does it have gay german rock (david hastlehoff style) ???? that is usually the biggest off put to any sonic for me.

I actually quite like it, it's not a brilliant game, the loading times are teedious as hell, and the start is quite dull, but once you get further into the game it becomes quite fun all be it in an annoying "i fell off again" kind of way.

Well the snowboarding bit drove me loopy, especially when the camera switches from behind to infront and your controls reverse without any transition and you end up doing a 180 and start heading back the way you came (normally into a gaint snowball), or you try to turn around and suddenly the controls become unresponsive and you can't do nothing, and it takes 2 minutes to face the right direction.

Same goes for the boarding bit in crysis city.

The music is quite good, which is suprising. Though it was one of the things that roped me into buying it. When i heard that a remix of Sweet Sweet Sweet was the main theme of the game, I was instantly hooked.

The first two levels in this game are completely write offs. Wave Ocean and White Acropolis are totally and completely botched. With Wave Ocean, everything feels pretty good, until the game starts wrenching the camera out of your hands, which wouldn't be a problem if the controls were locked. But they aren't, so if you're not expecting it, you'll end up dead. Then once you get past these parts and you start to get the hang of it, they slow down the pace of the gameplay by making you play as Tails who is slower than he's ever been.

Then you have the sand boss. Let me say this right now. There are no good bosses in this game. Silver is literally the only boss that will actively attack you. The egg cerberus will charge at you, pass you, charge at you again, pass you again, then run in circles endlessly, never actually attacking. You just have to beat the crap out of it in the pre-ordained fashion. The bosses in Sonic Heroes are better than this, which says a lot.

Then you have the levels where you're carrying Elise around. These levels are generally 1/4th the size of a normal level and make you wonder if they were included in order to take away how much shorter the levels seem when you're going at the normal sonic pace rather then when you're playing as silver or shadow. They're ultimately filed with nothing but pit traps which you have to use Elise's power to cross. Though if you manage to find 2 of the 3 shortcuts in the stage, you can skip past 90% of the level anyway, so it makes you wonder why they bothered designing the rest of this rescue level in the first place.

Then we come to white acropolis and Crisis City. Crisis City is the first good level, but it shows how poorly this game was truly done. The first section of White Acropolis is a snowboarding level. Every 3d sonic game has had a snowboarding level of some sort, this is old hat. But somehow, they manage to completely botch it. If you make a turn that's more than 5 degrees to the level or right, you stop. Completely. Furthermore, the emphesis of these level is to use the ramps to make it to the shortcuts, but the jump button rarely works if ever. The controls are so sloppy and muddy that you will play through these sections once and figure out how to get an S rank further down in the level.

That being said, the first section of Crisis City is a snowboarding level, and the controls actually work! Which makes you wonder why the issues in White acropolis existed in the first place.

I don't understand how the gameplay mechanics in Sonic games get progressively worse as time goes on. I don't want another one if this is what we have to look forward to.

Actually, the combat seems to be the worst part of Silver's game.

I'm currently playing through the jungle level with Silver. So this is what usually happens. I use Telekensis, pick up 6 boxes, end having to cancel telekensis because you can't control more than 3 without the boxes smashing against each other, reenabling telekenesis, fire a box at a robot, watch that box explode on the ground 1 foot away from the robot, rinse repeat. The inability to mark who your targeting or fire projectiles up or down makes his combat relatively useless. If there are no boxes around or no enemies that fire missles, you're screwed, because the machine gunners will simply continue to chip away at your health until you find out where you're supposed to actually go. And the level design in this area is so bad, that can take quite a long time.

I mean honestly, every time I try to like something about this game, Sega shows me that they had absolutely no idea what the hell they were thinking. It's steadily getting to the point where I just don't want to play this piece of crap anymore.

I have to admit it doesn't hold my attention for long, it's the kind of game i have to play 1 level per sitting otherwise it just gets me annoyed.

The part where you have to do the 3 trials, the 2nd trial you have to kill all the enemies with no rings, die once and it takes 50 seconds to reload the level again, why the hell could they not just have a checkpoint at the start of the level.

Another thing which is unnecessary is when you run out of lives why can you not just select continue and it plonk you back at the start of that level, Instead you have to go back to the character select screen, load it up, trudge through the city and start the level again.

As much as i find the gamplay annoying there is something, which continues to pull me back to it. (Much like 2D sonic used to)

And the story seems to be pretty good as well.

This game gives me the feeling that Sega started out with the best of intentions, but got bored along the way and just threw the rest of it together.

It's not really a game i would recommend someone to buy, worth renting though.

Just a thought about the loadings.
I may be sounding like a ps3 fanboy anyway....
Are these like that because data has to be decompresed and is so much that it takes all that time?
If this is true and the PS3 version doesn't suffer so much of this problem, then is it posible that the PS3 may be the native devolpment enviroment for the game and the Xbox version is a port?

Um no, compression is many times faster than loading uncompressed data, Blu-Ray has a slower loading speed than DVD 12x so it would require more compression to maintain the same loading speed.

Don't be fooled that Blu-ray because of it's superior storage space would be any better off, it benefits compression more so than the DVD drive in the 360.

Add to that the fact the PS3 has less dedicated video memory the levels probably had to be chopped up into sections, if the game had been for 360 alone it may have been possible to have the whole level fit into memory.

Though doing so would sabatoge any x360 sales whatsoever and only prove that the game was rushed out the door, hurting SegaSammy's stocks dramatically.

The end of the world is one of the most fustrating levels ever.

You would buy the game just for better loading times, that's crazy. :P

I will be quite pissed off to be honest if the PS3 version is much better than the 360 version, i'm getting fed up with the 360 getting the lazy developer/ported crap all the time. (and the finger always points towards Japan)

I'm really enjoying this game dispite the problems with. Have found it alot easier to get on with then SA1DC which left you wondering about forever trying to find where you were going.

I'm also looking forward to the Wii offering, which really is looking like it's back to basics with a new twist.

I'm just hoping that the bad press this is getting doesn't kill Sonic off

My confidence for Sega is all but dead.

I been waiting years for Shenmue and they are still playing cat and mouse with their fan's.

Sega is pretty much the Japanese Electronic Arts.

As much as i am a Sonic fan (and i have had some fun out of the 360 version), I haven't played a real Sonic game since SA1 on the Dreamcast.

Sonic is Sega's cash cow much like Madden is EA's cash cow.

Like you said above "Sonic has a following that'll keep buying the games he stars in".

Sega never listen to their fan base and always make stupid mistakes, which cost them money, perhaps if they actually listened to their fans (A Nights sequel for example) then perhaps they wouldn't be always looking at failed games. (yet we get Golden Axe, WTF ?)

I would sooner buy Shenmue 3 than Blue Dragon (and that's the truth), you say Shenmue 3 wouldn't survive in the nextgen climate, you may be right, but i think Sega/Yu Suzuki owes it to their fans to finish the damn story.Yet Yakuza is almost a carbon copy of Shenmue and has spawned a sequel, so i don't agree with that.

You know what it is though, Sammy are holding Sega's creativity back, if you look at Namco since they hooked up with bandai or Square since they merged with Enix all 3 companies have slowly gone down hill.