Cross-posted at LVLs.It's time for TEi's in-depth impressions of Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing with Banjo-Kazooie! This game - abbreviated to STTR for the remainder of this article ("Sonic Toot Toot Racing" - coined by a friend of mine, anything to save my sanity) - is definitely a solid racing title. It's very enjoyable, and I love all the candy Sega has given to the more obscure titles in its library. Still, it's no Mario Kart Wii, and it comes with its fair share of flaws.
The first thing I want to address is the "Sonic" part of STTR. It's no secret to those who know me: I'm more of a Classic Sonic guy. The only "contemporary" Sonic I really like is Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Adventure 2 was alright, but after that it's been a massive shit-storm of suck. Sonic has, unfortunately, become a joke amongst older fans of the franchise, and even though this is
Sonic Toot Toot Racing, the level of dedication to Sonic-related content is atrocious.
STTR has seven Sonic characters, which is three too many: Amy, Big the Cat and Shadow are amongst those playable and have absolutely no place in this game, especially when those are three character slots that could have gone to Sega franchises that are barely represented at all, like NiGHTS and Skies of Arcadia. (Yeah, I know NiGHTS made it in as the game's flag-girl, and I know the retarded consequences tied to his inclusion even that far - that's an article for another time.) Every other franchise in the game has a single racer - rather, a single vehicle, as some of the cars have more than one person in it, although there's no way to change who's driving.
Not every character in the game has race tracks to represent his or her franchise; those that do have three stages, each one varied and memorable. Sonic, however, has
nine stages divided into three themes: Seaside Hill, Casino Park, and Final Fortress, all stages from Sonic Heroes. Anybody who has played Sonic Heroes will understand how abysmal that is; it's a shame that a franchise with so much color and history resorts to stages so without character. I mean, even I'll admit there are contemporary Sonic levels that have more presence than those three, despite my general dislike of what Sonic currently is. They could have easily accentuated the "Sonic" part of "Sonic Toot Toot Racing" without being this ham-handed about it.
...okay, that's my Sonic-grind out of the way. Now for the rest of the shittiness before I get to the good stuff.
I'm sad to say that the music selection is deplorable. All the songs in the game come straight from other games, and even then most of the ones they chose don't do their origin games justice. There are a lot of stink-bombs, and if I was presented with the opportunity to buy STTR's soundtrack, I'd pass it up. The way some of the music is applied is pretty bad, too: Billy Hatcher and Beat both have short ditties from their games looped whenever they perform their special moves, which really, really,
really becomes annoying. And why do I have to listen to the failure jingle from Jet Set Radio Future each time I complete a race, even in first? All that does is make me feel like I did an inadequate job. :< And, to touch briefly on Sonic again, there are a few songs that aren't from Sonic Heroes, including Can You Feel the Sunshine from Sonic R, a few songs from Sonic Rush, and then a couple other tracks. The game taunts you now and then though, as you can hear clips of My Sweet Passion (Amy's theme from Sonic Adventure) and Throw it all Away (Shadow's Theme from Sonic Adventure 2) during various points in the game, but never for long.
The menu layout is also irksome: instead of a nice, organized display, everything is jumbled and requires you to scroll left or right in order to find what you need, which is especially annoying when looking for a particular racer or course. There's obviously a heavy Mario Kart influence in STTR, but why couldn't the game have taken a hint from MK's menus, which are easy to browse?
Weapon imbalance is also an issue, though not to the same extent as Mario Kart Wii. Say you're lagging behind, you're in fourth place out of eight - what would you get in a position like that? Probably three red shells or a mushroom, or something like that. STTR is significantly less courteous and will give you a single KO Glove (STTR's version of the Green Shell) more often than anything else, leaving you to rely more on your drifting skill and blind luck, depending on the course.
(One thing I feel like I ought to mention, if only for the sake of the completion, is the in-race commentator; this shit is as obnoxious as color commentary in pro wrestling, but you're provided with the option to turn him off. So I'll just say, "he's annoying as fuck, but only if you want to listen to him," and move on.)
