- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
Sonic The Hedgehog Games
- Thread starter StoneKnightMan
- Start date
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2021
My autism is peaking....
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2021
I guess I'm going to Dave and Buster's
Which makes it official. The Angry Birds Movie 1 and 2 are officially Sega movies. Sega is now based and redpilled
Gravityqueen4life
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 29, 2019
This. Sonic is no longer "too cool for school" or "hedgehog with an attitude"Sonic's gone from 90s "cool" to 20s "cool"
Funny how Mario has been the same for 40 years and still more popular.
Last edited:
Sonic is sorta relevant, but has no attitude as back in between the early-90s to mid-2000s. Sonic is just self-aware Family Guy-tier humor (even going as far as to poke fun at its fanbase).
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2016
I think that has a lot more to do with Aaron Webber specifically, given he really leaned hard into it during his tenure as social media manager, permanently ruining social media through other companies copying his strategy. It was a noticeable shift from the social media [presence pre-Webber, which it's largely returned to after he moved on.
It's also before that, you know, something like the Sonic Boom show among other things.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2020
I'm still convinced the writers room for that show was filled with nothing but Anonymous shitposters from /v/ and /pol/
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2016
Too bad the same couldn't be said for the tie-in games.
Yeah. Especially the actual Sonic Boom game which was plagued with troubled production and was rushed to the public with horrifying reviews.
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2022
Tbf, if they had the time I am pretty sure the game wouldn't have been more than a kind of mediocre kiddy platformer, like those disney movie games.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
I liked the VN. Don't care about what you retards are sperging about. It was cute and the dialogue was very funny. I felt bad for the main character though, almost every single Sonic character absolutely shits on him, and he doesn't even get invited to the birthday party at the end.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2020
Even then, they were forced to make this thing on the WiiU when the CryEngine didn't even support it. And the only reason why CryEngine was even considered was because the WiiU wasn't even on the table at the time.
basically Sega fucked up their own game, because Sega.
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2022
Yeah I know, it happened because of a contract sega did with Nintendo, they had to release 3 exclusive sonic games on the wii u.
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2020
The whole story is insane
Here's the text for the lazy fucks who wont even click a link:
So, Sega/Nintendo. Somehow they saw fit to hire newly founded studio Big Red Button to create their game. Never heard of Big Red Button? No surprise, they never existed up until the development of this game.
I once looked up the wikipedia page of Big Red Button to find this out but they have since deleted their own wikipedia page to disable any crowd documentation of their studio. Strange right? I do know a bit of their pedigree and could talk on them by hearsay but I’m going to come here with evidence and trufax.
From the Big Red Button Entertainment website: http://brbent.com/
So right off the bat we have a couple of nobodies’ names who say they have some claim to fame. Lets find out who they are
Well, about one big studio name that has since fallen from grace Naughty Dog.
- Bob Rafei
- Jeff Lander
- “talented” veterans from Naughty Dog
- Heavy Iron
- Luxo Flux
- High Impact Games
Crash Bandicoot, the competitor platformer from Naughty Dog in their attempt to cash in on the platformer craze late-game in the PS1 era. In terms of art direction it was nothing special with a couple of good designs, but a dearly unoriginal design for protagonist of the game clearly intended to compete with the likes of many anthropomorphic animal protags of the time.
Jeff Lander
This guy is harder to find documentation of. Possibly another case of intentionally hiding his tracks. With some more googling I found this.
http://www.giantbomb.com/jeff-lander/3040-52006/
It credits him with 4 games but fails to mention his latest fuck up officially.
Games not exactly known for their functionality, or their code.
- Dark Reign: The Future of War — Additional Programming
- Supercar Street Challenge — Lead Programmer
- Anachronox — Programmer
- True Crime: New York City — Player Programming Lead
Now the rest of the pieces of the puzzle before we try to put it all together.
Heavy Iron Studios
A company for licensed videogames that never made it big, were known for anything good, and generally made a load of shit, for example Epic Mickey 2, that one was a disaster for Disney in economic, quality and advertising senses.
