The Hotdog Laserhouse

Since Tumblr is moving away from custom themed pages it's easier to just have a pin.

Hi! My name is Ryan, but everybody on the internet calls me "Blaze", as in BlazeHedgehog. I've had that internet username since at least 1998 or even 1997, where I picked it for myself as a high school freshman in the computer science lab. I was trying to fit in with other Sonic fans, you see. I just never felt like changing it (and now it's sort of like "my brand.")

I'm the founder of SAGE (The Sonic Amateur Games Expo), though I haven't had an active role in the event in a good while now. I still occasionally dabble in making games, and depending on who you ask, one of those games changed the face of an entire community.

Since then, I've been growing a slightly popular Youtube channel, and I occasionally stream on Twitch. I've been doing both of those a long time -- my Youtube channel dates back to 2006, and I've been livestreaming games since before Twitch even existed (Who here remembers a service called "Mogulus"?) I even used to run multiple Shoutcast radio stations back in the day!

In terms of this blog, it is largely an ask blog. I try to make sure at least one post goes up every day. Most people ask me questions about Sonic games, but feel free to ask me just about anything as long as it's not rude or too personal. Just be aware it might take a week or two for the answer to get posted, depending on volume and interest.

I wrote a big long intro post for the now defunct Cohost. If you'd like to know even more about me, that follows under the "keep reading" tag:

For those of you out there who don't know what this is a reference to, I mean these fellas:

I usually find them at Dollar Tree, and on the back of the box they proudly proclaim to predate Poptarts as "the original pop-up pastry."

They are, ostensibly, just Poptarts, but the notable thing, at least the last time I had them, is they have two to three times as much filling as a Poptart. Regular, name-brand Poptarts suck, in my opinion. They are 90% crust and 10% filling. But not these things, these things have plenty. I generally get blueberry, partially because my Dollar Tree only usually stocks blueberry and strawberry, and I'm not much of a strawberry guy.

It sounds like somebody kind of tried to do that, but it wasn't specifically about "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows," it's more just a guy was really angry about Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 so early.

Which now they aren't. If you're enrolled in the Extended Security Updates, Microsoft just pushed the deadline out from 2026 to 2027.

I mean, it's cool. I like how so many of them have such high compatibility with their target game. Like it took a really long time to emulate Sonic Unleashed, right, but so much about the Unleashed Recomp just works flawlessly. I know there's tons of logistics around that, it wasn't easy, but from a purely end-user perspective it's great how painless these things tend to be and how accurate the end product is.

I think studios and publishers will eventually look into it. It wouldn't surprise me if some already are. And technically some already have -- the first Mega Man Legacy Collection was using a series of static recompilations, I believe.

But you gotta see some of these guys as these, like, big hulking behemoths. It takes forever for them to change direction. It's like Sega getting into generative AI, right. They're kind late to that party and the tide is turning on it right as they're going all-in. Because it took them a while to steer the boat in this direction. Big corporations are not nimble creatures.

Recomp/decomps are still a little "bleeding edge" right now. Sonic Unleashed was the big wake-up call I think and that's barely a year old. Adoption outside of this space is going to take a while.

But then again, maybe not. The benefit of an emulator is that you make one piece of software that runs many games, whereas these recomp and decomp projects only exist on a game-by-game basis. When you consider retro game collections are often very budget things, doing game-by-game projects like this is probably more expensive.

Update time!

This time, I'm going to lead with the plea, because the situation is really bad this month. I explain why below, but this is a particularly nasty month for me to be out of work. If you can spare even a dollar, I really, really, really need to make my share of the rent. This is the absolute bare minimum I need for survival here.

Mostly, this has been a month of recovery. As you may know, I had my dental surgery just over a month ago, and I knew there would be some recovery time. What I did not expect is that the surgeon said I would need two full weeks of bed rest. Yes, bed rest for my mouth. They literally told me that if I worked, I would even have to request the two weeks off. And he wasn't kidding. The two weeks following surgery were genuinely exhausting.

I've thought about doing sort of a vlog about it, just to document what I currently sound like and to tell the complete story, but the cliffnotes version is that after the surgery I spent a lot of time sleeping, whether I wanted to or not. I was not prepared for how much it took out of me. I'd often just wake up not even remembering falling asleep like I had narcolepsy. My body was in recovery mode while my mouth healed.

