#i played two sonic games this month

[ixcaliber]

April

This month I’m going to try not to lose my mind a little bit as I write this post. Fingers crossed.

1. The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog

The best kind of april fools joke is one where there is an actual thing of substance to it and it stands on its own as something that could just exist outside of the idea that it’s a funny april fools joke.

The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog is a free visual novel with platformer elements, and it’s a lot of fun. Even as someone who doesn’t know every sonic character, doesn’t get some little background references and cameos this is a fun game with a fun narrative and satisfying payoff.

The platformer elements are like abstractions, little tasks to be completed which if successful indicate the player character having successfully thought their way through to the conclusion of the argument they want to make. It’s a little abstracted but it works well enough in the game. Some of the later bits are actually quite tough but there are accessibility options for anyone who needs them.

Lot of fun. Absolute recommendation.

2. You Are Dough

A new tiny experience from npckc (a year of springs). Playable in browser. Good illustration of a concept. Exactly as long as it needs to be.

3. Gexfeld

A game about nothing.

It’s a game where you traverse awkward geography and listen to the same unfunny jokes again and again as you struggle with the awkward controls. It feels user hostile in a very intentional way and combines these two completely disparate elements in a way that works surprisingly well to showcase what feels like thinly veiled contempt of its source materials. Maybe I’m reading too much into a game about nothing but still.

4. I Want To Pursue The Mean Side Character

Very short and straightforward visual novel about girls being gay for each other. Character deisgn is cute. It’s a little too predictable and simplistic for it to really leave any lasting impression. But it I am always happy to see girls being gay and happy together.

5. Magic Mirror Hall

Short visual novel about seeing an established relationship from an outsider’s perspective. It was interesting to play through as the choices really did make me feel conflicted in how best to handle a situation I was only tangentially part of.

The game does a really good job at evoking the idea of a world with the little snippets that you learn about magic and how it relates to the psyche of an individual delivered in a naturalistic manner.

6. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

Playing this game for the first time was like the arrested development dead dove meme. I was excited to play it as I had fond memories of Assault on Dragon Keep (a Borderlands 2 DLC from which this is spun off) and it just never crossed my mind what a full game based on this concept would mean.

It feels weird to say it out loud but I think the thing that I like the most about Borderlands is the setting itself. And some of the characters also I guess. It’s not the gameplay, aesthetic, sense of humour or tone.

In this you’re playing a character playing a game of Bunkers and Badasses DMed by Tina and so instead of the borderlands worlds and their strange worlds and varied creatures you are exploring the wonderlands, a generic fantasy world with generic fantasy monsters.

It really was a case where if I’d thought about it I would have concluded that this would be what the game was but I hadn’t and so it felt a little disappointing, especially since your party for this game are two new characters who I never quite warmed to as much as you would hope given their prominence.

Frette and Valentine are supposed to be there to represent the extremes of ‘follow the rules of the game’ and ‘roleplay and do what you want’, but I never read them this way until they have an entire conversation where they explicitly state that that is their whole thing. I mean rule of comedy has them both ignoring the rules whenever they want. The vibe I initially had was that Valentine was supposed to be like the charisma character who attempts to befriend and seduce every character he meets and Frette was supposed to be playing a murderhobo.

And this reading isn’t supported by the game either but it makes more sense to me in theory at least. Then the conflict between them is more about connecting to the world and the people in it than whether or not a rule that we as the players don’t know anything about because it’s just a game mechanic - or not even a game mechanic it’s a narrative abstraction of a game mechanic - isn’t being followed.

Also the character customization kinda sucks and despite giving myself cat ears I still couldn’t really manage to make a character who looked appealing. Also I think having custom characters of set character classes is just a fundamentally worse way of doing it. It makes the character you play as feel completely hollow as they say the most generic quips.

I picked Sporemancer or whatever. I had a little mushroom buddy, which seemed cute when I was picking the class but when it got to playing the game I quickly realized that they not only weren’t cute their main thing would be farting to get enemy aggro and while useful it means that 90% of things my character said were reactions to my mushroom farting.

That said as I continued through the game there were a couple of areas (the beanstalked village, the empty ocean) that were actually pretty memorable and interesting to explore.

The thing that got me interested was how the villain of the setting The Dragon Lord always talked about Tina and seemed to bear a personal grudge against her and it got me thinking about Spec Ops The Line. Spec Ops The Line is the game I hold emblematic of the brief trend to make a game that makes you do a bunch of bad things and then calls you out for it and while I do like that specific game I did always used to think, ‘if we’re bad for playing it what does it say about the people making it’. 

There are some pretty good moments with The Dragon Lord, where he points out for example that you’re just a pawn in Tina’s game as well. Despite the conceit of the game (you’re the fatemaker the one person in the wonderlands with free will) you don’t actually have free will, you can’t reject the main story to kill the Dragon Lord you can only either do it or ignore it.

He mentions that you’re essentially interchangable, an unremarkable cipher just to play the role of hero so the other characters can exist and do things and brings up that nobody has ever said your name, and it’s true. I mean it’s partially true because you’re given a free prompt to enter whatever name you want (I chose Piss because I was annoyed at the time or something. Look sometimes I just do things and there are no reasons) but it does touch something true about the experience.

Of course we could never have Valentine advocating trying to talk things out, befriending or seducing people because as ever the only verb that Borderlands has is kill. It would be incongrous if he said anything that made you try to connect to the Wonderlands as a world because by the very mechanics of the game you never can and never will be able to do so.

The end was a let down. All this stuff about the nature of the game that I’ve been enjoying for the last few paragraphs, I think it got in the game on accident because they definitely don’t seem to want you to agree with the Dragon Knight. If I’d have been writing this game I would have done some absolutely wonderful bullshit at the end. It could have been so good. I’m seriously considering writing fanfic of it.

7. Sonic Frontiers

It would be difficult to make a sonic game worse than Sonic 06 but they certainly tried.

I wanted to like it and conceptually I don’t think it’s unsalvageable. But the problems are significant and numerous including the aesthetic, the jank, whether or not this is a 3d sonic game or a 2d sonic game in a trenchcoat, the basic act of navigation, sonic’s deathwish, the combat, the characterization and the fucking pinball.

Chapter One: The Aesthetic

Its awful. That’s it. That’s the end of this chapter. You all have eyes you can see for yourself how it clashes with Sonic, how it looks like the kind of premade assets you’d see in an asset store with a bunch of sonic objects just thrown in at random.

I still think it could have worked, with just some attempt at bridging the gap between Sonic and the world he is inhabiting. A more colourful world, even with the same exact scattershot design would look more coherant. I watched The French Dispatch this month and that’s a great movie, I didn’t think I’d be mentioning it in this post. But there’s a line from that, a quote from the editor of the magazine along the lines of ‘whatever you write make sure it looks like you did it on purpose’ and the aesthetic of Sonic Frontiers looks like an accident. Looks as though the designers spilled a huge box of sonic objects over a pubg map and called it a day.

Or alternately a more muted colour pallete for sonic when he’s in the open world areas. I really think that if he could just match the world he’s in it would feel substantially different.

Chapter Two: The Jank

It’s not as bad as Sonic 06. Which is like the lowest bar I could possibly imagine. I just wanted to say that quickly because like... this isn’t the worst of the problems with Sonic Frontiers. When I talk about the jank I’m talking about glitchy behaviour like when you run up the arm of one of the big enemies and half the time you get to land where you need to and half the time you just get launched off in some other direction. Or phasing through the flippers in the Fucking Pinball section.

It’s definitely there and definitely irritating, but it is one of the lesser problems of the game simply because if the game was running perfectly then none of this stuff would be happening. All of the rest of the problems are fully intended aspects of the game.

Chapter Three: Whether Or Not This Is A 3D Game Or A 2D Game In A Trenchcoat

In the game you have cyberspace levels which are essentially 2d levels that you access them from portals in the 3d world. You might think I’m about to make an argument that these are the real content of Sonic Frontiers but fuck that I hated playing those as well. No my argument is that the 3d is actually an enormous number of tiny 2d levels all jammed together.

I would have thought that the purpose of the numerous boost pads, bumpers and grind rails was to help you navigate around the world. To aid in faster movement between locations. In fact the purpose of these items is to briefly shove you into a 2d platforming sequence that can last maybe just a couple of seconds, maybe a couple of minutes. It doesn’t sound like a huge problem but like okay this is kind of trending into the navigation problem now so lets just start Chapter Four already

Chapter Four: The Basic Act of Navigation

Okay so the reason it’s a big problem is that whenever you want to get anywhere your options are to just run there in a straight line or try one of the speed boosty items around you and sometimes you’ll get lucky and you’ll do a fun little platforming section that also brings you closer to your destination. Most of the time you will do that platforming section and find yourself turned around and further away from where you wanted to go.

