SweetieGames

It’s so easy to get stuck in your ways, especially with games being so expensive. I’ve talked previously about wanting to try out new video game genres, but it’s been difficult with the price of new games constantly rising. You have to really consider if this is worth spending your hard earned money on. I’m currently getting stuck in to another otome title that I’ve been itching to play and I can’t wait to write a review of for this site.

With new games becoming less accessible, I’ve been reflecting on my early days in console gaming. I’m sure the first “game” I ever played on a machine was probably something on Miniclip or possibly even Club Penguin, but I used to own a plethora of different genre games across my PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS. From platformers to puzzles, racing to RPGs, I tried my hand at them all to really get a feel for what I’d like! It felt like a whole other world was opening up to me.

After thinking about it, I realised the first game I ever played was outside of my usual genres I play today, and was most likely Sonic Riders, released in early 2006. For those who don’t know, it’s a racer where you play as various old and new Sonic characters, as well as some iconic Sega characters on hoverboards known as Extreme Gear. It has a fairly good variety of tracks, its opening movie is probably one of the best in Sonic’s history and above all it’s a unique and dynamic racing game that feels high stakes right up to the end of every race. Me and my brother still play Sonic Riders on our 20 year old PS2 fairly regularly, and despite owning and playing the game for two decades can still lose to CPU players on occasion. It’s fast, doesn’t feel stiff and you can do all kinds of cool tricks to increase your speed and go for the win.

I don’t know if it’s just nostalgia talking, but despite it having a few older game flaws, especially on the PS2 version, I adore Sonic Riders. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Despite it getting fairly mid reviews at the time of its release, Sonic Riders and its immediate sequel, Zero Gravity, still has a pretty devoted cult following. We won’t talk about Free Riders.

You would think that having a racing game be not only one of my first video games but also enjoying it 20 years later would make me a big fan of other racing games, but you would be mistaken. To be honest, I’ve not found a racing game that feels the same as Riders. I tried out the latest Sonic racing title, Sonic Racing Crossworlds, and even though it was fun and also has Hatsune Miku in it if I buy the full game, it didn’t feel the same as Sonic Riders. Maybe because I was trying out the demo and couldn’t use Extreme Gear, but it felt a lot stiffer and slower in the cars versus when I play Sonic Riders, even when playing at the highest speed settings. I found I never got as attached to Mario Kart either, despite enjoying the original DS game, because I liked the way Sonic Riders felt so much more. Maybe if a similar game to Riders came out, I’d get back into racers?

I’d love to see more games that treat their genres differently; maybe then I would be playing as big of a variety as I was as a child.