I canceled my pre-order and I’m waiting to see if it gets any significant updates before I consider buying it.Porting a program to another system is seldom an easy task. We just don’t need the big theatrics and the bickering over what is just another mediocre remaster. It sucks and we deserve better, but you could say that about a lot of things during this pandemic. This isn’t an excuse for the quality of the remaster. Blind Squirrel tried to clean up the mess as best they could, but it wasn’t good enough. That’s probably why Sonic Colors Ultimate is this weird mishmash of original game code + an implementation of Godot bolted on over the top of it. However, apparently, in early fall 2020, a performance evaluation revealed the game was in no state to release thanks to covid guidelines gumming up the development, and apparently Blind Squirrel was brought in to rescue the project. I was first informed that Sega was prepping a Sonic Colors remake/remaster in 2019, and it seems like the originally targeted release date was Christmas 2020. But you don’t have to go full Skeletor.īased on what I’ve heard, from people I know and from what other rumors have said that seems to line up, it sounds like Sonic Colors Ultimate was a victim of covid-19. Sure, there was the hope that things would get fixed before release, but that’s all it should have been: hope. I mean, we knew going in to this that the port looked a little funky, based on videos Sega was putting out that featured clearly broken effects. AND it still ran like unoptimized garbage, too! It took Capcom another 4-5 years to put out the “Ultimate Edition” port we have today.Īll of these ultra-dramatic Sonic fans out there like “SEGA WILL PAY THE PRICE FOR HAVING CROSSED US THIS DAY” are like… yeah, it sucks that the port could be better, and we did not deserve to have it be this bad, but could you tone it down just a little? The game originally shipped with a complete lack of any lighting whatsoever! It was also a port of the PS2 version, so the textures were visibly worse than the original Gamecube and Wii versions. Or what about the original 2007 PC port of Resident Evil 4? That looked like this: I mean, Gearbox’s original PC version of Halo was a complete mess of arbitrarily changed effects, and only now, 13 years later, did The Master Chief Collection finally fix that broken port. Sonic Colors and Stranger’s Wrath still aren’t the only examples of this. Finally, something like three or four years later, after they’d already wrung everything out of the Oddworld franchise everywhere else, they went back released an updated version of Stranger’s Wrath for the PC that looked and played correctly. They started porting Munch’s Odyssey to other platforms, as well. They made announcements for other Oddworld games. The PC version remained in the same broken state. Playstation 3, Vita, Xbox 360, I think even Wii U. Just Add Water, perhaps realizing the growing number of scorned users, vowed that they would improve the PC port “soon.” In the mean time, they ported Stranger’s Wrath to every other platform under the sun. What a great favor they had done for us bringing Stranger’s Wrath to PC where only the top 25% of their install base could run the game acceptably at low settings. At a resolution of 600p no less, when we were approaching the dawn of 4K games on PC. 30fps for a six year old Xbox game on a ~$700 PC build. The developer’s response was to make fun of people for having weak PCs, while revealing that “the game usually averaged 30fps at a resolution of 800圆00” on their test machine, which was a somewhat high end system for the time. There were a lot of posts from hopeful fans complaining about it being broken on their machine (I was one of them). Tons of effects were broken and it barely ran, especially if you were unlucky enough to have a Radeon GPU.Īt the time, there was a thread on the NeoGAF forum (years before it imploded) and developers from Just Add Water were posting in it, seeing how people liked the port. They released the remaster on PC first, a straight-across port from the Xbox hardware, and it was a technical disaster. The game was essentially left to rot on the Xbox.īut Stranger’s Wrath was a critical darling, people loved that game, so the idea that finally, FINALLY, it would be getting proper PC and modern console releases was a big deal. This was important, because Stranger was an Original Xbox exclusive, came out at the tail end of the console’s life span, and was a commercial failure. I’ve told this story before, but it’s the one that sticks out the most in my head:īack in 2011 or 2012, a company called “Just Add Water” announced they were going to remaster Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath. Sonic Colors Ultimate was not the first, and will not be the last. One, bad ports and remasters like this happen a lot. I don’t get the white-knuckle outrage people have about it.
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