Or maybe you’ll notice partway through and want to quickly exit from this diversion and get back to what you were doing. That’s not always an option. If your up high in the air there might be safe gaps you can drop through, but this can also happen on just narrow strips of land which still exist in the open 3d world. It feels so silly when you’re standing in a wide open field but still diligently working along a single line of obstacles instead of just stepping to the side of them even though you should be able to.

The other major problem with navigation is that okay for example the plot needs you to now go and interact with a chaos emerald and it’s over here on the edge of like a peninsula so you work your way along the cliffs to reach it but when you get anywhere near it’s all cliffs too high to possibly go up or maybe the area you need to go to is just way up in the fucking sky. At that point you need to step back look at the exact spot you’re trying to go to and then follow back all the loops and rails and bumpers back to the one spot where you can go to to start the actual trek to the place you want to be. It’s just completely antithetical to open world design. It’s like why is this game open world in the first place anyway.

Chapter Five: Sonic’s Death Wish

This is how I’ve chosen to label the chapter where I talk about how Sonic controls. It’s so strange because like, his turning is somehow both too responsive and too sluggish. It’s most noticeable in the cyberspace levels. I think it’s that he has a surprisingly wide turning circle. He’s responsive at turning but even at walking speed he has to veer around in a wide arc it makes it a real pain if you’re trying to do anything precise.

Attempting to use the boost button in cyberspace levels is more or less a guarantee that Sonic will just shoot off into the void, but there are also places where it feels necessary, where you just need that extra distance that comes from mid-air boosting and the unpredictability of it is so frustrating.

Chapter Six: The Combat

The new combat sort of works sometimes but also doesn’t really work at all. In theory having enemies that take more than just a homing bounce or whatever it is called is a good idea, and the cyloop is an interesting way to add movement to combat. In practice fuck fighting any of these enemies.

Early on the second island I fought a group of about four of the most basic trivial enemies that kept shielding themselves and it’s not as though I was struggling but it felt fiddly and annoying. They made the combat more time consuming, more awkward, but not necessarily more engaging.

The game tries to give you all these skills to unlock to try to engage you with the combat mechanics. But like it’s just buttons to press to initiate a different animation while you’re doing homing bounce combos on an enemy. It even gives you a skill to automate that so you don’t even have to engage with these new skills. That’s how little faith it has in these things. Not to mention a couple of times where I would trigger one of them by accident while trying to evade a fight and then sonic would do this whole wind up and go flying at a enemy who always seemed to be in the middle of an attack animation when sonic got there and you lose so many rings when you get hit. Just an ungodly amount. You can hold up to 400 and that’s about 2 hits most of the time. The combat fucking sucks.

Which is to say nothing of the big titan fights. They have cool soundtracks but god the super sonic mode is almost worse than regular mode. Sonic can’t get hurt in this mode. All the enemies can do is knock you back, force you to watch a little animation of Sonic getting knocked away and then regaining his composure for a couple of seconds. The only thing they can do against you is waste your time. And thats exactly what the fights feel like, a complete waste of time. Sit there with the parry buttons held down until the enemies do an attack then button mash until it gets ready to attack again and do that over and over again and then add in some quicktime events and you’re done.

The second titan fight is when I think I went from thinking this was a bad game to thinking this was absolutely abysmal. Second titan fight has you climbing up a tower in the open world, jumping onto a magic ribbon that runs parralel to the titan, running along this to keep up for an inordinately long amount of time, until you can get to its head. Then you get the chaos emerald and enter the fight proper. You fly around after the thing, dodging missiles, parrying attacks and attacking when you can. Around and around this island and then when it was down to 25% health it did some kind of qte attack on me and I start button mashing the appropriate button just like in the last titan fight only to die instantly. This was a new type of qte the game hadn’t shown me before, introduced five minutes (i timed how long the fight took on my next attempt and five minutes is a conservative estimate) into this boss fight. And the kicker is that it puts you right back there at the beginning in the open world to do everything I just listed above again. 

Chapter Seven: The Characterization

Maybe I got spoiled by The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog. I didn’t like any of the characterization in this one. Every little conversation between Sonic and his friends felt weirdly stilted and unnatural. I wasn’t given any impression that these people willingly hang out with Sonic even once. And it’s kind of funny that like each of the first three islands is about giving one of Sonic’s friends a moment of reflection, to consider what they want to do with their lives and let them express their interiority, and each one of them expresses the desire to go and do something else away from Sonic. About the only plot beats I could actually agree with.

Which is to say nothing of Sage and Robotnik. Every time they had a cutscene it was essentially the same cutscene. Robotnik says ‘let me out of this accursed cyber dimension’ and Sage says ‘no it’s too dangerous but i won’t tell you what the dangerous thing actually is and you won’t even consider asking me about it’ and Robotnik says ‘nevermind that let me out of this accursed cyber dimension’. Repeat for most of the game. Except for that one cutscene where a bunch of helicopters attack Robotnik for some reason and Sage blows them all up really easily and nothing of any consequence actually happens why does this cutscene even exist.

The funniest part of this whole relationship is that Robotnik spends the entirety of the game not showing the slightest acknowledgement of Sage as a person, he talks to her like he’s talking to Amazon Alexa or whatever and then when she gets blown up in space he’s suddenly like ‘my dearest daughter i’m so incredibly sad about your death’.

And don’t get me wrong when I say these things are funny they’re not really actually funny in the moment. Everything is too slow and clumsy to land as a joke. The game never really becomes so bad that it’s good.

Like this isn’t a characterization point but I’m not going back and creating a new chapter now, but all that stuff I was saying earlier about getting stuck in a faux-2d level every time you hit a bumper or whatever. It’s a problem if you’re trying to navigate the world as quickly as possible, but hypothetically if you’re just running around for the fun of it or trying to collect the collectibles then surely having lots of platforming challenges to stumble into is good.

And I’m not going to argue that that isn’t good. Its just that as the game went on I started to notice more and more how long the game would go without needing any input from me, as it bounced sonic around and through loop de loops and all kinds of cool spectacle, i’d notice that I could take my hands off the controller for like ten/twenty seconds, sometimes more and it started to feel empty like I’d have more or less the same experience just watching the game autoplay through these segments.

I got to the point where everything about the game had worn out its welcome; the story, the combat, the platforming, the open world, the cyberspace worlds, basic navigation, just getting collectibles. Nothing felt good. Nothing was what I wanted. That’s when it was time to play the fucking pinball.

Chapter Eight: The Fucking Pinball

At the end of the third island right before the titan your last task is to play pinball and score five million points. Honestly I could make a number list of all the ways in which this pinball minigame is fucking abysmal but I’m going to try to restrain myself, which means making all the same complaints but without the extra bit of unnecessary structuring I suppose.

The score you need to hit is so fucking high. You very quickly notice you’re not wracking up points in the thousands. You need to hit the red coins that appear to get a x2 multiplier and then a x4 and so on up until you get a x255 multipler whereupon you’re actually getting some decent points. The multiplier will reset to zero if your ball... falls down the pinball hole. I don’t know the pinball terminology you know what I mean. The length of time you have to play this pinball minigame, which by the way is completely mandatory you cannot proceed with the game until you reach this absurdly high score in this stupid minigame, is just unconscionable.

It does not help matters that the board is so basic. There are just some bumpers up at the top, a pair of paddles and little bouncy things in most of the walls. No switches to flick on for combos. No little holes to go into. I don’t know pinball terminology but anyone who has played a decent pinball table knows you need more than this, especially if you’re going to be forcing people to spend like five to ten or longer minutes playing this horrible pinball.

It doesn’t help that when you do finally hit this high score the pinball continues and the game declines to give you any more instruction. At this point you need to hit the pinball to a small hole that has opened at the top of the board which is the real win condition. If you gutter at this point, or just quit out because you think you’re done, then it’s time to start the entire thing over again.

This was the breaking point where I decided this was one of the worst games I’d ever played. I made a post comparing it to We Happy Few, and yeah it has less abhorrent sexual abuse victim blaming than that game does but moment to moment I had less fun playing this. It was more difficult to get me to want to sit and play this video game than WHF. I hated this game. Good fucking god.

8. The Birdcage

A little puzzle game I played on my tablet. It consists of about 25 different little birdcages each one has a bunch of little mechanical puzzles to solve which will eventually grant you a key you use to open the cage and free the bird.

