Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed: judder judder judder

First: stupid title. The previous game (which I've played on the Xbox 360 but can find no mention of on this blog) was called Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.  The sequel loses the "Sega", despite almost all locations and characters and everything still being Sega.  There's the addition of Wreck-It Ralph, but the 360 version of the old game had Banjo-Kazooie as a playable character and that retained the "Sega".  It's just daft.  Moreover, why couldn't they make it into a series with the tennis game and call it "Sega Superstar Racing" in the first place?  Sonic doesn't really have a leading role here.

Second: really impressive to look at.  From what I've read about the other console versions, this has all the same content in the same structure; the courses are vibrant and detailed.  An impressive achievement cramming this onto the 3DS.

Third: at least, it would be if the game wasn't a juddery mess at times.  The framerate dives on many courses (and if I can see it, it must be really low) which means that in order to play the game you really need to turn the 3D effect off (which doubles the framerate).  With 3D off, the vibrancy and colour means that it's really difficult to see where the track goes, and you keep crashing into background objects.

It can't all be bad, though, since I've played it a fair bit, finishing the first chapter at least.  It's not an easy game; I'm setting the difficulty to "normal" for everything so far but fear I may need to revert to "easy" for some courses and races.

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