Sonic '06 - Objectively Better Than Portal

[Terrible Opinions]

Got some good news for you, man.

Spoiler

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Spoiler: large snip

In light of my recent thread, I've come to the realization that many people feel that shorter games are not worth their money. They feel that the number of dollars spent should be roughly equal to the number of hours spent playing the game, or else they haven't gotten their money's worth. I've noticed a few other complaints about "modern" games as well, namely that many of them are first-person shooters with an extremely limited color palette, or are linear and just a succession of corridors that don't let you explore, or that they're too easy and don't challenge the player in any significant way.

Keeping all of these things in mind, I feel that I can now irrefutably prove that Sonic '06 is objectively better than Portal.

[small]It's no use, Portal![/small]​

First - Genre:

People always lament the prevalence of first-person shooters these days. Well, Portal is a first-person shooter. You run around in first-person view, and shoot things. Portals instead of bullets, but functionally it's the same.

Sonic '06 is a rare gem, though. A speed-focused 3D platformer. We don't get many of those anymore, do we? Truly it's much more unique than Portal, then, since as Sonic we're not walking around at half the speed of a snail waving guns around in peoples' faces.

Second - Color Palette:

Portal is a game that most of us know by now. Love-child of Valve, spawner of memes, and based around puzzles, it's a media darling. But... it has somewhat of a limited color palette, wouldn't you say? I mean, all of that white and grey... sure, you have the occasional blue or orange because of the portals themselves, but you're moving through such bland environments.

Sonic '06, on the other hand, is a bright and vivid collection of the entire spectrum of colors. Everywhere you go, you see not only grey and white, but blues and greens and reds and yellows and oranges, violets and blacks and browns and aquamarine and pink. It's so colorful, and it really brings the game to life.

Third - Level Design:

Portal is a puzzle game, set in a long-abandoned test facility. As such, most of the stages are small, self-contained maps that are generally pretty closed-off. It doesn't allow for much exploration, and there's really only ever one distinct path for you to travel along, no matter how obtuse the portal puzzles might make it seem.

Sonic '06, however, has a semi-open hub world with many missions strewn about, and all of the individual levels are large, with wide open terrain that invites and encourages plenty of exploration. Sometimes you might even get lost and need to search out your own way of continuing the level further, and really, how often does that happen in other modern games?

[small]All right, if I triangulate the hypotenuse of these three platforms... Princess, do you have a map?[/small]​

Fourth - Challenge:

Portal is not a very complicated game. You find the wall you can shoot portals on, you shoot portals on it, and you travel through the portals. Progress! Consequently, it can be completed in a very short amount of time despite the sheer number of challenges present within the game. It's all so easy, right? And people hate easy games.

Sonic '06 is another story entirely. In fact, once you reach a level called "Crisis City", the difficulty bar skyrockets so quickly you'd think your grandmother just *****-slapped you from the afterlife. It's long, it's torturous, and it's challenging as all hell. And that's exactly what people want, right? More difficulty in their games! Well, Sonic '06 has it in spades! In fact, I'd wager that it's the most difficult game in the entire Sonic franchise!

Fifth - Depth:

As I've previously mentioned, Portal isn't terribly complex. You get a portal gun, and throughout the course of the game you use it to create portals that lead you to the next testing chamber. The most it mixes up the gameplay are during sections that you need to weigh down multiple switches, and even then it just usually consists of shooting a few portals to move cubes around and then back-tracking until you reach the door you've opened.

Sonic '06 throws you right in and expects you to figure out everything for yourself, and there's quite a fair amount for you to learn. Between all of the separate controls, the different objectives missions have, the game switching it up by swapping you out to a different character, who have unique move-sets all of their own, or throwing Sonic into what's colloquially known as "mach speed" sections where you're constantly moving forward at a fixed speed and need to navigate perilous terrain, Sonic '06 was a modern pioneer of "easy to learn, hard to master" controls that games like Dark Souls would later popularize. There's so much variety that really contributes toward keeping the game from getting stale, which is more than can be said for the Portal "I'm Gonna Hide That This Is A Linear Hallway By Making You Shoot Vertically" Gun.