It feels reminscent of something like The Room, but in a much more simplified form. There was only one or two puzzles that were complicated enough that I had to stop and think and not just operate on first instinct. But its neat enough if you just enjoy the tactile feel of operating a machine, opening compartments and pulling levers etc. I feel like I’m damning this game with faint praise but I did enjoy my time with it.

9. Pizza Tower

Pizza Tower is an incredible indie platformer with an emphasis on speed and precision imputs. I’m sort of bad at both of those aspects but even so there’s still so much here to appreciate. For one thing the character designs and the animations are incredible in their expressiveness and exaggeration. There’s nothing I can say about that that can’t be better conveyed by just watching this man start running and build up to top speed.

The design of the levels is also really neat. Each level has a main phase and then at a certain point you will encounter a John Pillar (i still wonder if John Pillar is a pun or a joke i just don’t get somehow) you will have to break which starts the escape phase. Everything ramps up in intensity and a countdown timer starts ticking down. It’s such a good design, with enough leniency in timing to allow those who aren’t as good at the mechanics time enough to get to the exit, but those who have mastered Peppino’s robust controls to complete an entire second lap.

The variety present in the levels is really good. Each level has some kind of gimmick. Either some element not present in others, some transformation for Peppino or maybe the presence an ally such as Gustavo and his enormous rattie friend Brick, or Mort the Chicken from the video game of the same name. Every level feels fun and unique in some way.

The boss fights are mostly very fun. I kind of struggled the most with Pepperman (the first boss) because of the one phase where you have to hit him while he’s in the air and I never quite worked out the timing to do so with any regularity. Every boss in this game has at least one hidden health bar and this is probably the first game I’ve played where I don’t think of that as a negative.

The first phase of every boss fight is fairly simple and mostly there to acclimatize you to the mechanics of the fight before the second phase really goes wild with it. The fourth boss (who I will not name for spoilers) was the most enjoyable in the whole game for me. I realized with every new attack I was surviving to that I was laughing out loud as I dodged and weaved through this incredibly chaotic battle.

I had heard about how good a game Pizza Tower was and I had sort of held off on it because a lot of the discussion seemed to fixate around like the speed tech of the game and the mastery of the controls. And that’s not something I really find compelling. I’m super glad I gave it a chance though, as there’s a lot to love here that isn’t just in mastery of the systems. Fully expect this to be on my end of the year best games of the year list.

10. I Commissioned Some Bees 3

I played another one of these. As usual my only complaint is that the levels don’t feel arranged in order of increasing difficulty. In fact I got stuck and needed a hint for the last bees on the first three scenes and then had no problem at all locating them on all the rest of the scenes. Remains fun and chill with nice artwork.

11. Pixross

A little picross game I got from a bundle I think. It’s picross but by solving it you also create a little pixel art object or creature or something. My first issue is simple: there’s an animals category and it doesn’t have a foxie in it.

My second issue is less simple. I don’t have to explain picross do I? Well just in case it’s a grid you have numbers at the top and left of each of the rows and columns which tell you how many filled cells there are in each row/column, but more specifically they tell you how many filled cells in a row there are. Like 3,1,3 would be three cells in a line, then one cell on its own, then three cells all with at least one space between them. Yeah I know you’ve played picross before, sorry for overexplaining.

So as an example if I have a row labelled 1, 1, 3. And I have filled a single cell in the row. Lets say its dead in the middle. There’s enough space to the right that that cell could be the first one indicated by the label. If I were doing this manually I’d have to get more information before I could ascertain which of these blocks that cell belonged to. In pixross if a block is complete then it gets crossed off. So if this was one of the two solitary blocks that one would be crossed off automatically and I would be given more information that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to glean through just looking at the board.

It felt like cheating to use this aspect of the way the mechanics worked as a clue. I tried to avoid doing so for the most part, but you kind of can’t help but notice that and it colours how you would proceed even if you try to only proceed using logic that is apparent. 

12. Plastic Tape

A very short narrative game by npckc. I’ve mentioned them before. In fact I played a little game of theirs back up at the top of this post. This is one of my favourite of their little games. It’s about a series of phone calls across a number of years and it uses a really neat little framing device and it is playable in browser.

13. Aka

Aka is a cute game that deals with a surprisingly serious topic. It is about a red panda who returns home after war. Its main narrative isn’t immediately apparent, but is primarily about helping ghosts move on.

There are things to like about this one. The design of Aka is great, the design of the big capy is great. The world is pleasant to explore, the characters fun to meet and assist. In theory I like the main thrust of its narrative, though I think it has missteps in how it communicates and unlocks that narrative.

The main gameplay is all about gardening, collecting resources and crafting items, and that isn’t a gameplay style that personally resonates strongly with me. It also in my opinion doesn’t feel like it fits cohesively with what the game is and it quickly feels like you run out of crops to plant and objects to make. The game feels too short to really engage with these mechanics in any meaningful way, and there isn’t really enough things to make and plant to keep someone who was here for these mechanics engaged.

It also felt a little janky to me. Just something about the way it controlled that made it feel a little unpolished. And there were a couple of parts where the game offered me a minigame (the marble run minigame and one of the rhythm minigames) where it just didn’t load no matter what I did.

14. Riven: The Sequel To Myst

I have had a weird relationship with the Myst games. I have played all of them when I was too young to really even be able to solve the puzzles. I have a distinct memory of playing one of the later Myst games and all I was doing was looking up the answers in a walkthrough or hint book or something and then carrying them out. And I wasn’t even really following the story. I distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of ‘why am i playing this I’m not engaging with it on any level’ and giving up.

In 2021 I decided to replay Myst and had a great time (except for the fucking underground maze sequence). I remembered the shape of the island but not any puzzle solutions. I think I maybe also remember trying to fill a real life notebook with all the fireplace panel combinations. I hope that I didn’t actually do that and somebody stopped me.

Anyway so this month I saw the hbomberguy patreon video about Myst and my brain went, oh yeah Riven. I had about the same experience that I had with Myst where as I played it I began to remember the shape of the island but no concrete puzzle solutions. I remember being absolutely convinced that there was a secret area under the lake, under the big rock with the spyglass, that you just needed to find the right combination of levers in the control tower and then the submarine would go into there somehow. I mostly have memories of being stuck, wandering around the island trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing next.

The thing about Riven is its openness is its best feature and also its biggest problem. Like the first couple of hours is fun as you explore the various locations. It’s also a little annoying as each place that you come to you find yourself blocked somehow (a bridge that needs to be extended from the other side, a panel with buttons but no clues as to what to do with it, levers that control things on walkways you can’t reach, a number of eyes that clearly allude to something but what). Its like having a roll of sellotape and you just can’t find the edge to let you start peeling it away. And the most annoying thing about it is that the big puzzle here is you need to close a specific pair of doors behind you and finally you can actually make progress with the rest of the game. It was that simple.

The worst part is being stuck in that part of the game and you’re still learning about how the game works, how the machines you encounter work and what they do and sometimes you just don’t have enough information. If you see a puzzle its really hard to know if you have the knowledge you need and you just need to work out how to apply it or if you just need to close some more doors till you find the rest of the game.

Once you’re going though, the way the game gradually unfolds out and all of the things that you’ve been seeing throughout your playthrough finally become apparent. That’s great. Very few games made me feel as excited to solve a puzzle as when I first arrived at the plateau island and realized what I was looking at. I believe everyone hates the fire marble puzzle but I loved it. It turned the whole geography of the video game into an enormous multilayered puzzle.

Riven kind of is a masterpiece but I wish it was a smoother transition into the complicated puzzles. I will admit that the second time an important location was hidden behind an open door and I struggled and struggled to figure it out was on me though.

[ra-vio]

this blog is 11 years old now 🎉

I drew the siblings ever to celebrate as usual

[avoidmint]

I haven't played Forces yet but this is basically how it goes, right? I want him to bully me.

[discoreptile]

As of yet unnamed game card art!

[cdrspages]

from my clock app … yeah

[ya-know-nothing-yet]

"Did you think I’d easily forgive you after this was all said and done? You have hurt the ones I cared about most. And I cannot forget it."

[shima-draws]

Oh man Sonic Frontiers was so good. Especially with Eggman and Sage. Did you read the logs you get from fishing? Seeing him talk about Maria and come to see Sage as his daughter. Just so good.

