Classic Sonic's Sustainability

With this year marking the release of both Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, a worrying trend seems to have stuck itself to new Sonic games; that of leveraging ‘classic’ imagery and sentiment as a crutch to stay relevant. This isn’t entirely new, but it is an unsustainable method that will only yield returns for so long before we get tired.

Sonic Mania looks like a wonderful throwback to a time gone past, and looks well worth playing – the reviews of the game agree with this point. But the problem is in the game’s premise rather than its execution. It is part of a growing number of ‘flashback’ titles that leverage a desire for Sonic to ‘go back to his roots’ (a cliché phrasing of modern Sonic criticism if ever there was one).

How sustainable is this idea, really? Between Sonic 4 episodes 1 and 2, Sonic Generations, Sonic Mania, Classic Sonic’s return in Sonic Forces, not to mention a huge number of re-releases on virtual console systems, how much longer can SEGA milk what’s left of gamer’s nostalgia before gamers get bored of this trend? We can only see remakes and re-releases of Green Hill Zone so many times before it will inevitably lose its charm.

The unfortunate fact is that despite major positive steps forward in the form of Sonic Colours and Generations, the series still evokes an image of Bambi on ice, with shaky foundations that look so horribly precarious it’s almost hard to watch as the series goes on.

In its struggle for an identity in modern times, Sonic’s leveraging of its classics may have been a successful experiment, with the appearance of Classic Sonic in Generations and Forces, but now the trend is quickly becoming a tired trope. It’s time for gamers’ favourite hedgehog to drop these crutches and run – after all, isn’t this what Sonic is best known for?

More than anything, SEGA needs to reinvent Sonic’s identity, perhaps by looking at current Sonic conventions and throwing them out of the window. The transition wouldn’t be painless; many fans cling dearly to their nostalgic love of the ‘classic’ Sonic series that ended in the 90’s. But it won’t be long before this love runs out and instead we groan every time we see SEGA march out Classic Sonic only to expose him to further indignity. Let Classic Sonic rest now, and perhaps nail the final coffin in Modern Sonic’s grave, and give us a true reinvention of the character and his conventions before he winds up stuck in that grave permanently. 

Do consoles have a place in a world with PC gaming?

Every gamer knows the old meme of the PC gaming master race. For years, PC Gaming’s most vocal defenders have shouted to all who would listen about the seemingly endless benefits of gaming’s most powerful platform. Those gamers that still squabbled over their preference of Playstation or Xbox were regarded as lowly console peasants. This argument is one of the many controversial issues debated among the gaming community, spawning many debates of its own surrounding framerates, resolutions and the relevance of plug and play convenience.

My personal view is that yes, playing on the PC is the most premier experience available to gamers today. If you want the very, very best way to play a videogame, chances are that outside of console exclusives, you will want to play it on the PC. This issue sums up to basic logic; simply put, playing on a PC lets you play at the highest resolutions and framerates with the highest graphics settings possible, if your computer can handle it.

However, that last qualifier is the sticker in this debate; for many gamers the sheer level of cost and research needed to play the latest games at such a great level is a prohibitive point. Many PC builds can range into the thousands of pounds and there are many pitfalls with compatibilities that can brick such machines. Imagine buying a thousand-pound machine only to inadvertently make one fatal mistake, and break the machine rendering all that cash a waste. It’s intimidating, to say the least.

The value proposition is handily debated about between PC and console gamers; the former insist that affordable builds can match, if not exceed the performance of the latest consoles at a lower price, while many console gamers have found that the small outlay for their black boxes offers the best possible value. It seems quite obvious at first; £250 for a PS4 today vs £1200 for a good, future-proof PC. From the level of investment, it looks like consoles come out winning.

However, PC gamers are quick to counter here; a PS4 costs £250, which gives you a machine that can do nothing but game (and some multimedia features). On the other hand, a PC gives you access to basically everything; fully-featured internet browsers, productivity software and an indispensable level of general functionality combine with best-in-class gaming performance for those with big enough wallets.

