'Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing' review: Hazuki All-Star Racing!

I mentioned last week that I was due to review Heavy Rain and Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. Well, having met my commitment to the SONY title earlier in the week, I can now turn my attentions to this fun piece of SEGA fan service from Sumo Digital. Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing (with Banjo-Kazooie - on 360) is the latest in a long line of cartoony kart racing games inspired by the original 1992 game, Super Mario Kart. When I say Sonic & SEGA is “inspired” by Mario Kart, I mean it rips it off wholesale. The power-ups are more or less like for like, with red homing missiles instead of red homing shells, green boxing gloves instead of green shells and mines standing in for banana skins. It is unquestionably derivative and unoriginal, but it remains a lot of fun.

For a start a SEGA fan like me is treated to a range of playable characters from across SEGA history, with characters from every SEGA platform, as wide ranging as the Master System icon Alex Kidd and Opa-Opa (the star of the 1985 coin-op Fantasy Zone) to the Bananza Bros from the Mega Drive game of the same name and even including cult hero Ryo Hazuki, from the masterful Dreamcast game Shenmue. SEGA enthusiasts will also recognise much of the music used in Sonic & SEGA from games such as Sonic Adventure and Jet Set Radio Future. However, the game is less of a love letter to SEGA than Smash Brothers (the beat em' up which allows you to play as a range of Nintendo characters) is to Nintendo, as that title allows you to unlock far more (in terms of characters, stages and collectable items) than Sonic & SEGA does. It is disappointing that more time wasn’t spent adding unlockable character art (or something of that type) to the game, as once you’ve played Ryo Hazuki and gotten into his fork-lift truck, there aren’t really any more Shenmue references awaiting you as a hungry fan. A collectable model of an obscure Shenmue character (like Ine-San - pictured), in the way Smash Brothers does with Nintendo characters, would have provided that extra level of fan service the game needs to appeal to SEGA fans.

Indeed, Sonic & SEGA doesn’t try very hard to SEGAise every little detail in the same way Mario Kart and Smash Brothers do for Nintendo. Why are the power-ups red homing missiles and green boxing gloves? The shells and mushrooms in Mario Kart come from the Mario games. Whilst the Sonic & SEGA equivalent of the mushroom boost is a pair of Sonic’s speedy shoes, the other power-ups don’t seem to be SEGA-related at all, which is disappointing. How much effort would it have taken to turn the "confusion star" power-up into a picture of Mega Drive hero Ristar? A friend of mine at IQGamer told me that he thinks the game doesn’t have personality in the same way that Mario Kart does, and it’s hard to really disagree with that statement. There are some nice touches to be found, like the speech bubbles which indicate the objectives during mission mode, which are clearly stolen right out of SEGA’s OutRun arcade racing series, but they are few in number.

These gripes aside, I really enjoyed Sonic & SEGA as the Mario Kart rip-off it is. I played the 360 version, and it is great to have a colourful, fun game on that console in contrast to all the grim shooters. The courses look great, especially the Sonic-themed Ocean Ruin, which takes you through a translucent glass tube under the water. The slide mechanic, which again owes something to the slide and boost mechanism from the Mario Kart series (as well as SEGA’s own OutRun) works well and once you’re used to it you can naturally slide into the harshest bends and boost ahead of your rivals. The trick and boost mechanic is stolen wholesale from Mario Kart Wii to good effect, as performing a trick whilst airborne grants your an additional speed boost.

There is a pleasing variety to the games (60+) missions, a decent system for downloading pretty much anybody’s ghost on the time trials and the obligatory championship mode, with three difficulty settings (of course), is also pretty strong. Whilst I would have preferred there to have been more unlockables, there is still plenty to do in Sonic & SEGA. I’ve played it, across all the modes (including online and local multiplayer) for around seven hours now, and I still have half the missions to do, the majority of the time trials to attempt and I am yet to master the hardest difficulty in the cups. If you are looking for a fun racing game which offers 4-player split screen multiplayer (a rarity in this day and age) and an atmosphere of cartoony fun, then I would seriously recommend you play Sonic & SEGA.