YEAH YEAH YEAH I’ve been meaning to put together a post with all my thoughts since I finished the game two days ago but I just haven’t gotten the chance yet. But god. It’s SO good. I’m not a super big critic to begin with so I probably would have enjoyed it regardless but yes it was amazing

And yes I did get all the Egg Memos!!! I mentioned in an earlier post how emotional I got when Eggman mentioned Sage’s pronouns and how he should refer to her. And just the general change of Eggman’s feelings towards her over time…the further you get through the logs the more you can tell he’s getting attached and is starting to think of her as his daughter and I just 😭 UGH my kokoro

AND Eggman’s acknowledgment of Maria too—I never really thought about how he’d feel towards her but there’s definitely resentment there and he has every reason to feel that way honestly. I deadass forgot they were cousins until I heard that memo and I was like OH SHIT YEAH I guess they would be huh??

I loved all the little things they put into the game that reference other characters and past experiences they’ve had. Definitely makes it feel more connected to the series as a whole and shows that YEAH they’ve been through some shit together, the good AND the bad

[three-bunnies-in-a-trenchcoat]

PLAYSTATION 2? FUCK

[sleepy-crypt1d]

i love sonic adventure so much this game is so insane and makes no sense i adore it with my whole heart

[thankskenpenders]

Thoughts on two specific areas of the writing in Sonic X Shadow Generations

The best new 3D Sonic game in over a decade (or even two, depending on who you ask) dropped late last year. And I didn't write anything about it! Sometimes life happens. Well, I've finally sat down to finish Shadow Generations, and by now everyone has already been singing its praises for three months. This is the rare instance where the entire Sonic fandom, and even mainstream reviewers, are in agreement on something. The level design is the best it's been in a long, long time and the cool factor is off the charts, embracing Sonic's peak cringe era in an incredibly confident way. It's great. If you're even reading this post, you probably don't need me to tell you that. So I won't!

No, what I'm really interested in here is the writing. Because this is me we're talking about. But I actually don't want to talk about the main narrative of Shadow Generations, which is really solid little story about Black Doom trying to mold Shadow into his perfect soldier. No, I'd like to zero in on two other aspects of the writing here: the revisions made to Sonic Generations, and Gerald Robotnik's unlockable journal.

The updated Sonic Generations script

The new package mostly presents Sonic Generations how you remember it. There are some tweaks, but it's not a major overhaul. Graphically, I don't think the game has been touched much, if at all. I certainly can't notice any difference without a side-by-side comparison, despite playing it on a PS5. The most notable update is that the game's script has been rewritten by Ian Flynn.

Naturally, this caught my attention. Generations always had a nothingburger story, so with Ian rewriting Pontac and Graff's lame dialogue there was nowhere to go but up. (I don't like to pin the blame for those games' stories entirely on them, as a ton of it was dictated to them by Sonic Team, but, well, I don't think they're very good dialogue writers.) But it's less a complete rewrite and more like Ian was brought on as a script doctor for some minor touch ups here and there. Many lines of dialogue are completely identical to how they were originally written in 2011, and many others only have slight wording changes. Ian was clearly not allowed to request additional scenes or extend the ones that already existed. He has to match the original beat for beat so that they can reuse 99% of the cutscene animations. Don't expect it to be a whole new experience compared to the original.

Still, I think the new script is an improvement, albeit a minor one. Various things have been tweaked to maintain characterization consistency. Cream calls Sonic "Mr. Sonic" instead of just "Sonic." Instead of calling Sonic "buddy," Rouge uses the pet name "Blue," like she tends to do in things like the IDW comics. Espio doesn't have to remind you in the dialogue that he's a ninja, and he no longer has a line making it sound like he has some kind of soul reading power. I also like that Modern Sonic now actually has responses to what his friends say when he rescues them, rather than being silent like Classic Sonic. They won't blow you away, but they make Sonic feel a little more engaged with everything.

In general, the altered dialogue just seems tighter to me, and some of the more childish or trite wording of Pontac and Graff's script has been altered. Here, let's actually make a direct comparison, just because this stuff is interesting to me as a writer. Here's a couple lines from after the Egg Dragoon fight late in the game, in the original script:

Modern Eggman: Ooooh... I can't believe this! I was supposed to beat you this time. Modern Sonic: Aw, I'm sorry! I didn't get that memo. I beat you every time! [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat this guy every time. It's like it's our job or something!

This is a simple exchange. Eggman is mad that he lost. Sonic is unflappably confident because he always beats Eggman, and he explains this to his younger self. But the wording here isn't particularly good. Eggman's simple and direct wording makes him come off like a little kid who's mad because his older brother beat him at Mario Kart, rather than a mad scientist who just had his plans foiled. It's making light of the situation.

And I've never liked Sonic saying "It's like it's our job or something!" That doesn't feel like a thing Sonic would say, it feels like a thing an outside observer would say about Sonic. This is a frequent problem with so-called "MCU dialogue," where quips meant to echo the commentary of a casual, somewhat disinterested audience are inserted into the story itself so that the writers can be like "See? We get it. We're genre-savvy, too!" It also just reminds me of bad Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric lines like "Rings! It's like they're made for me!"

And then here's Ian's rewrite:

Modern Eggman: I recalibrated everything! This was supposed to be my time! Modern Sonic: Oh, please, keep dreamin', Egg-head. I beat you every time. [Turns to Classic Sonic] No, seriously, we beat him every time. Our score card's flawless.

Eggman's still mad about his defeat, but the line "I recalibrated everything!" makes it more specific. He put all this work into the engineering side of his latest scheme and got tunnel vision, thinking if he got his creations just right there'd be no way he could lose. "This was supposed to be my time!" also turns it into a time travel pun, which is a bonus. He's still pitching a fit over losing, but it feels more like Eggman pitching a fit, rather than sounding childish.

And then instead of saying that beating Eggman is "like his job or something," Sonic says he's got a flawless score card against Eggman. He doesn't take Eggman seriously as a threat—at least, not to his face. He acts like it's all a game. But he conveys this in a way that feels truer to the character, rather than feeling like the words of a real world observer poking fun at the tropes of the Sonic series.

Is this amazing, A+ dialogue that blows me away? No. Again, it's not a completely different scene from the one we already had. Ian had to fit the beats of what was already there. He couldn't go all out and write an all new story confirming his longstanding headcanon that the Time Eater is a remnant of Solaris or whatever. But the wording here makes the existing story land a little better and feel truer to the characters in subtle ways.

But to me, the main change is that the Sonics and Tailses seem to have a more solid understanding of what's going on with the timeline and the Time Eater, compared to how idiotic they sometimes seemed in the original game. Which is good! No more standing outside Green Hill and wondering why it seems so familiar. Thank god. As part of this, yes, there are a few more references to past games in the dialogue, like Sonic briefly being confused about the fact that they're time traveling without the Time Stones, or South Island and Westside Island being acknowledged as the normal locations of Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Yes, ha ha, insert joke about how Ian loves references here. Look, it's Sonic fucking Generations. It's a game built entirely out of nostalgic references. Just own it! And, again, in this instance Sonic and Tails come off as less stupid when they make it clear that they do, in fact, remember their adventures from presumably less than a year ago in-universe.

Eggman, too, seems to have a better understanding of the powers he's toying with. Where in the original vesion his focus was simply on going back in time to undo his previous defeats and he seemed kind of oblivious to how much the Time Eater was actually fucking up the universe, here Eggman says he wants to use the Time Eater to give himself complete control over the entire timeline. Eggman also makes way fewer references to his own failures and shortcomings. Of course he won't admit that Sonic has defeated him time and time again. To him, he's never truly lost—Sonic just keeps delaying the inevitable total victory for the Eggman Empire.

So, yes. The new Sonic Generations script is better. It won't blow anyone away, but it's better than it was. It's been elevated from "kinda lame" to "fine." No, if you really wanna see Ian flex his ability to breathe new life into old Sonic stories, look no further than...

Gerald Robotnik's Journal

Hoo boy.

The story of what happened aboard the ARK has always been... a bit confusing, to say the least. Fans with encyclopedic knowledge of the script for every route of Shadow '05 may disagree, but it's the truth. We've had all the pieces to understand the story for a long time now, but that info was given to us out of order by a pair of unreliable narrators—Gerald, who became a vengeful lunatic shortly before his death, and Shadow, who was subjected to multiple rounds of amnesia and altered memories. Some of the ambiguity left by Sonic Adventure 2 was cleared up in Shadow '05, but that game also retconned in a bunch of new elements to Shadow's backstory (aliens!) that lead to further confusion. Not to mention the fact that that game had multiple routes and only revealed the truth about Shadow if you sat on the ultimate final boss battle for WAY longer than the fight would normally last. Or the fact that Sonic X made its own tweaks in its telling of the story. Or the fact that none of these things ever had the best English translations. I can't blame anyone who hasn't played those games in two decades for not remembering the truth about these characters and getting some details mixed up.

