Alright, school’s done, hangover’s gone; it’s time to continue with my review of Sonic and the Secret Rings. Now, in the previous part, I mentioned how I was originally going to copy the Angry Video Game Nerd while doing a video of this, but I decided only to write a review instead. Well, you might get a bit of what it would be like in this part: not intentionally, but only because I can’t review this part without swearing. So, that being said, today I’ll be reviewing the game’s biggest flaw: the game play. I’ll also be looking at the controls, which some people consider a completely different thing, but I don’t, since controls are how you play the game, so it’s a sub-division of the game play.

So, let’s start off with the controls. Now, as I’ve said in the last part, they made this game exclusive to the Wii so they could make good use of its uniqueness. So, what we got is a game where the main control is that you tilt the controller left or right to make Sonic move either left or right. This isn’t actually all that bad, a bit buggy sometimes, but the really bad thing about it is that it needed to be mixed with the fact that Sonic is constantly moving forward. Now, when you first read this, it sounds like it might fun, but when you actually play it, you see how bad an idea this really is. Think of it like a racing game. Now moving forward at a constant acceleration until you hit a peak speed sounds like it would help, right? But that’s until you see a wall in the way and don’t want to crash into it. Now, let’s put in spikes, enemies that will stop the car, holes you’d have to jump over and other such obstacles featured in this game. Not so much fun anymore, eh? Now let’s put moments where you have to figure out what to do, stop and go in reverse. Seriously, now it’s just getting in the way. I look at the Wii-mote and I think “Why couldn’t they just pick one of the fucking buttons to make you go forward?” It’s not like the Wii doesn’t have enough, nor does this game use them all. WHY did they have to make it such a pain? I mean, too many obstacles AND the constant movement? One or the other would make it ok, but both is like saying “Well you like meat, and you like chocolate, so we’re going to give you chocolate-covered meat!” What you end up with is just shit. Also, there are levels where you see Sonic from a front angle, instead of the back, so avoiding obstacles while doing all this is hell.

Still on the controls, its time to talk about jumping. You remember Sega Genesis Sonic? GBA Sonic? Even Sonic Adventure Sonic? How did jumping work? Right: you would press the button and go up. The more you’d hold, the higher up you’d go, and when you let it go, you start going down, so you could easily tell whether or not you jumped high enough. Once you land, you could just keep going at the same speed. Thank god they changed that user friendly method, or else that would be something else that would be ok with the controls. What do you do now? You press a button that makes Sonic slide and, if you held long enough, he stops. After letting go of the button, he jumps. Depending on how much you “charged” the jump, Sonic jumps higher. Seriously, how did they fuck this up? First, sliding to a stop is NOT helpful or FUN in a Sonic game, it just slows you down. Also, as I’ve said in the last paragraph, you have no control over your acceleration, so to go back to the speed you were going at takes time. Making Sonic need to lose his momentum to jump is an insult to Sonic games- no, PLATFORM games everywhere! Oh, but that wasn’t the only problem, remember the charging? Let’s say you were playing Super Mario World, and BEFORE you did your jump you had to decide how high you wanted to. You’d get quickly annoyed, wouldn’t you? So why take the option away from us gamers? To make it more realistic? We’re playing as a fucken blue hedgehog in a book! Give us our classic style jumping back! Sure if you do a tiny bounce you lose a minimum of momentum (try saying that 10x fast), but these jumps are practically useless, only giving you the height to possibly jump over a snail in the road. You’d be tempted to charge your jump a lot every time, but that takes time, and in this game, time effects points, so if you care about your score, you can’t do that. Seriously, not enough charge and you don’t jump high enough, too much and you lose too much time and too much momentum. It seems the designers basically went “Hey, let’s find a way to make it so they need to know EXACTLY how much time to charge before they do a jump.” I never thought they could fuck up JUMPING in a PLATFORMING GAME. THIS. MUCH! AAAASSSSSSSS!

At this point, those of you who have played the game will probably be saying “Wait, there IS a way to cancel a jump mid-leap.” Though this is true, it’s not what I mean. The new version of cancelling a jump is to press the button again: this shoots you strait down and starts another jumping charge. The only time I use this is when I charge a jump too much and I’m going too far and am about to die by falling in a pit. But still, this makes you lose all your momentum, including what little you might have had leftover. It also works like ass with some camera angles; so many times have I had to cancel a jump because I though I was going to hit something only to end up hitting something else because I cancelled. The logic for the cancelling control is completely screwed up: they make a more realistic jump where you have to charge up before you go high, like in real life, but then they make it so that you can shoot strait down whenever you like? What sense does that make? It’s just giving the gamer two middle fingers for the price of one!

Final controlling aspect I’ll look at once again has to do with jumping; the homing attack. Now, this isn’t completely fucked up, so this paragraph will be shorter. It works pretty much the same as in other Sonic games: when an enemy is near, you can hit them after jumping. The cool thing is that this time, they give you a target to tell you if and who you can hit, which is handy (god knows that would have been useful in some of the previous games). The problem is how you use it: instead of hitting a button, you swing the controller forward. This is actually a little fun when a few enemies are around, but when there’s a lot and you’re left repeatedly swinging your arms, it becomes a literal pain.

