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33 - Operation: Awesome! |
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31/08/07 Caution: Echidnas May Eat Your
Brain |
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I don't have a good track record when it comes to
choosing favourite characters. In any given TV or anime
series, for example, my favourite character will
generally be the one who starts out fairly prominently,
but is gradually faded into the background once the
actual plot starts to kick in. By the time the show's in
its fifth season, they'll have been gone for so long
that half the viewers won't even know they ever existed
at all.
And it's the same with games. In the Sonic the Hedgehog
series, which is the greatest video game series ever
(no, shut up, it is), I found a particular favourite in
Tikal the Echidna, who made her debut in Sonic
Adventure, the first Sonic game on what the kids of
today would consider to be 'proper' consoles. Tikal
wasn't actually playable, but acted as a sort of guide
to the other characters. When Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
came out for the Gamecube, Tikal didn't appear in the
main story but was included as a playable character in
the the multiplayer mode. With this in mind, I was
reasonably hopeful of seeing her in more games,
especially since the next game due out was Sonic Heroes,
which promised a stupidly large playable cast. Alas,
this is where it all seemed to go wrong. Tikal was
nowhere to be seen in Heroes, despite the presence of
pretty much every other character from recent (and even
not-so-recent) Sonic history. Christ, even Big the
sodding Cat was in there (For those of you not familiar
with Sonic fandom, which I'm guessing is most of you,
Big the Cat is pretty much our equivalent of Jar Jar
Binks). Now, I'll concede that Sonic Heroes did actually
suck. But it would have sucked a lot less with Tikal in
it. Well, for me, anyway.
Several more games have come out since then, and she's
still nowhere to be seen. Mind you, neither is Big the
Cat these days, so I suppose there's good and bad. In
any case, I thought I was alone in my slightly anomalous
obsession for a very minor character in an increasingly
unpopular games franchise. But no, there is someone else
out there, who goes by the name of SkyLights, who is
even more serious about Tikal than I am. Specifically,
this individual is producing a Tikal game. Not just a
silly sprite-hack of another game, either. This is an
honest-to-goodness original work in the style of the old
2D Sonic games.
You can download a demo version of Tikal and Chaos
here. This is without a doubt the best fangame I've
ever come across. The attention to detail is superb, the
art is lovingly close to the old 16-bit games... even
the music sounds like it could have come from one of the
original games. Most impressive of all is how close the
game comes to the unique feel and control of the Sonic
series... the level design is every bit as intuitive and
flowing, and the physics seem fairly solid (A little
hard for me to tell, as I was playing the demo via a
keyboard, which always feels odd to me). Those of you
who can't be arsed downloading the game can peruse some
gameplay
videos
on
Youtube. This, my friends, is the sort of brilliance
that can only come from true obsession!
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I still miss Ceefax. It
was like John the Baptist to the Christ of the Internet. |
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