Uriptical 最近的评测

Update: Since I wrote this review, a patch has been released that fixes the major bugs that were present in Sonic Origins. As such, I've updated this review to give Sonic Origins my recommendation.

Unlike others, I did not experience any notable performance issues, although that could be due to playing Sonic Origins on a powerful PC (which shouldn’t be required for a collection like this). Your experience may vary.

The positives are, we finally have widescreen versions of Sonic 1 and 2 on PC and consoles and for the first time ever Sonic 3 & Knuckles in widescreen. Along with Sonic CD this collection is the official way of playing the early (and best) Sonic games in 16:9. The original 4:3 versions are also included and these appear to be unaltered.

The anniversary (widescreen) editions have been updated with some changes:

Each game now features an animated intro and outro that briefly sets up the plot for the game and leads into the next game. I enjoyed these as they helped to make the four games (Sonic 3 & Knuckles is packaged as one game) feel like more of a cohesive whole. There are also additions that make sense: Tails can fly in Sonic 2, spin and drop dash have been added to all games etc, creating gameplay unity between the games, although for some reason Knuckles is not playable in CD. Overall, sensible changes.

More controversially the Lives system is completely gone; the player is given infinite lives. Instead, players have a pool of coins that continue across all of the games that can be used to unlock video clips, music, and art in the game's digital museum. New coins can be earned in any situation where the player would originally earn a 1up. If you fail a special stage you’re given the option to retry it for price of one coin rather than having to find the entrance to the special stage again, making the task of finding all of the chaos emeralds significantly easier. While 90s gaming was a good teacher of patience and the rewards of not giving up, these changes ultimately make the game more accessible. With spare time being more sparse now, I welcome gameplay additions that reduce repetition.

The new mission mode is fun, consisting of small levels where you're given a task that takes a couple minutes or so, say reaching the end of the level with X rings within a time limit. Unessential, but replay value adding challenges.

They’ve also added in the game Blue Spheres (originally unlocked by combining Sonic 1 and Sonic & Knuckles game cartridges). This has not been updated to widescreen for some reason (the in-game special stages have been, though), however there is a new version called New Blue Spheres that is 16:9 and contains some gameplay changes, such as the addition of green and purple spheres to mix things up.

With regard to content, this is a solid way of experiencing Sonic’s origins that has been made more accessible to modern audiences. There’s also no question that the collection is expensive for such old games, but like the Final Fantasy pixel remasters, the brand is prominent enough to allow for that. In the fullness of time, Sonic Origins will be the go to collection to play these classics.

Journey is an exceptional interactive experience.

Every part of the game feels handcrafted with deliberate intent; the length, a mere three hours on my first play through (originally experienced on PS3), was perfect because from start to finish because there is no filler. Because of this, the game is possible to complete in a single sitting. Like a great movie, the experience can be uninterpreted and singular, immersion into a complete journey from start to finish.

Having no dialogue and a story open to interpretation in places doesn’t harm Journey, rather it’s a game that embraces the fundamentals of the interactive medium; it doesn’t try to work around the interactivity to tell a story but uses the game’s flow and mechanics to communicate to the player. Journey is very much an implicit experience. It doesn’t need a complex storyline or memorable characters to create an emotional response and a thoughtful experience for the player.

Journey is a game that embraces the medium of interactive art in producing emotion and making the player ponder their own personal journey (or that of others).

Sonic Mania is a consistently solid Sonic game all the way through, which is something I can't say for most of the post-Megadrive titles. But it's not the game I expected and hoped for.

Sonic Mania was marketed as “a new 2D adventure”. But most of the game is not new. Rather, it's a remix of stages from the 16-bit Sonic games, with only four brand new zones. As a special anniversary title that's fine, but when the majority is not new I can’t help but feel misled. It feels a lot like fan fiction. Good fan fiction, but fan fiction nonetheless. Move some elements around in the classic zones, change the music here, add some new twist on a classic boss there. The intent was to celebrate the old titles. But for me, much of the game felt like I had been there, done that.

It also feels very conservative with regard to the gameplay and the chosen levels. The first two stages are the same as the first two stages from Sonic Generations: Green Hill and Chemical Plant. Green Hill also makes an appearance in Sonic Forces. How many times is Sega going to appeal to nostalgia, rather than move the series forward? I was also hoping for an evolution of the momentum based gameplay of the 16-bit titles. While Sonic 4 evolved the 2D gameplay of the series in the wrong direction, Sonic Mania hasn't evolved it much at all, besides minor additions such as the new drop dash.

With these complaints out of the way, Sonic Mania still gets my recommendation. It's worth playing for the new stages and the nostalgia. I'm not convinced that the level design or music is better than the old games (too many cheap instakills), but it is close enough and is consistently fun the whole way through. Sonic Mania is what it is: a celebration title, rather than a true successor to Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

One of the finest story-driven indie games I've played.

Don't be fooled by the simple RPG Maker graphics; To the Moon is a compelling and emotional tale with a stunning soundtrack.

There isn't much in the way of gameplay here, but there doesn't need to be to tell this tale. To the Moon is a highly focused game, featuring primarily elements necessary to enhance the story. No filler. This is even built into the game world; NPCs who are not relevant are displayed as a dark shadow (which makes sense, narratively, as most of the game takes place inside the patient’s memories).