So, now I’m finally done with the controls, so lets move on to Sonic’s upgrades. Remember in Sonic Adventure 2, how you could get the Light Dash to be able to follow a string of rings? And remember how before each level, you had to say how you thought you were going to need it, so you had to equip it? No? Oh that’s right, BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T NEED TO! Now, in this game, all the useful stuff and any upgrades Sonic would get, you need to say how you think your going to need it before a level, which once again, implies needing to know them before you play them. Not a big complaint since you know Sonic player will play a level more then once in the goal of getting a better score, but you also have a limit on how many upgrades you can have. So, that means not only knowing which upgrades you need before a level, but also knowing which ones you WON’T need! Once again, this is the game designer’s ass attempt to go “Yeah, you need to hit it right on this bull’s eye. No more, no less.” The farther you get in the game, this become less and less of a problem, since your limit on how many things you can equip goes up, but my point is that you shouldn’t need to in the first place!

There are a few upgrades that you don’t need to equip to keep though. First off, is the ring limit: that just goes up with every level. Yeah, that’s right, you actually have a limit to how many rings you can have. What the hell? That’s just so idiotic, I don’t think I need to elaborate on this. Next are the speed bursts and time crawl upgrades (do I smell Viewtiful Joe?). The speed burst one is… ok. There is a major problem with rushing and not seeing anything that coming, and that would be: “OH CRAP, SPIKES!” Also, when you hit a wall and Sonic doesn’t seem to know what to do, you’re just left running pointlessly against it and wasting your spirit meter. As for the time crawl, its nothing like Viewtiful Joe, it just sucks. In Viewtiful Joe, this made things charge up, your punches stronger and things easier to hit. However, none of these things are seen in Sonic games, so it’s only really used for is to avoid spikes (quite appropriately the opposite of the speed burst). I can’t honestly see you using this much except for the moments made for it. Can’t really say these techniques are horrible, since it’s easy to play without them, which is odd, since they try to make it seem so important.

Now, let’s start actually playing the game. Upon playing the first few levels, like everything else in this game, you might see this as being passable. But, once again, those moments quickly fade when you find out there are only about 7 real levels in this game. For Christ’s sake, the first Sonic game had more! What did they jam pack this game with? Missions! Now, lets look at Sonic games and missions: Sonic Adventure had a few, mostly just variation on the original level mission, but nothing to take away from the thunder of the actual game. Sonic Adventure 2 had a lot, but it had a lot of everything (characters, extras, levels, etc…), still, if you wanted all the emblems, this could be distracting. Sonic Heroes had 1 extra mission per level, and I was quite happy with it, no one ever really talked much of these. Shadow the Hedgehog, probably their biggest flop, is a game composed entirely of missions. Now we have Sonic and the Secret Rings: a game that makes it seem like the missions aren’t part of the game, but they are. If you watch all the video clips, it seems like all you have to do is go from place to place and beat one level. In reality, what you have to do is complete a bunch of missions before the boss unlocks himself. Could you imagine the original Sonic the Hedgehog working like that? Say you just finished the first level, but before they let you get to Robotnik and his awesome ball and chain of doom, you had to play the level again and collect 100 rings. Or kill all the enemies. Or beat someone to the end. Or all of those and more. Seriously, stop making me have to fuck around and GET TO THE FUCKING POINT!

Above the annoyance of simply having to DO the missions and how many of them there are, there’s also the different kinds of missions (and we’re getting into shit now). First off, we got the standard “Get to the end” level. These are what the game should be, about 30 or so different locations, all just racing through. Oh well, that would be too good a game. Next are the “Collect X rings”. In these levels, you’ll just get a slice of the original level and rings become rare. All you have to do is collect your goal before reaching the… goal. In these levels, I’m actually thankful that when I get hit, I only lose 20 rings (though I have no hope of getting any back). Of course, there’s the opposite missions: get to the goal without collecting a single ring. These are a pain in the ass and go against everything I know about Sonic. The reason they go against everything I know about Sonic is because I remember playing the 2D game and needing to collect as many rings as possible, doing the opposite is just…wrong! The reason why they’re a pain in the ass is cause now the level will be covered with rings and you’ll need to take your time to avoid them, which is hard to do because of the constant acceleration, slightly sensitive controls and because if you’re too slow you loose points due to not finishing quickly. Once again the game designer sets up an impossible target for us; needing to be able to go quick enough to earn all the points, but careful enough to actually complete the level. Next are the rampage missions where you have to kill a set amount of bad guys. This can be fun, it actually might be the best one besides the get to the end ones, but if you miss a bad guy it can be a pain in the ass or even sometimes impossible to turn around to kill him, so make sure you don’t miss anyone you need to kill. Then we have the ones where you race a blue orb to the end. These… take some getting used to. Simply put, know the level, know what you need in upgrades and know how to work the controls and you should be fine (now were falling into the designer’s trap; well played). These come to the point where you will do a level so much, you’ll be able to do it blindfolded and swear at your TV every time you mess up one little thing that costs you the whole race.

