Wow. This project is now more than 20 years old. I recall playing this when I was 11(?),12(?). I’m 32 now. My first forum post ever - under this moniker, lostga

Wow. This project is now more than 20 years old. I recall playing this when I was 11(?),12(?). I’m 32 now. My first forum post ever - under this moniker, lostgame - is from their forums 21 years ago. I actually consider SRB2 to be the greatest 3D Sonic game of all time - obviously including SEGA’s poor efforts - due to the fact that it’s the only one that actually successfully managed to convert the Genesis/MD style of Sonic gameplay into 3D, preserving its sense of speed and exploration in ways that Sonic Adventure 1/2, Heroes, Sonic Colours, etc - just never did. Even the widely-heralded ‘best 3D Sonic game’ Sonic Unleashed, spends literally half the game as a beat-em-up instead of an actual Sonic game. I dunno what the hell happened to Sonic after the megadrive days (well, I sorta do, bad management and a crumbling company) - but having grown up with him, and having been a huge fan for a long time, it’s an absolute travesty what happened to him. I’m cringing in Sonic ‘06. The fan community has been - for so long - so much better at producing content than SEGA themselves that SEGA actually just hired the fans to make Sonic Mania. It’s intensely embarrassing - and shows how brutally shitty of a game dev SEGA is internally - when your fans, with no budget; in their spare time - create a game engine that is so much bafflingly better than anything you’ve created in ten years with large budgets. Check out the official GBA port of Sonic 1 vs the fan made version. There’s no excuse for any large company like SEGA to release fundamentally broken software. Especially when one fan with no budget does better in a couple weeks. And Sonic Mania - made by fans - instead of the company that created the IP - ends up being the highest rated game in the series in 15 or so years. Like - wow. Owch. SEGA’s brutal business failures are one of my favourite tech stories. If you haven’t heard about it - check out the hilariously awful mid 90’s period where they released two conflicting 32-bit systems that of course ended up both being total flops and failures. (The Saturn did okay in Japan, but that’s another story.) tl;dr - if your fans make better content than you do as a company, as has been the case with Sonic for years - there is something seriously fucking wrong with your company.