#Sonic heroes beta theme full#

Things happen in Sonic Heroes, but it doesn't often relate to the player or stir any emotions - until you start falling off every other platform and dying, anyway.ДЄnd it's a striking thing for a game that tries to emphasise your options that each of these levels is an extremely linear, one-way trip from start to stop. There are mini-game type diversions from time to time, and obviously the whole thing is book-ended by cut sequences and boss encounters (which don't really stand up to Dr Robotnik's best work), but often the end of a level shows up abruptly and unexpectedly.

#Sonic heroes beta theme full#

Each of the game's 14 levels sends your trio of characters - picked from one of four 'Teams', of which Team Sonic is the one you'll recognise - on a long, looping and often poorly contained journey through an over-large platform world full of flames to dodge, platforms to jump, rails to grind, gaps to hover over, switches to throw and enemies to destroy, broken up by the occasional burst of speed along vast corridors or concrete roller-coasters. Unsurprisingly though, Heroes is more of a Sonic Adventure than a Sonic The Hedgehog.

Make the process of performing the basic individual actions enjoyable enough and give the player enough options to proceed, and you still have a Sonic game that plays to most of the series' strengths, even if it's clearly no longer the same thing. Given enough thought, it could have carried the atmosphere and speed of Sonic whilst also playing to each of the character's strengths, ditching by-the-numbers platform design in favour of vast, sprawling three-dimensional play areas that required steady hands and lateral thinking. Sonic Heroes attempts to take the best bits of past 3D games and combine them in one cohesive whole, with three characters under your control at all times - and that's actually not such a lamentable idea. In my head though, the real question Sega poses with every Sonic Adventure title and now with Sonic Heroes is, simply, would Tim have enjoyed it? What do you think?ДЇor Sonic Heroes, the answer is 'probably not'. I've even seen the odd attack on our spiky blue hero himself. Some would later argue that it was Sega's insistence on fleshing out the roles of the other characters at the expense of Sonic-centred gameplay that sent it off the tracks others argued that Sega never really (and still hasn't) got to grips with the mechanics of making a good 3D platformer whilst others still argued that the games were trying too hard to be familiar without actually analysing or emulating the ideas and functions that made the 16-bit originals so engaging. There were spin-offs, some good, some bad, and then the vaunted 3D games meant to bring the blue blur back into direct competition with Nintendo's Super Mario 64. With the advent of 3D consoles, however, Sonic lost a lot of his former brilliance. But the best thing about Sonic was that it had something for everyone, casual or hardware, and it was busy and exciting enough to steal your attention from the other side of the room.

Sonic made it harder to die than Mario, had short, manageable levels that were laden with bonus items and alternative routes, regularly diversified into silly mini-games (remember the coin-grabbing chaos sub-game?) and increasingly bizarre boss encounters, and could be played countless different ways. Looking back though, there were many reasons for it, but most of the Sega crowd just preferred the path of least resistance.

We regularly swapped sentiments along these lines.ДЄt the time, support on my side was very hard to come by, and I naturally assumed this was because everybody else 'had Sega', whereas I was busy poring over Secret of Mana, Zelda III, Donkey Kong and a growing stack of Super Plays all on my lonesome. I preferred the pixel perfect precision, momentary bursts of satisfaction and continually mounting tension of a traditional Mario adventure, whereas he enjoyed the speed, accessibility and replay value of the first two Sonic titles. We were mini-geeks of relatively few long or interesting words, but I can still remember the gist of his argument versus mine. He was actually younger than me, but we hung out a lot of the time because he had a Mega Drive and I had a SNES, and we enjoyed playing, comparing and, naturally, arguing about the relative merits of our favourite games - Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario World. When I was around five or six, I had a friend called Tim who lived just up the road from me.