That's a legitimate strategy for Sonic Unleashed speedruns, because there are a few places you have to break out of (or skip) side scrolling segments.

I mean the obvious answer here is Spider-man 2. I owned that for the Xbox, and played it on the 360 through backwards compatibility. That was, for the longest time, the poster child for "good licensed game."

But deep down I don't think that game has aged super well. The swinging is interesting, but the combat and mission design and just general overall polish feels incredibly janky nowadays.

Shoutouts to the lesser-celebrated Spider-man 1. As in, the game based on the first movie. That game plays like a direct sequel to Neversoft's PS1 Spider-man game, even moreso than Enter Electro, and is still shockingly very playable even nowadays. And since it's not open world, it's got a lot less jank.

The next one I always think about is Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. This is maybe the first Hulk game that really puts you in the shoes of the big green guy and he feels "right." Hulk feels like this out of control freight train and its a blast jumping around the city and running up buildings. Definitely made me want a Sonic game that felt like that.

I think a lot of people forget because it's such a natural fit and there's a bunch of them that are actually pretty good, but Dragon Ball games are technically licensed. Budokai 3 is my DBZ game of choice from that era, but I know a lot of people like Tenkaichi 3.

I mean, I dunno, there's a bunch of licensed games I think are at least considered "good enough":

Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game. Some people swear this is a really "revolutionary" game. It's definitely pushing a lot of boundaries in terms of tech and design.

TMNT (2007). This is based on the CGI movie, and is developed by Ubisoft. From what I remember it's a very decent Prince of Persia type game, but you can swap between the four turtles.

Lord of the Rings: Two Towers & Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. The console versions are RPG-infused beat'em'ups as I recall and a lot of people were fond of them. The GBA versions are some of the best Diablo clones you could get on a portable back then.

The Simpsons: Hit & Run. Good enough that people are demanding a modern remaster. I never got into it, personally.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II. I own this. I like it conceptually but Factor5 really makes you work for it. Their games are always a little too difficult. Presentation is basically perfect, though.

LEGO Star Wars. I mean, this is where it all started!

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee. I've never personally played it but people swear by this game. And there's an upcoming remaster!

007: Nightfire. It's not as good as Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64, but I have a small amount of nostalgia for this game. But only the PS2 version. This is from the era of Electronic Arts developing the PS2 version in-house and then outsourcing completely different versions of the same game for all the other platforms.

James Bond: From Russia With Love. I've never played this one but I remember it getting LAVISHED with praise back in the day.

Disney-Pixar Cars & Cars: Race-O-Rama. These are surprisingly decent open world racing games. Their worst sin is being a little on the easy side.

Ghost Rider. I have been told this is a pretty decent Devil May Cry clone.

Monster Jam: Urban Assault. Perhaps the only good monster truck game ever produced. Sort of like with wrestling games, too many monster truck games want to be sim games. This is Monster Truck Burnout and it rules.

It's neat that he got through it so quickly but to be honest I never really watched much of it. I've been trying to cut down on long ass streams because they eat up so much of my day.

It was bad enough when I was watching one hour of GiantBomb a day back during the Persona 4 Endurance Run era, now streamers will average 3-6 hour streams multiple times per week. For Jeff, it feels like he's often live three or four days a week, for the podcast, for ranking NES games, for streaming new releases, for whatever.

And to be clear: that's fine! I have nothing but respect for Jeff. The man is an institution. But I find myself trying to rationalize how anyone is supposed to get anything done like that.

Specifically because it's like, if you're a streamer that streams 3-6 hours a day, but you also want to support your friends that stream 3-6 hours a day, how does any of that add up?

The nearest I can tell, most streamers just don't actually watch tons of their own friends. They'll stop in for maybe 10 or 15 minutes a couple times throughout a stream but it's probably weird that when I load up a stream, my goal is to have it up until it ends.

And when I do that, it eats up like, a third of my entire day! I can't be doing that!

And if you miss a live show and watch a vod, then it feels even more awkward. Because you watch a vod to watch the whole thing, don't you? That's the point.

"Brainrot" is not new. Kids have always loved to confuse or weird out their parents. This was 1980's brainrot:

It's rebellion against conformity. Go look at the history of abstract, avant-garde, and outsider art. Particularly Dadaism. It's often a type of protest. In the case of Dadaism, it was protesting war and nationalism. It's taking a different form now, something modern, but it's always been here.

