Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing

I sort of chuckled to myself when I found out there was going to be a sonic racing game. Do you remember Sonic Shuffle? If you don't, it was Sega's answer to Mario Party, and oh MAN, did it suck. There hasn't been a good Sonic game in about 10 years. On top of all this, Fristle pointed out to me the game was developed by Foundation 9, which is a collective of nameless developers who created such hits like Clifford Phonics for the PC and Race Driver 2006 for the PSP. He also pointed out the game was released for: 360, Wii, DS, PS3, PC and mobile phones. Surely, these are all signs of ultimate game failure. What was I supposed to expect from Sega's answer to Mario Kart? Well, I came across some reviews, and it turned out they weren't anywhere near as bad as I thought they would be.

My fellow gamer friend, Pernell, had the game. It's XBL compatible, so I decided to rent it from Gamefly. I have two new games sitting at home. One is Final Fantasy XIII, and the other is Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing. While I did pick up FFXIII briefly and started to get the hang of its battle system, I've been more in the mood for Sega Racing. I wanted to earn those miles so I could buy the characters I wanted to play, and I wanted to unlock all 24 tracks.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a post that briefly mentioned Mario Kart Wii. Despite "playing the hell out of it," I felt it was "not that great" because I feel like I've been playing the same game forever (or maybe it was that terrible piece of plastic in the shape of a wheel). I don't dislike the Mario Kart series. I love it, actually. I was just disappointed with both the Wii and arcade versions of the game. Though, I still play them from time to time, along with the DS version.

I've been playing Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing quite a bit, and it is, essentially, Mario Kart. It's like I'm playing Mario Kart, but I can play it in LIVE party with more tracks and more characters. This was the refreshing kart-racing experience I was looking for. While I find it incredibly lame a third of the characters are from Sonic games, the amount of extraordinarily random Sega characters in the game balance it out. They are so random, even my favourite adorable zombie couple, Zobio and Zobiko, are playable characters. Zobio and Zobiko are from House of the Dead EX, an extremely fun and cute arcade game that wasn't even released here in the States. Then there is Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone. What the hell is Fantasy Zone? I don't know, but I'm sure someone is happy to see it.

Like I mentioned above, this is practically Mario Kart, so most of the attack items in the game have their Mario Kart equivalent. Green boxing gloves are green shells. Red missiles are red shells. Orange cones are banana peels. Though, each character has their special item specific to that character alone (like in Double Dash). These are called "All-Star" items/attacks, and they are easily the most amusing part of the game. Chuchus transform into that giant, evil, orange cat and wreak havoc. B.D. Joe get someone to hop in his cab, and then he drives super fast. Beat gets on his roller blades and starts zooming past everyone.

Unfortunately, the tracks only come from a few different places: Sonic, Curian Mansion, Jet Set Radio Future, Super Monkey Ball and Samba de Amigo. I think they could have pulled tracks from even more places with all the different characters they had. Though, I really do love the Japanese streets from JSRF and Curien Mansion.

All of this made me think, what if Mario Kart opened up to all Nintendo games, like Super Smash Brothers does? They could pull characters and tracks from an endless array of games. We could be racing on Earthbound, Animal Crossing, Metal Gear, Pokemon, and Metroid themed tracks. Everyone would jizz in their pants and then maybe I could love Nintendo again.