Ultimately, how appealing Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing is will depend on which system you own. If you own a Wii and don’t already have Mario Kart Wii, than I’d suggest going for Nintendo’s more polished title instead. Similarly, whilst the DS version is surprisingly pretty and plays quite well, DS owners can play the excellent Mario Kart DS, as well as a perfect port of the classic N64 Kart-clone Diddy Kong Racing, which for my money is the best option. Sonic & SEGA really shines as a 360/PS3 game, where the only other option is DreamWorks Madagascar Kartz. Without Mario Kart on these systems, Sonic’s pretender is as good as you are going to get (although ModNation Racers may best it on PS3 later this year) and aside from the aforementioned Diddy Kong Racing (which was basically a re-skinned Mario Kart 64 anyway), it is by far the best Mario Kart clone that I have ever played.



However, it is with a curious sense of survivor guilt that I enjoy this game. The great studios behind the original games referenced in Sonic & SEGA either no longer exist (Smilebit, Hitmaker, United Game Artists) or are a shell of their former glory (Sonic Team, AM2) and it strikes me as cynical that SEGA have no interest in making new entries in many of these series (Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio) but are perfectly happy to pimp them for an easy buck here. What a slap in the face it must be to somebody like Yu Suzuki (creator of Afterburner, OutRun, Virtua Fighter) to hear that SEGA don’t want to conclude his Shenmue trilogy, but they would rather like to see Ryo racing Sonic on a motorbike! Gee, thanks SEGA. If you really want to please fans, this isn't going to be the way to do it. Sorry to end the review on that down note, but as much as I enjoyed Sonic & SEGA, I’d rather be playing a new entry in any of the classic series themselves rather than a derivative Kart-clone, however fun (and this game IS fun).

Check out footage from the German version running on a top-spec PC, below (thanks to the Fr3akDeluxe YouTube channel):




Sonic & SEGA All-Star Racing is out now on PC/Wii/DS/PS3/360 (not PSP?) and is rated '7' by PEGI. It really is a lot of fun.

'Heavy Rain' review: It's not big and it's not clever

I know I am massively out of step with popular critical opinion here, but it is with a heavy heart that I must say, I didn’t like Heavy Rain, the PS3 exclusive title which has promised so much since it was announced at E3 2006. It gives me no pleasure at all to say that many fears people had about the game being nothing more than a series of QTE’s have proven correct. As I said in my last post, after a few hours of playing I had found the “drama” aspect fairly comical and heavy handed, and it didn’t improve from there, with multiple sequences that REALLY stretch all credibility, including a major plot twist that comes from nowhere, and is a far cry from being the game which would make you cry (see video below for Mega64's take on this!).

Admittedly, Heavy Rain does get you doing some novel things for a video game (brushing your teeth; applying mascara; changing a nappy) but none of them are fun or involving or emotional and all revolve around pressing the right control stick in various directions. Failure to get the prompt right usually just results in doing it again and the whole thing is completely pointless. If the intention is to make a drama which just happens to be a video game, then it completely fails on that level. If you play the game imagining it is a film then you are just left with the most hackneyed series of derivative thriller-movie sequences. The whole thing is also quite smug. It is almost insulting how clever Heavy Rain thinks it is whilst being nothing more than a boring Dragon’s Lair clone. I applaud the ambition, and think developer's should be encouraged to aim for the stars more often, but the opening credit sequence, with sad people standing in the rain, or the moment when a red balloon ascends into the sky, are super pretentious and laughable as a result.

Oh, and it is boring and then some. There were so many times when I wished I could run somewhere rather than slowly walk (however "cinematic" walking in the rain might be). There were so many times when I couldn’t care less about a conversation which was happening on screen. But where Heavy Rain really, truly fails is in an area so many ambitious games have failed to master before: that is in meeting actions with consequences, with the intended result of making choices difficult. There are apparently more than twenty possible outcomes, but these are mostly reflected in an end of game “news report”, similar to the bit at the end of Fallout 3 where a few sentences have been recorded for each variant and all get stuck together in the final speech to reflect your path. Most of the time Heavy Rain is asking you to choose whether you want to have orange juice or not... and this has no consequence whatsoever.