[small]Now you're thinking with portals, son.[/small]​

Sixth - Length:

Portal is an incredibly short game. So short, in fact, that you could complete almost half of it over the course of an average lunch break. I don't know about everyone else, but to me that sounds like a pretty poor amount of content for the money you're spending. Who wants to be able to be able to beat an entire game during the time it takes to watch an episode of House? Not me.

[small]It takes longer for me to diagnose 'not lupus' than it takes to complete Portal.[/small]​

Fortunately, Sonic '06 is much longer. Not only do you get all of the content provided by Sonic's story from the start, there are also two extra playable characters with their own unique stories that unlock as you play through Sonic's. And the stages themselves aren't as short as the typical older Sonic games, either, where you could zoom through in two or three minutes. Oh no, these things are much more complicated than that, and a lot of them actually have multiple areas to go through before you actually reach the end too. Plus, then there's that overworld hub you get to explore, which also has its own missions. I mean, just look at the amount of content, and it's all for $15! What more could you ask for?

Seventh - Investment:

So, we've already covered how easy, simple, and short Portal is. Well, gee, but easy, simple, short games are pretty much poster-children for so-called "casual" gaming, aren't they? You don't need to put any significant amount of time or effort in to beat Portal, and pretty much everyone and their grandmother are able to beat it. You can just pick it up and play it without any problems, just like a mobile game!

Sonic '06 requires a much stronger resolve. You have to focus, you have to strain yourself to the limits of your gaming ability, and you have to tell yourself that you will beat it, no matter how much it kicks your ass around! And if you leave it for long enough, trying to go right back in will only end with the game kicking your ass even harder for being foolish enough to think your rusty playing would be good enough.

[small]Get used to this screen - You'll be seeing it a lot.[/small]​

No. Just no.

Not sure if you are trolling or if you believe that Sonic '06 is good for being unspeakably bad.

Either way, there's no denying that Sonic '06 is probably one of the worst Sonic games ever developed and certainly the worst to ever be released for the current gen consoles. I've never played Portal 1 or 2, but just from what I have seen and watched others play, it's a pretty intriguing game and I'd much sooner pick up a Portal title than to have to play Sonic '06 again.

Portal was a whole new IP that was not meant to be a fully fledged game, yet it had fun environments, great characters, a simple yet complex story, cleaver puzzles, a portal gun, and physics that further enriched the experience. It quickly obtained a cult following and became popular enough to warrant a fully fledged sequel.

Sonic '06 was probably one of the lowest points for the Blue Blur. Horrible controls, bad game mechanics (Sonic in the Adventure series was faster!), the wrong art direction for the hedgehog (i.e. too realistic and not warranted), an awful story, and overall, an unpleasant mess of a game. It is a disgraceful entry into a beloved and classic franchise that put Sega on the map of the gaming world.

So if you enjoyed or found Sonic '06 fun or even great, whatever. To each his own. All I can say is that there are far more installments, new and old, that are far better. Also, if Portal isn't your thing, don't try to convince people that it isn't cool, when it totally is.

Believe me, your 6 year-old blue cake is a lie.

I knew some people would miss the joke.

I didn't want to believe it, but it's true.

And one of them has a Sonic avatar?

So very delicious

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

Spoiler: large snip

In light of my recent thread, I've come to the realization that many people feel that shorter games are not worth their money. They feel that the number of dollars spent should be roughly equal to the number of hours spent playing the game, or else they haven't gotten their money's worth. I've noticed a few other complaints about "modern" games as well, namely that many of them are first-person shooters with an extremely limited color palette, or are linear and just a succession of corridors that don't let you explore, or that they're too easy and don't challenge the player in any significant way.

Keeping all of these things in mind, I feel that I can now irrefutably prove that Sonic '06 is objectively better than Portal.

[small]It's no use, Portal![/small]​

First - Genre:

People always lament the prevalence of first-person shooters these days. Well, Portal is a first-person shooter. You run around in first-person view, and shoot things. Portals instead of bullets, but functionally it's the same.

Sonic '06 is a rare gem, though. A speed-focused 3D platformer. We don't get many of those anymore, do we? Truly it's much more unique than Portal, then, since as Sonic we're not walking around at half the speed of a snail waving guns around in peoples' faces.

