 Let's just say this blind squirrel didn't find a nut. All right, jokes aside, it's actually kind of relevant and funny that I have that squirrel mask as a joke that we got for Eric during E3 because blind squirrel games is actually responsible for the Sonic Colors' ultimate port job to Nintendo's Switch. And I was wondering what was going on yesterday in regards to this game because obviously the digital versions out in the wild and the physical versions have been delayed for some really interesting reasons. But we've been just kind of wondering, you know, why? Well, what's the reaction to this game? And people should be talking positively. Sonic Colors was pretty much a well-acclaimed Sonic game back from the Nintendo Wii days. It's coming to all platforms. It should have been a decent chance for Switch owners, especially, to have a good time because we obviously grew up playing this game. But the thing is something happened as I was scrolling through Twitter. And that is the Switch, Nintendo Switch, was trending and trending by a lot with hundreds of thousands of tweets. And I kept wondering why? Turns out it was because of Sonic Colors' ultimate. And we have two avenues we need to talk about with this. One is obviously what the hell is going on with Sonic Colors' ultimate and why it's broken. And then two, kind of dismissing or dispelling some of the notions that the reason it's broken is because of the platform it's on. Now, before we get into this, I got to remind you, we are giving away a Nintendo Switch OLED. If you would like to win one, all you need to do is be subscribed to the channel and we will have a live stream announcing the winner at the beginning of October. So Sonic Colors' ultimate, obviously, was a fond memory game for my childhood. I don't like it as much as like Sonic Lost World on Wii U, but it is in general a well-received game from back in the Wii days. And it was one of the more exciting announcements during the Sonic Anniversary stream that happened earlier this year. So there's been a lot of people looking forward to it. Obviously, if you have a PlayStation 5, that's my series X, you can get your 4K 60 FPS version. I always thought it was weird though, because on Switch, well yeah, it's gonna hit 1080p. The target was always 30 FPS, which I found to be a bit baffling because this is a Wii game. And honestly, just on the surface, didn't really look that much better. It didn't really look like there was that many tweaks to it in the first place. I kind of feel like this could have been at 60 FPS. But you know what, on Switch, we've kind of gotten used to accepting 30 FPS as a standard, especially on third-party, multi-platform games. So whatever, kind of a minor gripe. I just think it obviously could have done more. But you know what we expect? Do you know the base thing that we expect when we get a game? That it's not broken. Turns out that Sonic Colors Ultimate is fundamentally the most broken Sonic game ever released, at least the Switch version. It is, I mean, just take a look at the footage for yourself. It is quite expensive. I'm gonna spun out of this. One is, one that I feel like it's just something that happens every time something's broken on Switch. And that is, well, LOLOL, Switch Hardware can't even run X-Game. Look how broken it is. This is a Wii game. So I don't know how that's even an argument, but we'll get into that in a little bit. The other one is obviously, how the hell did Sega let this game come out? Now, I mentioned before that it was blind squirrel games that handled this port. The thing is, they are not a bad port studio. They did handle the Mass Effect Remastered trilogy in the past and did a really good job with it. So it is baffling that they did a worse job with this and it's funny because they actually used the God OT engine with their port and then they forgot to somehow credit the makers of the engine. Now it is free and open source and anyone can use it, but you always credit the engines you're using and they didn't do that. Now they will, they did say on Twitter they will release a patch in the future that's going to have the accreditation given. But they're like, oh yeah, despite our numerous checks and make sure all this is somehow we miss this. It's a pretty big one to miss when it's a literal engine you're using in the game. Like we're not talking about like, oh my gosh, we forgot to put an artist's name in the credits. Let's go patch that. I didn't know. We're talking like an actual engine we can use. That's a bit of an oversight there, but it kind of explains that this port was probably quickly done. It was probably lazily done, definitely lazily done. Now it's not, so the sonic colors ultimate is not as broken as it's being made out to be some of the absolute worst stuff was actually just a troll who hacked a switch and ran the user emulator playing the old game and showed a whole bunch of broken stuff. But obviously the switch wasn't meant for that. So that footage has since been taken down, but a lot of the other footage that is still up and I have actually seen this in person for myself is accurate. The game is broken. You fall through the map, the objects disappear, weird things are going. The game is literally unplayable if I'm completely honest. And that feels weird saying that for a game that used to be really, really good. Now, is there a high chance that this gets patched and fixed over time? Probably, I would presume, but it's also one of those things that it should never release in the state in the first place. This is one of those things where that famous Miyamoto quote comes up that a delayed game is great forever. A Rush game is always bad and that's not always true by the way. It's an old quote from the old development days, but it is true in the case for this game that if they would have just held it back and say it's not ready to release until next year, at least when it did come out, it might not have to look like it does now, but it definitely looks like it was a rushed port job that did very, very poor optimization for the Nintendo Switch. And thus is all this artifacting and glitches and bugs. And it's just a game you shouldn't