Although To the Moon is the first chapter is a wider series, it can be experienced as a stand alone story that you can complete in a single sitting. The combination of the music and focused narrative makes me strongly recommend it.

When Panzer Dragoon: Remake launched on Nintendo Switch over a year ago, the game wasn’t in the best shape. Numerous technical issues plagued the game, along with missing features, leading to Forever Entertainment releasing a series of patches throughout 2020. Now that the game has stabilised, we’re in a better position to look at how Panzer Dragoon: Remake holds up as a finished game.


MegaPixel Studio, who developed the game, is a relatively small studio and used the Unity engine to develop the game. The result is a game that looks good, but isn’t AAA quality, it’s something between an AAA and indie game. But if you keep your expectations with the mindset that this is smaller budget game, you can expect to play and be impressed by a modern looking version of the original Panzer Dragoon.

Panzer Dragoon: Remake has been visually recreated from the ground up, and as a result the cut scenes are now designed with in-game graphics rather than distinct pre-rendered full motion video sequences. The full game feels more cohesive without the significant change in visual quality between full motion video and in-game graphics that was present in the Saturn original.


The gameplay of Panzer Dragoon: Remake is very faithful to the original. Essentially, the standard Panzer Dragoon rail shooter gameplay and level design has been replicated almost 1:1. A year later, most of the inconsistencies have been ironed out. The result is a smooth experience that mirrors the gameplay mechanics of the original.

This time around, the difficulty level feels more even too. The original Saturn game took its difficulty from the Arcade games of its time. It’s now possible for less experienced players to play through the whole game on Easy mode, whereas the original version brought you back to the title screen at the end of Episode 4.

Overall, I’m happy how the gameplay has been implemented after its post-launch patches and refinements, but in aiming for an exact recreation, its perhaps too faithful to the original. Since the game is a remake, there was an opportunity to refine the original concept. Ultimately, it is a missed opportunity.


The game launched with the late Yoshitaka Azuma’s original orchestral score as the only option, but soon after launch a new soundtrack by Panzer Dragoon Saga composer Saori Kobayashi was added alongside the original. Yoshitaka Azuma’s iconic soundtrack is hard to surpass, but the orchestral nature of the score makes it feel apart from the rest of the series; the addition of the second score by Saori Kobayashi brings the audio in line with later games in the series. The new soundtrack fits really well, so my view is that it was a wise choice to bring Saori Kobayashi back on board. Some of the tracks, such as “The Empire: Episode 3”, even surpass the original.

The sound effects have been changed, an unfortunately these don’t make quite the same impact as the original in places, particularly the sound of the dragon’s roar. But the original voice acting is all present, along the fictional “Panzerese” language, and I appreciate this being layered on top of real time scenes.


The art direction of Panzer Dragoon: Remake is one area in which the game departs from the source material. Most noticeably, the colour palette is a lot brighter in many places than the Saturn original. If you look at the concept artwork for Panzer Dragoon, which is found in the original game’s complementary guidebook, the same earthly tones found in the 1995 game were deliberately used in the art, matching the desolation of the story’s post-apocalyptic setting. In Panzer Dragoon: Remake, the change in colours was a deliberate design choice. To Panzer Dragoon: Remake’s credit, the colours have been significantly toned down from the almost florescent dragon wings we saw in the E3 demo, and we do see some later stages where the colours feel more in-line with the original (particularly Episode 3), but from the sunny water ruins of Episode 1 to the bright orange of Episode 2’s desert, this is an area where the remake feels like a step back.

The background details of the levels have been updated too, with additional elements added to fill up the space found in the more empty Saturn levels. While the limitations of the Saturn no doubt accounted for the emptiness to some degree, the sparseness of the original level designs also added to the game world’s desolate feeling. There’s a minimalism that you’ll see in modern games such as Shadow of the Colossus and Nier Automata, but that emptiness has been deliberately overridden here, and the game loses something because of that.


Panzer Dragoon: Remake is a short game, and you can expect to beat all seven episodes in about half an hour. This length is expanded somewhat with the addition of Pandora’s Box, a hidden menu that allows players to customise the game, along with an extra “Episode 0”, but there’s only so much extra longevity that these options will provide.

However, Panzer Dragoon wasn’t remembered due to having a lengthy feature set. It’s a minimalist experience that you can expect to pick up every now and again for a quick blast through between longer games. At its core, Panzer Dragoon: Remake is a rail shooter that is about steadily improving your shot down ratio with each play through, with the goal of achieving 100% shot down ratio on every episode. There’s a nice set of achievements that will add some additional replay value too, although we could have done without the “Lifeless” achievement which requires 100 hours of gameplay from the player.


Although it had a rough launch, Panzer Dragoon: Remake has become a conservative, but solid remake of the 1995 Sega Saturn game, while taking some liberties with the art direction that fans of the classic Panzer Dragoon games may find questionable. My hope is that Forever Entertainment will take on board the criticisms regarding the art direction in the upcoming Panzer Dragoon II Zwei: Remake. But although it’s not perfect, I’m glad that Panzer Dragoon is finally back after all these years. The core of what made this series noteworthy is here; Panzer Dragoon: Remake is an experience that both new and old fans alike will be able to appreciate.

Note: this is an abridged version of my review on Panzer Dragoon Legacy[www.panzerdragoonlegacy.com].