Unlicenced Lawyer: Sonic's Buddies at 3:36 PM

Thanks, sonicthehedgehogbg, for this image. You forgot Fang the Sniper.

So, Sonic's been  a topic lately. What, with the whole 2 new Sonic games

announced.

But there's something I noticed on the trailer to Sonic Mania, the

throwbackies of throwbacks who couldn't  be more of a throwback if it

actually zapped us into 7 year olds all over again: The cast.

The trailer boasts 3 playable characters: Sonic(yeah, no duh), Tails and

Knuckles. Which, while seemingly an offhand remark about the nature of

this game, I interpret it another way.

You see, for the longest time there's been a consensus among many: That

Sonic sucks because there's just too many characters. Somewhere after

Sonic and Knuckles, Sega went overboard with Sonic's friends and

frenemies, when they should have stuck with Sonic.

To me, this is their way of saying "We learned."

However, I must say that that people, even if they don't realize it, don't

hate Sonic's friends at all.

How did we first play as Tails? Well let's take a look.

Did you notice it? The stage played exactly as the normal Sonic 2 stage,

but now you are Tails. You run from left to right, collect rings and fight

a boss. They later gave Tails the ability to fly.


Tails still collects rings while running from left of the screen to right,

but now has abilities that open different  gameplay options.

What about Knuckles? Well, Knuckles is the same. 

Knuckles can glide and

climb, but other wise it's still the same gameplay, same speed same

everything. In fact, playing as Sonic felt kind of vanilla, now.

Comparatively, this is the first time you played as Amy in a mainline

Sonic Series.
Amy's gameplay is kind of survival horror, but also not any damn good.

Even compared to the 3D Sonic action of the same game...


It's a departure. In a way, you kind of have to admire that Sega tried to

innovate on it's most popular franchise, but it...fucking blew up on their

face several times.

Here's our introduction to Big the Cat.

If such a thing  as an  opposite to "run really fast, avoid enemies and

collect rings" exists, it's probably "sit still and fish." Big could be played by Robert Downey Junior and you still wouldn't like him after that. Although...

Feel true fear.

So obviously by Sonic Heroes everybody "hated" Sonic's allies, and wanted

to clear them away. Who does the Sonic fandom like from those years,

though?


Meanwhile, in portable land, Sonic's supporting cast had new additions

like Blaze The Cat and Cream The Rabbit.

Eventually, Sega tried to put the thing by making Sonic The Hedgehog, a

reboot that focused exclusively on Sonic.

And...and Shadow, naturally.

And they had some left over telekinesis game engine, so they put in Silver

the Hedgehog from the same alternate dimension Blaze is.

Wow, way to miss the point of rebooting something. That's like if Batman Begins was nothing but Jim Carrey rubbing Batman's bat nipples.

So to recap: It is my belief that the hate for Sonic's friends is a

symptom of Sega's  failed gameplay experiments being used on new

characters. If Big The Cat had been playable in Sonic and Knuckles, maybe

they'd be boasting 4 characters instead of 3 in Sonic Mania. The same trouble with failed experimental gameplay also occurred with the older characters and Sonic himself, but nobody blamed the characters because we'd seen them work at some point.

I think Sega SHOULD give these characters a chance again in the future.

Not all of them at the same time, obviously.  I'm not even saying they aren't... well, hard to like. Just...if you can make a good

Sonic game and make their gameplay stick closely to...Sonic, I don't care

if you put in Bark The Polar Bear, Sticks the Badger, Rotor the Warlus, or Ray The Flying Squirrel.

The REAL reason Gamestop left Puerto Rico at 1:46 PM

"Power(off) to the Players"

So as you may have heard, Gamestop has decided to close all 7 of it's stores in Puerto Rico and GTFO. As a Puerto Rican living in Puerto Rico I can explain it slightly better than IGN, but it'll take me a bit of time because the story of Gamestop leaving the island is also basically the story of the of the island itself.

So in the  late 1890s the Americans took the island from Spain after 400 years of spanish rule during the Spanish American War.  We could talk a long time about this and why it happened or if it was right, but ultimately that has nothing to do with Games.

After a few decades of military rule, it started to look a little bad. So they made the Island a Free Associated State, which since it's not a colony, forever solved all status disputes with the US forever(citation needed) . Now we were all American Citizens, but the island had only words to represent it on congress and no vote. Congress also reserves the right to undo any laws we try to do.

Financially, the island started to progress because several laws made it a good place for the manufacture buisneess. Cities were built,  and people started achieving enough capital to spend on frivolous stuff, like  TVs and Games.

However, eventually, the laws that made manufacture a good buisness were taken away, and slowly but surely the backbone of our economy started to fall under us.

This was the point to find a NEW backbone to our economy. But our leaders had a different idea: Borrow a lot of money and pretend we were ok. They Weekend at Bernies-ed our Economy. After all, would a collapsing economy have an expensive train that runs  a short distance? An expensive obelisk praising the chief of police? Giant metal avocados?

Our leaders suck. Can you tell?

The thing with borrowed money is, you have to pay it back or else people won't want to lend you more. Soon the size of our debt was mirrored only by our lack of resources to pay it back. And so, our government looked to the only reasonable source of income it could: giant corporations that owed it billions of dollars and had operated for years without paying them The informal economy,

The informal economy is mostly  criminals who sell drugs and guns, but don't  pay any taxes on those because...they aren't doing this to pay government. However, it also includes, say, people selling water bottles on the street, who aren't paying taxes on them because...fuck the government.

So they made a tax on bought goods of 7%. So if you buy a pack of waters to sell on Walgreens, or a Kawasaki bike with which to shoot up your drug rivals, you pay the cost of that, and a 7% tax charge on that.

The only thing they forgot was that they suck at doing their job. Oh, a cop would fucking threaten you with thousands of dollars in fines if you sold water on the corner now, but although most buisnesses charged this new tax, the government had no system in place to see if buisnesses were actually giving them the REAL 7% of anything. Many places did charge the tax, then proceeded to pocket the money.

With the noose tightening around their neck, the government came up with new incremental taxes on the chain of production itself, figuring if it could tax stuff at every point of retail, it would make  a lot of money.

Instead that, along with the continual increases on the cost of water and electricity, are killing the very idea of malls. You see, the owners of a mall charge  the stores within it, and that's how they make their money. Stores like KMart and Gamestop are mall stores. There aren't loose Kmarts and Gamestops around.  So, with imported goods taxed several times over before they hit the shelf, Malls refusing to back down on their rental prices, and frankly the economy being in the shitter because...there ISN'T an economy,  stores like Gamestop can't find any ground anymore.

While it's not quite a good thing that Gamestop is going away, I want to see the positive side of it. It's certainly good for Neo Japan. It's a small place, near my home. I've been meaning to go there, but now, I won't have choice it I want to get my game on.

I will miss Gamestop, and it's used games, and used games  sold in new boxes for new game prices, and the way they gave you 25 cents of discount if you brought them a used game from 2 years ago, I think we will  survive.  We somehow always will. This is hustler island.