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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY
They still have those little item boxes. They’re not hidden in trees this time, but it certainly tests your button reflexes when you come upon a jump and it suddenly starts flashing ‘O’! And then you get the power-ups that make the screen lag a little as it tries to keep up with your speed, and yay.
Some challenge is good, of course; I lost a few times to Knuckles, but it was fun, and only took one or two retries. But when it you fail five times in a row by half a second to Silver in the same damn race, I start to wonder if maybe Silver shouldn’t have been placed later in the game, when the player would have built up some ninja-skillz. Again, challenge is good, but you don’t put all your hard enemies at the beginning.
DESIGN
It’s a two-dimensional environment with three-dimensional graphics. Places have depth and camera angles move, but you can only go forward or back—much easier than trying to navigate a 3D space when the screen is flashing by. PSP graphics are quite pretty anyway, but it’s still rather exciting to see the original levels from the old Sega Genesis Sonic games done in glowing lights and flowing water.
Which brings me to another point; because Sonic Rivals is a redux of the Sonic line, it wouldn’t have been right if there hadn’t been some of the same details and levels carried over from the first games. I was happy to see the Falls Zone and Knuckles, even though I never really went for Shadow and this Silver character is just irritating me.
Such is the danger of introducing new characters to an old canon. Shadow is a bit iffy, but at least had some history on the Dreamcast; I don’t know where Silver came from, and the already shallow storyline doesn’t make his faked mysteriousness very entertaining in the least. And maybe I just missed something over the years, but wasn’t this ‘Dr. Eggman’ originally ‘Dr. Robotnik’? Why the change, Sega?
As much as I complain about some of the stylistic choices, Sonic Rivals still has that thing that makes racing games so much fun—the variability of outcomes and the speed with which you have to react. You’re actively involved and competing not just against the computer but also the clock, so it’s almost a personal insult to lose. It plays well to one’s sense of competition. (Now if I can just convince one of my sisters to get a PSP, we can take sibling rivalry to a whole new level above Duck Hunt.)
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