The Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Web site has updated with some hot new assets for its first level, Splash Hill Zone. Eight new screenshots, as well as the first music track, have been revealed. Hooray!
The new screens show off a few new items of note. His homing attack, a shield, and a checkpoint have all been unveiled, as well as a familiar feature to old school players -- Sonic swinging from vines to reach higher places. As with everything we've seen of Sonic 4 so far, it seems pretty damn funky.
Love the music as well. That's exactly the kind of tune I want in a Sonic game!
[Thanks, TimmiT]
LAUNCH GALLERY (8 IMAGES)
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
5:00 PM on 03.18.2010
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I would assume that's the crosshairs for the homing attack.
I have it on good authority that it'll only be 400 points.
4/10.
Go away and take your heavy metal and rap with you.
All God could Sonic 4 be...good?
*dies of happiness*
so one dude says he doesn't like the music and you decide to dis Heavy Metal AND Rap? How the hell did you even get there?
VGFreak1225: Why do you believe it will be 400ms points?
Phoenix Gamma: Now now, lets not make a river of tears over that little event.
Maybe I'll grow on me
Seriously though, this might actually be good!
Also, I think there are far too many trees in Sonic 4. I can't stand all this chlorophyll in my Sonic!!!! This is Sonic the Hedgehog after all, not bloody Treehugger the Nature-Koala.
BTW, does the music remind anyone else of the options screen in Sonic 2?
Well, it's too late to complain now, but the graphics look nice as is.
But the music :/
Come on, when you go back and listen to Green Hill Zone, Emerald Hill Zone, and Angel Island Zone, all those tracks were original and catchy. This new thing sounds like it should be the menu music, it's so sappy, ugh. And what's with the heavy synths!? Just because you layer up the synths doesn't mean you've got a nostalgic song. They screwed up on that... hoping they get the other levels right.
Yeah, I agree that they are pretty linear for the most part, but don't mention multiple game paths to Sega. Remember Shadow the Hedgehog?
Yeah. THAT.
And if the music wasn't made with a synthesizer, it would sound like Donkey Kong Country too.
Now Donkey Kong Country 2 is way up in my top ten best games ever, but why is Sonic being broken into episodes and digitally distributed? Downloadable implies a game that I wouldn't be willing to buy at retail for retail prices, but enjoy coming back to once in a while, usually a very short game. Episodic implies a game too long to distribute all at once; a T.V. series will sell a season because one episode isn't long enough to be worth packaging, but a season as a whole delivers 12 hours of entertainment, much longer than a movie. Digital and episodic is usually a series that's season is the length of a full movie.
So the new Sonic is too short on it's own for people to buy it at retail (shorting than New Super Mario Bros. Wii, for a good comparison of a similar game), but the thing as a whole will be a full game. A webseries, so to speak.
Sega and Sonic team must have a really low opinion of 2D Sonic platformers if they think the best way to distribute them is via webseries. 2D Sonic was a true blockbuster, the only franchise that ever stood up to a 2D Mario game. Now, imagine taking New Super Mario Bros. Wii, splitting it up into 4 parts, and selling only Worlds 1 and 2 during the Holiday season. I doubt it would have been a big deal. Even Half Life, which is the best that has ever been done in something close to this kind of method, is not a Sonic the Hedgehog big series. And Valve is the master of digital distribution.
Whatever Sega is doing to Sonic right now might be worse than the gimmicks. The 3D games were at least high budget, but the average downloadable game can't stand up to the average DS game, let alone a full console release. And history slaughters the average downloadable title; Virtual Console proves that. If Sonic the hedgehog is going to look like Donkey Kong Country and return to the 2D roots, it should try to be as big a deal as Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was. But it is impossible to get consumers as excited about a quarter of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 as a complete game.
What I want is a Sonic game out this Christmas that reminds me of the old Sonic v. Mario rivalry, that make me put down my copy of Super Mario Bros. wii and fall in love with the blue blur as much as Mario, what I'm getting is a quarter of a game that makes the same claims as Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, that most annoyingly of all, can never become a collectable and can never be displayed on my mantel.
And the worst part is that they did this before when they made Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. They claimed that Sonic would be as big as it's old days, showed us amazing graphics, but gave us the worst blot in the history of Sonic. Now Sega is doing it again, using the medium with the lowest rate of quality (digital-only), but instead of making a full game, this time they are selling part of it that will add up to the price of a full game, on the assumption that we'll take it to mean that the whole is at Sonic the Hedgehog 3 quality.
I'm not going to be fooled again, and I'd have to be insane to fall for the same trick twice when the first time I fell for it was so incredibly, infamously well known.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVEyGntyOZQ&feature=related
:-)
Point is, fool me once with Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), shame on you.
Fool me twice, while using the historically lowest budget and quality platform (console digital, even lower quality and budgets than the DS), while telling me that your only selling me a quarter of said game, and I would have to be an idiot of the highest order to fall for it.
Either beat the past, or get out. And so far, I think only Nintendo has shown the capability to compete with it's own past. Sega is especially historically terrible; between setting, gameplay, and quality it can be said without exageration that Sega shows the least faithfulness to Sonic's roots than any other company to any other franchise in all of gaming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRuJfhEeCe8&feature=related
HA HA HA I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE LOLLLLLLL
Does your dog tell you to kill? Because I'm pretty sure you're an Objectivist conspiracy-soaked loony who's going to get out of his parents' basement juuuuust long enough to pull your dick out of your tightie-whities and rub it on appalled nuns before you try to rape them. I say "try" because your pale, diseased member will fail you at that point, and then you'll be arrested and taken to a nice place where the nice people can give you the pretty pills for your condition.
That's just my opinion, of course. :P
XOXO,
Ffordesoon
@Wanderinpixel: I just finished listening to some of the Yoshi's Island soundtrack and I still don't like this new music. :|
@Everyone else: I'm not really a very big fan of the music either; it has the retro sound down, but it's really not all that catchy and sounds like there's a lot of unnecessary background to it that takes away from the whole minimalist attitude of old game music that makes it really appealing.
SEGA DID EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED BUT NOW I HAVE NOTHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT SO ILL COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS AND BUY SONIC 1 WHICH IS STILL A SONIC GAME AND STILL GIVES SEGA MONEY BUT I DONT CARE BECAUSE I AM A STUPID DOUCHENOZZLE AND SONIC RUSH BECAUSE HIS LEGS AND MUSICKY BAWWWWWWWW
There, I summarized your dumbass argument for you, haters. Now you don't have to post! We both win! :D
Why are you such a downer? Don't complicate things and have a little blind faith. Ignorance is bliss and all that jazz.
Pretend all that other junk never happened and be excited with the rest of us.