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 Shadow the Hedgehog is a rare solo venture from one of Sonic the Hedgehog's compatriots, in this case his dark doppelganger. Despite Shadow's supposed death at the end of Sonic Adventure 2, he was too popular to leave that way, so Sonic Team immediately brought him back in Sonic Heroes. Cue them quickly forgetting what anyone liked about him, slapping a gun in his hands, and making him a grumbly, angry dumbass in one of the most confused, bloated, and ugly entries in the franchise. This is widely considered the point where the Sonic franchise went off the rails, soon to crash completely with Sonic 2006, and Shadow himself would only get less cool and less likeable from here (you read the IDW comics? WOOF). The Story Shadow has lost his memory, except for flashes of Maria's death. Suddenly Earth is invaded by the Black Arms, a race of aliens suspiciously colored the same as him. Their leader, Black Doom, appears before Shadow and tasks him with finding the seven Chaos Emeralds. Whether Shadow does so, uses the emeralds to stop Black Doom, or takes them for himself, is up to you! Don't worry, the game's written so badly it doesn't matter. The LP I'm doing five separate "routes", which will show off each level and boss at least once: Pure Neutral, Pure Hero, Pure Evil, Neutral Hero, and Neutral Evil. I'm ignoring the keys and various alternate routes you can take. I'm joined on co-commentary by MugiStraw and JigglyJacob. We could easily ignore the cutscenes, but I decided to make two separate versions of each video, one with our commentary over them and one without. ----------------------  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes)  (No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes) 
ThornBrain fucked around with this message at 20:00 on May 26, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2021 20:40
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| # ? May 9, 2024 19:31 |
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 (source)
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Mar 17, 2021 22:00
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ThornBrain posted:The LP Disappoint, I was hoping for a 100% including every single one of the 326 paths. 
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Mar 17, 2021 22:09
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Hahaha, yesss. I played this game a lot when I was younger and stupider. Looking forward to seeing how well I remember it.
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Mar 17, 2021 23:45
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weso12 posted:Disappoint, I was hoping for a 100% including every single one of the 326 paths. 
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Mar 18, 2021 01:41
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I remember playing this when I was a teenager but never got far so I look forward to seeing just where the various train wrecks go.
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Mar 18, 2021 01:55
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Oh boy. I have some really fond memories of this game, but even back then I could recognize how garbage it was.
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Mar 18, 2021 02:20
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Are you doing the true ending too or is that too much Shadow the Hedgehog for one person to take to unlock?
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Mar 18, 2021 03:10
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OOrochi posted:Oh boy. I have some really fond memories of this game, but even back then I could recognize how garbage it was. Me too. This seems to actually be a pretty common opinion; lots of people played and liked it when they didn’t know any better, but in retrospect it’s exactly as awful as everyone claims.
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Mar 18, 2021 04:23
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hopeandjoy posted:Are you doing the true ending too or is that too much Shadow the Hedgehog for one person to take to unlock? I am, and yes it still is, but I'm also doing even more Shadow than one person should do and playing the unlockable Expert Mode on a livestream at the end of the LP.
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Mar 18, 2021 09:35
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This game is loving terrible and I hated actually playing it, but every time I think about I smile. It's bad but in a good and memorable way. (It's probably the Soundtrack.)
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Mar 18, 2021 12:36
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Is this the game where the president has a framed photo of Sonic and Shadow on his desk?
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Mar 18, 2021 15:11
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I think I died a little the day that I learned that Shadow's stupid pump-action SMG is real.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:23
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Another LPer I follow is currently doing this game, and somehow it inspired me to pick the game up a third time for the lols, and this time I actually figured out HOW to deal with Shadow's fully idiotic acceleration and the worst pits of level design, and went on to 100% it (not all keys, certainly not all paths, but all A-Ranks). I seem to not be able to get enough of this mess so I'm on board here as well. After seeing everything it has to offer, my opinion on the game is that it has a LOT of ideas, which are everywhere on the scale of good to terrible, and it squanders literally all of them. For example, making (blue) Chaos Control into a zoom-ahead thing is a really interesting implementation of the "teleportation" or control of time/space concept, and it almost, almost works because yes, allowing the player to skip huge chunks of your level is super dumb on paper! However, there's two main things keeping it from being an obviously dumb thing: - you lose out on points for the Hero route if you zoom past enemies instead of killing them, so if you're going for rank, you might not want to do it - because of the game's structure, you're going to replay levels a lot, so it's actually pretty nice to have a way to skip ahead in some of the levels So there's two meta game design reasons that justify its inclusion. Nice! HOWEVER! Because the mechanic exists, this means that every level needs to be ultimately very linear, and it's abundantly, painfully clear that most of them are. There's some exceptions with large optional offshoots and a more exploratory structure, but here's the rub: those are universally complete garbage, by far the worst ones in the game, because the Shadow the Hedgehog makers are terrible level designers. Womp womp.
