And I’ve outlined pretty much all of them in this needlessly exhaustive video recap of the pros and cons of every Sonic developer ever:
This, of course, ties in with a feature that went live today to inaugurate the rad new layout for USgamer. Go check out the video and the website. Because they will make your life better.
Fun stuff! I enjoyed it, and dig the Sumo Digital love. Sumo gives Sega the kind of fandom celebration we haven’t seen since Fighters Megamix.
The video did have some rendering issues. I wasn’t super bothered, but I hope the video guys sort that out for you next time.
If you ask me, Dimps has been slipping for quite some time now. Sonic Advance to Sonic Rush Adventure were all great games, but their renditions of console Sonic games (Colors, Generations, Lost World) and the two Sonic 4 episodes were below mediocre.
I’d almost say that their 3DS version of Lost World ranks down there with some of the worst Sonic games ever made. Hopefully it’s kosher to link things, but here’s a review I wrote for it: http://www.tssznews.com/2013/11/18/review-sonic-lost-world-3ds/
Neat redesigns for both USgamer and GameSpite. I haven’t had the chance to check out the Sonic vid you posted, but quickly glancing at the article it seems you lumped Sonic Pocket Adventure with the Dimps! developed titles. This seems to be a common mistake for some reason. SPA was made at SNK a good year or so before Dimps! was even funded. Sure there’s staff overlap, but it seems strange to credit something to a company when the game predates the company itself.
I feel like it was someone, somewhere at Sega that linked Sonic Pocket Adventure to Dimps.
Good roundup. I mostly agree, except where DIMPS is concerned. At best they create decent reminders of the 16-bit era Sonics, but why bother with Sonic Advance when I can get a similar but more inspired experience out of, say, Sonic 3. And after that one, they kept making games that were essentially just about going right really fast and MAYBE not falling in a pitfall. It was a very gross oversimplification of how the old games work (open-ended levels, specific gimmicks in each zone. Where are they?).
Excellent video – as an Australian, the Master System was huge down here (we inhertied a lot of our gaming stuff from the UK/Europe since we also use PAL for our video standards) and I always wondered why Sonic 1 and 2/Chaos were very different. During a recent playthrough of Sonic 1 I noticed Yuzo Koshiro in the credits which explained the amazing audio, but didn’t realise it was Ancient that developed it. By extension, it was great to hear about the devs for the other 8-bit titles too, and I appreciated the attention given to Travellers Tales. While it may not seem so now, when Sonic R was released I remember a lot of discussion around the hardware trickery TT pulled off on the Saturn – 2D and 3D geometry alpha blending, reasonably strong framerate, quirky Richard Jacques OST, average (but enjoyable once you master the floaty mechanics) game.
Mind, I was a bit of a Saturn fanboy, so I’m still a bit biased!