Second - Color Palette:

Portal is a game that most of us know by now. Love-child of Valve, spawner of memes, and based around puzzles, it's a media darling. But... it has somewhat of a limited color palette, wouldn't you say? I mean, all of that white and grey... sure, you have the occasional blue or orange because of the portals themselves, but you're moving through such bland environments.

Sonic '06, on the other hand, is a bright and vivid collection of the entire spectrum of colors. Everywhere you go, you see not only grey and white, but blues and greens and reds and yellows and oranges, violets and blacks and browns and aquamarine and pink. It's so colorful, and it really brings the game to life.

Third - Level Design:

Portal is a puzzle game, set in a long-abandoned test facility. As such, most of the stages are small, self-contained maps that are generally pretty closed-off. It doesn't allow for much exploration, and there's really only ever one distinct path for you to travel along, no matter how obtuse the portal puzzles might make it seem.

Sonic '06, however, has a semi-open hub world with many missions strewn about, and all of the individual levels are large, with wide open terrain that invites and encourages plenty of exploration. Sometimes you might even get lost and need to search out your own way of continuing the level further, and really, how often does that happen in other modern games?

[small]All right, if I triangulate the hypotenuse of these three platforms... Princess, do you have a map?[/small]​

Fourth - Challenge:

Portal is not a very complicated game. You find the wall you can shoot portals on, you shoot portals on it, and you travel through the portals. Progress! Consequently, it can be completed in a very short amount of time despite the sheer number of challenges present within the game. It's all so easy, right? And people hate easy games.

Sonic '06 is another story entirely. In fact, once you reach a level called "Crisis City", the difficulty bar skyrockets so quickly you'd think your grandmother just *****-slapped you from the afterlife. It's long, it's torturous, and it's challenging as all hell. And that's exactly what people want, right? More difficulty in their games! Well, Sonic '06 has it in spades! In fact, I'd wager that it's the most difficult game in the entire Sonic franchise!

Fifth - Depth:

As I've previously mentioned, Portal isn't terribly complex. You get a portal gun, and throughout the course of the game you use it to create portals that lead you to the next testing chamber. The most it mixes up the gameplay are during sections that you need to weigh down multiple switches, and even then it just usually consists of shooting a few portals to move cubes around and then back-tracking until you reach the door you've opened.

Sonic '06 throws you right in and expects you to figure out everything for yourself, and there's quite a fair amount for you to learn. Between all of the separate controls, the different objectives missions have, the game switching it up by swapping you out to a different character, who have unique move-sets all of their own, or throwing Sonic into what's colloquially known as "mach speed" sections where you're constantly moving forward at a fixed speed and need to navigate perilous terrain, Sonic '06 was a modern pioneer of "easy to learn, hard to master" controls that games like Dark Souls would later popularize. There's so much variety that really contributes toward keeping the game from getting stale, which is more than can be said for the Portal "I'm Gonna Hide That This Is A Linear Hallway By Making You Shoot Vertically" Gun.

[small]Now you're thinking with portals, son.[/small]​

Sixth - Length:

Portal is an incredibly short game. So short, in fact, that you could complete almost half of it over the course of an average lunch break. I don't know about everyone else, but to me that sounds like a pretty poor amount of content for the money you're spending. Who wants to be able to be able to beat an entire game during the time it takes to watch an episode of House? Not me.

[small]It takes longer for me to diagnose 'not lupus' than it takes to complete Portal.[/small]​

Fortunately, Sonic '06 is much longer. Not only do you get all of the content provided by Sonic's story from the start, there are also two extra playable characters with their own unique stories that unlock as you play through Sonic's. And the stages themselves aren't as short as the typical older Sonic games, either, where you could zoom through in two or three minutes. Oh no, these things are much more complicated than that, and a lot of them actually have multiple areas to go through before you actually reach the end too. Plus, then there's that overworld hub you get to explore, which also has its own missions. I mean, just look at the amount of content, and it's all for $15! What more could you ask for?

Seventh - Investment:

So, we've already covered how easy, simple, and short Portal is. Well, gee, but easy, simple, short games are pretty much poster-children for so-called "casual" gaming, aren't they? You don't need to put any significant amount of time or effort in to beat Portal, and pretty much everyone and their grandmother are able to beat it. You can just pick it up and play it without any problems, just like a mobile game!

