Sonic and the Secret Rings
C hates this game. I’m not high on it either. Her dislike for it stems from the prodigious amount of swearing and yelling at the TV this elicits from me. My dislike stems from the frustration it causes that drives me to swear and yell at the TV.
I’d say Sonic is a bit symptomatic of several Wii titles that seem to utilize the Wiimote poorly, with the motion-sensitive gestures too difficult to execute consistently and perfectly. The net result in a game like this is the real difficulty of the game seems not to be from the game itself, or puzzling out solutions to challenges posed within the game, but rather, what makes the game challenging and hard is getting the controls for the gameplay to cooperate. So many times with Sonic I’d know exactly what I needed to do to complete a level or surmount some challenge, and I’d know exactly how to go about doing it, which maneuver or “skill” I needed to use, except I couldn’t seem to get the game to interpret the controls accurately, which caused a lot of needless hedgehog killing. And this is a general problem with a lot of video games (and not just Wii titles): the developers seem to forget that polished, realistic graphics, floor-thumping audio and nifty features are cool (all of which Sonic and the Secret Rings has in spades), but if you don’t have a game that’s fun to play, you’ve missed the forest for the trees.
Case in point: in Sonic, there are something like 100 “skills” you can unlock, which encompass everything from simple jumping or super running speed, to incredibly complex skills like being able to double jump up and over high walls. Certain missions require, or at least are significantly easier with, specific skills. But before you start a mission, you have to equip one of Sonic’s four customizable skill rings, with each skill ring limited by the number of skill points you’ve accumulated so far in the game. Sound confusing? Try playing it.
Contrast Sonic to Super Mario Galaxy, which plays a lot better in large part because the handful of special skills Mario gains over the course of the game are more limited, but you also don’t have to manage them: if you need to float in a bubble for a level, there will be a bubble blower in the level. It’s little stuff that makes the gameplay a lot more enjoyable, and which seems sorely lacking in much of Sonic.
I also dislike how you can earn medals for each mission based on your completion time. This doesn’t matter for the most part, except that you can only unlock certain bonuses by earning medals. Imagine my disbelief when, after beating the story mode of the game, then going through to complete all the uncompleted missions, I found myself lacking one mission, which I hadn’t managed to unlock. Turns out the mission requires you to have earned something like 45 silver medals, and I think I had maybe three at that point. Instead of continuing to play endlessly, I just put the game away. I’ll probably never play the story mode again, but I might try the multiplayer mini-games someday, though that’s it for this title.
