Do you want to win a free Gameboy Color, Gameboy/Gameboy Color game, and a Pikachu figure form the 1990’s?
OF COURSE YOU FLIPPIN’ DO.
We did it! We finally hit 1,000 views on systemshuffle.com! As a thank you to everyone for the constant support, I’m doing a giveaway!
On October 19th, 2013, I’ll be randomly drawing a winner who will receive these prizes: A turquoise Gameboy Color, A Pikachu figure from the 1990’s, and a mystery Gameboy/Gameboy Color game!
Click here to learn how to enter!
At the end of the year 2003, Sega released a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog game for GameCube, Playstation 2, Xbox and PC. Japan got the first taste of this newly released game on December 30, 2003 while America was given the game on January 5th, 2004. Europe then received the game a month and a day later, and while everyone was excited to play Sonic Heroes, little did the world know how much a mess this new game would be.
I remember it being sort of a rainy day outside when my little brother Miles and I went to Gamestop to pick up the new Sonic game, and while at the time I didn’t think anything of the weather, I now think the world was trying to tell me something. My brother and I would always look at the manual and case of any new game we bought, so I recall looking at the back of the Sonic Heroes case and thinking how awesome this game was going to be. “They brought back old characters from Sonic Adventure and the Chaotix team?! You can play as 3 at a time?! New levels, new music, I can’t wait to get home! Maybe this game will have a Chao Garden!!” (Needless to say, I was very disappointed when I discovered that there was no Chao Garden.) I don’t remember much about when I played Sonic Heroes as a kid though. In fact, all I remember is getting really angry (which is strange, since I’m not an angry gamer). So recently, almost 10 years after Sonic Heroes came out, I was talking with my boyfriend Mark about how much he and other players hated Sonic Heroes. I didn’t understand why, and it bugged me that I couldn’t say if I hated Sonic Heroes or loved it. Not knowing bothered me so much that I picked it up for this weeks review.
There are 4 different teams to play as, meaning that there are 4 different storylines to play through. Each team consists of 3 characters, each having their own special trait. One character will have a flying trait that allows them to fly to high places and shoot down flying enemies. Another character will have the running trait, so when they’re selected your team moves much quicker. (WARNING: When going through loops and different parts of levels with the speed trait, be careful! The game can be very glitchy at times, and will send you right through the stage if you’re going too fast or if you move your joystick the wrong way.) The final trait is the power trait that allows the 3rd team mate to smash through obstacles along the way. The power trait is very over-powered (no pun intended), since the character with this trait can kill enemies much faster and easier than the flying and speed character.
I decided to start with the Sonic team, since it’s first in line. The storyline takes place a few months after the Sonic Adventure 2: battle plot, where we find Sonic running through a canyon of some sort. His best friends, Tails and Knuckles, fly down next to him in Tails’ plane to give him urgent news: Robotnick, their worst enemy, has returned! Robotnick sent Sonic and his friends a letter explaining that he has finally created the ultimate weapon, and that in 3 days, he will take over the world and he invited Sonic and his friends to try and stop him. After reading the letter, Sonic gets excited and goes “Sounds like an invitation!” Wait, hold on, pause. I don’t know about you guys, but if I had a device that I was completely sure could destroy the world, I wouldn’t invite the one guy who has foiled ALL of my past attempts at ruling the world to try and stop me, since odds are that HE’S GOING TO STOP ME.
While you can switch between characters at any second, you can only be one character at a time. Each different character also has their over team fighting stance. For example, when you play as the speed traited character, your other two team mates will follow directly behind you. If you’re the power traited character, each teammate will stand on either side of you, and when you’re the flying traited character your teammates hold onto you from below you. These different stances can make it easier for you to get rings throughout the game.
In Sonic Heroes, there were a lot of moments where fighting enemy robots could get very overwhelming, especially since the game can sometimes flood the screen with them. The solution to this problem was to level up your characters to fill up your team blast bar. “How do I level up my character to raise my team blast bar?” When you kill bad guys (or occasionally when you go through a checkpoint), colored orbs will be dropped for your characters. These orbs raise your characters level, making them more powerful while raising your team blast bar. Each character has a special colored orb: Speed has a blue orb, flying has a yellow, and power has a red colored orb. Once your team blast bar is full, you can press the Z button to use a special move the destroys all enemies near you. Note: Some of the levels in Sonic Heroes are very long (10-15 minutes depending on how fast you go), so I suggest that if you want to just get through the level as fast as possible, don’t kill enemies unless you absolutely have to. (There will be plenty of areas that won’t let you through without killing some robots blocking your path.) You’ll still get plenty of orbs along the way to use the team blast move, so don’t worry about that. If you’re going for a good grade on the level, good luck to you. There’s a time bonus at the end of the level that helps a lot, but if you’re sticking around killing robots for points, it’s going to slow you down by quite a bit.
