Which has been your most relaxing moment as a gamer?

Today I am going to write in a more calm and non-critic matter. We all know that certain combinations of sensory input have the power of becoming some sort of memory beacons. Those memory beacons are moments in your life that flash through your mind just by thinking about those events and objects even if your thoughts are ambiguous, sort of like catching a glimpse of a poster or something and remembering a very specific feeling because of it. The same thing happens with video games, so today I am going to share a very rare time in my life as a gamer and that was the small time span when I felt so at peace while playing that it was almost weird and surreal.

It was Christmas 2008 and as the college semester ended I was getting ready for my holiday vacations. My Xbox 360 had died (RROD)  and I was broke as hell, so I went back to the Wii and my PC for some Christmas time gaming. I started my vacations by ordering The Longest Journey (saga which I am a hardcore fan of since then) and Sanitarium through a very cool trading site that used to exist at the time and went by the name of Goozex (no longer working). I did this by using the first 100 points they awarded me just for joining the community and another points I earned for referring a friend. Both games were awesome and I just felt so nice and focused while playing them that I basically breezed through all the puzzles and problem solving with a lot of ease. Also both storylines were really surreal, which helped to the overall "mind on the clouds" mood. It is also worth noting that the temperature at the time was near perfect and there were a lot of rainy days (which I love) making it all a lot more enjoyable.

After that, Nights: Journey of Dreams was going to be released and in a lucky turn of events, my mother bought it for me as a Christmas present (which was very surprising considering that the last game she had bought for me at the time was Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones (NES) so yeah, it had been a while). Been a long time Sega fan, I found the game to be quite enjoyable even if official game reviews were not that good. I was also one of the very few that actually used the online feature this game had, in which you basically constructed your own dream world and could have friends visiting your world while you were visiting theirs. The whole dream topic made the experience to be very mellow and relaxing and I thought that the game's ending was even better than in the original Sega Saturn games.

So there was another game like Hotel Dusk: Room 215... I have to play this!

After that, as New Year's Eve was getting near, I got a couple games for the Nintendo DS at a bargain bin at Kmart (they don't do those anymore) which were Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and Contact. In Hotel Dusk I was instantly absorbed by the film noir style it had and also by its intriguing story (in which I got a couple bad endings before finishing it the way I was supposed to). As for Contact I got it thinking it would be some sort of DS Earthbound and while it wasn't exactly what I expected, it still made up for a pretty nice experience.

Finally as 2007 went away and my vacations were ending, I got some more cheap games while I had the chance. This time it was Trace Memory (DS) and Alida for PC (Alida was through Goozex). Trace memory was a good game that made me feel as if I was watching one of those "wth is happening" anime series and Alida took me back to the days of games like Myst. I barely finished both games before college started again and I went back to the daily grind.

So yeah, my little story of an awesome holiday season... So what?

Why do I tell you all of this? Well, because this was my case, but I'm sure each one of you had at least one occasion where you went full mellow gaming just to kickback and relax. For me, that holiday season was very special even if my Xbox 360 broke down (missing out on some of the new games) and even if most of the games I played were one year old at best. This proves one simple thing, which is that following the latest trends will not always lead you to the full enjoyment of your games. At times you just have to look back and give a chance to those games you may had missed when they first released. Give it as try, as it is a very fun and rewarding thing to do.

The Moment That Sega Perfected Sonic, Then Blew it afterwards.

After seen a couple of videos about Sonic Boom (which is not bad, but not great either) I was left to wonder as an all time Sonic fan, what was the time when Sega managed to evolve their famous mascot into its best form. Many say that Sonic stopped been cool after the original Sega Genesis games, but if I had to choose one of the forms in which Sega has chosen to portray their blue hedgehog, it would be the Sega Dreamcast era that included the 2 Sonic Adventure games. Why was this the closest that Sega has ever been to perfecting Sonic? Just continue to find out.

This is where it all started.

We all remember the classic sonic games on the Genesis. At a time when all we knew was Super Mario Brothers, Sonic came as a radical and cooler alternative. The games were fast, stages were interesting and the story was simple but appealing. Sonic itself not only looked different than everything we had seen at the time, but he looked cool and hip, sort of rebellious if you ask me. This gave the blue hedgehog an edge over the Italian plumber that lasted a while and helped Sega to establish themselves as a gaming powerhouse at the time.