Sonic '06 requires a much stronger resolve. You have to focus, you have to strain yourself to the limits of your gaming ability, and you have to tell yourself that you will beat it, no matter how much it kicks your ass around! And if you leave it for long enough, trying to go right back in will only end with the game kicking your ass even harder for being foolish enough to think your rusty playing would be good enough.

[small]Get used to this screen - You'll be seeing it a lot.[/small]​

No. Just no.

Not sure if you are trolling or if you believe that Sonic '06 is good for being unspeakably bad.

Either way, there's no denying that Sonic '06 is probably one of the worst Sonic games ever developed and certainly the worst to ever be released for the current gen consoles. I've never played Portal 1 or 2, but just from what I have seen and watched others play, it's a pretty intriguing game and I'd much sooner pick up a Portal title than to have to play Sonic '06 again.

Portal was a whole new IP that was not meant to be a fully fledged game, yet it had fun environments, great characters, a simple yet complex story, cleaver puzzles, a portal gun, and physics that further enriched the experience. It quickly obtained a cult following and became popular enough to warrant a fully fledged sequel.

Sonic '06 was probably one of the lowest points for the Blue Blur. Horrible controls, bad game mechanics (Sonic in the Adventure series was faster!), the wrong art direction for the hedgehog (i.e. too realistic and not warranted), an awful story, and overall, an unpleasant mess of a game. It is a disgraceful entry into a beloved and classic franchise that put Sega on the map of the gaming world.

So if you enjoyed or found Sonic '06 fun or even great, whatever. To each his own. All I can say is that there are far more installments, new and old, that are far better. Also, if Portal isn't your thing, don't try to convince people that it isn't cool, when it totally is.

Believe me, your 6 year-old blue cake is a lie.

I knew some people would miss the joke.

I didn't want to believe it, but it's true.

And one of them has a Sonic avatar?

So very delicious

And I knew that some wouldn't read between the lines (specifically the second sentence), one of them being pretty a familiar face around the Escapist forums.

Quite tender indeed.

 

[lithiumvocals]

Too true man. Sonic '06 is literally a fucking triumph of modern game design. Portal was maybe 3 hours of tutorials.

 

[MegaManOfNumbers]

I am reading words of your post, but the arrangement of them is physically incompatible with my brain. I cannot process your statement for the placement of its words is inherently impossible to successfully execute. My brain refuses to process your words in its current structure.

 

[Twilight_guy]

I'd be more interested in your absurdity and comical satire if I actually bought into any of the arguments presented as absurd. I don't I know they are dumb. As such I will simply post my own absurd reply:

*puffs on a pipe*
Hum... yes, indeed.
*stands up, walks to window, waits, and throws himself out*
Quiet.
*splats on ground*

 

[Lazy Kitty]

Well, I haven't played Sonic 06 yet, but I know I like puzzle games and tend to dislike speed focused games.
I also just tried to find it on steam, to give it a chance, but it's not there, or at least I can't find it. Too bad.

Captcha: Melody Pond... I think I'm starting to like the current captcha thing...

 

[AlbertoDeSanta]

Read the title of this thread and literally laughed. I've not Played Sonic 06, but I have heard from quite a few reliable sources that it is one of the worst games ever. Portal may be linear, but it does so in it's own unique way. The palette suited perfectly too, as having random Greens and reds and what not everywhere in Portal would have made it odd. Regardless, you are a magnificent troll OP. That is very very good trolling right there.

 

[Alhazred]

Sonic 2006 is such a good game that it doesn't technically exist. Whereas we're stuck with games like Metroid: Other M and Mass Effect 3 befouling our precious continuities, Sonic 2006 helpfully has the story go back and erase everything that happened in it. That's right, Sonic 2006 is a game so good, it retcons ITSELF out of existence!

 

[Daystar Clarion]

Spoiler: large snip

In light of my recent thread, I've come to the realization that many people feel that shorter games are not worth their money. They feel that the number of dollars spent should be roughly equal to the number of hours spent playing the game, or else they haven't gotten their money's worth. I've noticed a few other complaints about "modern" games as well, namely that many of them are first-person shooters with an extremely limited color palette, or are linear and just a succession of corridors that don't let you explore, or that they're too easy and don't challenge the player in any significant way.

