The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Remember the old Sonic Games? Or even the newer ones! Talk about these Sonic games here, whether you are stuck or just want to talk about your favourite game!
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The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by NiGHTSIsLife »

I never hear anyone talk about the Sonic Riders games. Time to change that. I can't say much about the original because I never played it, but if it's anything like Zero Gravity, I will totally get it. Everything but the anti-gravity drifting was perfect to me. Free Riders, though, was a waste of my money. The Kinect is a horrible controller for a hoverboard racing game, and my shoulder always gets sore from playing it! :darkcry:
EDIT: only play Zero Gravity with a GameCube controller! I can't play with a Wii Remote! :no:
Last edited by NiGHTSIsLife on Tue Feb 14, 2017 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Rajikaru »

I recently replayed both Riders and Zero Gravity. Riders was okay, a solid 7/10. The mechanics and gameplay are okay, the turning is especially horrid, as well as the really strict jump pad timing, but I had fun playing it. Also, the character roster is irredeemably small, if it wasn't for the SEGA crossover characters and the two recolour robots, there would only be a total of 11 unique characters to choose from where the only major difference is whether a character is a speed, fly/accel, or power/handling type.

Zero Gravity is honest to god garbage. As a kid I loved it, but playing it again, especially right after I finished the original, the game is a painfully slow cakewalk. Turning is still awful, boosting doesn't exist except in choreographed areas, and there's no way to actually accelerate or decelerate short of gaining 20 rings and pressing triangle to gain a max speed boost. Anybody above the age of 12 can beat the main story mode in less than 2 hours. The new "drift" mechanic is interesting, but it's not enough. The game is just boring. Boosting and drifting are solid mechanics and shouldn't have been taken out. In a racing game where you can't manually accelerate, there needs to be some sort of mechanic (like boosting) that allows you to actually, y'know, interact with the game, or else it's just a carnival ride with button presses along the way. The only reason I like ZG is because Silver and Blaze in it and the music is great, otherwise it's irredeemably bad.

I didn't play Free Riders because lolKinect but it brings up my complaint with Riders again - where the **** are all the characters? Metal Sonic and Vector are both pretty memorable characters in the Sonic universe, yet it takes two sequels for them to show up in such a game? And what about Espio, or Gamma, or Omega, or Marine that dumb raccoon or whatever, or even older characters like Mighty or Fang?
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Tsui »

I actually find Riders a really enjoyable multiplayer game and it's my favorite Sonic racing spinoff. I've never played any of the sequel games, though.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Ivogoji »

I've only played the original, but it was definitely one of my favorite Sonic titles as a kid and remains the only racing game I really like. I think it's a really unappreciated game.


Also, nominating this our official Riders Game Discussion thread.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Lamby »

the first game my six year old brother beat, to be fair the series had weak track design and is only marginally more advanced than boarding in city escape, so let's not overstate the quality of the series, hehe. when the original riders came out it got 5 and 6s, 7 would be trending toward more than average, which riders... c'mon sugar, it was a typical board racing party game that didn't even top something as cookie cutter as mario kart. ZG and FR dipped into 4s with major publications, it's clear sega just slapped something together that would get a quick impulse buy from parents... three times.

with FR maybe microsoft confused the success of the wii with "hey nintendo always sells garbage with gimmicks y can't we" idk. first was pretty lame, second i played with a gcn controller, it was more interesting with the only mechanic that would get the game displayed on a walmart bargain bin, and even if FR was good, i prefer arcadey games left in 1996

though i still played them because the industry stopped caring about sonic and i still did
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Rajikaru »

Whatever nevermind
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Tsui »

Lamby wrote:so let's not overstate the quality of the series, hehe.
I'm allowed to think a game is enjoyable, heck, I'm allowed to think it's good. Intentional or not, please stop wording your opinions in ways that make it sound like everyone else's opinions are bad. It's upsetting.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Rajikaru »