What we needed was something to piece together all of the info we have into one coherent backstory, told in chronological order. And thanks to Shadow Generations, we have that, in the form of an official journal tying together what we knew from Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow '05, and Sonic Battle into the tragic tale of Gerald's rise and fall.

Ian Flynn was the perfect man for the job here as the guy who started his career by tidying up the mess that was the first 159 issues if Archie Sonic. This is what he excels at: taking disparate bits of weird Sonic lore from multiple different sources, boiling them down to their most interesting elements, and connecting it together in a way that will make the audience see the dramatic potential he's always known was there. Rather than feeling like a cynical exercise in franchise building, going back and explaining things that never needed explaining so that people can add more bullet points to the wiki, he puts a new spin on things that retroactively enriches those past stories. The story here means something to the characters involved and gives us a better understanding of them as people, rather than as plot devices to motivate Shadow.

(And, of course, Ian didn't do this journal alone. He wrote the story, but I also have to give a huge shout out to Evan Stanley, who made the final product. All of her handwritten journal entries, sketches, and "photos" included throughout. The physical damage done to the journal over the course of 50 tumultuous years, passing from Gerald to Eggman to a certain special someone at GUN. The way Gerald's handwriting gets less and less legible as his mental state declines. So much love was put into what could have been a mere text dump in a menu, and it really elevates it to the next level. Congrats on officially getting hired by Sega, Evan, you've sure as hell earned it!)

The main idea the journal conveys is that Gerald was under a lot of pressure from a lot of different parties—GUN, the President, his colleagues aboard the ARK, Black Doom, even his own family—and boy did it get to him. The known incidents aboard the ARK mentioned in previous games are put together here to form a story where everything slowly spirals out of control as Gerald keeps compromising his morals to further his research, thinking he'll eventually find some way out of all this because he's a genius. I won't recap that whole story here (if you haven't already played the game and read the journal entries, I would highly recommend at least reading it on the Sonic wiki), but I'd like to highlight my favorite elements of the story, as Ian tells it here.

1) The Eclipse Cannon

Here's something that never quite made sense in Sonic Adventure 2: why does the ARK have a laser that can blow up the Earth built into it? It was supposed to be a peaceful research colony. Sure, Gerald went crazy and swore revenge on the Earth, but, like... when did he have an opportunity to go back up to the ARK and modify it? Did he have someone else do it? How? The ARK was raided by GUN and shut down! And then they arrested him, held him in prison for an unclear period of time, and executed him by firing squad when he was no longer useful! It doesn't add up. Shadow 'the Hedgehog '05 would give its own answer by introducing the Black Arms and saying that the Eclipse Cannon was always supposed to be a secret trump card against the Black Comet. But, like... we know that's kind of a bullshit answer, right? You don't need enough power to blow up a whole planet just to destroy a comet.

Well, the new journal retains what we already knew, but it paints a much more complete picture.

See, long before Gerald ever made a Faustian bargain with Black Doom, he had already made one with an even greater evil: the military. GUN gave Gerald much of the funding for the ARK, Gerald's personal utopian research station in space, but it didn't take long for GUN to start pressuring him to design them weapons. Gerald tried to get GUN off his back by personally contacting the President of the United Federation, and the President gave him an alternative: how about, instead, you just use your genius brain to figure out the secret to immortality for us, so our soldiers can be immortal? Gerald was initially sickened by the notion and found it completely absurd, like chasing a shadow... but given no other option, the sarcastically named Project Shadow soon began in earnest. (Maria would later put a more positive spin on the name after Shadow's awakening, pointing out that a Shadow can show us the direction of the light, like she says in the game itself.)

Of course, this search for the ultimate life form didn't go very well, and without any results on that front GUN kept hounding him for weapons. Gerald would throw them a bone here and there to get them off his back. His research on Chaos resulted in the Artifical Chaos prototypes, which he worried would be used for warfare but could at least theoretically be used for search and rescue missions in floods, in his mind. But that wasn't enough. So he gave them Chaos Drives to power their mechs. And that still wasn't enough. He's got Emerl. He'll give them Emerl. They're not impressed by Emerl. They'll shut the whole ARK down if Gerald doesn't give them something big.

Fine! GUN wants something big? Gerald builds a huge fucking laser cannon into the ARK. However, as a middle finger to GUN, Gerald makes it so powerful that it would destroy the Earth if it was ever fired at any target on its surface. In other words, GUN now has their ultimate weapon of mass destruction, fulfilling his contract, but they can never actually use it. Oh, the delicious irony. (And also Shadow will blow up the Black Comet with it in 50 years yada yada yada.) Is this perhaps extremely shortsighted and naive of Gerald, to believe that such a weapon would never actually be used just because of the risk? Of course. But hey, that's Gerald for you. And I love this as an answer.

(Also, this, uh, kinda echoes something from real life! Remember the bit in Oppenheimer where he says all nuclear war will become unthinkable, and Edward Teller responds "until somebody builds a bigger bomb"? Yeah, Teller went on to conceptualize a superweapon codenamed Project Sundial that would have been able to kill all life on the planet, as the ultimate deterrent for war. This was never made for obvious reasons, but hey, there's a basis for this sort of thinking outside of heightened sci-fi! There's a whole Kurzgesagt video about this if you're interested.)

2) The Biolizard

The Biolizard is, of course, brought up as the initial failed prototype of the ultimate life form, from before Gerald met Black Doom. We don't really learn all that much about it that we didn't already know, but I just love the way it's framed in the story.

As you can see above, we actually get to see a picture of Maria holding up the cute little salamander that would end up mutating into the Biolizard through Gerald's experiments. (Researchers want to figure out how to replicate salamanders' regenerative abilities for humans in real life, too, so this was a natural starting point for the project.) And then, after it grows to a monstrous size and goes out of control, Gerald has to lock it away in an unused sector of the ARK. He needs to keep the poor thing alive for his research into harnessing Chaos Energy, building life support systems directly into it, but he doesn't have the heart to tell Maria what happened. So it just becomes this first dark secret weighing on his conscience. The Biolizard becomes Gerald's Tell-Tale Heart beating beneath the floorboards of the ARK. I love that.

3) Lost Impact was the breaking point for the ARK

Remember the level Lost Impact in Shadow '05? The flashback level on the hero path where Shadow is running around fighting Artificial Chaos enemies on the ARK 50 years ago? Yeah, that wasn't just a random incident. That was important, as we now know due to its placement on the timeline.

See, Emerl's rampage aboard the ARK that was chronicled in Sonic Battle and Dark Beginnings set off a domino effect. Emerl riled up the Artificial Chaos, causing Gerald to lose control of them. They became violent, and so Shadow had to stop them, as depicted in Lost Impact. The thing is, that incident sent an SOS signal to GUN telling them that shit was going down on the ARK. Gerald didsn't fully understand the trouble he was in and assumed that he'd simply be reprimanded by the higher ups, or maybe face legal action. But, well... the next time he heard from GUN, armed troopers were raiding the ARK.

So Lost Impact was the straw that broke the camel's back. I just really like that detail.

4) Maria

And, of course, there's Maria herself. Maria has often been more of a symbol than a character, this perfect embodiment of everything that's good and pure in this world who gets killed to motivate Shadow and Gerald's revenge plots. But I really like the wrinkles this journal adds to her and Gerald's story, and their relationship. This is the most fleshed out they've ever felt.

For one, the journal leans into the idea of Maria's intellectual potential. The rest of the Robotnik family is all geniuses, after all, and she was proving to be a really bright kid. She excelled in her studies on the ARK, and she even helped design Shadow's jet skates and inhibitor rings. When Maria died, the world didn't just lose a symbolic personification of purity. She genuinely could have been a hugely influential scientist who did so much good for the world. That's what Gerald wanted for her. But we'll never know, because GUN killed her.

Speaking of her family, their presence isn't just mentioned for the sake of fleshing out the Robotnik family tree. It's mentioned that as Gerald struggled to find a cure for Maria's illness through his genetic research, he faced mounting pressure from his family. They didn't want Maria to be up on the ARK forever. They wanted Gerald to hurry up and find a damn cure, or otherwise just send her back home to Earth so she could be with her family again. She'd been up on the ARK for so long that Gerald's coworkers started thinking that she had been born up there. Eventually she gains a baby sister on Earth who she's never met. A rift forms between Gerald's two sons, and he's unable to really deal with it because he's so consumed by his work. There's this sense that the family is falling apart, and that everyone is dreading the possibility that Gerald will never find a cure and that Maria will just spend her final years up in space and die far away from her family, because Gerald just couldn't let go. If that happens, it'll break the whole family. But he can't stop now. So he just keeps working. Curing Maria is the only way to win his family back, in his eyes. It can't all be for nothing.