Keeping all of these things in mind, I feel that I can now irrefutably prove that Sonic '06 is objectively better than Portal.

[small]It's no use, Portal![/small]​

First - Genre:

People always lament the prevalence of first-person shooters these days. Well, Portal is a first-person shooter. You run around in first-person view, and shoot things. Portals instead of bullets, but functionally it's the same.

Sonic '06 is a rare gem, though. A speed-focused 3D platformer. We don't get many of those anymore, do we? Truly it's much more unique than Portal, then, since as Sonic we're not walking around at half the speed of a snail waving guns around in peoples' faces.

Second - Color Palette:

Portal is a game that most of us know by now. Love-child of Valve, spawner of memes, and based around puzzles, it's a media darling. But... it has somewhat of a limited color palette, wouldn't you say? I mean, all of that white and grey... sure, you have the occasional blue or orange because of the portals themselves, but you're moving through such bland environments.

Sonic '06, on the other hand, is a bright and vivid collection of the entire spectrum of colors. Everywhere you go, you see not only grey and white, but blues and greens and reds and yellows and oranges, violets and blacks and browns and aquamarine and pink. It's so colorful, and it really brings the game to life.

Third - Level Design:

Portal is a puzzle game, set in a long-abandoned test facility. As such, most of the stages are small, self-contained maps that are generally pretty closed-off. It doesn't allow for much exploration, and there's really only ever one distinct path for you to travel along, no matter how obtuse the portal puzzles might make it seem.

Sonic '06, however, has a semi-open hub world with many missions strewn about, and all of the individual levels are large, with wide open terrain that invites and encourages plenty of exploration. Sometimes you might even get lost and need to search out your own way of continuing the level further, and really, how often does that happen in other modern games?

[small]All right, if I triangulate the hypotenuse of these three platforms... Princess, do you have a map?[/small]​

Fourth - Challenge:

Portal is not a very complicated game. You find the wall you can shoot portals on, you shoot portals on it, and you travel through the portals. Progress! Consequently, it can be completed in a very short amount of time despite the sheer number of challenges present within the game. It's all so easy, right? And people hate easy games.

Sonic '06 is another story entirely. In fact, once you reach a level called "Crisis City", the difficulty bar skyrockets so quickly you'd think your grandmother just *****-slapped you from the afterlife. It's long, it's torturous, and it's challenging as all hell. And that's exactly what people want, right? More difficulty in their games! Well, Sonic '06 has it in spades! In fact, I'd wager that it's the most difficult game in the entire Sonic franchise!

Fifth - Depth:

As I've previously mentioned, Portal isn't terribly complex. You get a portal gun, and throughout the course of the game you use it to create portals that lead you to the next testing chamber. The most it mixes up the gameplay are during sections that you need to weigh down multiple switches, and even then it just usually consists of shooting a few portals to move cubes around and then back-tracking until you reach the door you've opened.

Sonic '06 throws you right in and expects you to figure out everything for yourself, and there's quite a fair amount for you to learn. Between all of the separate controls, the different objectives missions have, the game switching it up by swapping you out to a different character, who have unique move-sets all of their own, or throwing Sonic into what's colloquially known as "mach speed" sections where you're constantly moving forward at a fixed speed and need to navigate perilous terrain, Sonic '06 was a modern pioneer of "easy to learn, hard to master" controls that games like Dark Souls would later popularize. There's so much variety that really contributes toward keeping the game from getting stale, which is more than can be said for the Portal "I'm Gonna Hide That This Is A Linear Hallway By Making You Shoot Vertically" Gun.

[small]Now you're thinking with portals, son.[/small]​

Sixth - Length:

Portal is an incredibly short game. So short, in fact, that you could complete almost half of it over the course of an average lunch break. I don't know about everyone else, but to me that sounds like a pretty poor amount of content for the money you're spending. Who wants to be able to be able to beat an entire game during the time it takes to watch an episode of House? Not me.

