Saturday, January 3, 2015

Gaming Chronicles - Sonic '06: Shadow! The Grittier Sonic

Alright! Now it's time to tackle the Shadow campaign. I know I could go ahead and play Silver, but I'll save that fun for later. Anyway, I actually like Shadow more than Sonic or Silver. Yeah, yeah, the games overload his angst a bit. Still, he's a bit deeper of a character than Sonic. (At least, in my opinion.)

One nice thing about Shadow is that there are no mach speed sections. Instead, Shadow's story has a lot of vehicular sections. Oddly enough, I enjoyed some of them. The glider was a bit fun! However, the land buggy thing was way too sensitive, and I found myself jumping out of it early to escape the annoyance. I can't say much about the water vehicle. It was OK.

Unlike Sonic, Shadow has a kick technique that he does after a homing attack. Most of the times, I avoided using the attack as getting out of it was annoying and slowed my pace down. Similar to Sonic, aiming a homing attack incorrectly would send my flying, often off random ledges into the abyss. And there was another Silver fight. (I dread Silver's story because of that; he fights Sonic and Shadow... Ugggghghghg.)

Playing as Rouge was just annoying. She has to stop whenever she attacks. Walking, flying, whatever. At least Tails could fly and throw at the same time. Anyhow, that didn't compare to the E-123 Omega sections. (I won't go into how they totally changed his voice, that's a different issue entirely.) His attacks were weird, and I couldn't just attack enemies. I had to be above them. Supposedly he had a target-lock system (a la E-102 in Sonic Adventure) but I never got the hang of it.

As I feared, the Silver fight was horrible. Out of the five Game Overs I got in that play session, three of them were from Silver. I eventually figured out a trick to beating him (using the passing cargo containers by kicking on top of them. It wasn't perfect, but it helped.) Shadow's final boss fight, with Mephiles, was also annoying. I wasted 11 minutes in one failed attempt because the dodgy homing-attack aiming didn't let me climb the fake Mephiles to get the final hit on the real one.

Starting out, I was ambivalent. However, by the time I got to 80% and higher, I just wanted to be done with Shadow. I just couldn't *wait* to get to Silver's story. Just one full campaign left, and I'll be finally done. I hope.

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