But my real beef - aside from the Sonic stuff - is the Super Monkey Ball courses. Oh sweet Christ on a bun, these were programmed by the Dark Lord himself; I'm all for a challenging course, STTR has plenty of those, but the Monkey Ball courses seem like they're out to get you. There are three of them: Jumble Jungle, Detritus Desert, and Pirates Ocean. All three courses have one distinct feature that serves no other purpose but to infuriate you.
Jumble Jungle, first, is THE course you'll get lost in. This won't happen on any other course in the game, even the Curian House levels, which are dark and bathed in shadow. The layout is confusing, and you always come up on sudden turns from downhill, so your line of vision is obscured by the peak of the road. The arrows that point which way you should go get lost in the background, which is busy with spectators and jungle-sorts-of-things, even though the arrows are florescant orange. There's one section of the course where you're going uphill in a narrow, walled-in path, which levels out and opens up suddenly in a big, wide circle; one of those obnoxious arrows is pointing to the right, so you figure, you can drift around the outside of the circle to get a speed boost and cut into the connecting path. But when you pull that turn, you find out that not only is the connecting path almost right next to the one you came from, but if you do anything broader than a hairpin turn, you'll miss completely and waste precious seconds readjusting yourself! Why the hell?
Detritus Desert isn't as bad as the other two, thankfully, but still suffers from an overabundance of walled-in sharp turns, so you'll either be sent careening over an edge, or will smack into a wall so hard you'll spin out. Very obnoxious. But the real stinker...
Pirates Ocean. Now I'm getting my AVGN shirt on, and if you know who he is, read the following with his voice in mind. Like Jumble Jungle, Pirate Ocean is very misdirecting, often making you think you have to go right when you have to go left and vice-versa. But that's not what really gets my cheese about this level. Near the final stretch, there is a series of interlocking ramps: it looks innocent enough at first, as all you need to do is go up a single ramp. When you get to the top, though, there are two arrows pointing backwards and to the left and right; this is confusing enough, leading you to think that you need to turn around at first, but that would be too easy. No, running parallel to that first ramp are two more ramps, one on either side. You have to make a hairpin turn when you turn to go from one ramp to the next, and I mean you have to be dead-on-balls accurate, or else you'll go flying off the edge. There isn't a single character in the game equipped to make that turn without letting off the gas, so that's what you have to do: let off the gas.
The course designers also used the application of walls wherever it would most dick you over: if you try to take the turn onto the next section of the ramp too tightly, you'll crash into a wall, but if you take it too wide, you fall over the edge, because there's no wall to catch you! You have to be exact, and I mean
exact, and the only way to be that exact is, again, to let off the gas. You can't do this area fast. The computers - they have it lucky, they can power turn around those corners no problem, but if you try with a character whose strength is handling, you crash or you fall. To make matters worse, you need to make three of these obscenely fucked up turns in order to make it up to the top of the ramps! You can be in first place with a sizable lead when you get to the first ramp, but by the time you get to the top, you'll be down in seventh, and if you fall, well, you're back down on the second set of ramps, so you have to do the second and third turns all over again. At this point you're so far behind that, if you're doing a Grand Prix, you have to hope you've scored high enough in the other courses to keep you afloat.
There is absolutely no reason for those three courses to be so obnoxious. As bland as I think the Sonic courses are, they're at least navigable. Did they even playtest this level, or any of the Monkey Ball levels? It's made even more frustrating by the fact that SMB is a relatively young franchise, whereas older ones like ChuChu Rocket, Space Channel 5 and Alex Kidd don't have courses at all - despite how crazy easy it would be to make them thematically. There's a lot of content to work with there.