Indeed, there were many times I wanted to make a game changing choice (like shooting somebody you have pulled a gun on, rather than waiting for the obligatory bit where they hit it out of your hand and you have to scuffle about on the floor) only to find that there was no option. There was a (stupid) scene where a “bad cop” pulled a gun on my FBI agent during an interrogation of a suspect, and infuriatingly I couldn’t fight him, or tell anyone he’d done it, or turn on the video camera behind the two-way glass to show him beating the suspect... it was completely out of my control. I could go and make myself a coffee, but that would be POINTLESS!

I have nothing against pointless details if they add to an atmosphere (I’ll never forget standing at a bus stop on a cold Yokosuka morning in Shenmue, for example) but the lack of any choice in terms of where the characters go (I never knew why my characters were turning up at various locations for half the game) and generally not having any meaningful input in what will eventually happen (bar a few key moments) took me right out of the game and cut the atmosphere dead.



I don’t want to completely bash this game, however this reads. Heavy Rain is commendable for its ambition and for the fact that there isn’t another game quite like it (previous QTE games have generally used them for action and not tooth-brushing or French-kissing). The titular rain is really well realised and the motion capture work is superb. There were a couple of really entertaining moments, which usually involved running away from/after someone. I also quite liked using the FBI agent character, who has a pair of futuristic glasses that allow him to find forensic evidence quite easily. These bits felt the most like I was playing a game and not watching a generic Channel 5 thriller. I also liked the Kubrick-inspired art design in one key location, which I won't spoil here.

But most of the time the game is stupefyingly repetitive and bland. How many times must I check a bathroom medicine cabinet in a single video game? It felt like every other scene in Heavy Rain involved doing just that. Why is every fight sequence the same (people pick up objects and try to bash you with them or throw them at you, and when you fall to the floor you have to pummel ‘x’ to stand up again). The first time I had one of these fights, it was entertaining. But the novelty quickly wore off.

Basically, Heavy Rain is quite a stupid game with delusions of grandeur, aspiring clearly to win some sort of industry Oscars. If you want to watch a drama about a serial killer, then lord knows there are plenty of them and most of them are better than this one in more or less every way imaginable. Or if you want to see games as an art form than I would, again, direct you to Flower or Shadow of the Colossus. I would love to know someone who genuinely cried at some point during Heavy Rain. I am easily moved to tears, and yet I found myself laughing at every terribly acted “poignant” scene in the game. It takes a real effort to take the tragedy out of child murder, but hats off to the guys at developer Quantic Dream for making it happen.

In summary: top marks for trying... but please don’t try again. Also, the "sexy" female journalist character, Madison, looks unsettlingly like the 1980s Scotch tape skeleton.



Heavy Rain is out now and is rated '15' by the BBFC!

Full thoughts to follow...

Just a quick post to say I am playing through Heavy Rain (PS3) and Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing with Banjo-Kazooie (360) as of today. It may take a couple of days to get far enough through the pair of them that I can post a review, so in the mean time I will leave you with my initial impressions from having played both of them for around four of hours:

Heavy Rain: More like "Heavy Handed Drama". In fact, the first trophy I recieved thanked me for "supporting interactive drama" so it has certainly nailed its colours to the mast. To start with the dialogue is cliche, drawn from every thriller movie ever made about the hunt for a serial killer. The voice acting is only one notch above Shenmue in terms of how natural it sounds (which I quite enjoy because it makes me laugh, so I'm not knocking it there).

I suppose this next comment is a SPOILER. The opening section where you lose your son as Ethan seems to demonstrate the best and worst of the game: there is nothing else like it, as you genuinely feel lost in a crowd, unable to get to your son, and it is a nightmare. However, it is also faintly ridiculous in terms of plausibility (Ethan allows his child to wonder off twice in two minutes, and not only does his kid disobey him by leaving his side, but he crosses the road outside the mall for some unknown reason)and because of the heavy handed way in which your sons red balloon floats into the sky after he is killed. It just made me laugh, which isn't the reaction David Cage wanted, I'm sure. It certainly isn't how I wanted/expected to feel playing this game. It is also oddly un-engaging as you never really feel in control of anything, just resonding to occasional button prompts and lurching ever forward with 'R2'. "Interactive drama" is about right, as you don't decide where to go or what to do there, with most decisions being pointless (orange juice or coffee?) and with most areas (so far) not letting you leave until you have found the important plot point.



Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing: This much more traditional game will not win anything like the plaudits of the above, but has still been brilliant fun (so far). It looks lovely (with notable frame rate issues) and plays just like Mario Kart, although is obviously as derivative as that sounds at its heart. I am just happy to be playing something on my X-Box that doesn't involve shooting someone through the brain in an alleyway or something. The cast of SEGA characters and the recognisable music have filled me with a nostalgic glee I never get from Smash Brothers, I suppose due to being a SEGA kid at heart.

On the negative side, the game doesn't go as far as Nintendo's Smash Brothers in really offering content to the fanboys. There is no unlockable art or models or anything like that: just characters (each with a little piece of biography), courses and music tracks are there to be earned. I never usually care about this sort of thing, but I would have loved it here. Also, in my first few games on X-Box Live it seems that the game may share a problem with Mario Kart Wii's online multiplayer: races tend to be dominated by one player who goes so far ahead you never see him again, whilst the rest of the pack blow each other up. Maybe I'm just not good enough at the game, and it's my fault, so I'll just keep trying!

Two very different games, as you can tell, with one trying to develop and evolve the medium with something a bit different, whilst the other is attempting to be a decent and polished example of a tried and tested formula. Anyhow, come back in the week for full and fair reviews of both!

Rejoice for the SEGA All-Stars (and, again, that bloke from Shenmue)

After railing against console-brand-biased fanboys earlier this week, it is time for me to be a big hypocrite and don my SEGA fanboy hat. Last night I played the 360 demo for “Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing” and loved it. I know Sonic’s track record for spin-off titles isn’t great, with lacklustre games like Sonic Riders and All-Stars Racing developer Sumo Digital’s previous effort SEGA Superstars Tennis scoring poorly with reviewers. However, from what I played, this new Sonic racing game was pretty good fun. In the same way that Sumo’s Sonic tennis game was based around the principles of SEGA’s Virtua Tennis franchise, All-Stars Racing seems to have been based on the driving mechanics of the arcade series Outrun, in that you must drift to turn corners. As a pretender to the Mario Kart throne, the game seems to be a lot better than it has any right to be and may provide PS3 and 360 fans with the opportunity to enjoy a decent game of that type without having to go cap in hand to Nintendo.

As I said, though, I am a bit fanboyish about this topic. Most of my time playing the demo was spent gawping at the references to other SEGA games, most of which come from the Dreamcast era and pointing them out to my girlfriend (who couldn't care less). There are playable characters and stages from Space Channel 5, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Samba Di Amigo and nods to other neglected games like Chu Chu Rocket. I also loved the fact that the music for the Sonic-themed stage of the demo was taken from directly from Sonic Adventure. I hope all the stages take their music directly from these old games. I couldn’t tell from the demo whether Shenmue’s Ryo Hazuki is voiced by the legendary Corey Marshall, but I remain hopeful (despite the fact his IMDB entry doesn’t list the game).

Basically, as you can tell from that last paragraph, a fair slice of my enthusiasm for this game comes from loving many of the franchises which it is cynically cashing in on. I knew I’d like that aspect of the game when it was first announced (it had me at “hello”), but what surprises me is that the game seems playable enough for me to actually buy it. It seems off though that this game should be released now and continue the Sonic Adventure-era branding of Sonic, seeing as SEGA are trying to bring the franchise back to its roots and put an end to this kind of crap. Anyway, enjoy the video of Shenmue's hero getting his race on below:



Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing is rated '7+' by PEGI and comes out in Europe on February 26th... which come to think of it, clashes with the release of Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain demo available!