The game that could had saved the Saturn.

After that, Sega went through a heavy streak of mistakes and one of those was abandoning Sonic. This caused their next big console which was the Sega Saturn, to lack a definitive Sonic title and all we got was Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R which were kind of O.K, but not what we were hoping for. After that came project Katana which turned into the Sega Dreamcast and at that time we saw their mascot making a comeback in the form of Sonic Adventure which at the time was the most awesome thing around.

This iconic image from the game made many people to become early Dreamcast adopters.

Not only had Sonic jumped into the 3D graphics era, but the game looked great, the action was fast and the story was once again simple and appealing, just like they did with the classic Sonic games. This time you also had a little more freedom, as you could explore some stages at will, find secrets, do speed runs and find different ways to survive until the end. Sonic itself was not lacking any attitude either. He was know accompanied by some nice alternative rock music (played by Crush 40) and had a cool voice to express himself. He was cocky, confident and easy going even in the worse of situations so most fans fell in love with this version of the Sega mascot as soon as we saw it.

Multi characters for high replay value. Something brilliant at the time.

He was also accompanied by other characters that you could play as such as Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Big the Cat and E-102 Gamma (which was made by Dr. Robotnik). Everybody had something different for the player with Sonic handling the fast paced stages, Tails focusing on his gadgets, Knuckles floating around looking for pieces of the master esmerald, Amy going through alternative versions of Sonic stages using her hammer for a more action oriented approach, Big the cat with his fishing stages and E-102 Gamma with his story about how he escaped from Dr. Robotnik and became one of the good guys. The really cool thing about them is that each of them had their own angle on the main story, so it this wasn't about repeating the same stages with different characters.

Shadow was a nice surprise back then, he is still awesome.

After that came Sonic Adventure 2. This game introduced a couple of villains like Shadow the hedgehog and Rouge the bat with the inclusion of Dr. Robotnik as a playable character. This time the whole thing was to be able to play as both the good side and the bad side as the story progressed. The game looked even better than the original and featured very imaginative stages following a storyline that was both cool and heartwarming at the same time. The greatest thing about both Sonic Adventure games was that their storylines included a little bit or everything from adventurous, funny and cute moments, to confrontations, peril and even tragedy. This may have to do with the fact that the anime series called Sonic X was been transmitted at the time and as we all know, anime can pack quite a punch in story telling terms.

The "Shadow with a gun" thing was kind of weird.

These two great Sonic games came and went, and after the Dreamcast met its demise and Sega became a third party company, the almost perfect Sonic the hedgehog we enjoyed on Sega's last machine was replaced with a couple of experiments that went from so-so to mediocre. At first they made Sonic heroes which was nice and kind of a throwback to the old games with the inclusion of the 3 hero party mechanic that served to solve puzzles and get through the stages in a more strategical way. Other game was Shadow the Hedgehog in which they tried to mix up both speed and action with Shadow using guns and everything.

Pound for pound the weirdest Sonic moment ever.

Then after the next generation in line was about to start (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii), somebody had the "brilliant" idea to bring Sonic as closest to reality as possible and this is where it got ugly. When the Sonic the Hedgehog "next gen" game came to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, what we found was an adulterated version of what we used to love. Not only the game had technical issues like very long loading times, it tried so hard to be a "realistic epic" that it failed miserably at what mattered the most and that was gameplay. Sure, the free roaming aspect was still there, but it felt bland and generic with stages that tried to give that Sonic Adventure vibe, but ended been a lot slower and tedious.

Slow and clunky werewolf.

After that, a whole number of Sonic games began to enter the market, having the blue hedgehog in many different situations that weren't that good. On one of them he could turn into a slow werewolf (Sonic Unleashed), on other he was sort of a knight (Sonic and the Black Knight) and there even was a Wii version of Sonic called Sonic and the Secret Rings which was just an "on rails" game that was kind of fun at first, but after a couple of stages it felt like a hassle. On all of these games the storyline aspect was severely degraded, lacking the passion that the Sonic Adventures games had. Couple that with bad gameplay experiments and then you will know why Sonic isn't as popular on this day and age.