It feels like there's some mandate from above that's preventing things. Takashi Iizuka just gave an interview recently where he said if it was up to him he'd have every Sonic game ever made released on every platform.

Also interesting to note that he says that the budget for a remaster is the same as creating a new Sonic game. I feel like you can read between the lines on that pretty easily, because remasters are usually treated like quick, cheap ways to generate easy money.

Like I've been watching some of Jason Schrier. If you aren't familiar with that name, he's one of the higher profile game press people, very smart guy, works at Bloomberg right now on their gaming side. So I would say he knows his stuff better than most people. But he's started a solo channel on Youtube where he talks about the game industry. Recently he did a video on game budgets and why games cost so much to make.

And he does some quick napkin math on how something like Marathon from Bungie costs an estimated 300 million dollars. The cost of living has gone up, the number of people working on games has gone up, so on and so forth. It adds up very easily.

So I think you can take a step back and say that on the cheaper end of things, 80-100 million dollars is a low end game budget for a AAA studio these days.

I do not think there is a remaster in the world that costs 100 million dollars. Let's look at NightDive. Now the Mobygames credits page for the Heretic/Hexen remaster lists more than 940 people, but in terms of the actual development team there was maybe 45 actual developers who put that remaster together, and maybe 19 of them worked for NightDive.

If you compare that to the credits page for Marathon, it lists 2,700 people in the credits and Jason Schrier says the actual number of people employed at Bungie is more like 400. So it's the same deal; big number in the credits, but a fraction of actual developers. And since some of those were still working on Destiny 2 during the production of Marathon, you could say around 300 people at Bungie made Marathon.

Versus 20-40 people on a remaster from NightDive, a company mostly known for some very high quality work. Some of the best, most robust remasters in the business today come from NightDive.

You see this at Digital Eclipse, too. Again: known for a very high bar of quality when it comes to remastering. Maybe 50 actual developers per project, and nowhere near the numbers credited on a brand new, big budget game.

That means that when compared to a brand new, big budget game, it takes maybe 10-20% of that to make a good, high quality remaster from some of the best remastering houses in the business today.

So when Takashi Iizuka says remastering one Sonic game costs as much as a new game does, he's telling on Sega, either on purpose or by accident. Especially given Sega's track record of bungling remasters. They are not paying top dollar for someone to do them correctly. They are being extra cheap.

I've heard a couple things through the grapevine. Anecdotal things, so I can't verify them for myself. But the main thing I've heard is that people in the press can't stand him simply because he was kind of annoying. I was told he basically had the heart of a 4chan troll. One of those guys who loved sharing foul memes of cognitohazard level garbage.

For that reason, apparently a lot of the press tried to avoid dealing with him, because off the record and in personal situations he was just the worst kind of irony poisoned internet gremlin. Exactly the kind of guy who would make "I identify as an attack helicopter" jokes on the official company social media account. Absolutely insufferable dumpster water sense of humor.

One story I did hear... again, anecdotal, but you know how the Sonic "brand" started having this weird rivalry with Game Grumps?

The way I heard it, Grumps were apparently not Sega's first pick. Aaron Webber supposedly bent over backwards to court Pewdiepie instead, and Pewdiepie refused to play ball with them. So they had to find some other influencer to torture and signed Game Grumps instead.

And to be clear: Webber was specifically looking for something antagonistic. They wanted it to be this kind of back-and-forth feud. A "friendly" rivalry. Which makes the years of claims that Arin hates Sonic look very different to me, because Webber was apparently encouraging him to be that way on purpose.

This is a little bit funny to me, considering people who know me know that I am a gigantic Final Fantasy VII Mark. I put over 100 hours into the PS1 game, finishing almost every quest and mastering every materia without using a guide.

Final Fantasy VII Remake was maybe one of the last games I bought before things got really bad for me. It took me a while to work through because unless it's my Fortnite dailies or something I'm playing for review, I tend to work through games in fits and starts. But I did stream the ending about two years ago:

I think I did that in prep for Rebirth coming out, so people wouldn't spoil anything for me. Then last year I remembered I had a PS5 and I hadn't touched the Yuffie DLC, so I did a private friends-only stream for that.

