What killed Sonic the hedgehog? Well many people will point to the games, particularly Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) or Sonic Unleashed for 360 and PS3. However if you take a closer look, Unleashed got good reviews for Wii. Why is that? Well it goes to prove that it's not the games themselves (however a few bad things do make them worse) it's that Sonic Team is unable to configure a proper set of controls for a 3rd party platform.

Looking back to the past, Sonic Adventure was released for Dreamcast in 1999. The game got outstanding reviews as Sonic entered the 3D generation. It later got a sequel, Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001. SA2 came out around the same time as Nintendo GameCube, and I suppose the Dreamcast wasn't selling well so they made a revised version of the game for the new system. The game was supposed to be better. They added new features, reorganized the menu screen and removed unnecessary features. Oddly enough, the game lost about 2 ratings to the original. What was the problem? Controls. The camera was wonky, there is a long list of glitches you can perform on the game (Some aren't nearly as fun as they seem. There's one where if you go to the edge of the neutral Chao garden and homing attack at the wall a few times you fall out of the garden, come back and all the chao are underground. This seems awesome but if you try to leave the garden to go somewhere else in chao world, the whole game freezes and you can't just press the reset button, you have to turn the GC off completely.) About 2 years later they made a remake of SA for GC and it had pretty much the same amount of issues. It kind of makes me wonder why they would choose this version of the game as the one they'd released on 360 and PS3 as a remake after a good majority of us who owned it probably now own one of these systems.

So why can't they just fix their controls? I'm not giving Sonic Team a break when I say this but, the reason is probably because after Sega was unable to continue selling their own systems, Sonic Team got left in the dust struggling to figure own control configuration. You may say, "Well Sonic Heroes got pretty good reviews." Most of the systems out at the time were fairly well aged. if they couldn't configure controls for it, they weren't going to be able to ever. I personally disliked this game. I didn't like the idea of having so many people at your control at once. Using flight was an absolute bother. You pray for fans and use power to glide over everything. You'd be in the middle of a boss battle and you start shuffling through the abilities and u just end up dying because you will more than likely only use one button to shuffle and you miss it you have to shuffle through 2 abilities before you get the one you want. You might even die before then. That's another story for another day though....

Controls were relatively good for Wii games. Most of them were story book and they received mediocre reviews because they appealed heavily to a category of people who weren't or possibly still aren't even old enough to rank or review the games. 360 and PS3 games apparently changed their settings completely because Sonic team has yet to figure out a game that would work for these systems. 2006 was probably going to be a great game. It would be good if they got rid of elise and didn't get lazy and pretty much borrow everything for Sonic Adventure. That being said those problems are minor in comparison to the controls. It wasn't even just a wondering camera. At least with SA2 and SA2B you would get a linear camera in Sonic and Shadow levels, Knuckles and Rouge levels were the only ones to worry about. In this game though, everyone gets a free roam camera and the sad part is that Sonic and Shadow levels are still linear, but now you can go everywhere and get lost and die trying to find your way back. In Crisis City with Sonic you're being chased by a fire tornado. The camera flips to show you the road in front of you which is annoying because you were in the middle of avoiding an obstacle, but when the camera flips you realize you walked right into another obstacle sending you flying when in laws of proper physics, Sonic should have bumped into that car and splattered into pink goo or flung backwards braking all the bones in his spinney little body. The game also has laggy controls. You could tell the game to perform an action and it refuses to complete it. Like Sand Ocean with Shadow in the last part because of free roam camera i got seriously lost in the middle of an ocean of a hover car. I wanted to get out so I could figure out what I wanted to do, but it wouldn't let me, so I tried to blow it up by riding it on places it shouldn't have been. Big mistake, I was on top of a wooden doc and it blows up. I had rings so I expected to survive it, but no. They chose that moment to be realistic and I end up dying.

I pity Sonic Team. Where is Naka Yuji when they need him most?