Now I do have some little, nit-picky things to complain about with this game. For starters, the controls are extremely slippery in this game. There are lots of moments in the game where it wants you to come to a sudden stop, but since you can’t just stop on a dime, you end up slamming into a wall and sliding around until your characters decide to finally stop. Also, unlike other Sonic games, enemies need to be hit multiple times before dying. They have a health bar, and can take up to 3-4 hits to finally destroy. This can prove to be rather obnoxious. My final complaint is the fact that the voice acting is just flat out awful. I know a lot of people complained that Sonic Team got new voice actors for Sonic, Tails, and others, but that’s not where my problem stands. It’s not that I’m not used to the new voices, it’s the fact that the new voices are wheezy, nasally and sound like they’re 4th graders having to read out loud in english class. Knuckles sounds like he’s screaming the word “Sh*t!” when he punches enemies, and when Tails flies he shouts “WHEE”, making him sound like he’s going to lose his voice from yelling. It stresses me out.
Overall, this isn’t a bad game, but it’s definitely not a game I would want to voluntarily play again. While the gameplay itself isn’t the greatest, the soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks from any Sonic game. I can now understand why my brother and I would get so angry over this game, especially after all the countless times we’ve fallen through stages due to a glitch, or have gotten killed due to cheap hits that the enemies got off on us. The storyline is nothing special, and is in fact extremely predictable. (Hmm, I wonder if the guy who get’s defeated in every Sonic game got defeated this time! Probably.) Sonic Heroes is available for less than $10 on Amazon for Gamecube, but unless you’re a Sonic fan who hasn’t played this, I wouldn’t buy it if I were you. Try it out at a buddies, or watch gameplay of it. Don’t put yourself through the amount of frustration this game creates.
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Sonic Shuffle was released by Sonic Team and Hudson Games in Japan and America in 2000. It was Sega’s first party game, and they released the game on the Dreamcast. I’ve had a few people recognize this game when I mention it, but it’s never because it’s a good game. At first, the idea of a Sonic party game sounded like the greatest game I’ve ever heard of, but after playing one game of it, I have nothing really good to say. So, prepare yourself.
The game starts with a clean cinematic explaining that these gems called Precious Stones have been scattered, and shortly after the Goddess of the Precious Stones vanishes. It’s up to Sonic and his friends to collect the stones before the enemy of the game, Void, does first. The collecting of the Precious Stones has it’s own little twist on things. Instead of choosing how many turns there will be in a full game, you pick how many Precious Stones someone has to collect to win. For example, you can make it so the first player to collect 2 stones wins.
Before we start, though, let’s go through the menu. You have Story (single player mode), Versus (multiplayer mode), Tutorial (god knows you’ll need it), the Sonic Room (the room that shows your unlockables you can buy with rings you get by winning in multiplayer or single player), and File Select (if you want to change to a finds file or a more completed file you may have.) Since party games are nothing without a party, I made a party of two and asked a family member to help me out and play with me. We opened Versus mode and got started right away with choosing our options for our game setup. First is character select, where I chose Tails and my Mom chose Amy. Next, stage select. The stages you can choose from are Emerald Coast, Fire Bird, Nature Zone, Riot Train and Fourth Dimension Space. In this game, we went with Fourth Dimension Space since it sounded the coolest to the both of us. After you pick your stage, you decide on how many Precious Stones a player must collect in order to win. Wanting this to be a shorter game (and thank god we did), we made the requirement 2 Precious Stones. The map spaces are pretty straightforward to understand:
So before you begin playing, the turn order is determined by a mini game. The one who wins gets to go first, and whoever was closest to 2nd, 3rd and 4th follow behind. Once everyone gets their place in the game, it’s the first persons turn to move. Instead of rolling a dice or spinning a wheel to determine how many spaced you move, each player gets their own row of numbered cards. You get to choose how many spaces you move. You can pick a number already shown in your own deck, or you can steals another player’s card without knowing the number it gives you. This gives you a chance to take their higher cards, but also gives the risk of picking a lower card. Minigames continue throughout the game after the 4 players have taken their turns on the board, and the types of games that can occur are 1 vs. 3, 4-player, 2-vs.-2, 1-vs.-3, & Duel (2 players go head-to-head while the other 2 try and distract them with no consequence or real place in the game).
