Downfall
Sonic sat slumped in the chair in front of the computer, lazily clicking the mouse, one hand resting on his cheek with his elbow on the desk, eyes half closed. He had been surfing the Internet for almost an hour but nothing of interest came to him.
"How can Tails spend so much time on this thing?" he sighed.
Frowning, he was about to switch the computer when a link caught his eye.
"NO WAY!" He shouted out loud and suddenly sat bolt upright and quickly clicked the link, he waiting for the webpage to load and there he saw it, with a large heading and a large image of Shadow, Silver, Knuckles, Tails and Sonic himself staring back at him. He hardly dared to believe it; Sega had announced an upcoming release of Sonic Rivals 2.
"OH NO!" Sonic groaned and head-butted the desk in front of him. For a while he just sat there, his head on the desk in front of him. Suddenly Knuckles and Tails burst into the room, laughing with each other.
"I got you good that time Tails!" Knuckles laughed loudly.
"Don't worry, next time I won't go so easy on you," Tails replied.
They stopped when they saw Sonic, still sitting face down.
"Er… Sonic are you alright?" Tails asked in a concerned manner.
"He's fine… he probably got so bored with the Internet, he just fell asleep," Knuckles sniggered. He then noticed the webpage Sonic was on and quickly scanned it.
"Awesome! Another game where I can kick your butt!" Knuckles grinned. Sonic sat up and gave him a filthy look, his forehead swollen a bit from where he'd hit the desk.
"What?" Knuckles asked curiously. Sonic just sighed and returned to the screen.
"Why must they do this to me?" Sonic muttered angrily, his face enraged.
"Sega must like the image of me kicking your butt," Knuckles replied, still grinning widely.
"Great, first the Shadow game, then that next-generation game, then the Genesis Game Boy Advance port, then Rivals then Secret Rings and now this!" growled Sonic in a frustrated tone of voice.
Tails scanned the webpage thoughtfully
"He does have a point…" he said slowly and thoughtfully.
"Yeah well… kicking his butt is a lot of fun," Knuckles responded, grinning even more widely than before.
"FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE KNUCKLES THIS ISN'T ABOUT YOU KICKING MY BUTT!" Sonic shouted, a lot louder then he intended, his face reddened with rage. Knuckles' grin quickly disappeared from his face.
"Alright, alright, lighten up will ya?" Knuckles replied, surprised by Sonic's sudden outburst, "What's wrong with a new game anyway?" he asked.
"Sega are throwing out games like there's no tomorrow, they released four games last year and there are now at least four games being released this year!" Sonic explained, waving his arms around in exaggeration.
"I thought you would've loved the attention," Knuckles replied. Sonic glared at him.
"I'm getting too much attention Knuckles, I'm losing fans by the day and Sega are doing nothing to help," Sonic stated, clearly getting more frustrated by the second.
"I don't get it, how are you losing fans if Sega are producing lots of games for attention?" asked Knuckles curiously, rubbing his chin with his large gloved hand.
Sonic sighed in exaggeration, "You really don't get out much do you?"
"Well I'm spending most of my time guarding the Master Emerald, so what do you expect?" Knuckles replied smartly, a glare now etched onto his own facial features.
"Well putting it simply, Sega are too busy getting as many games out as possible rather than focus on the actual quality of the game, therefore the games are… well… crap, frankly," Sonic explained miserably, his eyes now on his feet.
"How are they so bad?" Knuckles asked. Sonic glared at him once more, tearing his eyes away from his shoes.
"Well they may have good graphics and all but the plots are disappointing, the cameras are awful, the controls are difficult, they throw in new characters unnecessarily into every new game and the games are just generally disappointing and why? Just so Sega can make a quick buck as soon as possible," Sonic said quickly, scowling like a moody teen.
"What? Surely they aren't that bad?" Knuckles replied in confusion.
"The games use to be so great… when did it all start going wrong?" Tails sighed slowly.
"HIM!" Sonic declared and pointed just behind Knuckles, who quickly turned round and saw Shadow standing there, looking as moody as usual.
"What do you mean HIM?" he asked, clearly not expecting this sort of welcoming, not that he cared too much.
"It was your stupid game that started all this trouble!" Sonic replied irritably, shaking a fist towards his black counterpart.
"My game was great, don't you dare diss it!" Shadow replied, raising his own fist threateningly.
"Well, before your game everything was fine, then you go and a show off with your own game sand bring in the big guns, literally!" Sonic replied moodily, his eyes narrowed in Shadow's direction.
"Yeah it was great," Shadow replied, taking great pleasure in winding Sonic up, a smirk now crossing his face.
"It wasn't great!" Sonic shouted, finding himself becoming incredibly annoyed with Shadow, "the controls were really tacky, the story was too drawn out, it didn't fit in with any other game from the series, it was horribly repetitive, it took everything from my series and ruined it, it had things that would not really be expected in any game of mine, it turned half of my fans to Shadow fans, to me it can't even be considered a Sonic game! You didn't even deserve your own game" Sonic ranted in one breath as fast as he could.
"Maybe not but I still got my own game and it was great," Shadow replied and quickly left in a blast of orange light.
"He really irritates me…" Sonic muttered angrily.
"Well, so one game was crap! Big deal! All the others were fine!" Knuckles said, not quite understanding Sonic's predicament.
