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I wanted to like it–I really, really did.  The Penny Arcade guys seemed to like it (though they didn’t write any follow-up notes when they finished it, if they finished it), and it got good reviews pretty much across the board.  For a while, I thought I was crazy–what was I missing?  How could so many people say that this game returns Sonic to his roots when it has more in common with Sonic Unleashed than Sonic and Knuckles?  How can they say that Sonic’s “annoying” friends are downplayed in this game when they are, in fact, constantly present, and the few levels in which they are playable seem to be uniformly awful?  How can anyone claim Generations is the best new Sonic game in years when it attempts to redo a stage from the worst Sonic game of all time (Sonic 2k6) and leaves me liking the original version better?

When I look at what I wrote before, I have to stand by the Pros (though the nostalgia factor matters less and less as the game becomes more irritating, and the “excellent cross-section” of stages wound up getting kind of thematically repetitive) and admit that I might have been understating the Cons as part of giving the game a fair chance.  For one thing, the load times are unforgivable, especially after their near-total absence in Sonic Colors…granted, this game is a lot more graphically complex then Colors, but did it need to be?  Colors looked great, and it was on a less-powerful system!  Style is what makes graphics look good, not complexity…and as pretty as Generations can be, you’re ideally not going to be slowing down to enjoy it too often, which comes very close to defeating the purpose.  Furthermore, the game’s control scheme is really grating, not just for its variance against other Sonic games but for its unnecessary flourishes (e.g., bouncing and turning into a ball when drifting) that steal precious seconds and screw up your timing.

Even getting past my original list of Cons, there’s plenty to complain about.  The stage designs in Generations run the gamut from perplexing to painful.  You’re operating at the very limit of Sonic’s jumping range almost constantly, which means that you have no room to improvise when you see a stack of six platforms–you have to methodically (i.e., slowly) hop on all of them in order, or else you’ll just fall off and have to start over again, slowing down even more.  Despite having the superior example of Sonic Colors to work from, the designers seemed to draw much of their thinking from Sonic Unleashed instead, a game that continued the unfortunate modern Sonic tradition of filling every empty space with bottomless pits.  There was a little corner behind a wall in one stage of Generations where the ground just stopped, and I remember falling to my death and saying to myself, “Oh, come on! Did that really need to be there?”  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–having instant death an inch away at all times discourages players from even trying to play fast, and playing fast is the core experience of a Sonic game!  There are other ways to create a challenge besides filling the screen with 5% things you can stand on and 95% things you can’t.

But do you know what really killed this game for me?  The Sonics” lack of responsiveness.  There is a very noticeable delay between, say, pressing the jump button and seeing Sonic jump–this was what I alluded to when I compared the game to Sonic 4, but I think I was being too forgiving.  This game’s lag is just as bad as Sonic 4’s, if not worse, and this problem exacerbates all the others, from glitchy floors that you can get stuck in, to a malfunctioning homing attack, to the preponderance of straining jumps and looming pits, to the Sonic series’s latest frustrating and incomprehensible final boss.  I only played the PS3 version of Generations, so I dunno, maybe the controls are better on the XBox, but there’s no excuse for such a glaring lapse on any system.  I met the minimum number of requirements to finish the game and then shoved it back onto my shelf largely because of this issue, and that’s saying something.

Bottom line: despite what virtually everyone else is saying about this game, I say skip it.  It’s just not that fun for the most part.  Get Sonic Colors instead.  The more people who buy Generations, and the more websites that inexplicably praise it, the more likely it is that Sega will learn the wrong lessons here…and that would really be a shame.

I can’t tell if it’s comforting or depressing that the site still managed to amass 1,024 spam comments (all caught in the moderation queue) while I was recovering.  I know I’m not as prolific as any given high-schooler on Tumblr, but I’d still appreciate some real feedback now and then…assuming I could even find it if it existed, in this sea of watch ads.

I tried to stay out of the way as OWS participants and coordinators flitted around, some cleaning up accumulated garbage and bringing it out to the curb, others passing out flyers or offering trinkets.  Something about the unspoken energy there reminded me of my alma mater, which is perhaps the only place I’ve ever felt completely at home.  That’s how Occupy Wall Street struck me–as a community, one I felt I could fit into, at least as a visitor–and I think that’s exactly the kind of atmosphere the park’s 24/7 residents were trying to create.

