Taking these games back to their roots has no doubt allowed Sega and Nintendo to focus their efforts and produce gorgeous-looking games with smaller teams in shorter production cycles. Game development has become bloated and ruinously expensive, with open 3D environments requiring years of work, vast teams and bleeding-edge physics engines. (I can’t go on, it’s too painful.) Anyway, in 2023, where the companies have moved in very different directions, the arrival of Super Mario Wonder and Sonic Superstars (with Knuckles pictured top right) so close together feels more like a statement about the industry than an attempt to outdo each other. For every Sonic Rush, there’s a Shadow the Hedgehog. While Mario games have consistently been wonderful explorations of design and technology – Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Odyssey – Sonic’s back catalogue is … patchy. Famously, when tech reporters tried to talk to Sega about the much smaller colour palette of the Mega Drive hardware compared to the Super Nintendo, Sega’s then head of marketing Al Nilsen would point at the games running side by side and yell: “Which has more colours? Can you tell? Nobody cares!”įor years, Mario has won this battle easily. While the latter was sedate, comfortable and somewhat childish, Sonic pelted across the screen like a comet, synth-rock blaring. Visitors could watch a video demo of Sonic the Hedgehog playing side-by-side with Super Mario World on a big CRT monitor in the centre of the space. At the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in 1991, Sega made its rivalry with Nintendo the theme of its stand, where the Mega Drive console (known as Genesis in the US) was being shown to American audiences for the first time. Sonic can harness chaos emerald power to, say, transform into a watery version of himself so that he can swim up waterfalls.Īfter visiting the Summer Games Fest in Los Angeles earlier this month, I am thrilled to hear other attendees vividly debating the merits of the two titles.
Mario can transform into an elephant and use his trunk to batter enemies. Both games allow players to select from a range of classic characters and take on the rich, lushly colourful environments in cooperative modes, and both supplement the retro aesthetics with new abilities. Both Super Mario Bros Wonder and Sega Superstars are nostalgic callbacks to the era of 2D platforming. Which is why I’m secretly delighted that Sega and Nintendo are apparently releasing their new Sonic and Mario games within days of each other this October. Whether its punks v rockers, Star Trek v Star Wars or Marvel v DC, subcultures have always defined themselves by what they’re not as much as what they are.
0 kommentar(er)
