cowardly turtle-genius Bentley or pro wrestling mark of marks Murray. Their missions tend to be amusing mini-games, but the process of getting to said missions can be tricky for animals that can’t scurry or climb the way blue raccoons are capable of.

Small sacrifices that one makes in the name of an entertaining criminal platformerish experience, a fun way to spend 14 hours of your life. Not to mention an ideal set-up for Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves.

Sly 3 is the wiser, smarter, maturely-more-immature version of Sly 2. The structure and concept of going into an overworld and performing a myriad of conniving sub-missions is the same. There are some wise tweaks; waypoints are easier to find thanks to the incorporation of sonar hearing in Sly’s genetics. Traversal upgrades are made available sooner as to make getting through the land as either Sly, Bentley or Murray less menial of a task.

Most importantly, Bentley and Murray are now also capable of pickpocketing.

The Ocean’s Eleven vibe of performing mini-tasks in service of a master heist has been slightly compromised. Instead, the game’s plot involves Sly’s crew attempting to recruit good guys by way of doing bad things to bad people. But even with that in mind, the writing in Sly 3 is the very best. The game is rich in sharp dialogue and humour that doesn’t just pander to the youngest possible audience.

I guess you could buy these games a la carte on the PSN store, and I can sit here and say that just buying Sly 3 by itself isn’t the worst idea in the world if you’re strapped for time. But hey; I paid thirty dollars for little over thirty hours of entertainment from this package and came away very satisfied. Ergo, I consider this a strong purchase for people craving a charming, pocket-lightening value proposition.

4 stars

Skullgirls

I found the target audience for Skullgirls in a basement facility near a video game shoppe in downtown Toronto. This gentlemen’s club was sort of a modern day arcade, where tournament-caliber fighting game fans can ply their craft at the expense of people who wanted to be tournament-caliber fighting game fans. One guy asked me to do repeated Sub Zero low kicks so he could decide which Kitana attacks were best suited for countering said low kicks. You know, that kind of crowd. Well Skullgirls was the new hot dame at the club and people were smothering the various monitors of this facility, attempting to learn what attacks chained into what, what cancelled where and how to get away with the longest combos without the game’s “infinite breaker” telling them to stop.

Many of my attempts to challenge these eager students resulted in extended periods of me sitting down, palms on cheekbone, waiting for Miss Valentine’s combos to end on my once promiscuous female combatant of choice. The practice and determination of these enthusiasts had certainly paid off. Granted, I turned the tables when I had asked to throw down in the less combo-friendly Street Fighter Two, and these combination fiends were helpless against such tools as “fire ball” and “pile driver.” But alas. If those gamers converted their Skullgirls skills into boxing skills, they would have no hope against Floyd Mayweather’s unexciting counterpunch strategy, but that’s neither here or there.

But the point is that Skullgirls is a fighting game for people that mechanically love fighting games. Well, I think it is, anyways. I know for sure that it’s a fighting game for people that dream of being people that mechanically love fighting games. To get the most out of your Skullgirls experience, you must be the kind of person that has the willpower to study frames of animation, damage properties, stunlocks, roman cancels, roman catholic cancels and other fighting game terminology that enters my left ear and flies out the right. 

If you are not that person, then don’t listen to the lies that you may have heard about Skullgirls having in-depth tutorial designed to teach you how to properly play a fighting game. It has a lengthy tutorial, alright. And said tutorial does use some flowery fighting game language. But it seems the game arrives with about half of the material that the developers would have intended. The technical bits that make a fighting game a fighting game are explained, but none of the psychology of how to win, how to use certain characters, how combinations of characters match up against others. They don’t even give you the movelists! My first hour of play was spent with Cerebella, a girl with giant arms sticking out of her hat. I never clued into the idea that she had some 5-6 throwing attacks, and that she was meant to be a Zangief-styled throwing character. Maybe it was the lack of chest hair that kept me from making the connection.

Or maybe the developers intended all along for players to do all the research themselves. Treat Skullgirls like a 90s arcade game, where fools easily parted with their quarters spent their money, toying with various button presses because a friend told them the secret to playable Kano and Sonya in Mortal Kombat 2. 

Regardless, Skullgirls definitely works within its singular focus. The 8 character roster seems small, but each character is so vastly different from the one before it, demanding (I think) completely different play styles and strategies. You can elect to play either with one strong fighter, two not-so-strong fighters or three pantywaists with full Marvel vs. Capcom-styled tag abilities, and that seems to be the approach to success. Further encouraging freeform combo self-expression, you can even choose any single attack or special move as an assist attack.

And you’ll want to express yourself against other live players. The online netcode uses GGPO, which does complicated math-things that I don’t understand to make matches feel lag-free. Match-making is also usually a quick procedure. Or at least it is quick to pair me against players much, much better than me, eager to get me better acquainted with their fists in sets of 20-30. 

To be frank, either, playing online, locally against other humans, or practicing your favourite air juggles for use against other humans is really the only way to play Skullgirls. There’s an arcade mode, but saying Skullgirls technically has an arcade mode is like saying a porti-potty technically has a toilet. You fight people, often the same people repeatedly because the roster is small, you waltz your way to the credits screen. There’s a story mode that puts dialogue and pictures of the girls getting touched in places in between the fights, but not much of note is worth experiencing.

This is definitely a game that I wanted to appreciate more. The art is nothing if not provocative, contrasting overty-sexualized female characters with some more grotesque anomalies and several dozen video game references. The music is kind of catchy in a way I want to listen to in my every day life... just not within the context of a fighting game. Think a less unintentionally ironic rendition of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, not wanting to be taken for a ride but maybe more a casual stroll down the Harbourfront.

But Skullgirls is a picky lass, only wanting to be admired by those willing to obsess over its every minute detail. The foods it likes, the jewelry it makes you buy, the stunlock properties of its low-cut top. Devoted fighting game enthusiasts who enjoy doing their video game homework will be supportive and put up with Skullgirls’ bitchy attitude and desire to be driven everywhere. Me, I prefer something a little more level-headed, so I’m going back to my long term relationship with Street Fighter 2.

3 stars