But my favourite ones of all (sarcastically speaking) are the ones that are exclusive to each level. It would take too much time to describe them all to you, so I’ll just tell you about the one that made me lose my sanity: Dinosaur Jungle, 10th mission, “Get the Pterosaur Egg!” The title is a little misleading; what you actually have to do is place 4 lost eggs into their respective nests. The first big problem is that your “genie” can’t carry more then one egg. … Your magical magic genie can’t float more then one egg. For Christ’s sake, give me two of those eggs, I can carry both of those fuckers under my arms, and I don’t know MAGIC! Even a weak ass genie should be able to float two eggs while carrying the other two and fly to follow Sonic. Now, this wouldn’t be too big a deal, but eggs and their nests are never close together, so while you have an egg and you’re looking for its respective nest, you’re bound to hit into another egg and pick that one up instead! So then you go looking for that nest, but no, you hit into ANOTHER EGG! So now you need to find THAT nest now! Even if you could just carry TWO, hitting into another egg wouldn’t make you need to go off course. Sometimes, just to piss you off, the nest will be right behind the egg, meaning you’ll have to loop the whole fucking level again, make sure you don’t hit into another egg and get to the nest again. Beyond having to be careful not to hit eggs you have to hit eventually, what other big frustration could there be? Well get this one: if you die, all the nests and their eggs get reset, meaning you just lost all progress. However, and this is really hilarious, your time doesn’t reset. Your PROGRESS gets reset. Your TIME keeps going. That’s like saying “Well you haven’t really done anything, but we’ll act as if you have.” Once again, your TIME is worth your points, so if you die, you might as well go to the start menu and hit restart to start back your time to get the best score. So then you start all over again, having to pick up ONE egg at a time and run around in circles trying to find its nest. But SHIT, you hit into an egg on the way, so now you gotta find THAT nest. SHIT, you hit into ANOTHER EGG, so now you have to find that nest. Eventually, you hook up a nest with its egg, but shit, you DIED! So now you have to start all over again, so now you pick up a new egg, because the patterns and nests locations changed, so you need to figure it out again. So you pick up another egg and start running, then hit into another egg, or die, or actually find the nest, but then you either do the next nest egg or you die, and even if you did that one, you can die and BOTH get set back! This is the most frustrating thing I’ve ever seen! I would rather try to teach algebra to second graders, and that probably wouldn’t take as long! It’s like a game of memory match with two people with short term memory loss! This level is absolute ass! Absolute ass meaning there is nothing more ass then this! Sure, reading this might not seem like it’s all that horrible, but trust me, if you try to play this one, you’ll see it IS!

There are two things in that last level that really make it ass that also apply for levels in general. First off; the time. Now, I already mentioned time and again that time is points, but it’s not just that mission that your progress gets reset when your time doesn’t, almost ALL of them do that! It makes me wonder what the hell the point of this is. Did they actually program it like this purposely? JUST to piss us off? No, it has to be an accident; it must have slipped by somehow. Seriously, you accomplished nothing if you died, but you time still says you were doing shit. WHY? It makes no sense and it only gets in your way. The other thing is water, and there was lots of it in the egg nest level. Why is this such a factor? Well, Sonic fans will know that he can’t swim. Originally, this was used as a little extra challenge, where Sonic will be in underwater levels and have to find air. Even in Sonic Adventure, Sonic could go under water, but jump out before he drowned. In Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic dies most every time you hit water, but that’s because most of the situations where you fall into water you have no hope to survive anyways. In this game, when you hit water, you die, but you shouldn’t have to! When looking at the levels and the points you die in water, you see you would have the chance to get out, but you’re not given that chance. Not only is this a pain in missions, but there actually is a level played over an ocean! You can imagine how horrible it is to not fall into water when your jumping controls are so fucked up. Why aren’t you given a chance to get out of the water? Seriously, I hate having to restart the egg nest mission after matching 3 of the 4 just because Sonic accidentally stepped into a puddle. There’s also a point tin that mission (and others) where your surfing. What a piss off.

The game play is absolutely horrible. The controls are the equivalent of playing the genesis with your arms crossed and having to use your nose to jump. The designers made it so you need to know exactly what they were thinking in order to play the game well. The missions are dick and it seem like the game is simply against you. They tried to make something original (like with the story), but it’s not only not enjoyable, but it’s an insult to what Sonic is. I am forced to give the game play a 1/10. You do not want to have to play the adventure. With it getting a 1 and the story getting a 2, it would be slightly better to just watch it and use this game as a movie, but that’s like saying it’s easier to swallow a peace of glass then it is to shove it up your ass.

Oh my god… I still have one more part of this for my review!