Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode One – A New Hope

All weekend, all over the Internet, I’ve read complaints of Sonic’s physics. I had no idea what “Sonic’s physics” meant, and while playing Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode One I hardly saw what the big deal was. I figured it was just the endless whining and trolling of your typical Internet mob, combined with the victimized bawling of the Sonic fan crowd. Do these fans even know what they want anymore? Then, the more I played, and the more frustrated I got, it occurred to me.

Something’s wrong with Sonic’s physics.

Well, maybe not wrong. They’re different. Having replayed the entire original series earlier in the year, I should’ve noticed it earlier. Maybe I was so caught up in the whole “OH MY GOD SONIC IS BACK, BABY” fervor of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 I failed to notice a tiny thing like his … his physics. I mean, when was the last time anyone even mentioned video game physics since Half-Life 2?

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E3 Day One: Stranger in a Strange Land

For someone who grew up seeing E3 through the pages of EGM and later through the web pages of IGN you’d think it’d be a dream come true to actually be there at the Candyland of video games. Well, let me tell ya. It was an exhausting, mind numbing experience. Sensory overload the likes of which I’ve rarely seen, felt, smelled, touched or heard. Remember that episode of Batman Beyond where the bad guy goes deaf from the all the sounds of the city piercing his brain all at once and he screams in agony from it all?

Sorry, I got Batman Beyond on the mind since that Splice review. Great show.

But anyway, that was me. For three days! Surrounded by sweating nerds, servile booth babes and sycophantic industry types in a bombed out section of L.A. no one wants to be in, except for this one giant convention. Seriously, otherwise the place is a ghost town, which is a very weird (and scary) place to be in coming from New York friggin’ City.

Not that any of that matters really. E3 is about one thing: games. Lots and lots of games. And I got my grubby hands on all of them. Well, a lot of them. Not all of them. Off the bat I’ll say I missed Zelda: Skyward Sword, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Microsoft’s and Sony’s Wii-too nonsense. So if you’re looking for the umpteenth amount of armchair punditry for those — whoops. This is just one simple chump’s first visit to E3, trying to find something that wasn’t a derivative arm-waving simulator or a FPS about shooting foreigners.

But boy, does that Move controller look like a luminescent dildo or what?