Sonic Chronicles Playtest

Every time I go to London now it seems to be on Sonic related business, and my latest trip was no different, I won't bore you with the details of how I got there and back this time because I took a train, instead of a coach, which improved the journey massively.

Samba De Amigo
Once everyone had gathered in the Nintendo flat it was time to try out Sonic Chronicles, at least that's what we thought, however AAUK turned on the Wii and up popped a early build of Samba De Amigo. Unfortunately I never had the pleasure of playing the original Dreamcast game and only had a passing familiarity with it having watched a few reviews of it a few years back.

The idea of the game is to shake the wii mote and nun chuck in time to the instructions on screen, now I am the first to admit I have no skills whatsoever when it comes to playing any type of music or rythym games, but playing through a song I found myself getting things right more often than not, this may be due to the fact the game was set on normal rather than hard. At times the game asked you to strike a pose which didn't seem to sit well with some of the attendees; however I was one of the few who succeeded at this feature, partly because once you have dressed up as Tails their isn't much that can embarrass you.

Overall I enjoyed playing it, although half the fun is watching someone else play, as you can actually watch what's actually going on in the rich background rather than concentrate on the movements. The wii mote handled itself very well however the nun chuck felt a little sluggish which seemed to be a problem picked up on by everyone else who played hopefully this will be fixed for the final version, that or SEGA will actually bring out a set of maracas like they did for the original, well I hope they will.

Sonic Chronicles
After everyone had played Samba it was time for Sonic Chronicles. Now before I launch into what I thought of this, I would like to note that I am not an RPG fan, the only I've played being Final Fantasy 3 on the DS, and I still haven't finished it after owning it for over a year!

The game starts up with a nice comic style animation of how Dr. Eggman was defeated two years ago, the animation is very well done and impressively detailed for a portable gaming system, although I may still have my head in the GBA era. Once this is over you are placed in green hill zone and get a communication from Tails telling you Knuckles is missing and Amy will meet up with you. Tails also acts as a guide to the response choice system which has a range of responses which will help you find out more information, or sarcastic responses which makes Sonic out to be a dick... I of course kept on choosing the sarcastic responses, which gets you an annoyed look and a snide comment back most of the time. Overall the response system was rather intuitive and very entertaining to explore, plus there the odd occasional nuggets of old Sonic game references which will give the old fans a buzz.

Moving around the map is easy enough by putting the stylus on the screen in the direction you want to go. This flows nicely with the background being very rich and detailed. At certain points action icons will appear which let characters do certain actions like make Sonic do a loop or Tails to fly to an area no one else can reach. Of course starting out I didn't have any characters other than Sonic and Amy so there were only a few actions I could do, so people are going to have to go back and play areas again.

There are creatures roaming the areas which if you run into you go into a battle screen. The battle screen gives you a set of options attack, power move (I'll talk about this in a second), defend, item and flee. These are pretty standard sets except if you go for flee then you move into a chase scene where you have to make characters jump to avoid obstacles; this could get very interesting with a four person team. Now the power move is also a bit different, each move in this is earned as you level up and costs you points to perform which can be replenished by using certain items, these moves also require you to perform a series of screen taps in order to improve the chances of success like the submarine mini game in Sonic rush Adventure, however I wasn't very good at getting the timing right as I kind of skimmed over the tutorial on it and my sense of timing is awful, especially when it comes to jokes.

I think that's about all I can really say at the moment, this was still a pretty early build of the game so some aspects will probably change, but from what I've seen so far I can see myself really enjoying it, if only for the references to previous games, and with Bioware claiming they are wanting to tie this story into previous game stories, which are to be honest are somewhat lacking in the writing department, they have there hands full. I wish them all the best on finishing this game as I feel it has great potential, for a Sonic game.