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It’s hard to review a game these days. Not only are the games getting so much more sophisticated, making playing through them quickly and yet accurately describing most of its pros and cons a difficult task, the reviewer also has to put up with criticism of his writing, sometimes only over the lack of one or two words or points.

That is why, in general, I respect people’s reviews even if I don’t agree with it, or if I spot a few grammatical or spelling mistakes in it.

However, there is a limit to how much one can put up with. That’s where Mr Terence Ang here comes in.

Recently, on my stay at i-CON, I managed to pick up a copy of the April issue of GameAxis Unwired. It’s a great publication, by the way - it’s free, has great content (mostly, anyway), is well-organised, has stuff to give away, and.. did I mention that it’s FREE?

Anyway, one fine day, I was sitting on the toilet bowl, reading GameAxis Unwired while ‘minding my own (big) business’ when I came to this Sonic Heroes review, written by freelance writer Terence Ang. It gave me the shock of my life - my standard of what a lousy review is just got lower.

Usually, if a review, say, makes a number of unforgiving grammatical mistakes or leaves out certain important details that may affect the score when describing a certain aspect, in my books it is considered bad. If it does both, it is considered awful. If on top of doing both, the reviewer also uses inept description, then it is considered lousy.

Mr Terence Ang’s Sonic Heroes review tops all that. It is ridiculous.

If you’ve still got the April issue of GameAxis Unwired somewhere in your backyard, please fetch it and do a read on the Sonic Heroes review (page 9) if you haven’t already, in order to better understand my rantings. I’m not going to quote the whole disaster.

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“While Sonic Heroes is available on all three major console formats, ours in the NTSC-J Xbox format with support for up to two players on a split-screen format, minus support for Xbox Live or System Link. You’ll probably wonder how this game works against past incarnations of the franchise. Well, interestingly, it’s working wonders thanks to an interesting ‘teamwork’ (called ‘Team Action’) concept.

You see, the game is played in trios, meaning that there are four different Sonic Teams you can pick…’

That is quite possibly one of the worst introduction paragraph I’ve ever read, which was surprising considering that I had just read an excellent World of Warcraft preview followed by another quality write-up on Terminator 3: War of the Machines.

Here are three reasons why:
1) Interestingly, I am interested by how interesting Terence’s writing is.
2) Terence assumes that we wouldn’t be able to infer that ‘Team Action’ is a gameplay concept that involves ‘teamwork’.
3) Team Sonic, Team Dark, Team Rose, and Team Chaotix cannot be collectively called Sonic Teams.

At that moment, my spine started to tingle, not because I have just unleashed a mammoth amount of chocolate cake unto the big, white, hungry hippopotamus, but more because I sensed that the introduction was a premonition of the horrible things to come. Boy, how I wished I saw a premonition while eating that plate of fried beehoon.

More inept description ensues..

“Each member of a team represents one of three elements, which are crucial in getting through the game. The three elements are Speed, Power and Flight. In Team Sonic for example, Sonic the Hedgehog (blue) is the fastest member of the team, Tails (yellow) is great as a flying member while Knuckles packs a powerful punch that clears obstacles easily (red).”

Now, Terence, I know you like colours. I love them too. However, you must realise that suddenly tagging the team members with colours like that, without explaining the relationship between the elements and colours, is freaky.

“We also found out that the different Teams are actually different difficulty levels. Team Rose (Amy Rose, Big the Cat and Cream the Rabbit) is for beginners while Team Chaotix (Espio the Chameleon, Vector the Crocodile and Charmy Bee) is geared for players with medium to high skill levels.”

It’s true that Team Chaotix is geared for medium to high skill levels, but that’s only because Team Chaotix offers mission-based gameplay that is slightly different from the rest of the teams. A casual reader could easily take it that said team provides the most difficult challenges among all the teams, when Team Shadow should be the one taking that crown.

Now, dear reader, if you have the complete article in your hands right now, you’d have noticed by now that I’ve been going through Terence’s errors as I go down the paragraphs in his review. However, please bear with me as I skip the next few paragraphs for the moment.

“As your team races to the finish line, you can collect coins along the way. As you collect more coins, there’s a lesser chance of you being injured by Dr. Eggman’s many nasty gun-toting minions.”

……

I pity you, Terence. You know, I really do think that my vocabulary is already pretty bad. Never would I expect someone like you, also a freelance writer, to have vocabulary worse than mine - so bad that you can’t tell the difference between ‘coins’ and ‘rings’. This is an outrage to all Sonic and Mario fans or haters.

Also, the chance of you getting injured by said minions has got nothing to do with the amount of rings (’coins’, in your native language) at all. The team leader gets hurt every single time it touches an enemy unintentionally. It does not matter how many rings the player has - as long as the player is not careful, his on-screen persona will get hurt.