This is where the biggest problem with this game spawns. If everything sounded fine and dandy up to this point, imagine this added onto it: The computers cheat to the point that unless you know the game as well as they do, you’re highly likely to lose. The computers know every card, every minigame by heart and how to win them, move much quicker than you do, and have memorized every map. The map doesn’t have an overview option, so your best bet is to memorize the map as quick as you can, or follow the computers. The games dialog for the story, events, and duel games runs automatically and continues too quickly to even read properly. These may not sound as bad as it may be, but it’s like putting a professional soccer player against a guy who’s never played soccer before and barely knows the rules. So unless you practice this game over, and over, and over again until you know the game just as well as the game knows itself, this isn’t the best game to play with your friends who have never even heard of Sonic Shuffle.
Overall, if you have Mario Party, Monopoly, or any other game to your disposal, play those instead when you have a group of friends over. If you’re by yourself and have the patience to learn this game to the extreme toughness that it is, then go ahead and play the story mode. Just don’t beat the crap out of yourself if you lose a lot in the beginning. The AI in this game is flat out unfair, and I would highly recommend going through the tutorial before you do anything else. If you wait until in-game to ask for the map to be explained, I kid you not, it will only explain ONE of the spaces on the board, nothing else (at least that’s how it is on the Fourth Dimension Space map). The last thing I have to say about this game; Sonic, slow the hell down.
By the way guys, I’m still out of town! I made sure this published today so you guys would have something to read while I’m away! See you next week!
I was sitting at breakfast thinking about what people may guess what my favorite type of game is. I wondered “Would they guess party games, or maybe shooters? RPGs or MMOs?” The funny thing is, none of those are right, even though I do love a few of those types of games. No, my favorite type of games are 2D Platformers.
For those of you that don’t know, a platformer is a game where your characters goal is to jumps from to and from platforms and over obstacles until you reach the end of the level. Simple, right? The only camera direction is horizontal, making the game play different for those who are used to seeing through the eyes or directly in front of their avatar. Some platformers are simple in design, while others can be a bit more challenging with more gaps to fall in or more enemies around to kill you. Others get even more complex, making you back track or defeat bosses on the way. The reason I love platformers so much is because of their flow. If you time your jumps right throughout the levels, you don’t really ever have to stop moving. This makes you feel better about landing your jumps, jumping on enemies and killing them while still moving along the path. It keeps the level going smoothly and and makes you feel good about keeping “in beat” with the level.
Some 2D platformers I’d recommend:
The Castlevania Series
Kid Icarus
Klonoa
Cave Story
Metroid
The Kirby Series
The Mega Man Series
Sonic the Hedgehog
Yoshi’s Story
Rayman
Here’s a list of other platformer titles you may wanna check out as well!
So I was reading on IGN, GoNintendo and other forums when I stumbled across a recent rumor. Apparently, people are predicting a new Sonic Adventure game for the Wii, Wii U and/or 3DS by the end of the year. The first two Sonic Adventure games were successful but I just don’t see how they can come up with a new story line continuing off of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, since they already kinda did so by making Shadow the Hedgehog and we all know how that went. Terribly. Then comes the question on what on earth they’re going to do with the Chao Garden since both Sonic Adventure games had them. What more could they add? I’d love to see new gardens, animals, evolution’s and such for the Chaos, but I hope they don’t go too outside of how the Chaos already are I also read that they want to go back to what the first Sonic Adventure game did, by giving you different Sonic characters to play with their own story lines I would adore this, but it seems like all the newer Sonic characters don’t have nearly enough depth to have their own stories, since they barley have stories in games they star in. It’d be nice for Sega to bring back older characters like Bean & Mighty since those characters have been so packed up and hidden away for so long most of you may have no idea who I’m talking about. Then it makes me wonder how they’d fit all of this on a 3DS without ruining the game itself. I mean, the first Sonic Adventure games were large with variety that they set a pretty high bar for the 3rd game. How could it compete on a smaller device when it should be a huge release?
Then again, every site I’ve gone to about the rumors just leads me onto another site that heard of the rumors, and links me to where they found out about it. It’s just a giant circle of rumors that I can’t seem to find a stable answer to. I’d be so happy to see a a great new Sonic Adventure game out, but what do you guys think? What would you guys want in the new Sonic Adventure 3 if it’s released?
System Shuffle 