"No, everything went downhill from there," Sonic replied darkly.
"How did it?" Knuckles asked… Sonic sure was acting strange today.
"Well not long after they released that they had released Sonic Riders, and that wasn't that great because it had a lot of normal elements missing and it introduced too many new characters, only racing fans seemed to like this game and it wasn't considered a good game by many Sonic fans," Sonic complained, scowling deeply.
"It was rated six out of ten by critics," Tails stated, looking at the computer screen and scanning a different page, "and the next game released, Sonic the Hedgehog for the next-generation consoles, only got a four."
"Well I admit that game sucked," Knuckles admitted, turning red a little in the cheeks.
"And why do you think it sucked?" Sonic asked, pressing on.
"Because I didn't get a proper role," Knuckles replied as though it were obvious.
"That's not the reason it's bad, Knux," said Sonic "It sucks because it wasted tons of potential. Sega had released it far too early because all they wanted was to get money as quick as possible and therefore the game was rushed. It was incredibly glitchy and-"
"Yeah I know, Rouge and I couldn't jump off the walls half the time…" Knuckles interrupted. Sonic carried on as though he had not been spoken across.
"-it had awfully long loading times, crap camera, controls were terrible, frankly there isn't one good thing I can say about it."
"What about the graphics?" Tails suggested hopefully, his large blue eyes alight with curiosity.
"Well the graphics were good," Sonic admitted grudgingly, "But I think they focussed too much on the graphics and didn't seem to think much about the gameplay. Plus they made it expensive."
"They turned me into a laughing stock with my gameplay," Tails frowned sadly, "they made me really slow with really poor attacks."
"What about Silver and Elise?" Knuckles suggested, trying to get them to look at good points, "Surely they weren't bad?"
"New characters that were unnecessarily thrown in. Sega brings in way too many new characters," Sonic replied moodily, causing Knuckles to look slightly downtrodden, "Although I admit Silver became surprisingly popular," he added. "But do you know what really ruined this game?"
"I don't know, you tell me," Knuckles replied, having just about given up on his spiky blue rival.
"THEY KILLED ME AND TURNED MY DEATH INTO A FRIGGIN' JOKE!" Sonic shouted angrily and banged his fist onto a table, his cheeks red and his eyes alight with anger.
"Yeah but you didn't die permanently," said Tails reasonably.
"That's not the point, they still killed me and turned me into a joke," Sonic replied, trying not to get angry at his small, best buddy.
"Yeah but then they released your very first adventure on to the Game Boy Advance so that must've been great since you loved your first adventure!" said Knuckles, trying to change the subject desperately. He was sick of hearing Sonic rant about how his next-generation adventure blowed.
"Have you even played that version of that game?" Sonic asked darkly, glaring deeply.
"Well no," Knuckles admitted quickly, "But-"
"It completely ruined the original; they took a great game and completely messed it up."
"How did they?" asked Knuckles surprised as he expected Sonic to have liked it, due to the immense popularity of Sonic's first adventure.
"The music was horrible, the frame rate was terrible, the boss battles wasn't even challenging-"
"Since when has Eggman been challenging?" Knuckles interrupted grinning.
"I mean the game was so glitch-filled! The boss battles were so easy that you didn't really have to do anything! The whole game was just one big horrible glitch and it turned one of the best games into a bitter disappointment, and I was really hopeful when that game was announced."
"What about Sonic and the Secret Rings, that one was good wasn't it?" Knuckles asked. Sonic shrugged with a lost expression on his face.
"It wasn't too bad I guess… it was fairly good," said Sonic slowly, "the problem is it was really overrated and the remote sensitivity was a problem but I suppose overall the game was good."
"I think it was pretty crap myself. I didn't get a decent role," Knuckles stated, causing Sonic to once again sigh with plenty of exaggeration.
"The point is, Sega are releasing too many games, they've releasing four a year and they are rushing them so they are not that great, personally Sega should give me a break and try and bring the magic back in."
"What do you suggest?" Knuckles asked, looking extremely bored.
"Well instead of releasing so many games each year they should focus on releasing one, good quality game each year, after all one great quality game is better than four rubbish games," said Sonic reasonably, trying to explain his argument maturely. After all, he was sick of being overworked.
"Not to Sega it isn't," said Tails, flicking through the Internet pages, "more games mean more money to them. Money is the only thing that matters to them."
"Well, clearly Sega don't care about their fans, they know there's fans who'll buy anything with my name on it," said Sonic slowly.
"Yeah, they could get a plain brick and slap 'Sonic' on it and they'd buy it!" Knuckles replied grinning again.
"Oh great there's another one being released…" Tails informed them.
"Where?" asked Sonic and turned round so quickly he almost slipped.
"Some RPG game being released next year, although there's not much information on it at the moment," Sonic sighed in exaggeration.
"See what I mean, Sega are releasing game after game and not even giving me a break, as long as they can get money, and soon fans won't bother anymore because the games are crap, nine times out of ten!"
"Well Sonic Rush Adventure is released soon and that's looks set to be a big hit," Tails said reassuringly.
"Trouble is the first Rush game was really good so if Sega mess up the sequel it's gonna make things a whole lot worse."
"Well there's nothing we can really do about it, we'll just have to take it as it comes," said Tails frowning.
"I just hope Sega will start listening to the fans," Sonic sighed.