Shenmue Dojo

Riku Rose wrote: See this posted elsewhere and it made me laugh.

phpBB [video]

The footage here is my second play-through of the game with all moments where you can't control the character in 3D edited out. Specifically:
- menus/cut-scenes, of course
- classic sonic and 2D sections of the 3D characters
- long automated sequences (the train in that one avatar stage)
- the boss fights, while most are 3D, they are essentially padding and come out as tedious wait-fests.
- the slide, because fuck the slide

All that's left is about 15 minutes of 3D sonic(and avatar). And even then a-lot of this game-play is grinding on solo rails or just boosting straight with little challenge or player input required. And I didn't even take the fastest routes.

MiTT3NZ wrote: Voice overs were possible on the Mega Drive. And the SNES.

Mr. Frozen wrote: Yep, could even do fully voiced FMVs with the Sega CD, but that is cheating since the Sega CD added extra hardware to help with the processing of movies and audio. Sonic CD actually had some pretty nice videos, but they chose to make sonic a mute until sonic adventure.

OL wrote:^^I'm not sure having multiple characters and voice acting was all that impressive an achievement, when Playstation, Saturn, PC, and N64 games had already been doing that for years.

But yeah, until now I literally hadn't looked at anything for Sonic Forces aside from the announcement gameplay, but seeing that video above... yeah, that looks pretty poor. Literally a series of narrow corridors to press forward in and occasionally jump. That might have been vaguely fun as a Saturn game, but it looks a bit sleep-inducing now.

MiTT3NZ wrote:I think I get it now... other games are irrelevant. Other studios are irrelevant. Hell, the entire industry is irrelevant. Only Sonic and SEGA are, and therefore you've been reading every post out of context. See, to us all of that is relevant, so I see where we got our wires crossed.

Kintor wrote:You're still missing the point, Sonic Adventure and the power of the Dreamcast hardware is what allowed Sonic Team to finally integrate a higher level of storytelling into Sonic game. Trying isolate specific qualities like voice acting alone is far too reductionist, it's everything from the animation to the 3D landscapes that provide context to that voice acting for multiple characters. That in truth huge and epic stories, where Sonic spoke, have always been a part of the Sonic series. Sonic Adventure simply marks the point when modern technology caught up with what the cartoons and comics had been doing from the beginning.

Kintor wrote:As for Sonic Forces, you shouldn't pay much attention to such poorly made videos. There are plenty of branching paths and exploration in Sonic Forces, especially when it comes to the later levels. Just take a look at the late game Null Space to consider when Sonic Forces can achieve with its more complex examples of level design:

Kintor wrote:You're still missing the point, Sonic Adventure and the power of the Dreamcast hardware is what allowed Sonic Team to finally integrate a higher level of storytelling into Sonic game. Trying isolate specific qualities like voice acting alone is far too reductionist, it's everything from the animation to the 3D landscapes that provide context to that voice acting for multiple characters.

Kintor wrote:People forget now but Sonic Adventure was a real technical showcase of what the Dreamcast could do, a complex multi-character voice acted story is an important technical achievement for Sonic Adventure and the Dreamcast.

OL wrote: I'm not missing the point of anything. You didn't say anything about graphics before. You literally just said:

...and nothing about any of that was an important technical achievement. You specifically pointed out a "multi-character voice acted story," and there's tons of that all over the Dreamcast and every console from the previous generation. Might have been new for the Sonic series itself, but saying they were important achievements for the Dreamcast is just false.

EDIT: Etc etc, the stuff Riku said.

Jesus.
You keep going into this stuff like you're having some grand debate, and no one else is debating properly to meet your standards. You're arguing points that no one was contesting to begin with, then putting words in others' mouths.
Case in point:

Kintor wrote:Of course you're missing the point; you keep trying to reduce this argument to semantics and looking to score points that way, while avoiding the truth of what I'm saying. If graphics didn't matter when it comes to storytelling you'd read a book, using your imagination to fill-in the gaps.

Kintor wrote:Also, I've noticed that you no longer want to talk about Sonic Forces itself, ever since I offered a great counter-example to that awful video you cited. By now you must concede how Null Space refutes the baseless rhetoric you've been using to attacking Sonic Forces with.

Another -->
Whatever I've said about Sonic Forces isn't baseless at all; it's based on the two gameplay videos I've seen of it.
You mention this "baseless rhetoric [I've] been using to attack Sonic Forces with" as if I'm on some kind of smear campaign, when almost literally all I've said is "now that I've seen videos, I'm not impressed."

You're trying way too hard to get some kind of victory out of this, when there's nothing to win. One more for the road:

OL wrote: When did I say a single thing about graphics not being important to storytelling?
You said that having voice-acted characters was a major achievement for the Dreamcast itself, and I disagreed on account of a multitude of games having done that previously. You made no mention of graphics in your statement, so obviously I wasn't talking about that.
I'm barely even arguing to begin with; I've just pointed out the holes in your posts, and you seem to take umbrage with that.

Another -->
Whatever I've said about Sonic Forces isn't baseless at all; it's based on the two gameplay videos I've seen of it.
You mention this "baseless rhetoric [I've] been using to attack Sonic Forces with" as if I'm on some kind of smear campaign, when almost literally all I've said is "now that I've seen videos, I'm not impressed."