#really nerdy

1. Reduce Medal Requirements Significantly

Why? One of the biggest things people hate about Sonic Unleashed is the game's medal collection aspect. Stashed in the corners of many levels are sun and moon medals which unfortunately block your progression. As you play through the game, eventually you'll reach a level requiring a certain number of these medals, and if you don’t have enough, you can't progress any further without returning to previous levels and collecting more. More often than not, players don’t know they’re behind on their medal counts until it’s already too late. And as you near the end of the game, medal unlock numbers get to be excessive, wasting hours of playtime on busy work. So, just reduce that requirement. It barely provides any legitimate gameplay and is clearly only there to tack on extra hours to the clock. Nothing of value will be lost, but players will enjoy the game more, and completionists can still hunt out all of the medals for achievements and such. Complexity: Low. With what I know about game development, this would be as simple as changing a few variables in the code -- it’d take ten minutes, tops.

2. Increase EXP Earned for the Werehog

Why? I maintain that a fully powered up Werehog is actually kinda fun. Early-game Werehog sucks; you don't have enough health, and you don't have a lot of combat abilities to fight back with. You must spend HOURS grinding out experience points (EXP) and leveling up your stats before any of that starts to feel tolerable. What's annoying is the Werehog is balanced so that you'll finish the game long before you learn all of the combat abilities, even if you focus on JUST leveling up the one stat that teaches them to you. There are entire DLC levels built explicitly to help grind out tons of EXP quickly, so Sonic Team knew this was a problem. Just throw the player a bone and make defeated enemies drop slightly higher amounts of EXP so you can get to the good stuff faster. Complexity: Low. Along the same lines as changing medal requirements, changing the EXP values in the code could be done in the time it takes to heat up leftovers in the microwave. It would probably take longer to figure out how much to change them.

3. Consolidate all DLC in to one “World Tour” pack

Why? Typically re-releases like this include all of the DLC as a free bonus, but Sega has bucked that trend with games like Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. Both games contained optional DLC to add in their bonus Gamecube-exclusive content for an extra $7 or so. Shrewd, I guess, but it probably also helped provide Sega with a financial incentive to make those ports at all. It was also easy to ignore if you didn't like the idea of paying an extra $7, because it was all optional side-content, separate from the main game. So, do the same with Sonic Unleashed: roll the five or so DLC packs in to a singular “World Tour” pack and charge $7-ish for it. I know it's dumb, but business is dumb, and it might give the porting team a little more leeway with their development budget. Complexity: Moderate. I don’t know how Sonic Unleashed supports DLC, but this probably wouldn’t be as easy as packing all the DLC together. It still wouldn’t be that difficult, though.

4. New NPC marker to denote story-critical characters

Why? A big complaint and misconception I've seen about Sonic Unleashed time and time again is that you HAVE to spend lots of time hunting down and talking to villager NPCs in towns. Though there are a few times the game forces you to talk to townspeople, you can ignore most of them and progress through the game just fine (I certainly did). The issue is that the Unleashed doesn’t really designate between characters you can talk to, characters that give out optional side quests, and critical story characters, so it’s easy to get stuck doing something that’s unnecessary. My answer is to simply do what many other games do: mark which NPCs are important. NPCs already have markers above their heads, so simply add a new type of marker so it’s obvious who you need to talk to for progression and who is giving out optional side quests. Complexity: Moderate. This would require generating new graphics assets to insert in to the game and editing the icon display systems as well as changing map values to support it. Not difficult, but it would still take a bit of effort.

5. Break Werehog levels up into smaller chunks

Why? The other main problem with the Werehog is just how disproportionately large his levels are. Again, I don’t actually think the Werehog is the worst thing in the world, but only when it's experienced in the right context. 20+ minute Werehog stages vs. 3-5 minute Sonic levels creates a significant imbalance, and combined with grinding out EXP, everything about the Werehog feels like too much effort for not enough reward. So, cut the Werehog levels short. In theory this isn’t hard -- just move the Goal Ring found at the end of a stage somewhere closer so the level ends sooner. Of course, this creates a huge list secondary problems with pacing and leaves a lot of unused real estate on the cutting room floor, so this would take some significant work to figure out. But it’d be a necessary evil for making this part of the game a lot more digestible. Complexity: High. Individual elements of this seem simple, but combined, this would take a lot of coordination to do properly. You’d be redesigning almost half the game.

Now, let’s talk about fringe features. Things that would require exorbitant amounts of work, or are just daydreams:

6. Recreate the game in Sonic Forces’ “Hedgehog Engine 2” Why? Regardless of how you feel about the game it powers, Hedgehog Engine 2 does seem to offer some moderate technological and rendering benefits over the original Hedgehog Engine that powers Sonic Unleashed. Those benefits could be carried over to a remake, but that could come at a cost: a remake would have to be careful to make Unleashed feel “right” otherwise the whole project would be in vain. Complexity: Extremely High. You’d have to update everything for the new engine, and change how the engine itself works to support features from Sonic Unleashed that aren’t in Sonic Forces. It’s basically like making an entirely new game.

7. Implement Sonic Colors’ “Marathon” Egg Shuttle Mode Why? The shuttle mode in Sonic Colors is basically the only way I play that game now. It runs through every level in the game, in order, with boss encounters, without having to go back to a map screen or watch cutscenes, turning it into an experience like the classic Genesis Sonic games. All Sonic games could use something like that, including Unleashed. Complexity: High. You’d have to write a lot of new code and make a new map and menu option for this to work.

