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By brikrok3 (21st Apr 2008)

At an abstract level, it all sounds so run of the mill: 18 characters, 60 vehicles, 16 tracks. But then again, even the particulars sound generalized, its publisher, Sega, promising if not novelty, then the always-comforting familiar. Thus you’ll be treated to “futuristic tracks, including solar loop-de-loops, height-defying vertical drops and tons of other edge-of-your-seat moves.” Haven’t we seen, or at least heard about, all of these things before? So where does Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, the latest installment in the capacious series known for its hedgehodge namesake and his concomitant speed, manage to innovate? According to its publisher, the innovation is gravity-free racing; for some, this innovation will just be smoke and mirrors, a marketer’s attempt at repackaging a flagging brand and an already released game that might best be defined as old hat.

As might be expected, Sonic Riders is a pretty straightforward piece of business. You are Sonic or one of his many friends—Tails, Jet the Hawk, the silent consonant-loving Knuckles the Echidna, among others. The game’s premise is equal parts flimsiness and science-fiction cliché: Meteorites have fallen from the sky, causing the mighty empire’s security robots to roam the city. In particular, these robots want Tails, who happens to have found a lump. This piece of Aztec gold, though, isn’t all bad, so as you make your escape, you discover that it possesses gravity-defying powers. Ploddingly added to this are the Babylon Rogues, throwbacks to the game’s original installment, who want the rock’s ostensible powers. Less plot than jump start, this feeble ruse will keep the game moving along, even if its ultimate outcome is predictable as the force of gravity (at least as we know it).

Hence the need for speed, I suppose, and Sonic and his friends’ speed-enabling hover-boards (strangely the technology of the future already seems dated in the present). As you progress through the game, performing tricks, winning death-knell races—and on and on, in all the usual ways—new characters become available. The zero-gravity function, AKA the game’s only innovation, is admittedly pretty cool, but not really either all that innovative or all that radical; once you surf a wall once, you’ve surfed it a million times. One supposes that had Sega not decided to push this particular aspect as the game’s grand novelty then the ostensible novelty itself would have been a nice add-on rather than a conspicuous sleight-of-hand: we’ve seen zero gravity before, so don’t act like it’s new. The result seems just plain gimmicky.

Unfortunately, Sonic Riders’ gameplay is hampered by its control scheme—a problem only moderately corrected by employing the GameCube controller option, which in turn renders the Wii’s motion sensitivity purposeless. Why would one use the Wii, with its lag-behind graphics, if not for its often delightful, though frequently infuriating, motion sensitivity? The GameCube controller, though, really does seem the best option, the other two control schemes—the horizontal Wiimote steering-wheel model and the unintuitive laser pointer mode—being all but impossible to use, the latter in particular. Added to this is the problem of just basic maneuverability. No matter the control scheme, Sonic and his chums are generally intractable when it comes to tight turns. The oft-touted zero gravity offers something of a corrective, though: Through tricks and the acquisition of Gravity Point (GP) boost objects, you are able to perform Gravity Control, a nifty way to make sharp turns, and Gravity Dive, a much needed shot of speed on straightaways. These GP points, and their delightful function, are of course limited, so players are best advised to monitor their usage and stockpile when possible.

Visually the game is decent—particularly its transitional cinematic scenes which explain the game and its plot. Admittedly, though, this is in many ways empty praise, like saying that a film’s end credits were well edited, that your girlfriend owns a nice pair of jeans, or that the Republican party has handsome candidates. None really deal with what’s most important—namely, the preceding, underlying, or quintessential problem. And in that sense, this is exactly the quandary of the game’s visuals. Sonic and his chums always look a little chunky, a little block-like (admittedly, of course, this is a constantly reoccurring, Wii-specific problem). At this same time, the game doesn’t look bad, per se—the game’s tracks, backdrops, and landscapes, for instance, are all pretty decent looking, if vaguely ‘80s in their colour palette and aesthetic—though, at the same time, it just doesn’t look great. The game’s developers, quite obviously, have focused too much upon peripheral rather than central visual details. The result is a game that looks good in all the wrong places.

The soundscape is good, I suppose, though the music leans towards the techno-loving, party-all-night gay Spanish club scene—that is, if the idea of such a club scene were first filtered through the travestying, dysmorphic tendencies of Japanese cultural appropriation. There’s something laughably parodic about the music and its bald-faced attempt to heighten the game’s passable intensity. With every pulsating beat, every corny midi-produced guitar riff, every vaguely inaudible, perpetually redundant lyrical interjection (always machine-like, because this game, this music, is the technology-dominated future), you’re naggingly reminded that this is a racing game, and you are thus expected to be “pumped up.” That being said, I suppose the music does its job. Yet the whole thing’s so wink-and-nudge, so manifestly calculated if just gratingly off, one wonders whether the whole thing is high camp or just some elaborately corny in-joke—and if so, whether you’re the laughing or the laughed at.

Considering the game’s weaknesses, it’s rather surprising that Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity is a sequel or – better put—a re-hash of its earlier installment, the unambiguously, even dully named Sonic Riders. This earlier version, sure, was both tolerably good and, more importantly for Sega and its hirsute spokesman, popular. But that game, like this one, was laden with errors. The difference, I suppose, is that those earlier errors have been largely corrected—well, maybe supplanted—by new errors. Interestingly, Sonic Riders, in capturing the ethos of its music—the go-go-go of its intensity, and its inexhaustible drive for constant, instant pleasures—has also provided the attention-deficit logic behind the game’s very production: give us what we want now; sort out the complications later. Overall the game is admittedly decent, though if you’re to buy one racing game in 2008, I can’t help but suggest that you wait a bit longer. But if what you want is whatever is now, then Sonic Riders might not just be the right videogame purchase, but a self-contained psychic mirror: you—like the game, like its music—get what you want now, and need only worry about the consequences later.