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Mar 19, 2021 16:49
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I'll always remember the day they gave a hedgehog a gun, the world was never the same.
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Mar 19, 2021 20:25
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I had been recently inspired to replay this in a fit of confused madness and its...not that bad? Like its not a good game but you can at least get some enjoyment out of it, though thats probably true of almost every sonic game. It mostly just comes across as really really stupid in a very juvenile way, and I remember even as a kid thinking "wow these missions suck". It was mentioned in the video about if the game should have taken itself more or less seriously and I think the reason its so dumb is because it halfasses both options instead of going all in so you get shadow acting all serious and then whoops, heres something straight up cartoony.
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Mar 23, 2021 01:26
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(No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes) Like the thumbnail, the resolutions of the neutral story are both flops. Premiering the Comm Over Cutscenes version live on the channel right now!
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Mar 24, 2021 20:02
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Mar 24, 2021 22:09
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Fun Fact: Penders being tasked to do a 3-issue adaptation of this game and then getting absolutely jack poo poo from sega to use as reference material (thus forcing him to make up something else on the spot) was among the straws that broke the camel's back that got him to leave the book
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Mar 24, 2021 22:24
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The homing attack has always felt like a kludgy solution to the desire to have sonic still attack in as a ball and I'm amazed they never scrapped it for something better.
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Mar 25, 2021 03:01
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Bliss Authority posted:I think I died a little the day that I learned that Shadow's stupid pump-action SMG is real. Uh... Real in what way?
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Mar 25, 2021 05:23
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Asking too many questions of Shadow the Hedgehog if the first step into learning the true enormity of the universe and leads only to madness.
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Mar 25, 2021 06:58
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:The homing attack has always felt like a kludgy solution to the desire to have sonic still attack in as a ball and I'm amazed they never scrapped it for something better. It's definitely clunky as hell in these earlier 3D games but I would say post-06 they figured out what they wanted the homing attack to actually be, which is a way to complement the platforming by using enemies as accessories to get to higher paths rather than the defacto attack option for most situations.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:24
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Simsmagic posted:It's definitely clunky as hell in these earlier 3D games but I would say post-06 they figured out what they wanted the homing attack to actually be, which is a way to complement the platforming by using enemies as accessories to get to higher paths rather than the defacto attack option for most situations. Fair enough. Shadow was the last 3D sonic I played, besides a bit of Generations.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:02
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Homing Attack is awful if enemies have health bars, that's the big issue at play here imo
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Mar 25, 2021 18:10
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the homing attack is largely purposeless in shadow because of the guns, along with being done really, really poorly in shadow. it made perfect sense in adventure 1 as a way to maintain the sort of flow the 2d platformers had in a 3d space by allowing the player to get that without having to worry about constantly aiming overmuch, and it worked fine, same in adventure 2. shadow the hedgehog is the pits in terms of its usefulness because boy is its aiming bad. into the pit with you. shadow's homing attack is done a lot more reasonably in 06 for wanted to focus on combat but then you have the problem of sonic's homing attack being dogshit. then it was good again in unleashed.
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Mar 25, 2021 23:22
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Despite its awfulness I have a lot of nostalgia for this game. Hell I'd replay it if I had a working gamecube/wii. Definitely enjoying the LP so far. You guys provide great commentary. Samovar posted:Uh... Real in what way? I'm guessing they're referring to the fact it's a real gun, specifically a variant of the Heckler & Koch MP5 . That said, despite there being over 200 variants (some being visually identical to Shadows) none of them are pump action. Safe to say that was a liberty taken by Sonic Team. As for why they made it pump action I'm guessing they saw the cocking lever support (the tube under the barrel of Shadows SMG) and assumed it worked like a pump action shotgun or rifle. That or they just wanted it to look more edgy  .
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Mar 26, 2021 02:54
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(No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes) I swear I'm completely wholesome this time!
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Mar 31, 2021 20:02
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I'm watching those video and it's absolutely baffling that I actually got to the true ending in this game. I'd repressed all memories of that drat 400 rings mission and hunting down enemies for the missions. And the bosses, they're so terrible. 
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Apr 1, 2021 16:57
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Marluxia posted:I'm watching those video and it's absolutely baffling that I actually got to the true ending in this game. I'd repressed all memories of that drat 400 rings mission and hunting down enemies for the missions. And the bosses, they're so terrible.  