buy. Now, to Nintendo's credit, they are taking refunds on this game. So you can call customer support and get a digital refund for your purchase. So kudos to Nintendo for doing right by that. They don't always do that for every game, but obviously when there is this number of problems of the single game that seems to happen, it's not as bad necessarily as when PlayStation literally removed Cyberpunk 2077 from their digital shop and gave refunds. So Nintendo maybe should consider doing that, but for right now, they are giving refunds. So that is a credit to Nintendo because they didn't have to. Their digital refund policy is actually that we don't refund. So it should be something we just expect at this point, but that's typically not the case, but they have been confirmed to be doing refunds. Now, what I wanna do is dispel the notion that this is like this because of the Switch because obviously other digital versions don't seem to be having this problem. And guys, this is a Wii game. Well, not only should it be a 60 FPS and 1080p, it looks like the exact same game and it looks like it's just like upscaled in some emulator. It's baffling how they handle this version. And this obviously all goes back to the Blind Scroll games that they did everything for this. This version of the game was literally all them and it's bad, it's really bad. It's to the point that I'm not so sure that other companies are gonna hire the studio to port things to Switch. There are so many better studios that have not messed up ports to this degree on Switch. So I can't say this is a Switch, it's hardware. I know the other platforms are more powerful and don't have this issue. They also had different companies porting and creating the game. This is a totally different situation. The Nintendo Switch can run Sonic colors. This isn't even a debate. There are so many more intensive games on the Switch platform. In fact, it's getting the next major Sonic game. What I think is more disappointing is that more attention wasn't paid to the Switch version because with the history of this particular game on Nintendo platforms, it was the history of Sonic and Sega working so closely with Nintendo over the years that it's probably gonna be the version that sells best, right? Like the Switch version has a very high chance of being the number one selling version of this game. And that's the worst version released in terms of polish and bugs. Obviously it wasn't gonna be 4K, but it should have had the most attention. So it's really baffling that some people are trying to twist this around as LOLOL Switch hardware sucks. And I get it, it's dated hardware. It's the worst platform on the market. Valve Steam Deck is way more powerful whenever the hell that's even available to buy. I get it, PlayStation 5, Xbox, PlayStation 4. I understand, okay, the Switch is not a powerful platform, but power isn't everything and power has nothing to do with why this game is this way. It just is a bad port job. It happens. There has been bad port jobs on the new generation of platforms as well. So again, I think that's just more people wanting to hate on Switch and laugh at Switch, which is why Nintendo Switch was trending on Twitter. It was mostly just a lot of people that have been waiting and waiting and waiting for the next clickbait they can use to trash the Nintendo Switch. And I just, it's infuriating, because I even see it sometimes in our comments every time we talk about, say there's a minor PlayStation story in one of our things or an Xbox Game Pass story, or we have a multi-platform game story for Switch, where we talk about multi-platform games coming to Switch because we actually have quite a number of them coming next year. And it's a repeated narrative that keeps coming up that LOL Switch sucks, I'm getting the Steam Deck. LOL, I'll just go buy a PlayStation 5. LOL, like I don't understand. I know console wars is a real thing. I know that we have a tendency to want to put down platforms that compete against our preferred platforms. There's also always gonna be a little bit of outrage sometimes if you did buy a platform and it didn't perform to your expectations. So if you bought a Switch and you did not like, you bought it to play like The Witcher 3 on the go, you bought it to play Civilization 5 on the go, or Six or whatever, you bought it to play all these other games on the go and you're just not happy with the performance of the platform, I understand that. And that's a good thing there's options on the market. There's the IA Neo, there is obviously the upcoming Valve Steam Deck. So Switch isn't the only player in that space. There's obviously our phones as well that can play some of these games. And obviously, you know, laptops like this laptop could play, I might, you know, whatever. There's a whole bunch of options to play games. It's just, it's frustrating that we feel like we need to put down platforms to prop up our own purchasing decisions. Look, I don't think that Nintendo Switch is the greatest platform since sliced bread. I think it has a fantastic library of games and I really enjoy playing those games. And I do enjoy the form factor, the fit, the finish, the home console-ness, but on the go-ness of it. There's a lot of things I enjoy about Nintendo's platform. It's not perfect, right? Somehow we still don't have folders, right? Forget about theme music and all that stuff playing. We don't have folders. Like it's such a basic thing to have on the platform like Switch that we don't have. It's really weird when the 3DS UI that was clunky because of the slowness of the hardware was a better UI than Switch. It's weird. It's also weird that the entire eShop is just filled with shovelware. So much of it that we can't seem to get to the good indie games. It's frustrating. There's no, you know, suggestion system, no user rating system to at least sort through the crap. That's one thing like Steam is, like the Steam platform is a pile of just garbage. When you just look at recent releases, it's bad. There's a lot of shovelware. But people can get around it by looking at things like user ratings. It helps sort through the garbage. And we can't do that on