[small]It takes longer for me to diagnose 'not lupus' than it takes to complete Portal.[/small]​

Fortunately, Sonic '06 is much longer. Not only do you get all of the content provided by Sonic's story from the start, there are also two extra playable characters with their own unique stories that unlock as you play through Sonic's. And the stages themselves aren't as short as the typical older Sonic games, either, where you could zoom through in two or three minutes. Oh no, these things are much more complicated than that, and a lot of them actually have multiple areas to go through before you actually reach the end too. Plus, then there's that overworld hub you get to explore, which also has its own missions. I mean, just look at the amount of content, and it's all for $15! What more could you ask for?

Seventh - Investment:

So, we've already covered how easy, simple, and short Portal is. Well, gee, but easy, simple, short games are pretty much poster-children for so-called "casual" gaming, aren't they? You don't need to put any significant amount of time or effort in to beat Portal, and pretty much everyone and their grandmother are able to beat it. You can just pick it up and play it without any problems, just like a mobile game!

Sonic '06 requires a much stronger resolve. You have to focus, you have to strain yourself to the limits of your gaming ability, and you have to tell yourself that you will beat it, no matter how much it kicks your ass around! And if you leave it for long enough, trying to go right back in will only end with the game kicking your ass even harder for being foolish enough to think your rusty playing would be good enough.

[small]Get used to this screen - You'll be seeing it a lot.[/small]​

No. Just no.

Not sure if you are trolling or if you believe that Sonic '06 is good for being unspeakably bad.

Either way, there's no denying that Sonic '06 is probably one of the worst Sonic games ever developed and certainly the worst to ever be released for the current gen consoles. I've never played Portal 1 or 2, but just from what I have seen and watched others play, it's a pretty intriguing game and I'd much sooner pick up a Portal title than to have to play Sonic '06 again.

Portal was a whole new IP that was not meant to be a fully fledged game, yet it had fun environments, great characters, a simple yet complex story, cleaver puzzles, a portal gun, and physics that further enriched the experience. It quickly obtained a cult following and became popular enough to warrant a fully fledged sequel.

Sonic '06 was probably one of the lowest points for the Blue Blur. Horrible controls, bad game mechanics (Sonic in the Adventure series was faster!), the wrong art direction for the hedgehog (i.e. too realistic and not warranted), an awful story, and overall, an unpleasant mess of a game. It is a disgraceful entry into a beloved and classic franchise that put Sega on the map of the gaming world.

So if you enjoyed or found Sonic '06 fun or even great, whatever. To each his own. All I can say is that there are far more installments, new and old, that are far better. Also, if Portal isn't your thing, don't try to convince people that it isn't cool, when it totally is.

Believe me, your 6 year-old blue cake is a lie.

I knew some people would miss the joke.

I didn't want to believe it, but it's true.

And one of them has a Sonic avatar?

So very delicious

And I knew that some wouldn't read between the lines (specifically the second sentence), one of them being pretty a familiar face around the Escapist forums.

Quite tender indeed.

What am I supposed to be seeing exactly? Because all I can see is white space.

 

[chadachada123]

I'm still here, waiting for the "objectively" bit to be pointed out and elaborated on. So far, all I've seen was subjective stuff, or rather, you keep talking about why you liked Sonic more than Portal.

Sorry, but at the use of "irrefutably prove" and "objectively" in the OP, I think I will have to let my ol' pal Inigo Montoya do the talking.

You haven't really been around too many modern game disscussions have you?

Each point is a laundry list of what gamers say is "wrong" with games today. Those people think of wrong in terms of objectivity as well. I can see why. If I finish something in an afternoon, and have no story to really think about, nor interesting and varied gameplay, well does make a game shit.

Now statistically, many of the people that claim gaming today sucks will also look at Valve as the crowning acheivement of what developers should be doing. That there presents it's own issues. But I digress.

Take a well loved game and put it up against the standards being laid out, and you can see it fail horribly at it. While a game everyone hails to be shit hits all the high marks.

The ending result will have one of two options.

The first is that it gives you a wealth of insight into why something isn't as bad as people make it out to be. With this new viewpoint you can gain a newfound respect for it.

Or, alternatively, people who use all the hallmarks that allegedly make a game better have to abandon their system because looking at something like this will make them foam at the mouth.

In short, this thread is an epic exercise in critical thought. It's less of a "joke" as the others would think, and more of an analysis of the state of gaming as a whole today.

