The Monday letters page celebrates the traffic jams of Spider-Man 2, as one reader wishes Nintendo’s Advance Wars was on PC.
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A reader is dismayed to realise Sony has no major first party exclusives currently scheduled and there’s no hint when more might arrive.
A reader suggests not buying expensive but relatively short games like Spider-Man 2 digitally when you can save money with a physical copy.
PS5 exclusive Spider-Man 2 is out now but whether you know the original or not our guide will help get to grips with all the new features.
The Friday letters page gets very excited about the prospect of the Switch 2, as readers offer suggestions for fixing an Xbox Series S.
Fans have not only emulated Super Mario Bros. Wonder on PC but have begun creating their own mods, much to Nintendo’s annoyance.
Sony will likely make another acquisition to match Microsoft, but it may not necessarily be one related to video games.
Nintendo returns Mario to his 2D origins in what might be the best game of the year…
The Wednesday letters page hopes Activision will go back to making non-Call Of Duty games, as one reader looks forward to playing Daytona USA 2.
The new Spider-Man game is just around the corner, so read on for the latest on release dates, villains, prices, and more.
The ability to stream digital PS5 games will be available this month in the UK but it won’t be free.
The Tuesday letters page shares more tips for getting cheap video games, as another reader praises Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch.
The Monday letters page asks why do people cheat at multiplayer video games, as one reader tries to name the third Final Fantasy 7 remake.
A reader regrets pre-ordering Modern Warfare 3 and suggests that Call Of Duty is currently the worst it’s been since the Xbox 360 days.
A reader explains his love for Level-5’s Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch and why he thinks it’s superior to Persona and Final Fantasy.
Sonic Superstars – not as good as Mania but better than most (Picture: Sega)
GameCentral reviews Sega’s new 2D Sonic The Hedgehog game, that tries to mix modern visuals with the gameplay of Sonic Mania.
Sonic The Hedgehog is a cautionary tale of how easy it is to turn a much loved, globally famous mascot, into what amounts to a warning sign for bad games. Some of that negative reputation may have been undone by two surprisingly watchable films, but more trust was earned back by 2017’s Sonic Mania – a beautifully crafted love letter to the original 1990s Sonic that comprehensively outshone its decades old inspirations.
Sonic Superstars is from different developers and eschews Mania’s delightful faux 16-bit graphical style in favour of shiny 4K. It also chucks out the £16 price tag but retains the classic fast-moving 2D side-scrolling of yore, making it a combination of new and decidedly old school. Based on its now six-year-old competitor, can it reasonably justify its much higher price point?
Starting out on Bridge Island, a setting that’s more than reminiscent of the original Sonic’s Green Hill Zone, you’ll find plenty that’s familiar. Choosing Sonic, Tails, Amy or Knuckles the Echidna, you sprint through levels that delight in sending your cartoon avatar around loops, plunging across multiple screens, and finding excuses to spin in tight circles before triggering a brightly coloured explosion.
As is traditional, you’ll be collecting gold rings, which you lose in their entirety when you run into an enemy, spikes, fire, or any number of other environmental hazards. While you can usually pick up a few remaining rings as they bounce away from you, there are also numerous dangers that will insta-kill you, sending you right back to the previous checkpoint. That’s a feature we’ll return to later.
Embedded in the familiar-feeling levels are occasional giant gold rings and what look like sparkling black holes. These lead to bonus levels where you collect more rings, find collectible Sonic medals, or swing after chaos emeralds – with each one you collect permanently unlocking a new power. These are typically ballistic, letting you briefly become a missile you can fire around the screen or triggering an army of Sonics to help take down a boss, but one emerald also shows secret platforms if any are on screen when it’s activated.
The powers are odd, in that other than the hidden platform spotting ability (which we never once managed to use successfully) the others are only ever helpful during boss fights, one of which you’ll find at the end of every act – with most worlds comprising two acts. The bosses look magnificent, most using Dr Eggman’s signature style of creating huge anthropomorphic robots to stamp and barbecue Sonic into oblivion. Unfortunately, other than their unarguable good looks, all are monumental letdowns, featuring bland attacks and little to no progression over the course of battle.
Sadly, the same is true of the mini-games, which range in quality from forgettable to annoyingly arbitrary. Although technically they’re optional, they’re used to gain the chaos emerald powers which are in turn needed to make the boss fights bearable rather than interminable, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to enjoy the process.
It’s just as well some of the levels are so good. Lagoon City, with its glorious looping waterslides and jets of water that send you tumbling through the air, and a section in Pinball Carnival that has you hopping between moving rollercoaster cars as they weave up and down, deserve special mention, but there are plenty of areas with the same spirit of riotous invention.
Superstars is also entirely at ease with ratcheting up the difficulty out of the blue, which is something of a Sonic tradition. Players familiar with Eggmanland from Sonic Unleashed will probably still wake up sweating, thinking they’re back there. In this case the difficulty comes both from ruthlessly hard sections and a strong reliance on the instant death mechanic mentioned earlier.