In addition, there are the infamous Steam sales, many of which represent huge savings that can more than decimate the cost of a game. Then there are other avenues; from the resurgent indie scene that offers a glut of excellent experimental games at tiny price points, to the widespread and much-championed modding community. PC gaming offers something for just about everyone.

In my opinion, on the value level there is a purpose for consoles. Quite simply, consoles remain the most accessible way to get into gaming at a moderate-to-hardcore level. To play the latest, most important games, the average person can just pick up a black box for £250, plug it in, download a patch or two and they’re away.

With a PC there are many differing and intimidating levels of access. To get into PC gaming there is a lot of research required from graphics cards to processor clocks. It’s hard to gauge the right amount of investment required to give you the best experience. But again, for the customisability and range the PC remains triumphant; if a gamer is so aligned, they can still play even on a low-budget machine with no graphics capability to speak of. There are a massive amount of Indie and Flash games that can cater for these exact needs. What is still up for debate, however, is how much value this actually offers. Sure, playing Flash games is one thing, but they’re a far cry from the latest and greatest AAA experiences out there. There may be many levels at which a player can game on a low-budget PC, but how much of this is worth playing when at around the same cost for a PC with such low-capability one can buy a PS4 and open themselves up to playing the latest Doom, or Resident Evil 7? This may be a controversial point, but who can honestly say they can find a £250 PC that will reasonably run those titles?

As a gamer that has recently bought a gaming PC, simply because I want to experience the very best way to play games for once, I have to say that I am not as devout a follower of the PC Master Race doctrine as many others are. The main conclusion here is that PCs are great value if you want to experience the very best way to play, but there is a place in the market for consoles. Like them or loathe them, the world will not be a better place if the consoles just failed. As I have stated before, more competition is, in general, usually a better thing for both consumers and for companies in the gaming space. As a proud owner of a new, proper gaming PC, I want to make clear that I love gaming in all its forms, and this includes consoles. This whole argument that pitches consoles and PCs against one another is just one way in which the gaming community is breeding toxicity, and I hope that this article has gone some way in showing why that makes little sense. Quite simply, there is a place in the market for the consoles and for the PCs and if the gaming economy is going to continue to grow we need to be more accepting of people’s purchasing choices.

Condemned: The Criminal Origins of Modern Horror Gaming

Modern AAA horror is in a good place right now. Outlast, Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation are among some of the best first-person horror experiences that are out there on modern machines. It’s safe to say that the genre has experienced something of a revival since the dark, gloomy days of the Xbox 360.

In the generation prior, horror games seemed to fall by the wayside, in favour of more bombastic experiences. Everybody can remember the heavy action and set pieces of Resident Evil 5 and its much-maligned sequel. It was rare to find a popular horror game in the previous generation that wasn’t laced with a heavy dose of action to up the playability; even Alan Wake, one of the best horror-thrillers out there, was heavily based on action and the implausible gunplay of a novelist main character.

To find a relatively ‘true’ horror game, one would have had to turn to the indies to get their fix. We all remember last generation as being the one where Let’s Players really started to gather steam, and with this came the popularity of horror indie titles such as Slender: The Eight Pages. Because, let’s face it, the prospect of experiencing horror is made a lot more consumable by watching someone else suffer it and laughing at the comedy that arises from a good entertainer. It is in part thanks to Let’s Plays that we saw the popularity of good gaming horror arise, such as Amnesia and its sequel. As we moved to the current generation, there was a plentiful supply of horror games of all kinds, becoming somewhat of a mainstay genre for independent developers who all hoped that their game would be able to ride the coat-tails of a popular Let’s Player to becoming a sales success. Nowadays, even the AAA studios can’t help but stick their profitable noses in for a quick sniff of horror and we were treated to some new classics such as Alien Isolation and Resident Evil 7, which benefited not only from higher production values but also from lessons taught by the older indie titles on how to craft claustrophobic and terrifying games in first person with a gritty, horrifying surrounding environment.