Guess what, Terence? Every educated person who has had 30 minutes with the game will likely be able to observe the corrections that I have done for you. Furthermore, these two gameplay systems have been implemented in most if not all traditional Sonic games since the time the famous hedgehog broke the sound barrier, turning his hair blue.

In other words, Terence, you are essentially telling me that you have not played Sonic Heroes, and any of its predecessors in the series. So who do you think you are to tell us that “the game works wonders against past incarnations of the franchise”?

I’m sorry, but I’m one of the traditional people, which I believe makes up of the vast majority of videogamers these days, who refuse to believe that a game can be reviewed without playing it. Sonny, my eyes are getting old - can you give me one of those eyes you’ve got that allows you to read the vast amount of content stored within the DVD-ROM directly?

Here’s more proof that Terence did not play the game before writing the piece of nonsense he calls a review.

“The color-coding of the three members (red, blue, yellow) works well with the three button colors on your Xbox controller as they allow you to switch team leader intuitively. For instance, if you’re speeding down a steep ramp, you’ll use the speedy Sonic (blue button). If you want to punch your way through huge concrete slabs or doors, you’ll use the power-punching Knuckles (red). If you want to jump up a ledge or land safely on a platform after a corkscrew-looping jump, you use the tailswishing-helicopter-like Tails (yellow).

The green A button becomes the ‘Action’ or ‘Primary Attack’ button then with a double-tap of the A button giving you a ‘Secondary Attack’. For instance, if Sonic is the current team leader, pushing A once will force him to do a light dash forward while a second tap will give him a sudden surge that barges through enemies (dazed robots with weird guns mostly) and rushes up ramps more effectively. If it’s Tails being the leader, tapping the A button twice lets loose Sonic and Knuckles as springing boomerang-ing missiles that’s effective in bringing down Jumbo plane meanies (Dummy Ring Bombs).”

Dude, you’ve got the frickin’ control scheme wrong.

Terence’s descriptions:
X (the blue button) - switch the team leader to Sonic
Y (the yellow button) - switch the team leader to Tails
B (the red button) - switch the team leader to Knuckles
A - Action button

The actual control scheme given by Sonic Team:
X - Action button
Y - switch the team leader by cycling through the members in one direction
B - switch the team leader by cycling through the members in the other direction
A - jump, among other things.

My dear Terence, Sonic Team developed this game to be multi-platform right from the start with similar control schemes used across all three versions. So it’s really funny how you could have associated the colours of the three elements to the X, Y, and B buttons. Maybe if you spent all the time you did on figuring out the control scheme by looking at the back of the DVD case and the Xbox controller to actually play the game, I wouldn’t be mocking you here right now.

That was the final blow. It’s one thing to be making a mistake about the small details, like how many stages there are in the game, but it’s quite another to make a mistake about the control scheme of the game, which anybody who has had 15 minutes with the game will be able to spot.

Furthermore, I’m not even being extremely strict in criticising your writing, Terence. I won’t bother to pick on you for not noting the drop in refresh rates at certain points of the single player mode or in multiplayer, or that you did not mention anything about the other unlockable multiplayer modes such as the 2-player Special Stage or the 2-player Team Battle, etc. Oh, and what about not letting any multiplayer-loving gamers know that the 2-player mode runs in 30 frames per second or less, regardless of which version they plan to buy? These are serious concerns: slowdown issues and the variety of multiplayer modes should be considerations when determining the score of a game. So please, do us all a favour and give up. Stop being a disgrace to professional writers everywhere.

Be glad that God built in us a little quality called ‘ignorance’. For if f15hy had read your bullshit, he would have long hunted you down Ryu Hayabusa-style and slapped you to death with his Sonic N Limited Edition N-Gage. *N-GAGED*

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Did’ja know.. that the best single version of Sonic Heroes is the GameCube version? Here are the pros and cons of each version:

Playstation 2
Pros:
- allows you to choose from English and Japanese voices and subtitles, regardless of the game’s region code.
Cons:
- 30 frames per second, even in single-player mode. I can’t tell if the framerate is even lower in multiplayer.

Xbox
Pros:
- allows you to choose either an English set of voices and subtitles or a Japanese one, depending on your dashboard settings, regardless of the game’s region code.
- 60 frames per second in single-player mode.
Cons:
- doesn’t allow you to have Japanese voices and English subtitles.
- drop in refresh rates at certain points of the single-player game.

GameCube:
Pros:
- allows you to choose from English or Japanese subtitles, regardless of the game’s region code.
- 60 frames per second in single-player mode, with hardly any drop in refresh rates at all.
Cons:
- the language of the voices differ depending on the region code for your copy.

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