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Apr 1, 2021 17:27
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Marluxia posted:I'm watching those video and it's absolutely baffling that I actually got to the true ending in this game. I'd repressed all memories of that drat 400 rings mission and hunting down enemies for the missions. And the bosses, they're so terrible. That's things like: - always have a gun in hand, prioritize weapons with high ammo count - the infinite ammo of the super meters is 100% required to abuse so the bosses aren't super awful (hint that they intended that: A-Ranks are impossible on the not-Egg-Dealer final bosses without you blitzing them down after getting meter up) - do NOT trust the homing attack - do NOT expect to be able to go full speed at any point, unless you have memorized the level. This is not a Sonic game - don't waste ammo or time on enemies you don't need for points. If you're just going through the game casually, do not fight anything except enemies you need to kill to open doors - the "kill big target" missions can and should be cheesed: if you die, the target's health doesn't reset. So get a gun, empty its clip, then kill yourself. Do that for all of your lives and you should win with an official time of like one and a half minutes - if you're stuck in a room, there's always a random elevator that started moving after you killed something, it's probably offscreen right now And of course, if you've done a level once then it instantly becomes much easier on replay because you know where all the janky parts are, and can avoid them. Then you don't die to dumb poo poo, and the 400 ring mission is in fact so easy that I once did it accidentally while looking for the last enemy I'd missed.
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Apr 1, 2021 17:28
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I don't think you get lives directly from collecting 100 rings, but you do get a 1-up for each checkpoint you hit with 100+ rings on hand.
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Apr 1, 2021 17:53
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(No Commentary Over Cutscenes) (Commentary Over Cutscenes) All Hail Shadow! Heroes waste a lot of time on tedious bullshit
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Apr 7, 2021 21:02
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This game continues to prove why it is so infamous.
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Apr 7, 2021 22:10
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I'll defend this game as a whole, but not this stage. I legit rage quit the game on 3 separate occasions due to the hero mission. TheKirbs fucked around with this message at 12:27 on May 13, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 22:28
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So a lot of the 3D Sonic games like to spice up the credits by playing back a bunch of cutscenes from the game. Sort of a way of summarizing everything you just did. This usually works fine. But Shadow the Hedgehog has basically no story and they can't be sure what path you took to get here, so you get the entire opening cutscene, about 5 seconds of Eggman, and then... they're out of material. So they just start playing the teaser video that plays when you turn on the game.
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Apr 8, 2021 01:34
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Samovar posted:Is this the game where the president has a framed photo of Sonic and Shadow on his desk? Yes 
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Apr 8, 2021 01:50
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That's not even just frame, he took it down to the local corporate awards shop and had it embedded in a block of lucite.
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Apr 8, 2021 03:50
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I'm pretty sure the "candy from a baby" line is meant to convey "this is easy, which is fine by me", not "taking candy from babies is fine by me", but Sega bad at translations The timeline on the artificial chaos is consistent with SA2: Gerald researched Chaos as part of his "ultimate lifeform" plan, which is why Biolizard is, well, a giant lizard, he based it on the Perfect Chaos mural from SA1. (Additional lore note, the reason Shadow's quills are shaped like Super Sonic's is because Gerald based Shadow on the Super Sonic mural from S&K) I'm not going to say Lost Impact isn't a long and bad level, because it is, but if you hold A the turret lifts move faster. It's still full of copy-pasted rooms and hallways, but at least the turret sections can be sped up. Not only does this game have co-op, on Lost Impact, the second player gets to play as Maria! She has a lovely melee attack! Wow! It's weird, but somehow I feel like the part that bothers me the most about this game isn't any of the obvious stuff, it's the way scoring works. In SA2, you get points not just from killing enemies and going fast, but also for stuff like doing sick flips off ramps. Here, neutral missions are scored solely on time (technically rings contribute but it's very minor), while hero/dark is a combination of time and enemies, with enemies of the wrong alignment giving a score penalty. For levels with an even-ish split of hero and dark enemies, this sort of works maybe kind of? You have locked doors that require you to kill certain enemies regardless of your alignment (while your helper complains) because this game is bad at actually implementing the ideas it has but there's maybe something there. Final Haunt, however, has no enemies that give dark score (and has a bunch of required Black Arms kills because of course). As such, the way to maximize your score is to go through the level, hit the checkpoint at the end, jump in a pit to erase your hero score (as it will always be higher than your dark/ring score), then finish the level. Let's end this post with lyric analysis of All Hail Shadow, courtesy of the Sonic Wiki: quote:
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Apr 8, 2021 10:20
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| # ? May 9, 2024 19:31 |
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Yeah you didn't do anything wrong by using Chaos Control in Final Haunt, you HAVE to kill the big Black Arms (unless you skip that with CC as well ofc) in order to make the ring trail appear. Also some other enemies that make elevators move. It's even worse in the other comet level. The "target" you're supposed to hit is some floating thing that you reach with the Black Volt (the flying creature) if you allow it to finish a pointless-seeming loop around the area, or by Shadow randomly targeting it from the ground while you blast away at dudes. Like most things in the game, it's extremely poorly conveyed. Lost Impact is among the worst levels in a game filled with almost no good ones. Every time Shadow attempts a more open, exploratory level it ends in a complete desaster because ultimately, the levels still have to be linear because of the chaos control gimmick, so there's just a bunch of dead ends and offshoots and split paths that might or might not hide your objective(s). Central City coming up is another one of those garbage open levels, and of course Lost Impact itself is only rivaled by the other level sharing its tileset for confusion and annoyance factor.
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Apr 8, 2021 11:16
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