Amidst all this, I realised that one game seems to have gone forgotten, and yet could largely be seen as a missing link between the poor, action shoot-em-up horror that we saw in the previous generation and the more carefully-crafted gems we are seeing today. Condemned: Criminal Origins was an excellent, early Xbox 360 game that seems to hold a lot of fitting comparisons to modern horror titles as they are even in the modern market.

While looking understandably dated as an early seventh-generation game, Condemned’s graphics is not without merit. Careful design went into the locales experienced in the game, which were gruesome and scary in their own right. Despite being traditionally cliché areas for a horror setting, such as abandoned department stores, dilapidated schools and the dark recesses of the subway, Condemned’s levels proved that sometimes clichés exist for a reason; there is something just horribly creepy about old, rotten mannequins in a quiet, desolate department store long since left to ruin.

The overall design of the game, however, is a masterclass in horror design, something that seems to inspire what I consider the scariest part of Resident Evil 7: the approach to Evelyn’s room. The knot in my stomach as I continued my slow pace into the darkness, that overwhelming feeling that I was going somewhere I really should not have been going shows just how masterful Resident Evil 7 can be in its quieter, more psychologically-scary moments. At the same time, Condemned is equally as inspired in just how it could make the player feel terrified of their own progress.

The devil here is in the details; the way that the ambient sounds seem to attack you from all sides; hearing a tin can drop onto the floor to your left, making you wonder whether a terrifying enemy was just out of your view, and at the same time dreading the inevitability of having to investigate the source of the sound. Condemned makes masterful use of this with the shadows in the game, using them to play with the player’s mind to create illusions of would-be murderers just around the corner. Many parallels here can be found between this and the Evelyn sequence; the bouncing of the ball from a location of screen, the rocking chair, the slow fading out of light until the player seems surrounded by a thick, impenetrable black fog. Both examples show expertise in making the player dread what they’re going to have to do to progress.

Where Condemned does better than most modern games, however, is in the late stages of the game. It is very rare that a horror game feels as scary at the last level as it does in the introduction, but here, Condemned surpasses Resident Evil 7, which was somewhat of a disappointment in its latter stages. I remember strongly that feeling of fear as I went about and investigated an abandoned house out in the sticks. There was this incredibly spooky feeling of claustrophobia as destroyed furniture blocked my progress, making me carefully plan my route. I never felt quite so unsafe as I did in that level (which soon branched off into a run through a farm area and some barns culminating in a strange boss fight), and it is to Condemned’s credit that my growing skill at the game never hit the point that I felt truly safe or even able to tackle what it was throwing at me. On the other hand, Resident Evil 7 suffers from being still at its core a game where a player picks up a gradually-more powerful arsenal and soon is able to face head-on the hordes shambling toward them.

An honourable mention goes to the minute-by-minute gameplay of Condemned. It is interesting to note that Condemned was a first-person atmospheric horror games long before their current popularity. This makes the comparison to modern games like Resident Evil 7 more striking. Guns are scarce and typically over-powered when used, making them invaluable to the game, but they are never the central focus. Instead, combat is focused on taking improvised weapons to the enemies you face, be they drug-addicted madmen or strange creatures impaled with metal rods. Investigation using a series of interesting tools forms a good mechanic, and serves to intensify the atmospherics of the locations in which the investigations themselves take place. There is one scene in a locker room which is particularly chilling, and many horror gamers that picked up Condemned will understand what I mean when I say this. Condemned is a quieter experience than the likes of Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation, and this only enhances the scariness of the title, allowing the narrative and the scares to really soak into the player.

Condemned: Criminal Origins represents a missing link between the decline of horror in the past generation and the current resurrection that we are seeing in the modern day. Although understandably dated, its comparisons hold up favourably to modern horror, and while its sequel was a big disappointment, the original game still deserves a lot of credit for being a potential inspiration for how to do horror right in the modern games industry.