But my favorite detail regarding Maria is this one paragraph:

Maria is growing into a lovely young woman. It breaks my heart that someone as bright and energetic as her is diminished by disease. There are no visible effects, and I've caught my fellow researchers muttering to each other, doubting her illness. It is infuriating. I find all my reason and restraint vanishes when she's slighted.

This is SUCH a great addition to the story! It's always been true that Maria doesn't really seem all that ill, just looking at her in cutscenes. With this one little comment, Ian flips that issue on its head and turns it into a story about invisible disability. She doesn't act like she's in chronic pain, so she must not be, everyone thinks. And this really, really gets to Gerald, as does the pressure from his family. He's dedicating his whole LIFE to saving her, and they think she's faking it?! It's such a small addition, never referenced elsewhere in the journal, but it adds so much flavor to the story, as does the implied family drama. It grounds Gerald and Maria and makes them feel more like real human beings, rather than being pure archetypes. It's just enough info to let my imagination run wild filling in the blanks.

You also get the feeling that Maria being such a walking ray of sunshine was the only real source of joy Gerald had left in his life before Shadow was awakened, and the only thing keeping him from snapping under pressure sooner. All this stuff just keeps piling on, everything's spiraling out of control, but at least Maria is keeping her chin up, right? It makes so much sense that losing her would make him go off the deep end when it's framed like this.

It's just... man, I never thought I'd care so much about Gerald and Maria. But that's the Ian Flynn touch. After years of less than stellar Sonic writing that seemed to be embarrassed of itself, I'm so happy to have new games coming out that fully embrace the history of the series like this, making its world feel so rich and real instead of just serving as an excuse for a string of platforming levels. I don't even like Shadow '05, but I'll be damned if Ian and the rest of Sonic Team didn't make something amazing by "yes, and"-ing Shadow's cringe past here. Sonic has truly reached levels of "we're so back" never thought possible.

[nigtmarcz]

⎯⎯ bf!hamzah headcanons

— whenever hamzah plays a game with voice chat, he’ll make you wear his headset and talk into the mic as if you’re playing, just to troll the randoms (and also to show off how good he is at the game)

— if hamzah was streaming on twitch, he'd try to pull you into the frame to show you off, even if you didn’t want to show your face right after waking up

— if hamzah’s tired from editing videos, he’ll beg you to finish it for him. you always say no, so he ends up doing it himself anyway, muttering, "just say you hate me…"

— he’d always refer to you as "mom" or "mama" whenever talking to red and blue

— would send you instagram reels, and you’d hear him laughing from the other room.

"you know you can just show me in person, right?"

— before hamzah would put on his glasses, he’d always make you wear them first and admire how cute you looked in them, even though you had perfect eyesight

— every month, you two would create a new Spotify collab playlist and try to make them have a similar vibe

"okay, why did it transition from bladee to lily chou-chou?"

— you two would definitely have matching discord profile pictures, but not the typical anime couple ones—more like sonic the hedgehog and mario kissing

— he’s not really into pda, but if you were hanging out with friends and everyone stepped out of the room, he’d start hugging you, clinging onto you, and kissing your face everywhere. but if someone walked in, he’d quickly pull away acting all suspicious and shy

— before going to bed, he’d purposely pull all the blankets away and hog them for himself, leading to you two playfully fighting in bed

— his tiktok drafts are filled with you two doing couple trends or dances. you’d usually film them after getting high, then spend hours re-watching them and laughing your ass off

— if he was busy for the day, he'd text you every time he was doing something

"filming right now!"

"gonna get some food you want anything babe?"

"taking a massive shit rn.."

— you trained him to be the perfect photographer for you. even though him recording himself is his job, this man still has no clue how to take pictures for anyone else

— when you guys go shopping, hamzah actually pays attention and helps you pick things out

"do you think this top is cute babe?"

"ehh.. i like this one better."

— he’d always put you onto new music and give you the artist's backstory, sharing all the little details about them

— if either blue or red was laying on your lap, hamzah would playfully snatch them away from you

"don't touch my kid"

"you mean OUR kid??"

— he would always mention you during the podcast but in the most out of pocket way.

"yeah y/n loves to smell my farts. that's what i think true love is."

"dude? what are you saying?"

[couch-house]

If you've been following me for a while you already know I'm going to tell you to vote for @themetalvirus's Egghog AU in @sonic-au-collision. You know I love drawing those funny little guys. But I think it might be a good idea to actually get into why I find them so compelling! I think any good AU is in conversation with canon,and egghogs is a certified Yapper.

Let's start with our hero, Amy!

Our canon Amy can be characterized by her deep compassion and optimism. As well as how Sonic has inspired her hero crush and motivated her to go out and put that compassion to work herself!* Egghog Amy has that same compassion, but what if she had no choice in being the hero? She had no one to look up to and inspire her, just the crushing weight of necessity. An Amy put in canon Sonic's position, who relies on unceasing and perhaps inappropriate optimism, but is still worn down by the weight of the world. I like this take on her, an exploration of where "toxic positivity" can get you.

*I think the classic IDW Amy characterization is a good example of this. As well as Fleetway Amys origin story heehee

Despite the stress of it all, she still has the optimism to see the best in people and believe they can change for the better. Like, for example, her crush: Egghog Sonic.

Just like canon Sonic, Eggy is a headstrong hedgehog defined by his own moral compass and his need to have a pretty good time. But while canon Sonic is defined by his love of freedom, independence, and by his "coolness," Egghog Sonic has been raised in Eggman's trap of control. He's just as headstrong, but in the opposite direction. His adoptive family is just as important to him as canon Sonic's friends, but in opposition to the good of the world. Where canon Sonic is personally reckless to protect others, Eggy is careless with the safety of others in service to his and his family's needs. Canon Sonic is capricious and relaxed, even in the face of danger, while Eggy is restrained, emotionally stunted, and stressed at all times.

Personally, I think that Egghog Sonic's fighting style being based in ballet--associated with control, restraint, and exclusivity by wealth--opposed to canon Sonic's fighting evoking breakdancing--a sport associated with creativity, play, and its origins as an urban art--does a great job on its own of juxtaposing the two Sonics.

But as I mentioned, even with his morals and freedom in opposition to canon, Egghog Sonic still has that essential connection to the people he cares about: his close-knit (read: highly controlled) family.

Egghog Sonic's younger brother Silver has all of canon Silver's accidental dickishness and ruthlessness, but without the humbling experience of surviving in a ruined future to keep him in check. Born and raised with a silver (ha) spoon in his mouth, Eggy Silver would be killed instantly by canon Silver's upbringing. All his worst qualities have been encouraged (as opposed to canon silver facing consequences for and learning from his flaws) and Eggy Silver is a huge fucking bitch. You know when Silver mugged Tails in Rivals? Okay now imagine if he was raised to do that as a child soldier. Now imagine he gets anything he wants whenever he asks. Thats Egghog Silver. When Silver defects from the Eggpire, we see that appreciation for the world and its history grow back where it belongs. It gives a better appreciation to what motivates canon Silver's view of the world, and recreates it in a new way.

Also the irony of Mr. I Must Fight For The Future's fucked up AU version of himself being part of the cause of the ruined future.... its delicious.

Finally, the oldest brother (by like a couple months...). We all know canon Shadow's had a rough time of it RE: mind control, manipulation, having a whole game where he is asked to be everyones gofer... This is Egghog Shadow's life for a full 15 years. Gerald doesn't finish cooking Egghog, and Eggman is the one to dump him out of the tube and raise him to be the perfect chaos-weilding soldier. He makes liberal use of his ability to physically manipulate Shadow's artificial mind to keep him in line as an endlessly obedient servant. Of course, any Shadow meaningfully based in canon won't stay that way. Just as his canon counterpart breaks free from the demands of those around him to forge his own path, so does Eggy Shadow. Even in the fucking miseries, even without a Maria, Shadow is still will make the choice to walk his own path.

Well, not just his own path. Because while Shadow (esp post-06 Shadow) can be uncompromisingly independent at times, he is still often defined by his friendships. Specifically, his relationship to Rouge is given focus in this AU, being his one reprieve from the empire and ultimately his way out. Canon Shadow had Rouge and Omega by his side during some of his darkest moments and arguably that made all the difference to his arc. Their presence (yes, Omega is here too) during Eggy Shadow's suffering is all the more essential and highlights their roles in canon.