Sonic Superstars – the gang’s all here (Picture: Sega)
That’s mitigated to some degree by generous checkpointing, with markers placed directly before every section where you’re likely to spend a lot of time retrying. It also avoids the trap some past Sonics have fallen into, of placing a checkpoint without any rings nearby, effectively giving you a single life to work with on each attempt. That being said, its habit of dropping spiked blocks on your head negates any rings you may have saved up, sending you straight back to the last checkpoint.
There are a lot of new mechanisms built into levels, even if most of them simply toss Sonic into the air or, more frequently, spin him in high-speed circles. The biggest addition, though, is drop-in couch co-op with up to three friends, playable in battle and story modes.
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Local co-op is a rarity on its own, but four-player really feels like a treat, the game automatically letting stragglers boost forward to join the leader if anyone falls behind. It’s unfortunate that this generation’s consoles have such expensive controllers and so few reasons to own more than two, but those considerations are hardly Sega’s fault.
With its UHD levels whipping past at light speed, and especially with a friend or two in co-op, Sonic Superstars’ occasionally creative level design is a pleasure to explore and carries a serious challenge at times. Its boss fights and mini-games are disappointingly pedestrian, and very little in this game feels as glorious as Sonic Mania, but compared to the usual output from Sonic Team even a mild success feels like a revelation.
Sonic Superstars review summary In Short: It’s no Sonic Mania, but this is still one of the better attempts to create a modern day 2D Sonic The Hedgehog, with impressive visuals but boring boss battles.
Pros: Truly spectacular set pieces in the best tradition of Sonic. Local co-op works well and each of the available characters jumps and handles differently.
Cons: The patchy difficulty can occasionally feel frustrating and the best bit of every boss fight is the moment it’s over. Expensive compared to the superior Sonic Mania.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £54.99Publisher: SegaDeveloper: Arzest and Sonic TeamRelease Date: 17th October 2023Age Rating: 3
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Yet another Soulslike tries to beat From Software at their own game, with an unlikely new reboot that desperately wants to be Dark Souls 4.
The Friday letters page offers advice for keeping track of your video game backlog, as one reader praises indie game Cocoon.
The latest entry in Sega’s popular strategy series goes back further in time than ever before, to Ancient Egypt and the Bronze Age Collapse.
Box art for Princess Peach: Showtime! has been altered so that Peachy looks more like her appearance in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
GameCentral looks back at Sony’s earlier Spider-Man games and the importance of the new sequel to their increasingly barren release schedules.
The Thursday letters page contemplates the idea of Disney buying EA, as one reader offers some very detailed advice on racing wheels.
Starfield has been out for a month now, and sifting through reviews, ratings, and charts reveal a mixed reception of the game.
Could EA Sports FC become a Disney property? (pic: Wikipedia)
Bob Iger is being advised to buy EA and all its developers, as Disney considers whether it wants to re-enter the games industry as a major player.
Given their traditional audience, you might have imagined that Disney would’ve been an early pioneer in the video games industry, but they’ve always been strangely disinterested. That level of disinterest has varied over the decades, but they’ve often gone years without any major internal developers and usually just licence out their properties to other companies.
That’s the situation they’re in at the moment, as they licence Star Wars and Marvel to various different publishers. Games based on their classic properties are less common but there’s still things like Disney Dreamlight Valley – even if the last time they tried to make an original title was the (excellent) Split/Second in 2010.
However, it seems they may be having one of their periodic changes of heart, with various execs supposedly pushing the idea of transforming Disney into a ‘gaming giant’ by… acquiring EA.
EA has been the subject of acquisition speculation before, with many worrying that Microsoft’s purchase of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard would lead to other major companies making a grab for any remaining third party publishers.
The idea that that would include Disney is not new, but the problem is that current CEO Bob Iger seems especially ambivalent towards video games and has apparently been noncommittal about the prospect of buying EA, despite the advice of his deputies.
Although it’s no longer the only publisher using the licence, EA has been making Star Wars games for almost a decade now and also recently got the licence to make games based on Marvel characters, including Black Panther and Iron Man.
This is especially true as Marvel is reported to be planning an ‘internal shift’ to focus more on video games. Although it’s unclear whether that’s related to this latest talk of buying EA.
In that sense an acquisition would make a lot of sense, but Iger has already ignored one opportunity to foster in-house game development, after immediately selling off the FoxNext games division when Disney bought 20th Century Fox.
At that time, he said: ‘We’ve just decided that the best place for us to be in that space [i.e. video games] is licensing and not publishing.’
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There’s no sign that his attitude has changed but the Bloomberg article which highlighted the EA plans is about all of Iger’s various problems at the moment, where he was brought out of retirement to lead Disney but has so far failed to have any positive impact.
If others convince him that buying EA would be a good idea then the video game landscape will see a seismic shift; especially if Disney’s interest in games proves to be as fleeting as usual and EA get a taste of their own medicine, in terms of what usually happens when a larger company buys a smaller one.
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The Wednesday letters page discusses the economics of keeping video games versus selling them, as one reader asks for F1 racing wheel advice.