This morning, I woke up to images of an empty Zuccotti Park being power-washed by cleaning crews, shown as part of continuous live coverage by NY1.  The police had descended and destroyed the encampment minutes after I’d gone to bed.  Without its vibrancy, its voices, its tents, the park was barely recognizable to me.

Today, the mayor of New York City uttered the phrase, “No right is absolute” in all seriousness.  This is a man whose very name calls his impartiality into constant question–the Bloomberg brand is stamped on information feeds and trading terminals all across the financial industry–and a man whose vast personal fortune has bequeathed him such myopia that he often seems to want to run New York as his own, private corporation.  In order to secure the third term as mayor he is now serving, he had to more or less change the rules of how government is elected, but he made sure to change them back as soon as he got what he wanted, revealing the hubris that must necessarily accompany a belief that no other man or woman has the right or skill for his job.  In this way, Bloomberg has at times seemed less like a mayor than a CEO in the way he has presided over the city–from his ill-advised lack of transparency regarding his whereabouts during last year’s big snowstorm to calling a reporter a disgrace after being asked a pointed question, he carries himself with the imperiousness of the very “trust fund babies” that some say, wrongly, make up the whole of OWS.  I might have actually respected his choice of Cathie Black for schools chancellor (the virtues of outside perspective are too often ignored, and experience is too often enshrined as the sole factor in an intelligent hiring decision) had it not yet been one more transparent attempt to install a like thinker (and a like personality) in his citywide boardroom–all the better to concentrate an outsize portion of power in his hands.

And never has Bloomberg’s deference to corporatism and the elite been more on display than last night at 1:00 AM.  Proudly, he took full responsibility for siccing (by some accounts) 1,000 police officers armed with powerful lights, zip cuffs, pepper spray, sonic cannons, bulldozers, and nightsticks on a peaceful group of people who were probably half-asleep.  Just like that, News Corporation got what it wanted, and, if only for a little while, the 1% was once again spared from confronting the anger their greed has inspired.  The after-the-fact attempt by the deputy mayor to smear Occupy Wall Street as some kind of militia-in-waiting is just shameful.

I’ve been to Occupy Wall Street–many of my friends are participating in or helping to run it.  This was a place of music and discourse, a place lined with shops and visitor information tables, a place where young people dedicated enough to their companions and their ideas rode bikes for hours to generate power for them.  It was a place were random passersby were offered free flu shots.  And–here’s something I’m not seeing said often enough–nothing about any of this rendered Zuccotti Park closed or impassable to the general public.  Well-kept paths, entrances and exits, greeters, and signs marked the way into and through the tent city, and even when a young man with a nose ring and a spiked leather jacket told one my friends that their music wasn’t to his liking, he vowed not to force them to leave.  All were welcome–all were always welcome.  Both times I visited the protest encampment, the only people telling me where I could and couldn’t go (in loud, authoritarian voices) were the police.  I have always been far more scared of a group that cannot be legally disobeyed under any circumstances, and which is therefore essentially empowered to make up the law in the moment, than I could ever be of a diverse mass of Americans reading, writing, and thinking.

This is what Mayor Bloomberg and New York City’s omnipotent, bullylike, vaguely militaristic police force broke up last night for the convenience and comfort of the rich and powerful.  But you know what gets to me the most?  The loss of the People’s Library. It’s bad enough that personal property has been a matter of on-demand public inquiry since 9/11 (with nary a vote to install such a policy, at least not that I can remember), and that the police can now apparently just toss your things in the garbage if they think it will baffle your attempts to organize events their benefactors don’t like.  But consigning 5,500 library books, and the knowledge therein, to a dumpster and an uncertain fate is a sin in a visceral way.  The fact that the police and mayor were willing to take such an action, even as it echoed with similarity to many of the most infamous fascist crackdowns in history, speaks to just how out-of-touch they are.  This and the journalistic blackout imposed on the 1:00 AM crackdown (the account of one MotherJones reporter who got through is a must-read) are affronts to free speech that I, as an American and as a person, cannot abide.  Our absolute commitment to free speech is the light that has always redeemed America, even in its darkest times.