Tsui wrote:
Lamby wrote:so let's not overstate the quality of the series, hehe.
I'm allowed to think a game is enjoyable, heck, I'm allowed to think it's good. Intentional or not, please stop wording your opinions in ways that make it sound like everyone else's opinions are bad. It's upsetting.
Not to derail the topic, but at this point it's best to ignore her posts entirely. Every one positively reeks of condescension and passive-aggressive arrogance, it's not worth your time to argue with her, she holds the same opinion towards just about everything that is discussed on the site.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Lamby »

oh sorry, generally i've always just assumed "hehe" was a universal social cue that you should not take what i say as an academic statement or something objective :c i'll be more mindful, okie dokie?

also i don't really particularly care if you enjoy a game or not (it's not my business), my post doesn't even encroach on subjective enjoyment of the game, considering it'd be just kinda illogical for me to say in my post i played through a series i got nothing out of, ya know? it was just particularly funny to me that he was giving this professional style review saying things that led to the series scoring 4-6 by actual journalists and it got a 7, idk. was more just something i piggybacked off, because gamers as a whole have this cognitive dissonance because they're emotionally attached to a product and my fun and critique are actually totally separate. anyone could of said it, nothing to do with rajisomething in particular. also someone could have refuted me, i don't care much about pride, i'm not gonna flip out and i don't bite much <3 i'm really not being that serious though, most of the time, usually it's pretty hyperbolic when i say something like bargain bin

i never aim to bait insecurities or whatever, but i do contest one thing, i'm not passive aggressive, that's for jilted people with a bone to pick, i'm just a little facetious and flippant and manic
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Rajikaru »

The only person that gave it an actual reviewer "score" was me, and that's just to give people that care a basis on what I think the game is. Sonic Riders was okay at best, and the other two games are plain bad from a grown adult's perspective, but I can't deny that I personally had some fun trying to mastic the mechanics of the game. There's a lot that can be done to improve both the series and the three separate games, but they aren't completely irredeemable.

Also you're a tad too harsh in what you say, that's mostly it. Just saying "I don't like it and think it's not worth much" goes a long way.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by Jeffery Mewtamer »

To me at least, most of Lamby's posts come across as "meh, not my cup of tea" rather than "It's bad and you should feel bad for liking it".

I also think it worth noting that you really can't compare scores between reviewers even when they use the same scale. For a reviewer who uses a baseline/average score of 5, a 4 is a "just below par" score, but for others who use 7 as the pass/fail mark as analog to how 70 is the pass/fail line on many 100 point scales in school, a 4 really is a bad score, and at the opposite extreme, you have overly harsh critics who will give a 4 to a game because it's only decent rather than remarkable. Likewise, there's a lot of variation in how readily reviewers hand out 10s. To some reviewers, 10s are the only things worth playing, to others a 10 is exceptional, but not unheard of, and you have reviewers who really treat 10 as a perfect score and have never given anything higher than a 9.5 and have only a handful of games in the 9.0+ range(Nintendo Power circa most of the N64 era fell in to this latter category with Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask tied for highest rating at 9.5 and when they switched to a 5-Star system around the time Gamecube came out, they even gave one of their reasons for the change to make it easier for games to get perfect and near-perfect scores).

Anyways, I've never played the riders series. By the time they came out, I had pretty much completely lost interest in playing games on a television with what the DS and PSP were doing to deliver play anywhere experiences that didn't feel watered down to meet the limitations of handheld technology.

That said, it always struck me as weird that Sega decided to make an extreme sports-style racing game with Sonic Characters. Putting the fastest thing alive on a hoverboard makes about as much sense as putting him in a car for the Drift games. Sonic R might have been a masively flawed game even when new, but at least it was a racing game that had the characters doing what they do best: Sonic running around and other characters using their unique abilities to make up for what they lack in sheer speed.
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Re: The Sonic Riders Trilogy

Post by NiGHTSIsLife »

I got the original Riders last week! It is SO awesome! It's not perfect, and half the tracks are skins of one another, but the game is enjoyable and is WAY better than Zero Gravity, if you ask me.
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