With the exceptions of:
Which can be argued are games with merit, but those are just two games among 14 shit titles of which only 2 others sold well, or not completely horribly.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (PlayStation 2/Gamecube/Xbox — 2003)
- Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/PC — 2012)
Luxo Flux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxoflux
Another licensed game company. See a pattern yet? Of which only made 2 games worth any merit
But otherwise have the same trappings of Heavy Iron.
- True Crime
- Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
High Impact Games
A company that helped on some good games like Ratchet & Clank get on PSP, but ultimately also became a company for licensed games. With a stain of a cancelled Crash Team Racing 2010 title, but this also facilitated their meeting with Naughty Dog for people from there to be drawn in to Big Red Button.
Now the puzzle pieces are all there, and together they form Big Red Button. A mix of shitty studios that never made it big, with two guys who barely have a claim to fame. How did this spell disaster for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric?
Not sure if it’s of any consequence considering the end result is the same, but the brbent.com website had Jeff Lander’s game credits and a quick bio for your enjoyment:
Game Credits:
True Crime: New York City (2005), Activision Publishing, Inc. Shrek 2 (2004), Activision Publishing, Inc. True Crime: Streets of LA (2003), Activision Publishing, Inc. Anachronox (2001), Eidos Interactive Ltd. Bait (2001), Crystal Interactive, Inc. Supercar Street Challenge (2001), Activision Publishing, Inc. Dark Reign: The Future of War (1997), Activision, Inc.
So we have
What did it mean for Sonic Boom?
- Uninspired art director
- Programmer who barely ever made a splash on the scene despite his insistence on his work
- Modern Naughty Dog ex-devs
- Three companies for mostly licensed shit games, ports, and games that never sold well
Don’t believe me? Never checked this game out?
- Animation glitches & fuck ups
- Camera glitches & fuck ups
- Character control glitches
- Lighting glitches
- Horrible game design
- Horrible disjointed story
- Horrible art direction
- Game not being able to decide what it wants to be
- Bad marketing
- Rushed development
- Horrible practices between the developer, publisher, and reviewers
I’m about to give you the proof in the pudding.
(Note: I think GameGrumps its total shit but these videos do show the problem)
They couldn’t even settle on a design for fucking sonic. This is proof of the fact that they couldn’t settle on a design for fucking anything. The symptoms resulted in a world that never decided on a color palette, a style, a core gameplay to work itself around, and was generally schizophrenic.
Scrapped content that were supposed to be components to the game
So how did this happen? Well we can only dig further to find more development information.
Taken from a forum when searching development news of the game
20 Motherfucking million dollars invested in the game. And BRBE blew it all during development, ending with nothing but a shit game, and had the gall to ask for more.
You wanna know how? Here’s how. The game was left under supervision of the Sonic Team. And Takashi Iizuka
What else did Takashi Iizuka and Team Sonic do?
Clearly they will allow any and all fuck ups to go through their production line. Why is this? I don’t know, probably incompetency or negligence or both.
- Sonic ‘06
- Shadow the Hedgehog
- Sonic Jam
- Sonic Unleashed
Then I stumbled onto something that went even deeper down the rabbit hole…
Part 1: Cut Content
River of Sticks
Sticks is a new character introduced to the universe and was intended to be part of the new gang. Here’s a piece of PR that reports on her before the release of Sonic Boom hyping her up as part of the game, show, and franchise.
From a Sonic fan website:
The Destruction of All Worlds
Here’s a video of a level that was supposed to be in the game, was advertised, and fully playable.
Shown years before the game was complete. And then again in 2014. This means that it was developed for YEARS, then cut out RIGHT BEFORE RELEASE. Although running on Windows 7 PC hardware, the WiiU version was never able to reach that graphical fidelity.
This image shows what it ended up looking like in the final version of the game. Stripped down, the level design is different now, and generally shittier in terms of art design.
Actual game on the WiiU
Death of the Ancients
Perci, a character cut from the final game
So from what we can gather another plot arc was taken out of the game mid-development with portions of it still in the game, assets made for it, dialogue voiced for it, but ripped out for some reason.
Unplayable Character
I agree completely with this obsessed Sonic fan. And only further serves to prove how much was ripped from this game, without any care as to what would happen, or to clean it up.
This also goes with
- Cut Lyric content
- Cut 4 player campaign mode
- Rushed inclusion of Shadow the Hedgehog
The Big Red Button team
So how long has this giant pile of shit been daunting the Sonic Franchise, before it was ready to fall like it did?
PART 2: THE BEGINNING OF THE END
The Sonic Exodus
The story here comes from multiple sources, the claim is that at some point around June/July, there was a mass ‘exodus’ from Big Red Button in which staff were either let go or left. The biggest piece of evidence comes from Christian Senn, who stated he did not leave willingly…
This was a man who was putting in 14 hours a day in the studio, who was fired. Jesus christ I can see why people say the game industry is harsh.
Now, according to a developer who posted at NeoGaf, Boom went gold in July of this year and a lot of staff left/were let go. However we have found evidence to suggest not only the claim of an exodus, but that there were major problems at BRB spanning back a period of months.
Where is this evidence? It’s on Big Red Buttons own website. Job listings were posted which we’ve been able to view thanks to the wayback machine show that as late as February 2014 Big Red Button were looking to fill a position for a ‘senior combat designer’, however they were still looking for one as late as July 2014. Alarm bells should be ringing, for three reasons.
However it doesn’t end there. Because we were also able to find the job advert for Senior Level Designer too, as late as February 2014. You might be thinking ‘are you sure this is for Boom?’ Look at the job details.
- This matches up to the time period of the so called exodus.
- They didn’t have a senior combat designer in July of this year, for a game which main focus is combat
- Based on the job listing, for a period of 6 months, there was no senior combat designer working on Boom.
- You might be thinking ‘it could be another game,’ that’s unlikely, because we found someone who potentially got this job, Mark Vernon, in his LinkedIn profile he lists a role at BRB from February of this year as combat designer. This strongly suggests that BRB not only didn’t have a senior combat designer, but also lacked combat designers in general.
- This is crazy, you have a game which is mainly combat, yet you have one senior role and an unknown number of minor roles which are for designing the combat vacant with less than a year to go? Might explain why the combat has been heavily criticised.
It certainly sounds like they’re describing Boom doesn’t it? Also look at the other listings, all of them mention the CryEngine, and various future job listings put strong emphasis on experience with that engine, the same one Boom uses.
The CryingEngine 3
But let’s put this into perspective, no other development studio has released a game on the Wii U using this particular engine that’s in Boom. Think about that for a moment and everything it means.
- Only 1 team has produced any documentation about putting this engine on the Wii U, the developers of the engine
- There is little to no community support for using this engine on this particular hardware.
- There are no case studies to look at in order to learn and predict problems with using the engine on this hardware.
Do I need to go on here? You have a team who are using someone else’s engine on someone else’s hardware with virtually no help or documentation to support them. That team ranges from 14–65 in house staff… There is no way you can do this without problems occurring.
So what does this mean with regards to the CryEngine 3 working on the Wii U? Can it run it? Probably, BRB have ironically proved it can run. But will it be any good? I don’t know, more developers need to use it and learn from it.
The problem here is that BRB were the first to use it with little to no support, there was no way there wouldn’t be problems, hoping for a flawless implementation and outcome was a doomed hope from the start.
In fact according to the LinkedIn Profile of the Senior Programmer Carl-Henrik Skårstedt he had to make major modifications from scratch just to get the game working, there was nothing pre-existing to assist with this work.
Now this might be fine if you were working on a FPS, but Sonic Boom is a platformer with a split screen mechanic and is on the WiiU, a platform woefully lacking in WiiU CE3 engine documentation. There’s been no game that involves any combination of these 3 things on the CryEngine 3 so in almost every aspect of actually building the game with code was from scratch.
Why the fuck was this game put on the WiiU in the first place?
Well look back at my first post. The Nintendo-Sega publishing deal, during part of the development cycle they ended up taking an exclusivity contract with Nintendo to release this solely on the WiiU. Maybe in an attempt to get enough funding to finish the game, maybe to run away with a bit more cash when everyone found out it was shit, or to try and bail a sinking ship. Either way it happened. This deal was struck 2013, well into the game’s development as we know now. Meaning that this game may have once worked well on other consoles, and the PC before but putting it on the WiiU meant a lot of optimization and cutting away content that would strain the system and the engine.
Problems upon problems
Probably getting screwed by the studio for 2 years, but I digress.
PART 3: THE FALL OF SONIC’S BOOM, DESCENT INTO LYRIC
Now lets look at how BRB acted once this game was rushed out the fucking door, went gold in July, and was an affront to all reviews, the world, the sonic fanbase, and god himself.
If we pretend it never happened, we might get to keep our jobs!
From the Big Red Button site, the last update is from E3, in which they show their Windows 7 build that has content clearly not in the current game, better graphics, an entirely different design, and is seemingly devoid of so many glitches that are in the final build.
You said it obsessive Sonic fan. You said it.
What of all their contact with their fanbase they had scheduled? Let’s see. Oh wait they cancelled them as shown in the pictures above. They weren’t even willing to talk to their fans. This was a blatant bait and switch, hype up the game as much as possible before release, and then fade into the darkness to strike again, no goodbyes, no thank yous, nothing. Just radio silence.
There’s not just that but the game released with accessible test, and debug levels without the use of any hack, glitch, or save file edit.
One of the debug levels
Another debug level left in the final game
Hell the game didn’t even have proofread subtitles.
All these things, all these bad decisions from design to business to art. They culminated in this game.
AFTERMATH
Big Red Button has made no news since the release of Sonic Boom ROL. They are likely to go under, SEGA will likely never hire them again, and their names are now tarnished for their incompetence, negligence and DELIBIRATE LIES. Everyone involved will feel it in their wallets, and
their reputation. Those involved in this project all have bad things to say about their experience there, their leaving, and some won’t even mention the game nor the studio on their LinkedIn profiles anymore.
SEGA blew 20 million dollars minimum, Nintendo a less untold amount, and BRB sucked it all up and shat out this gem.
This game was one of the biggest fuck ups of our time. Nothing from the Game Industry Crash of the generation past will ever compare.
ADDENDUM, SONIC BOOM IN ALL ITS FLAILINGS
Some of Sonic Boom’s many many glitches
Sonic is fighting Eggman in their world, chasing him down for his latest transgression(never specified). Eggman breaks the road underneath them and they begin fighting his newfound robot army that he says he reactivated after finding them somewhere. The combat tutorial begins. Then a cutscene activates in which Sonic & pals are underwhelmed and have their backs to a giant door with hieroglyphics of what looks like Sonic & Pals with a button on the door shaped to Sonic’s hand. He goes in to escape from Eggman, Robot Sanic, and company. They go deeper into this tomb, and begin reactivating it to go out (this makes no sense). They keep going until the tomb is operational again and they are able to reach the centre, in which Lyric has been trapped. Lyric gives a “We meet again Sonic, you trapped me here 1000 years ago!” kind of villain speech, and traps sonic and pals with his robot minons. He leaves them trapped in energy beams, which Tails hacks and they introduce the Enerbeam mechanic, in which they are able to lasso objects with an energy beam from their hacked energy beam handcuffs. They begin to try and escape the tomb with their new tech. Meanwhile, Lyric takes control back from Robotniks hacked robots. It’s then revealed to the gang once they escape that Lyric is an enemy of nature and wishes to create a world of robot technology to eclipse all life on their planet, and that he was defeated by THE ANCIENTS 1000 years ago, all this told to them by Tail’s dad/uncle/granpa? He needs the 7 crystals of power to power his robot army and they must all race against him to collect them before he can.
So you do all that shit, Shadow comes in and starts being edgy to Sanic about him having friends and they start fighting through time portals, they end up 1000 years in the past after sonic beats him and they go to beat up Lyric and lock him in his tomb. They then go back to the present and continue collecting the crystals. Meanwhile Robotnik goes to Lyric and offers his services. When all the crystals are collected Lyric ambushes them and takes all the crystals for themselves. He then goes off to power his robot shit, they chase after him through a few levels, fight robotnik in a suit Lyric had made, go on to Lyric’s hideout where he’s powered up his robot earth fucker. You must then fight a robot lyric while Robotnik comes back with his suit and helps you. You defeat Lyric and you all live happily ever after.
The end. Tons of plot holes I didn’t mention, or didn’t point out in this summary because fuck me if I’m going to put more effort into the story than the developers did.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Big Red Button Entertainment’s Twitter page, https://twitter.com/bigredbuttonent Last activity: November 4th, still haven’t acknowledged the release of their game
Website http://brbent.com/ No activity since the E3 2014 update
Staff losses http://nintendoeverything.com/big-r...d-from-staff-losses-before-sonic-boom-launch/ the studio shrunk back down from its engorged state of 60+ people, back down to likely its original 14 man team, although the real number might be much lower or higher.
Sonic Boom Sales Lowest in Franchise History
The masses didn't take kindly to the revamped looks the Blue Blue and the gang got in Sonic Boom, resulting in the…
arcadesushi.com
This one offers a neat piece of info:
Sega has yet to distinct whether the 490,000 figure pertains to actual number of games sold or number of copies shipped
Meaning the game may have actually sold less, than the dissapointing 490,000.
Friendly reminder that the 490,000 number includes the 3DS game Shattered Crystal
People still believe Sonic can be saved
http://www.sportskeeda.com/gaming/w...oes-not-mean-the-death-of-the-sonic-franchise
Also this picture made me laugh, never trust a BEST OF E3 award, and never trust Destructoid for objective opinions.
What about the co-founders of Big Red Button?
Well their twitters are either deleted, or inactive since march, meaning they are also in the radio silence plan. Their profiles still say they work at Big Red Button Entertainment, but no citations of this post-release. Jeff Lander on the other hand has his Facebook set to private now, his twitter is gone, and his LinkedIn doesn’t state whether or not he’s still working at BRB although he’s still living in the LA area of the studio.
Overall though I can’t seem to find any more news of Big Red Button post 2015 or post-release of Sonic Boom: ROL. I looked through job listings to see if they happen to be hiring anyone, usually a good way to tell if a company has started a new project, but no job listings from them after the Sonic Boom project.
My guess? This company has 14 people TOPS, may have dissolved already or is about to, and key members like Jeff Lander may have already left it behind. They are all likely shifting around in the decks of other companies right now, if you went to the GDC I imagine you could probably find some of them there, especially Jeff Landers with his GDC advisory board member position.
“I AM A MONUMENT TO ALL YOUR SINS”
Is what Sonic Boom would say if it could talk to its creators
But yeah they’ve all left and gone back into the shadows as they have before. To strike again and kill another franchise. They’ve cleared their trail to try and wash the blood from their hands. The incompetence by all parties was really bad. I only wish I could be given a 20 million dollar budget to make one of my own games as I’d actually end up with something substantial by the end of it and still have enough leftover for a “Yay, we didn’t fuck it up” party after.
- Joined
- May 5, 2020
You'd think they could've found some other project in the works at the time to use over Boom if they took a moment to ask BigRedButton what engine they would use and subsequently ask Nintendo about CryEngine's compatibility with the Wii U if BRB Stuck with CryEngine, but alas, this is Sega, which can't do anything right with the IP that brought them this far on a daily basis.
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2020
Never thought I would see a pic that so succinctly resumes the state of the classic sonic fanbase.
BTW is that on the left the fat cunt who made the ouya?
Ouya still gives me 'nam flashbacks to this day