In the interim, a friend gifted me both Crisis Core and Rebirth... last year? The year before? For my birthday and I just haven't started them yet. Part of that is indecision; I don't know if I should play Crisis Core first or Rebirth. Some people say Crisis Core, other people say Rebirth.

With Revelation announced I'd dive head first into Rebirth, but the problem is I started Final Fantasy 9 in September of last year and I'm still sluggin my way through that, bit by bit.

And I'd rather not juggle multiple Final Fantasies at the same time. Heck, I'd rather not juggle multiple JRPGs at the same time.

What this ultimately means is that I am kinda-sorta in the dark about Rebirth, and I have been deliberately avoiding even the reveal trailers of Revelation. I've also been forcing myself to focus harder on getting through Final Fantasy 9, because these games are typically ~30 hours long but I'm pushing 20 hours and I'm still on Disc 2 of 4.

I really loved FF7 Remake. Absolutely adored it. I love the idea that it's both a remake and a sequel, and a large portion of the game is sort of reckoning with forces trying to push the story in a new direction versus the phantoms of the past trying to keep things on track. Really smart stuff, really stellar characterization, just the absolute perfect adaptation.

I guess I did not, no.

The Final Horizon was... I mean, Kishimoto said he was trying to compete with modders, I guess, right? To show that Sega can do that kind of content. But I feel like he went too far. The Final Horizon kind of drags. They made a lot of content out of what is arguably very few assets and you can really feel that. It's a lot of cheap junk that only exists to fill time. Like the Episode Shadow DLC for Sonic Forces, but padded out to be even longer.

If they wanted to make The Final Horizon feel meaningful, they should have spent more time on the new final boss and then unlocked the playable versions of Amy, Tails and Knuckles as some kind of NG+ "what if" bonus mode.

I've played it up to about Twinkle Snow. For those of you aren't aware, Tracker has produced two rom hacks, one of Sonic Advance 2 and recently one for Sonic Advance 3. The idea is to rebalance the games and kind of sand down the rougher edges.

Sonic Advance 2 SP largely just increases the number of SP rings in levels to make it less grueling to get the Chaos Emeralds, but Sonic Advance 3 SP makes much larger changes to the level structure itself.

And... it's not enough for me. He got rid of a lot of the instant kill pits, sure, but it's still an ugly game stuffed full of gotcha traps and pointless gimmicks. I think he wanted to maintain some sense of a light touch, to not alter the core of the game too much, but that's the whole problem for me. Sonic Advance 3 is a game that needs a lot of work. A lot more than this.

IF I KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT ROM HACKING, I'D:

Remove all Chao from the game. Sorry, Chao heads. To access special stages in Sonic Advance 3, you have to collect all the Chao in every level in a zone. Once all the Chao have been collected, they get replaced with keys, and keys can be spent unlocking the special stage hidden on the map. But that means you have to replay levels at least twice! Too many steps! Get rid of the Chao! Keys only!

Get rid of the variable acceleration mechanic. In Sonic Advance 3, your rate of acceleration is determined by how many rings you're holding. I think it measures from 0 rings (lowest acceleration) up to 70 or 80 rings (maximum acceleration). For speed run sickos this is great because there's a big skill ceiling that lets them go really fast if they can master it. For everyone else it's annoying because once you get up to around 50 rings characters start accelerating a little too fast, so it ends up feeling like a trap that causes you to make mistakes more easily. So get rid of it! Lock acceleration down to a fixed value!

Let you swap between characters like in Encore Mode. Partners are a big thing in Sonic Advance 3. Each pair comes with their own set of abilities, but you only ever get to see one side of that equation. So I think you should be able to press Select or L bumper or something and swap out for your partner and back.

Ideally, put at least one swap station in every level. Arguably this is going to be a lot harder because there's checkpointing to consider and all kinds of things, but being able to swap out characters entirely in the middle of a level would be ideal. Keep the partner swap button but also maybe you find some place that lets you go from a Sonic & Tails pair to Knuckles & Cream. Or maybe just character boxes like Encore Mode had.

Every gotcha trap has to go. ALL OF THEM. There are so many places where you're running full tilt, bump into a wall, stop dead, and spikes pop out of the floor just to humiliate you. Absolutely not. There are springs that launch you directly into enemies that are off screen. Get out of here. Reducing bottomless pits is only "step one." Go further.