But of course, with greater miseries comes greater struggle to heal. Canon Shadow's neat freak nature gets reinterpreted as a trauma response--maladaptive perfectionism and OCD. (tbc, in the same way fan works often recognize that canon Shadow likely lives with PTSD as a result of his experiences, Egghog Shadow's OCD is presented as an appropriate consequence of the stressful environment he's been raised in.) I like this as an exploration of how Shadow handles stress and trauma, how it might change in different circumstances.

All that to say, Egghog AU is just done in such a compelling way that really grabs me and facilitates Rambling about The Parallels and such. And that I think makes for a GREAT AU. The exploration of Sonic's strong personal morals and headstrong...ness, the benefits and flaws of Amy's intense optimism and compassion, Silver's ruthlessness and meaner side, and Shadow's tendency to introspection and overcorrection... Again I say, a good AU is one that is in conversation with canon, and Egghogs is constantly talking about the fascinating conflicts created by these characters. And thats why you should vote #Egghogs4Eggver

[shadowxamyweek]

Where Does the Headcanon That Silver Is Shadow and Amy’s Kid Come From?

Much like Shadow calling Amy, 'Rose,' Silver being Shadow and Amy's kid is everywhere. If nothing else, he's often relegated to a distant descendant. When did we all agree though that this was just kinda a thing? To answer that, we're going to have to back up to Dragon Ball.

Sega has never hidden its love of Dragon Ball. Much of what is now Sonic Canon just started out as Sega artists and game designers delighting in some of the cool stuff Dragon Ball does, including but not limited to how the 7 chaos emeralds parallel the 7 dragon balls, and how Sonic's super form mirrors Goku's. This is important to keep in mind because there's another set of parallels that are being drawn when the, 'Silver is Shadow and Amy's kid,' headcanon comes into play. In Dragon Ball, there's an villain turned anti-hero/secondary protagonist called Vegeta and a very bubbly, very domineering woman named Bulma. The two get together and have a kid, named Trunks. Trunks ends up time traveling, specifically going back in time to prevent certain tragedies from happening. Aaaaand then once again, in Sonic, we have Shadow, being a villain turned anti-hero/secondary protagonist, and Amy, being a bubbly and domineering girl. We've also got Silver, who ends up time traveling, specifically going back in time to prevent certain tragedies from happening. *gestures loosely* People on Sega's payroll have noticed the parallels and commented on them as well. In 2008, on his Bumble King website, Ian Flynn answered some fan questions about the subject:

Later, in 2023, Flynn and his cohost Crouse over on the @bumblekast answered a question about this again:

(It's at 1:26:13, just in case I messed up the link) ---- TRANSCRIPT Crouse: Right, here's another question. This one is from ChaosSonic1. "This might kill this headcanon for others, but it always bugs me: people constantly consider Shadow and Amy as Silver's parents but that would be impossible due to two things. One, Shadow was in prison for 200 years. Thoughts?" ...That's only one thing but okay. [Laughter] Flynn: It is something that's come up because there were a lot of weird parallels, number one that silver was, you know, decidedly based on Trunks and I think it's quite obvious that Shadow is the kind of Vegeta of this group. It makes Amy default to the Bulma, which isn't really solid. I mean, if anything, Tails is the Bulma of the group, but you know there are no solid one to ones throughout the whole thing. You started trying to get too specific with it and falls apart. There was other stuff like-... something in Sonic and the Black Knight-... Amy was Nimune and Shadow was Lancelot and Silver was-... Galahad... Point being, within Autherial 1:27:40 within Arthurian, lore Silver's character was the child of Shadow and Amy's characters, which kind of made everyone go, 'beg pardon?' (Brief pause, this is slightly incorrect. Nimune is both the singular and plural name for water nymphs, one, or all of which, raised Lancelot. Galahad is *only* Lance's child. Again, like Dragon Ball, not a one to one, but enough to cock an eyebrow.) Flynn: There's also like the kind of vague mysticism around Amy and the fact that Silver can do Chaos Control so it's like, did he inherit Shadow's Chaos Control and his psychic powers from Amy? And it's all like extremely loose vague breadcrumbs that don't really so much make a line as they just are kind of scattered in the water for the ducks to eat so no, it doesn't really make any sense because like you said, in that timeline, Shadow was sealed away for like the duration and it's still 200 years. I don't think Amy was, you know, secretly carrying Shadow's love baby that long. That doesn't add up...- I mean, who knows. I mean, if that is your headcanon, if that's your ship, if that's how you want to connect the dots, go nuts. I'm not going to shoot it down.

Crouse: But there's also the whole thing, like time travel is a thing.

Flynn: Yeah.

Crouse: A lot of other things are things that could happen, like- [Laugh].

Flynn: And Amy's associated with Little Planet a lot, I get it, you can- you could put the pieces together that way if you wanted. I just don't think that's what Sega's doing with it.

Crouse: Well, no, but you know, who cares what Sega's doing except you I guess. You have to. Flynn: I do. It's part of my job.

Crouse: You have to care, but the rest of us now, we don't have to. Screw whatever Sega's doing, we can do whatever we want. My headcanon.

---- (This evidence I have to thank @shadamyheadcanons for. I remembered reading this ages ago, but couldn't remember *where*. She also provided the Bumblekast interview. ) I'm also going to point out, as many have before, that Sonic plays loose and fast with what Chaos Energy/Magic/Science/Whatever can and cannot do, including but not limited to time stuff as evidence in Sonic 06, where Silver debuted. I've also talked before that just because we see a future based off of the current events and trajectory of those events in 06, that does not mean that said-future is set in stone, and may very well change if the characters themselves make different decisions.

And that's *only* arguments for the headcanon that Silver is, in fact, their child. That doesn't include just how much more liberty there is in the headcanon that Silver is some distant relative, who's bloodline is intrinsically tied to Shadow and Amy. So yeah! That's where the headcanon comes from! It's moments like these that I can appreciate the lack of details in Sonic. That's not a thing I say very often, but in situations like these, it really allows for an open imagination of the different parts and pieces, and how they all fit together. Sonic is fun like that, and I love it for this reason <3

[avoidmint]

Hey all, just wanted to apologize for the lack of new posts since returning. I've had some pretty serious burnout lately due to health issues leaving me pretty exhausted, physically and mentally. It's taken a bit of a toll on my creative output as I've been struggling to find inspiration and energy to do much of anything.

I'm still trying to work on getting at least something here and there that I can post, but it'll probably be pretty limited for a while until we figure out what's going on. And admittedly most of the time I have spent drawing lately has been of OCs, and I don't generally post OC art. <<;

Anyways, just wanted to explain that I haven't fallen off the planet or anything yet, just having a bit of a hard time right now. Sorry for the lack of content!

[jamiepaige]

Constant Companions Closeup #1: DYAD

(also on spotify!)

Hello everyone!! It's been a couple weeks and change since Constant Companions, my newest album, was released unto the world, and I've been genuinely blown away by the response. Genuinely, thank you to everyone who's been streaming, commenting, making mashups, changing their pfps and usernames - it means the world to me!

I wanted to give some of that love back with something people have been asking me a lot about - and, admittedly, something I love doing. Song explanations! Deep dives! Dropping the lore! Welcome... to the Constant Companions Closeups...

For the next eleven days, I'll be going into each track one by one and babbling about the process, inspiration, details, feelings, and thoughts behind each one! We're getting sappy. We're bearing our hearts. We're telling unfunny jokes. And we're starting with track one - DYAD (featuring unit.0)!

---

Naturally, since this is the first track, it also serves as a great point to talk about my intention with this album as a whole!

I'll elaborate more on this with future tracks, but to me, there are really two main things that define the sonic progression of this album versus my previous work - guitars and vocal synths. Obviously, these things have been present in my work since I first started calling myself Jamie Paige, but Constant Companions is intended to be my overwrought, sappy confession of love to these two things that time and time again have made me simply want to make music. I love rock and I love Hatsune Miku dammit!!!

I had originally written this song in February of 2023 for a game-jam-esque online festival hosted by my friend Loni called HAPPY PARTY TRI, and at that time, I had found myself at a major crossroads. I had put out People Posture Play Pretend and :women_wrestling: the previous year, and while the response was nice, I was feeling listless and lost.