So here’s what I’d like to say to the protesters–don’t give up.  The community you’ve built can outlive its original physical presence.  Stand together.  Sleep in shifts.  Crank the effort and the messaging up to 11.  Show the naysayers that even if the powers that be make reaching your goals hard, you’re willing to fight harder.  Put to bed once and for all the myth that this effort isn’t about anything, that it will simply fade away in cold weather, that a culture whose muscle for nuance has atrophied can no longer abide a movement of diverse ideas.  Make yourselves more visible, not less.  Because the whole world is watching now, and so am I.  This is no longer simply a fight for promoting awareness of economic inequality–this is a fight for our voices.  And that’s a fight we cannot afford to lose.

Pros

• The nostalgia factor is exactly as high as you’d expect it to be, yet the “classic Sonic” stages don’t feel like remakes or rehashes (a big improvement over Sonic 4).
• All the music is great.  The classic songs are perfectly preserved, the newer remixes hit just the right notes (I can’t wait until I start getting the reverse, i.e. Genesis-style remixes of later-era songs!), and the stage select music is fascinating.  It blends slowed-down versions of the different zone songs depending on your proximity to the zone gates, sort of like the hub world in Banjo-Kazooie.
• I haven’t yet seen any of those awful button-matching minigames in the modern Sonic stages, and they seem to have made the Starposts impossible to miss in both modes, regardless of what height you’re at when you pass them.  It’s about damn time.
• So far, the selection of stages represents an excellent cross-section from the various Sonic eras.  It’s nice to see Sega apparently knowing what makes its games good, for once.  (That said, I would totally welcome a redone Sonic 2k6 stage at some point, if only because this is probably their only chance to make amends for that game.)

Cons

• Classic Sonic’s controls feel a little sluggish, sort of like Sonic 4 Sonic (though at least a degree less obnoxious).  You’ll be using your spin-dash a lot–revving it more than once actually matters in this game.  (There’s a cute graphic to signify this.)
• Based on zone three (no, I’m not going to give it away), the modern Sonic designers still have too much of a capacity to get pit-happy.  I’m hoping this will prove to be an isolated incident.
• Sonic Team still refuses to settle on a control scheme: I find myself screwing up as modern Sonic a lot because I’m expecting the double jump from Colors, but it’s not there.  Maybe I’ll be able to buy this as an add-on skill later (see below).
• The load times are more like Unleashed than Colors (so is the menu, in terms of its convenience factor), which is disappointing.  Hardly the worst in the series, though (that honor still belongs to Sonic 2k6), and it’s much less of a problem inside the stages.

Not Sure Yet

• Perhaps in keeping with the “greatest hits” premise of the game, Generations blends mechanical elements from a lot of recent titles, and it’s interesting to see what made the cut.  This game has the boost command from Sonic Unleashed (but adjusted to its Sonic Colors implementation), the “skill sets” character-customization feature from Sonic and the Secret Rings (!), and, if the abbreviated manual is to be believed, the grinding-rail systems from both Unleashed (modern), and, like, Sonic Advance (classic).  Like I said, interesting,
• It seems really easy to get high ranks–I scored an S on my first passes through three of my first five acts, including the game’s intro stage!  I predict this changing in a hurry if there are more pit-heavy levels.  They’ve also made the rating system a lot more transparent–the highest you can get on points alone is rank A, but if you make it through a stage without dying, you seem to get kicked up a rank regardless, so that’s how you get the S.  This and the ranking system from Colors are both light years ahead of, say, Sonic and the Black Knight.  You always know what you’re shooting for.

Overall, I’d say I still like Sonic Colors better so far, but Generations deserves the good press it seems to be getting.  I’ll check in again when I’m further along.

Anyway, just in time for Halloween, here’s a house that appears to have a screaming fireplace (courtesy of Sotheby’s):

So Lulu, the service I use to print and otherwise sell the School Kids SG books, has changed my “storefront” over to a new format.  Personally, I hate it–I have much less control over the page layout and how the items I want to sell are displayed.  I threw together a temporary store of my own here on this site until I can figure out a longer-term solution.  Please check it out if you have a minute–I put up previews of all three SKSG books to stroke your interest.