Except that in this case, at least some of the arguments for Sonic 06 are just strawmen.

Take difficulty, for example. Sonic 06 can't, with any honesty, be compared to Dark Souls, because Sonic's difficulty comes from bullshit like glitches and absolutely horrendous controls/design.

Of course, since it's just one giant satire, it doesn't really matter, but it really isn't as large an exercise in critical thought as you claim when it exaggerates or just plain lies about what gamers are actually bitching about.

This is without even taking into account that the "color" issue isn't against specific games, but against the TREND of nearly every shooter coming out right now using the exact same color palette. It isn't used against specific games, but shooters as a whole.

I could probably find holes like the above for each of OP's arguments. It's a funny satire, sure, but ultimately useless, I feel (except for being useful as satire).

 

[Terminate421]

The moment I got to the color palette I stopped reading. Sonic '06 is the worst game I've ever played.

 

[ElectroJosh]

This is great but I think someone needs to take on an even bigger challenge:

Tell us why Extreme Paintbrawl is better than Baldur's Gate

 

[Voulan]

Oh my god, you actually have a point with this. Despite Sonic '06 being the biggest broken crap ever, it can actually be better than Portal....

I don't even. I can't handle. What is this.

You guys made it this far without bringing up this video?


It starts off tame and gradually turns in to insanity. The only thing I wish that video covered was the god damn motherfucking load times.

That made me laugh more than is healthy. Good times indeed.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

That's actually really funny.

It's ridiculous how these extremely common complaints can be applied to Portal, but not to Sonic '06. People need to keep in mind that any good piece of art, even games, has a sense of unity, where all of the aspects come together to achieve an effect. Portal is designed around simple physics puzzles in a hostile scientific laboratory. Minecraft is designed around building and survival in a wide-open world. Sonic '06 is designed around being a broken mess... oh, wait. The thing about Sonic '06 is that it doesn't achieve what it sets out to do, and I can't even tell what the hell it was trying to do in the first place. In that sense, it's horrible. There's very little coherency to it. It doesn't hurt that the physics are shot and the controls and hit detection are buggy as all sin, either.

To use another example of a game that fails to achieve what it had tried to achieve, I would like to mention Call of Duty. It's trying to be an action-packed spectacle of a military shooter. What I see is a horribly unbalanced, boring, annoying game where all of the environments look the same. Contrast those environments with the ones in Portal, as the test chambers are all highly distinct in structure due to it being a puzzle game, or even Sonic '06, which has a separate environment for every level. My point is, though, Call of Duty, to me, at least, fails achieve the effect that it tries to, and that diminishes its quality as a game.

Sonic '06 receives a lot of flak, but it would have actually been alright with a ton of work. There were some decent ideas floating around. It's really a shame that ideas don't count for squat if they're not implemented well.

 

[Sirtety]

My mind.......has been blown!

 

[Orks da best]

um op this the valvies HQ here, you aren't make them think any different.

Though that said I like anyone who isn't a valve zombie fanboy. Cheers!

 

[deathzero021]

I find this topic to be funny and pathetic at the same time. I know (or at least i think i know) that this is satirical but even still the whole subject seems pointless. Comparing a third-person 3D platformer with a first-person puzzle game is kinda impossible. Objectively or not, it's a matter of preference. One could argue a limited palette could be better for certain types of experiences. etc etc...

Either way, i had fun with both games for difference reasons. both had their major short-comings but both also featured something unique about them that made it worth it.

however this once again proves how useless criticizing and comparing really is. in the end, it doesn't mean anything. personal preference overrides everything else when it comes to art, and understanding one's preference is... well i don't even know if we can fully understand it.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

You should work in advertising. I have never even heard of the game and I want to play it.
Despite your sarcasm though i thought you brought up a few good points. Everything people love about portal is what they rip on in other games.

Objectively however that means CoD Zombies is one of the best games ever, it scores almost infinite on the length and challenge bits.

 

[Stordarth]

Sonic '06 is a brilliant achievement. You have truly shown me the light.

I will now proceed to re-watch the bestiality/necrophilia dead Sonic kiss scene over and over again.

Still a better love story than Twilight.