#honestly it feels like sa1 vs sadx to me

[semi-sketchy]

These are some old tweets, but I wanted to mirror them to Tumblr seeing as I'm mostly using this as my Sonic opinion dumping ground. I mostly wanted them here because to this day, I still haven't seen anyone mention some of the issues I ran into.

I posted the tweets in February, 2023, shortly after Colors Ultimate came to Steam, detailing some changes and issues I had.

---------------Thread 1---------------

Well I played Sonic Colors Ultimate now. Only for 15 minutes, but...man. All I can do is hope that some fans are able to salvage this if they even want to when an already good version exists.

The controls are an adjustment, but I'm thankful I can remap them. There's frame drops and frankly, I don't know why. It's installed on a gen 3 NVME SSD and only used about 40% of my GPU. There was no maxing of VRAM, my CPU was basically untouched, it just stuttered frequently.

There's literally less graphical settings in this than Frontiers. You get resolution and that's it. How can you do that on a modern PC game? Also yeah, the lighting and motion blur is so far out of control.

(Small update: I just found the option to turn off motion blur. It does exist. Why they put it in the "other" category when it belongs in "video" is beyond me.)

Even the textures themselves. I think the fan-made HD texture pack for Dolphin looks way better.

One more nitpick though. How and WHY can you wall jump off the sides of the results screen? This messes with breaking your rank so much?

Moral of this story: play the game on Dolphin using the HD texture pack for a better experience. I'm not upset that I bought it, I knew what I was getting into. "It's still Sonic Colors" is something we can agree to disagree on.

----------Thread 2-----------

While Colors Ultimate left a very negative first impression on me, I think I'm warming up to it some.

My biggest problem was the constant stuttering, but it hasn't happened in awhile which makes me think it was from compiling shaders.

My other biggest problem that I've somewhat adapted to is wall jumping on everything. They changed the amount of time you need to hug a wall in order to start sliding which caused a lot of muscle memory problems and even a few deaths, mostly at sections with the Cube Wisp. (I've had some time to think on this and maybe the physics change occurred due to doubling the framerate. Meaning if the wall sliding was tied to framerate, the time to activate it was cut in half.)

There's also some more subtle physics changes you might not have noticed, like it takes longer to do a 180 so you can't air boost in the opposite direction anymore and the Frenzy Wisp takes longer to turn around. This makes two red rings in Starlight more of a pain.

Another thing I noticed last night is the enemy AI appears to be affected. It was near impossible to get through some platforming sections because they never paused on their shooting in spots where they were only meant to fire 1-3 shots. That's minor though and only on two stages.

The lighting is still not great and the audio mixing definitely needs work, but I've gotten used to it.

I've only really ran into a few bugs, such as the title screen music not playing or the visual of a Wisp lingering, but they haven't really been a big deal.

I still don't care for any of the changes they made, but if it's your only way to play Sonic Colors...it works, I guess.

--------------------------

Just gonna throw a few more of my two-cents in since it's been awhile, there's been some changes and a few of the notorious bugs (such as Sonic staying in the air for the one Starlight stage intro) have been ironed out. The rest...I never checked.

I simply have not wanted to go through Ultimate again to see what's broken and what's not. Considering the amount of bugs, it's unlikely they were all fixed and even though the majority are solely graphical, I still recommend the original over this version. It is playable, I imagine someone who never tried the Wii version would think it's fine, but as a massive Colors fan who's been playing this game for a decade, the small physics changes are what makes Ultimate an inferior game.

And it's strange how I haven't seen anyone else bring that up.