Anyway. That's the shit. Here's the good stuff:
As I mentioned before, STTR takes a cue from Mario Kart games, which is never a bad thing. Unlike most Mario Kart rip-offs, STTR is a very enjoyable game when you're not playing Pirates Ocean, and the courses - aside from the SMB and Sonic ones - are bright and colorful and fun, particularly the Samba de Amigo ones. Even the JSRF and Curian House levels, which aren't so much "bright and colorful," definitely have the fun factor. I mentioned it before, but there are nine Sonic courses, and three Jet Set Radio Future, House of the Dead, Super Monkey Ball, Samba De Amigo and Billy Hatcher courses each, and, from a layout perspective, they're varied and interesting. The Final Fortress courses in particular feel reminiscent of F-Zero GX, which is nice.
Despite me grumbling earlier about the music, each course set has at least
one good song, and you can select which one you're listening to before each race. At first, there's only one song for each course set, but you can purchase more in the Shop.
On that note: the shop is pretty cool. Your currency is "Sega Miles," which you earn at the end of a race or mission; they're easy to earn, but you have to perform really well to get the big points, Grand Prix yielding the most, especially if you place first. You can buy racers, courses and alternate soundtracks; the first and last are pretty obvious, but until you buy the courses, you won't be able to play them in Vs. or Time Trial modes. That's a little on the gimp side, but it means I don't ever have to play Pirates Ocean with friends because I haven't bought it. XD
The cast of characters is pretty robust; setting aside the obnoxious amount of Sonic characters, Sega went the extra mile in addressing its obscure properties. Everybody who owned a Dreamcast has heard of Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio and Virtua Fighter, but not a lot of people - myself included - knew about Opa-Opa or the Bonanza Brothers. Every vehicle has its unique stats, but none of them feel unbalanced. The four racers with motorcycles (Ryo, Alex Kidd, Big and Shadow) are capable of doing wheelies by pressing up-down on the joystick or d-pad in rapid succession, earning them a speed boost. (More pages taken from the Mario Kart Wii book...) And let's not forget Banjo-Kazooie, exclusive to the XBox 360 version of the game, and the console-exclusive Mii/Avatar characters. (It's bizarre, though...my 360 Avatar is trussed up to look steampunk, but her car is really cyberpunk...CONFLICTION.)
You also get a nice selection of items, despite the lackadaisical application thereof. There's the KO Gloves, which are identical to Mario Kart's Green Shells, although they disappear after a short time, the Rocket, which doubles as the Red Shell (although it'll sometimes miss its mark if they're out of your line of sight or if they're too close to you), the Cones, which act as the Banana Peel and Fake Item Box, Bombs, which are also sort of like Green Shells only they have a small blast radius and can't be fired backwards, Rainbows, which can be deployed behind you and act sort of as a stationary Blooper trap, covering your screen with a swirling rainbow, the Confusing Star, which homes in on the character ahead of you and turns their vision upside-down, the Big Rocket, which is a massive, slow-moving bomb that you can detonate at will, slowing down clustered groups of enemies in one go, the Shield, which can push aside nearby racers and nullifies a single hit, and the All-Star Move, which varies from character to character. You're given an All-Star Move when you're lagging behind, and its duration depends on the place you are in when you activate it, and what place you wind up in. So, if you get it in 8th place and you use it, it's going to shuttle you up to 2nd or 3rd, but if you get it in 4th place, you generally stay in 4th, only you're closer to the head of the pack.
There are four control settings, for the XBox at least; one is similar to Mario Kart, although the default is one of those "accelerate with the triggers" deals. You can also use the XBox's wheel and accelerator accessories, so it's entirely possible you can use the GCN Controller for the Wii version, but I have no way to verify that.
Now, Sega has said that DLC might be coming for the game depending on how well it sells; Europe is already getting "Forklift Ryo," where he drives a forklift the entire time (though his All-Star Move gives him a faster, more powerful forklift), and rumor has it hat there'll be an "On-Foot Sonic." We'll see. Hopefully we'll get more than just Sonic and re-skinned character content, giving some love to those franchises that didn't make the cut, or did and are underrepresented. Seriously, why isn't there any Skies of Arcadia? =(
All in all, STTR is a great game. It stands well on its own and any Sega or Mario Kart fan will have a blast with it, despite its flaws. Definitely check it out.