It doesn't look that bad except for Knuckles, I will never get over that.

Wrapping it up:
Sonic Boom is not a bad angle to the blue hedgehog's universe (except for what they did with knuckles which was horrible), but the last Sonic games that were made with real passion and imagination lie on those fateful years after 9/9/99. At that time like the title implies, Sega managed to get Sonic to a near perfect state only to dump it all later when they began making uninspired games just for the sake of making them. I wonder if anybody in Sega has ever found him/herself on a meeting saying, "hey, let's go back to the Sonic Adventure style" only to be ignored or something like it.

Whatever Happened With Sadness

Now that survival horror games are back in style, let's talk about one of them that was aiming to be something revolutionary in the previous generation, but ended in development hell long before it could become a complete product. Back when the Nintendo Wii was soon to launch (and still labeled as "Nintendo Revolution"), there were a lot of promises that were never fulfilled. For example, there was supposed to be a beat them up game called Project Hammer which would had the player using the Wii remote to make the robotic hero swing his giant hammer and smash enemies and objects alike, but it never happened. The one we are going to talk today was supposed to be a survival horror game that would fully use the Wii motion control features in order to give the player a really immersive horror experience. That horror game that never came was called Sadness.

Using a female aristocrat as the main character in an horror game was an interesting approach
as it mixes the life of the rich and powerful with the sensible approach of a woman, this time a sister.

Sadness was going to be a survival horror game developed for the Wii by a Polish company called Nibris. The first thing everybody noticed was that game's graphics were going to be entirely in black and white, sort of like one of those really old horror movies, but without the cheesy parts or silent dialogues. The main character in the game was going to be a woman called Maria Lengyel who was an aristocrat from the Victorian times. The woman finds herself in a pinch after the train he was travelling in is derailed and now she has to protect her now blinded brother and press on as they go deeper into the darkness that fills the place while her brother begins to exhibit some strange and creepy behavior.

This live action concept looked very promising at the time.

In this game, the level of interaction was going to be its main focus with the player having to use full motion controls (not waggles) in order to protect Maria and her brother from harm. Examples of this were shown in live action concept videos where a woman was shown scaring off a pack of rats with a torch and protecting herself from the rain by using an umbrella. This was part of the promise of giving the player the freedom of using any object in the game to attack, defend or interact with the environment. Another part of the whole premise of Sadness was that there was going to be no HUD. The developers were aiming on giving the game a more cinematic feeling without HUD items or menus reminding you that it was just a game so, everything was supposed to feel as if it were a movie. To top things off, the game was going to feature a storyline with different branching points which would surely had led to different endings. All of this points out that as far as features go, Sadness would had been revolutionary if it were delivered as promised.

At first the game was been nicely treated with development updates coming at a monthly basis. A few concept art pictures and sketches were shown while the game was still in development and based on how they looked we can say that this game was going to have an environment a little similar to the one featured in The Order 1886 because of its old school European style. Enemies in this game had a mix of common and uncommon influences that could be seen in the few concepts that were shown. Some of them consisted of werewolves and even Slavic mythology creatures like Likho.

Sadness was starting to look like a game with a lot of promise, until they fell silent about it. Months went by and the Nibris website had the same pictures and videos with no updates whatsoever. Some years passed after their sudden silence and by 2010 Nibris ceased to exist as its parent company turned them into a coordinator, a decision that stopped all the projects they had been working with including Sadness. This was quite a disappointment to everybody who owned a Wii and was expecting to try this game as this was one of the very first concepts that promised to deliver the motion control revolution that Nintendo had promised.

A woman and her little brother, looking at this picture gives some sort of "The Last of Us" feeling.
I think these people were ahead of their time and could had made it big with this game.

Wrapping it up

Sadness is still nowhere to be found, but while it seems that the game is still in development hell, there are some articles like this one on Nintendo Life, that state that the game may be developed after all and released for the Wii U, so if you are still curious about how this game would had turned out, there is still hope. I personally expect it to be some kind of cross between The Last of Us, The Order 1886 and Clock Tower.