@Kitsune:
Gonna have to majorly disagree here. The controls tried too hard to be a combination of platformer and racing and failed at both,
Controls were fine once you got used to them.
the characters were horrifically unbalanced,
Some of them could run on water, some of them had homing shots, some could take advantage of shortcuts others couldn't. There was balance. It wasn't fantastic and some were certainly better than others, but there was some balance. I could win with any of them. The later characters like Metal and Super Sonic were far better than the others, but they were end game unlocks.
there were only like five tracks,
They also had weather features that altered the tracks and how they played and provided different shortcuts, versus tracks, balloon hunt, and side things to do within those tracks that were loaded with secrets. Yes it was only 5 stages but they did a lot with them… And the tracks they had were loaded with secrets, multiple paths, and shortcuts and were very well designed... especially in that some of the slower characters had access to shortcuts the faster ones didn't... or the curves and straightaways gave distinct advantages. (That's true of most racer games, but especially there.)
and you can do more or less everything there is to do in the game in like two sessions.
You can beat it in two sessions sure, but no way you did everything there was to do, find all there was to find or really get into every character. I blew a toooon of time on it as a kid. And Nights into Dreams, which only had 7 levels itself.
Yes, its a small ammount of stages, not arguing that. But they were solid stages they did a lot with.
But the general consensus that I've seen is that R is ass,
It's no Mario Kart and its aged badly, but it was perfectly fine in 97. Game magazines of the time gave it 3/5 or 8/10. Around the 70% mark. Not great but not terrible either, and okay as an attempt to get Sonic's speed to work n 3D, something they still haven't managed 19 years and countless 3d games later.
It's absolutely bad now, I have no real desire to go back to it…. But it was totally servicable at the time. And it was a sonic racing game where the characters actually RAN, instead of driving cards or hoverboards for whatever reason. It was better than Sonic Drift, and infinitely better than Sonic Riders, but not as good as Sega All Stars Racing.
I'm really confused here, because you explicitly said "Sonic 3D Blast was the only game the Saturn had", but you're arguing as if I'm being pedantic. Your logic for them showing 3D Blast because it's "the only game the Saturn had" doesn't really work, because they do show Sonic R, which is also a Saturn game and also the only Saturn-exclusive Sonic game. And if you're going to put a label on "traditional", well, Sega doesn't exactly agree with you there, because they showed R in the trailer along with the main games. And you also contradict your own point earlier by saying it controlled just like a 3D Sonic game. Juuuuust saying, "Sonic is a good game" is incredibly debatable, and "3D Blast is the only game the Saturn had" is blatantly wrong in the context of the video. If anything makes sense, "Sonic R is the only game the Saturn had" is a perfectly good reason to include it in the video, but that's just me being pedantic.
Because it's simultaneously both. It's the only game related to Sonic they had at all that wasn't a genesis port, but it also wasn't really a Sonic game. It's what they had to display for an entire console generation, and it looked like a part of the 3D progression, so they had to show it. But they only showed it for like half a second. They're not showing Sonic Spinball, Mean Bean Machine, the Gamegear games, Chaotix, or Sonic Riders. They didn't even include Sonic CD in there and that's considered one of the greats!
It wasn't a historical document tribute trailer, it was just a quick visual of "Here's Sonic in gradually better 3D graphics! Now here's those gradually better graphics in reverse!" They used it because it looked like an early 3D game, same reason they used 3D Blast.
What the shit, what is with these line breaks
Forum's been messed up for weeks. You can get around it by hard coding in spaces or going to advanced edit options.