8. Steam Workshop support Why? Sonic Generations modding support was hacked together from scraps and managed to generate some very impressive results. It’d be nice if we could get the official Hedgehog Engine tools in some form and have a way to publish levels without having to fumble around in the dark. Complexity: Extremely High. The old Hedgehog Engine tools require having a specific versions of the Havok Physics SDK installed, which costs multiple thousands of dollars. A workaround would have to be implemented.

9. Redesign the entire end game Why? Sonic Unleashed is not a game that finishes strong. From the moment you unlock the final level, the villain’s twisted theme park called “Eggmanland,” the game nosedives hard. Eggmanland is an obnoxiously long level, easily taking over an hour to clear (without any time to stop and rest). It also breaks many of the game’s rules, with a number of genuinely mean traps that only exist to mess you up and get you killed. Your reward for finishing Eggmanland is a gauntlet of at least three final bosses, each one more stupidly aggravating than the last. None of it is fun or exciting, just annoying. Every part of it needs to be reworked somehow. Complexity: Extremely High. Eggmanland needs to be shorter, bosses need to be more forgiving, controls in certain parts need to be improved… it’ll be a lot of work.

10. An option to revert every change on this list Why? Even if I think all of these changes are necessary to improving Sonic Unleashed, it's also important to preserve it in its original format. Besides, there will always be a group of people who prefer the old game over the new version, so, every time you implement a change, put in an option to revert to put it back the way it was. Simple. Complexity: Variable. It depends on what gets changed, really.

Some people may look at an article or a list like this and ask: why not just play the modded version of Sonic Generations that adds in the Sonic Unleashed levels? Why do we need to muck around with changing Sonic Unleashed for a PC port nobody supposedly needs? Because while The Unleashed Project (that Generations mod) is pretty cool, it’s not perfect. Generations doesn’t support everything required to translate those levels perfectly, and some of them definitely suffer for it. Not only that, but future updates to The Unleashed Project are indefinitely on hold, meaning the more questionable parts will never be fixed.

The only real solution is to port the full Sonic Unleashed game to PC, and why not smooth over some of its rough edges while they’re at it? Taxman and Stealth’s Sonic CD port in 2011 did this, improving the game’s control, collision detection, and framerate. Nintendo did this when they updated The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for the Wii U -- they added items to speed up the slower parts of that game and make the overall experience more enjoyable. Precedent for fixing these kinds of games does exist, it’s just a matter of whether or not anyone at Sega has the initiative to make it happen, vis-à-vis a potential Sonic Unleashed PC port.

anyway today i went to the first of my philosophy evening classes that i inexplicably signed up and paid for...it's a seminar course on deleuze (and guattari, by extension, since the texts we're covering are the ones he wrote with guattari) and it was totally incredible because despite the fact we were talking about dead french dudes it's like the one thing i've learned all semester that doesn't make me wanna die 

well it does a little because it is very tough material but in a good way?? like it wasn't triggering or anything and i could deal with the theory for what it was rather than for how problematic it was!! which was very nice, like, i miss this, i really really miss this about learning - the not being triggered to the point of feeling sick in the gut ^v^ 

today we covered anti-oedipus which i am very!! into!! because a) deathblow to freud, destroy destroy! and b) the oedipus complex as the capitalist form given to desire!! whoa! actually pretty radical...

anyway today made me feel very bad for a bunch of reasons but i had lovely conversations with people over text all day that kept me going and then i had bubble tea and then dinner with a sweet pal and then this evening course has revived my faith in like, theory, and learning, and stuff...that is very nice really 

anyway i am a total baby when it comes to deleuze and guattari and i know that when i go deeper i will probably find some upsetting things but for now it has given me lots of interesting things to think about and i am already looking forward to the next lesson...especially when we get to a thousand plateaus which is like my NEMESIS...i tackled it for like two seconds when i was writing my last essay and it truly broke me. but i am glad it did. because that was the impetus for approaching my (now favourite) professor who is the coolest white dude i have ever met and actually has written lots of stuff on deleuze!! in fact the philo lecturer tonight even mentioned his name...which is very cool because my professor is an awesome guy and very smart. 

like i want to email him and talk about anti-oedipus already because like...wow i am so into this conception of reality/society and desire as the real and i want to talk about it with someone who has written on it extensively and cares about my ideas and is invested in helping me unpack them.

i mean like okay i don't know how i feel about the use of 'schizophrenia' to describe a social process of decoding or even of protest - as opposed to the 'clinical entity' of schizophrenia. of course there had to be something. 

but nonetheless this idea of fracture and incoherence is very...tied in with a lot of the stuff i have had going through my head for the last few years. i am interested to see how i develop this in the next few years. i feel like i am getting at something? it is all...burgeoning. yes. but i think i am more interested in the more individuated processes of identification than the, like, social/political stuff, although perhaps it is all social, all political. but like. i don't wanna talk about capitalism. i mean, i do. but like, it is not really my concern right now. it's there and i won't ignore it but i want to queer this up a lot more. i approached deleuze initially in the context of recognition/habituation/identification - and although we are taking a very straightforward path through deleuze i guess this is what i want to follow up on my own. of course maybe there is no individuation. maybe intersubjectivity here is more important. but individuation is all about intersubjectivity anyway? kind of? i don't know what i think!! but i am very excited to be thinking about all of this. 

my last two essays that i wrote for that professor - and really they were for him, because no other professor i've had would really care about my engagement with irigaray or like...any of that stuff - they were kind of dabbling with these ideas and i feel like if i study more d&g i will get somewhere a bit further? i'm just very psyched about this right now. that was just the first text, the first seminar, and already i have so many more ideas, it is like an entire world has opened up.