Anyone who read my first post on this blog will know I am keenly awaiting Heavy Rain, the PS3 exclusive crime-thriller game. Developed under the direction of David Cage (the man responsible for the interesting Fahrenheit as well as the underappreciated Omikron: The Nomad Soul), Heavy Rain has attracted a lot of interest since it was announced way back in 2006. Much of this interest has been raised by the games mission to be a genuinely emotional experience, with realistic and interesting characters.

Personally, Heavy Rain excites me for many reasons, the first and most frivolous being that it bears some resemblance to the notorious Dreamcast flop, Shenmue (one of my favourite games of all time - pictured above). The resemblance, as I see it, is in the way both games feature mundane actions as gameplay elements. For example, Shenmue saw players waiting at a bus stop on their way to work every morning. You could also open pointless drawers and pick up the various pots and pans... for no reason whatsoever. Heavy Rain seems to allow similar scope for relatively pointless moments, such as playing with your son or opening a fridge. Of course, none of these moments are pointless within the context of the game, as they create a world and an atmosphere. The other similarity both games seem to share is a reliance on reaction times in responding to on-screen button prompts, popularly known as QTE’s (quick timer events).

Shenmue likeness aside, the main reason I am excited by Heavy Rain is that I want to see whether it lives up to its ambitious goal, and makes me cry (or at least feel something for the characters). In that earlier post, I discussed whether games could be considered art, and I see Heavy Rain as a potentially interesting chapter in that ongoing saga.

The reason for writing this now is that a playable demo has arrived on Playstation Network. In it you are allowed to play two brief scenarios, which introduce you to the games control system, as well as setting up two of its characters. I have played this demo and can now give my proper first impressions on the title.

I’ll start with the bad. Well, nothing I played was truly bad. The one thing I really wasn’t sure about was the control system. Pressing the “R2” button (the lower-right trigger on the control pad) causes your character to move forwards (this is again similar to Shenmue) and this took some time getting used to. Moving your character in this way lacks fluidity and this seems to undermine the realism of the game, as my character changes direction like a robot. The QTE’s themselves work well, but I was thrown by their inconsistency. For example, at one point in the demo I was told that pressing down “L2” would always present the option of hearing my characters thoughts. However, this didn’t prove to be the case more than half of the time. Another minor gripe is that the early previews of the game made the characters facial animations appear much more detailed and fluid then they would seem to be in the final game.

The single worst thing I can say about Heavy Rain, so far, is this: the all-important believable story and characters are falling into the trap of aiming for “cinematic”. The story and the dialogue do indeed feel cinematic, but only because they feel cliché. In one section of the demo I played as an FBI agent, complete with the standard banter with local law enforcement about jurisdictions and people saying “look, just remember we’re both on the same team here”. All the dialogue, from what I’ve played in the demo, seems directly ripped out of a million cop shows and movies. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t groundbreaking either. It certainly isn’t “realistic”. Within a minute of starting the demo I was asking a hotel receptionist whether Abe Lincoln would jog his memory. It’s that sort of thing.



It was all curiously affecting, however. Once the demo was over I was surprised that I was really hungry for more, despite having some reservations about what I’d seen. Most encouragingly I was left feeling that even though I had only spent limited time with them I knew both the characters I had been playing as. This will be vital in a game which splits between multiple characters fairly frequently. The game also had a decent atmosphere, with the titular heavy rain lashing down throughout. I must also say that the QTE fight scene I had in the first half of the demo was pretty good. I missed lots of prompts and was rewarded with bruises and busted limbs, rather than having to replay the section as with other games that feature QTE’s. I need to replay the demo and check this out, but it certainly felt like I could have walked away and not had the fight at all, or like I could have come out of it without taking a beating or even that I could have been truly smashed up by the end of it. One of the most intriguing elements of all this is seeing how these different outcomes will affect the remainder of the story. Of course, the demo gives me no insight into this.

It remains to be seem whether the story is emotionally affecting, but overall I am left excited by the prospect of getting deeper into it and I am looking forward to playing the full game (and reviewing it here) later this month.

Heavy Rain is released on Playstation 3 on the 26th of February and was rated a 15 by the BBFC.