I love singing. I like my voice well enough. I certainly love writing music with lyrics!! But... there was something uniquely electrifying about using vocal synths. Amidst a lot of insecurity and emotional turmoil surrounding the process of making art and putting myself out into the world, it was one of the few things that just made everything feel right. Suddenly, I was making the same kind of music that had touched my heart so many times over.

Would it alienate people, though? Would I lose longtime listeners? Yes, that weighed on my mind more than I'd like to admit, but even more than that... I was worried I'd lose some part of myself, as silly as it sounds. Maybe what I thought was a bridge would become a barrier, and the messages I wanted to send across the gap would never find their way.

Ultimately, I felt that Dyad was the only kind of opener I could've possibly given this album, and a perfect fit for the album's motif. A dialogue between myself, stricken with loneliness and a lack of inertia running in circles, and that synthesized voice (ANRI Arcane my darling), grabbing the outstretched hand and asking a question I already know the answer to -

"Baby, do you know what you wanna hear?"

Yes, it's a love song, but it's not just for a person - it's a love song for the creative impulse, and for the places I wanted it to take me.

im resisting the urge to be jokingly dismissive of myself to diffuse tension but i still need to signal that the emotionally bare part of this is over so pretend im doing a funny little dance Anyways let's talk more technical stuff

---

Like many of my songs, Dyad came together from a patchwork of different snippets and ideas I had laying around. The back half of the chorus - "dream together, we can dream together" - originally came from this idea I had jotted down something like 9 months prior, but ended up being a perfect fit for Dyad in basically every way. The verse snippet that I'd written to go with it got reused for a later song on Constant Companions as well! (I say without naming it, as if it isn't literally lifted wholesale from this demo and thus incredibly obvious)

I wasn't originally planning on brazenly quoting the bridge of a Tally Hall song when I set out to write this song, but while toying around with a bridge idea involving a shortened version of the pre-chorus melody, I realized I had inadvertently copied it anyways. I was going to scrap it... but at the request of my dear friend and certified Tally Hall lover Marcy Nabors, I made it an explicit reference. Which I'm fine with, personally! The first CD I ever owned was a copy of Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum my sister bought me all the way back in 2006 - You can pry that sentimental attachment from my cold, dead hands, TikTok kiddies.

Lastly - not really behind the scenes so much as just a shoutout - thank you to unit.0 for the lovely lead guitar work on this song!! He's been a beloved collaborator of mine for many, many years now, and one of the people who ultimately convinced me this direction was the right one to go in, so it means a lot to share this song with him. Go listen to his music!!! Now!!!!!!

That's about it for this song! Not to sound like a fucking YouTuber, but genuinely, if there are any details you'd like to hear more about, let me know and I might made a bonus post at the end of all this. Otherwise, thank you for listening! Tomorrow: Not Quite There, featuring telebasher!

❤️💚

[theguywithaplan]

List of Games Turning Twenty (20) Years Old in 2025

Advance Wars: Dual Strike

Advent Rising (they started planning the trilogy before the first game was out lmao)

Age of Empires III

Animal Crossing: Wild World (the DS one)

Arc the Lad: End of Darkness

Area 51 (the FPS that was low-key kinda creepy)

Banjo Pilot (the Banjo-Kazooie racing game on GBA).

Battalion Wars (the spin-off of Advance Wars).

Battlefield 2

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood (yep, they released two mainline games in one year).

Burnout Revenge (this cleared Burnout 3, and I will fight you on that).

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Call of Duty 2

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (go play the Castlevania Dominus collection. It has this game and a few others and it's GREAT).

Castlevania: Curse of Darkness

Civilization IV

Cold Fear (answering the age old question: what if Resident Evil 4 was on a boat and not as good?)

Condemned: Criminal Origins (a launch title for the Xbox 360 and a pretty solid horror game).

Conker: Live & Reloaded (maybe a controversial opinion, but this is WAY better than the original).

Crash Tag Team Racing

Dead or Alive 4 (aka, the one with not Master Chief in it).

Destroy All Humans!

Devil Kings (all the sequels would be under it's non-translated title: Sengoku Basara).

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (let's rock, baybeeeeee)

Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat

Dragon Ball Z: Sagas (I saw a stream of this game a few months back, and oh my god, this looks so shitty/funny).

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

Dynasty Warriors 5 (who's excited for Origins???)

Far Cry Instincts (a console version of the PC exclusive original game)

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented

F.E.A.R. (if you haven't played this before, change that. it's fantastic)

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (the one with Ike the Bisexual in it).

Forza Motorsport (the very first one).

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

Geist (the rare M-rated Nintendo game).

The Getaway: Black Monday

God of War (the very first one).

Gran Turismo 4 (one of the few PS2 games that could be played in HD, along with... Jackass: The Game...)

Guild Wars

Guitar Hero (the very first one).

Haunting Ground (a very rare PS2 horror game from Capcom).

Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer (since the second movie came out, this game is now considered non-canon).

Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit (the second game from known hack/fraud David Cage).

Jade Empire (the last game that BioWare made before they got acquired by EA).

Jak X: Combat Racing

Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death (there was a for real-ass Judge Dredd game on the GameCube).

Kameo: Elements of Power (another Xbox 360 launch title, this one made by a post-acquisition Rare. It's pretty fun).

Killer7 (from the greatest to ever do it, Suda51)

Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (you guys think it's based on the movie or what...?)

Kirby: Canvas Curse (a really fun DS game that only used the stylus)

Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament (i think klonoa would get along really well with sonic)

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (the one where Link gets really small)

Lego Star Wars: The Video Game

Lunar: Dragon Song (one of the worst RPGs I've ever played. Don't play it).

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (the one with the Baby Mario Bros.)

Mario Kart DS (the first one with online play).

Mario Party Advance

Mario Party 7 (my personal favorite)

Mario Superstar Baseball (we didn't get a Mario Baseball game on the Switch. Because they're saving it for the Switch 2).

Mario Tennis: Power Tour (so many Mario games...)

Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

The Matrix Online (an official continuation from the movies)

The Matrix: Path of Neo

Medal of Honor: European Assault

MediEvil: Resurrection

Mega Man Battle Network 5 (the only one in the series to have a DS version)

Mega Man Zero 4

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction

Metal Gear Acid (a launch title for the PSP, and a card game set in the Metal Gear universe. It works better than you might think).

Meteos (a puzzle game made by Masahiro Sakurai, the Smash Bros. guy)

Metroid Prime Pinball

Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks

Myst V: End of Ages (the final Myst game)

Need for Speed: Most Wanted (did you know that this game outsold the entire Halo series?)

Neopets: The Darkest Faerie (is Neopets still a thing?)

Nicktoons Unite! (a crossover between Spongebob, Fairly Oddparents, Jimmy Neutron, and Danny Phantom).

The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge (an honest to god sequel to the movie that plays like Devil May Cry).

Ninja Gaiden Black

Nintendogs

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

Pac-Man World 3

Perfect Dark Zero (yet another Xbox 360 launch title, also made by Rare, and a sequel to one of the best FPS games ever made. It was fine).

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (it had been out in Japan for a few years, but us Yankees got this four years after it came out).

Pokemon Dash (a Pokemon racing game. It was not very good).

Pokemon Emerald Version (I sunk like 500 hours into this game).

Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness (a sequel to Pokemon Colosseum where you could capture other people's Pokemon).

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

Psychonauts

The Punisher

Quake 4

Ratchet: Deadlocked

Resident Evil 4

Serious Sam 2

Shadow of the Colossus (one of the best games ever made. Play it if you haven't yet).

Shadow the Hedgehog (pretty good to be a sonic fan right now).

Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (parts 1 and 2).

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves

Sonic Rush

SoulCalibur III (RIP, SoulCalibur. Tekken is just too powerful.)

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (RIP, Splinter Cell. Ubisoft just sucks too much to make you anymore).

Spyro: Shadow Legacy

Star Fox Assault

Star Wars: Republic Commando

Star Wars: Battlefront II (this game's story mode is permanently etched into my brain).

Stubbs the Zombie in "Rebel Without a Pulse" (presenting it to you with no context. Look it up. It's hilarious).

Super Mario Strikers

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe

Tak: The Great Juju Challenge

Tekken 5

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (RIP, TimeSplitters. Embracer Group killed you before you could come back).

Trace Memory (got remade in 2024 as Another Code)

Twisted Metal: Head-On (another PSP launch title)

Ultimate Spider-Man (you could play as Venom in this one)

WarioWare: Touched!

WarioWare: Twisted!

We Love Katamari

Wild Arms: Alter Code F (a remake of the first game)

Xenosaga Episode II

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse