ive got way more thoughts on team sonic racing

• the wisp items are alot more finicky to use than i remembered. its a pain to aim any that isnt Rocket and they're not terribly practical. i actually had to look up what Jade did here.

• speaking of items, they are absolutely useless. TSR's Ultimate mechanic outright demands that you shove them off to your teammates constantly to build it up. games consist of mashing Circle and just driving past opponents without much effort.

• the track design is all over the place. a few are standouts (Bingo Party for the chaos, Market Street has some fun shortcuts) but many, many others are just long, large and winding roads with almost nothing happening or worse, automated like Sky Road. TSR expects the team gimmick to create all the variety but, outside of a stray wisp item, the AI has far too much space and cant liven it up.

• i used to hate the non-racing challenges but excepting the Targets one (which requires a really stupid strategy to win) its not so bad. about on par with All-Stars but can be oddly more difficult with how time works.

• some of the story-mode race challenges are miserable though. Get 5 Item Hits would be a given in any other karter but not here. the AI is so slow and glued together as a group that i had to deliberately stop-start to get near them. its not a good sign for a racer if im having to intentionally fuck up to accomplish something.

• that's the overarching point really: TSR is extremely easy and unbalanced. grab a top speed/boost character, dont hit walls and you'll pop out in first every single time. what kills TSR is that the game's designed to punish you for doing so. your AI teammates are borderline lobotomized, the other teams can whip out an Ultimate and win via pressing a button at any time, there's not one but two "fuck up 1st place" items, one of which is impossible to dodge. so much of TSR is out of your hands and it makes for a pretty frustrating experience; playing this after the much fairer, skill-based All-Stars is night and day.

• this game makes Tails less useful because of said imbalance and that saddens me. he is my son. how dare you.

• OST is still fuckin, bangers and mash all the way through. no complaints. its so good it almost fixes the track issues since its so hype. i could headbang to Roulette Road all day.

its been super interesting going back and replaying a bunch of sonic games. i always try to have a beaten save file for all of them but my last windows failure meant it all got erased. no complaints, i get to play games lmao.

none of my opinions have changed much (Colours great, Lost World rrrrrrr, Forces middling) except Team Sonic Racing. i still dont think highly of it, especially in comparison to... idk most other kart racers. it doesn't hold a candle to contemporary karters like Mario or CTR-Nitro, nor its spiritual predecessor All-Stars Transformed which is (imo) one of the best out there.

ive softened though. as a giant pack of sonic fanservice it's undeniably engaging and it plays well enough for me to ignore the uselessness of its "Team" gimmick in single-player. i even appreciate the attempt at a story mode, flawed and shallow as it is. definitely preferred to say, All-Stars' contextless races.

that said, the central gimmick rears its head in some nasty ways. i still dislike the team power mechanic, reducing many races to "who can press it before the finish line first". it's not a guaranteed win for the AI but it is for you. there's also the matter of team compositions which, to this day, baffle me. Eggman and Zavok? Silver, Blaze... and Vector? two fulltime members of Team Rose and no Cream? what?

it's not the flop i thought it was years ago, just more of a shrug. one of those rare sonic games that coasts by on being simply "alright". in this series, i'll take that.

the faction design in fallout 4 is hilariously contrasting with morrowind. unlike the latter, you can (for some time) ally with everybody. this results in the funniest quest ever, The Battle For Bunker Hill: a four-way chaotic war where nobody shoots at you.

yes. you can actually stand there and kill whoever you want without consequence, since all the factions believe you to be on their side. nobody questions this. you can even go to whichever faction you want afterwards and they'll think you were their leader the whole time.

this isn't hard to accomplish either. i did it accidentally since fallout 4 practically trips over itself to hand you every major quest on a silver platter. nothing prevents you from joining a faction; only a yes or no. fallout 4 is so terrified of you missing Content that it flubs its own systems because of it.

this fucking game man.

like, if ive not made it clear enough already, i really really dont like fallout 4. it's just bizarrely fascinating to pick at and see all the outcomes of this game's horribly misguided direction.

the faction design in fallout 4 is hilariously contrasting with morrowind. unlike the latter, you can (for some time) ally with everybody. this results in the funniest quest ever, The Battle For Bunker Hill: a four-way chaotic war where nobody shoots at you.

yes. you can actually stand there and kill whoever you want without consequence, since all the factions believe you to be on their side. nobody questions this. you can even go to whichever faction you want afterwards and they'll think you were their leader the whole time.

this isn't hard to accomplish either. i did it accidentally since fallout 4 practically trips over itself to hand you every major quest on a silver platter. nothing prevents you from joining a faction; only a yes or no. fallout 4 is so terrified of you missing Content that it flubs its own systems because of it.

this fucking game man.