But if you’re going so far as to pull out a 25-plus-year-old console to play it, sometimes it feels nice to do things the way they were intended. Sure, you can change the clock and do that any time (and the game includes unlockables year-round, even if you don’t mess with the clock). The developers also leaned heavily on Saturn’s internal clock to unlock features on different days and at different times of day, which - apart from the the obvious surface-level concept - is why some folks like to play it on Christmas, where they can see different background effects throughout the day. So playing Nights now doesn’t feel like the first iteration of something that has been refined for 25 years it feels like the best version of something we haven’t seen since (apart from a disappointing 2007 Wii sequel).Īs a follow-up bonus disc designed to help sell Sega’s Saturn hardware in Japan, Christmas Nights offered Sonic Team the chance to drench its game in decorations and holiday-themed music, and to overload it with “presents,” like a karaoke mode, a time attack mode, and a music player.
Each trackball and corresponding action button are color-coded. The characters are controlled with one action button which lets the player perform a spin jump, and a trackball which is used to move the characters around. Nights earned extensive critical acclaim, but didn’t reach anywhere near the sales of Mario and Crash, and never became big enough that competitors started copying it. SegaSonic the Hedgehog is an isometric platforming game with three characters who shares identical controls and abilities. And Sonic Team got rid of jumping, in part, in favor of a character-based racing game where you floated along a 2D plane with a 3D world behind you. Naughty Dog funneled players through narrow paths and side-scrolling levels in Crash Bandicoot. Nintendo went for open 3D stages in Super Mario 64. This project was helmed by burntends2, with the assistance of mattobii, danjia, Neko, TheOpponent, and comicmaster, with the goal of not only making Sakura Wars GB accessible to English readers, but to also restore unused content such as being able to view the.
Sonic Team’s game came about when studios were experimenting with how to make 3D platformers. Another Sakura Wars game called Sakura Wars GB Go Forth, Young Cadet has been translated into English by diligent fans. In some ways, playing Christmas Nights now is just an excuse to play more Nights, since there’s still little else like it. I will play this game every Christmas until I die (apparently I’ve been doing it for 25 already, might as well keep going) /pZmZTHlN6S- Tom Waterhouse December 16, 2021