The Missed Opportunities of Sonic 06 (2025) | Hacker News Reader

The Missed Opportunities of Sonic 06 (2025)

isaacmarovitz.com

64 pointsibobev20 comments

Sonic Adventure 1 is infamous for its lighting/textures successively degrading after each port from Dreamcast -> GameCube -> PC. There's a famous video showcasing all the changes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SORYL5J1Heg

The only version of SA1 I played as a kid was the Gamecube DX version. I was shocked to find out that the original version looks and plays a lot better (and has far fewer bugs)

> CSM here stands for cascaded shadow maps, the shadow technique used by 06.

I was curious about the technique, and there's surprisingly detailed documentation here from MSDN of all places: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dxtecharts/c...

Ah sonic the hedgehog… My beloved franchise, long since brutally treated by both consumers and the company that owns them. For something that was at one point just as big as Mario, it’s crazy how much insane history and drama has happened to it. I hold out hope I’ll get to see the Sonic SatAM and Sonic the Comic cast again in something, but I highly doubt it. At least the IDW comics seem to be doing pretty well (although the fans get really weird and parasocial about Ian Flynn and Evan Stanley)

Is there anything else that has both risen and fallen as far? It's not like every (mainline) Mario game is blasting it out of the park, but he has certainly been more consistent overall. I've lost track of the number of times Sonic is over... and then he comes back with some modest amount of success... and then fades... and then comes back. And who would have guessed perhaps the first truly successful video game movie franchise, of all things?

To be fair, I hold the somewhat controversial opinion Sonic has always been better as a TV Show or Comic than as an actual video game franchise. I feel like the Sonic TV Shows always usually are good.

Even the worst ones, like Sonic X, still end up having an amazing third season that redeem the rest of the show.

Theres a reason Cosmo still gets referenced here and there all these years later.

This is sort of an allegory of Sonic itself. As long as you have a single coin you get to try again.

I recall reading web fiction in the mid 90s (I was like 10) about the Sonic Comics characters. Parasocial is a super polite way to put it.

Interesting, the author is recompiling the Xbox game to PC, and complaining about the poor graphics of the final version.

IMO the gameplay and glitches are a significantly bigger problem. One Argentinian decided to take a different approach, rebuilding the game from scratch in Unity despite having no prior programming knowledge. It's called Project 06 (or P-06) and it's almost complete.

Sonic 06 can maybe be fixed at a technical level but not at gameplay level, yeah. Tortured myself by playing it through it twice and when you do know how to handle the game (don't do XY or the game freaks out, avoid jumping here, don't touch the analogue stick here...) a few Sonic parts can be quiet enjoyable but the rest of the game is such a shitshow. I even played ALL of the side quests for Sonic's part and it was one of the worst experiences I've ever had in a videogame. It's interesting to read about the development and people trying to "fix" it though.

I did what I could... but there were many complex issues involved with development, as you might imagine.

After seeing several LPs of how horrible this game was I asked my wife for it for Christmas. She got it for me and I was excited to experience the mind rotting horror it was supposed to be. Only to find out that despite being able to play almost every other XBox 360 game I have being backwards compatible this one particular game refused to play on it.

It sucks I still want to try it sometime if anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it.

Yuji Naka really fell off hard after Sonic Adventure 2 and commercial failures of Sega's hardware endeavors as a whole. Went from being Sega's golden child, to being arrested for securities fraud.

Allegedly he was extremely difficult to work with and would not share the Night's 3d game engine with an American team that was developing a 3d Sonic game for the Sega Saturn, effectively kneecapping a big part of that console's commercial viability

I'm going to go out on a limb and confidently assert that he didn't write a single line of the code that this article is about.

He lead the team for most of development until leaving the company months before the horribly botched release. He mostly wrote most of the assembly code for the mainline sonic games in the 90s.

So, again, he probably didn’t write the code the article is about.

Naka tried to justify in a tweet reply that, because most of the 3d engine was written in pure assembly, the american team wouldn't understand it eitherway. That was straight up bs.

It's obvious he had a personal bias with the american team working on a sonic title.

What are the target FPS and where do they know from?

It's a console title, so they have standards. I don't have the exact number but I believe it's 60FPS.

It was a point of technical pride that it was designed to run at 60 fps. Unfortunately the game was so poorly designed and coded that any time things started happening the game was incapable of running at 60 fps.

It is basically like if Windows ME team had designed it to work on 4k. It would've made things worse knowing they wasted time on putting a flower on a giant pile of turds.

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