Switch. Now I'm not saying user ratings is the be all end all. Those can be abused as well. Like on Switch, it's gonna be all the Nintendo games. There'll be like five stars and almost everything else will be like four or under. And I understand that it's not a perfect system, but it's better than nothing. So yeah, there's issues with Switch. Voice chat, being in an app. The Nintendo Switch online's slowness to add in classic platforms, especially now when you see Xbox Series X is fully backwards compatible physically with games dating all the way back to its first system. And then you see even PlayStation trying to get backwards compatibility fully with PlayStation 4, let alone that they have a service as well to play their classic games. So Nintendo is behind in many aspects and I will criticize them through the teeth. And I have for all of these things, but what I will not criticize Nintendo for is at the given power of the platform, I will not criticize Nintendo for a game running poorly on it, unless it's a Nintendo game that should have had more time. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a fantastic game, but it ran like dog shit when it came out. Should have had more time in the oven to get all that polished on. And as was proven with the DLC and then later Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition that when they did have the time and they did spend more time with the hardware, they were able to release a much more stable experience. So again, I can criticize Nintendo for stuff like that, but I'm not gonna criticize them for a third party doing a shoddy port job and barely had any upgrades and then giving us a fundamentally broken game. When this is a game that came out in 2010 or something like that, it's been a long ass time. If the game can run at 60 FPS back then on a frickin' Nintendo Wii, it can run at 60 FPS and 1080p today bare minimum, especially when you didn't even really do any graphical upgrades. There's pretty much nothing graphically upgraded about the Switch version except that it's in 1080p. I'm sorry, the Switch is more capable than that, but it does require you to actually put in effort. It's like they threw it in some new engine, chucked it on Switch and called it a day. And that's what we should be upset about. We should be upset at this company for doing a port job, but more than this company because ultimately this company didn't decide. You know, blind squirrel games did not decide when this game comes out. Sega decides. So Sega, I'm holding you to task. Not only are you conveniently giving ammo to Switch haters, and you're also trashing your own product and hurting your own sales because you were unwilling to delay a game that's not ready. Come on, Sega. Sonic is already a franchise that walks on eggshells as it is, right? It's not that it's not relevant anymore. It's just not as relevant as it once was. It used to be almost as big as Mario. It's not anymore. And it's because you've had a really inconsistent quality control with your releases. And then you take a beloved game, one of the good ones you've had in the last 20 years, from the Wii, and this is what you give Nintendo players? It's not okay. It should have been delayed. We are so used to third-party games for Switch getting additional delays. So we would have been okay with it, disappointed, maybe. But almost expected, because third-party games always seem to come out a bit later. But then we have other companies that can bring out brand new games, like Mortal Kombat 11 and Dade on Switch, and not only bring it to Switch, but also it's a really phenomenal version of Mortal Kombat 11. Like, literally, it is amazing what that game is. We've seen time and time again when companies care about the Switch. They can produce magical things. Monster Hunter Rise does not look like a game that can run on a Tegra X1 at the frame rate it runs at, and the smoothness of that online experience. And yet here we are today, and it's an amazing experience, as good as World in terms of visuals, no. But definitely looks like something better than Switch can do. Why? Because there was care and love from the ground up making that game for Switch. And I get that this is a multi-platform game from day one, so you have other platforms to worry about, but guess what? It was it on a Nintendo system first. Nintendo is the lead dog in the whole industry right now. They're approaching quickly 100 million in sales for their current platform. And you're gonna do them dirty? The company that you partner Sonic with? With Mario for Sonic and Mario, or Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games? A partnership that has been going deep now for almost two decades? Do better, Sega. Yeah, the development studio needs to be criticized. But Sega, you control it. It's entirely possible this studio told you, and we're never gonna know, because we don't get behind the scenes info like that. But it's even likely that this studio told you the game wasn't ready. That's very, very likely with how broken it is that there was a meeting at some point where they said, hey, we ain't ready, too bad, we gotta release it on this day. We can't delay it. Yes, you can. We deserve better as gamers? Sonic fans, my God, they deserve better. Like, you know, they already get yanked around like crazy on the quality of their games, the inconsistencies. Sonic Mania, amazing, but it took a fan group to really put that together, right? We don't get amazing experiences like that very often from the core Sonic team. We're all excited for that next Sonic game next year. So supposedly Rangers or whatever it's gonna call, but how do we know it's even gonna be good? We don't. How do we know it's gonna come to Switch and not be a hot mess like this game is? This is the most broken game, maybe even on Switch, let alone in the Sonic franchise. It's just unacceptable. And obviously now Nintendo deals with the blowback of having to give refunds and obviously has to deal with the fact that, you know what, this game isn't as good as it should be. They have to deal with people trashing the Switch again over something that they're not even responsible for. Although to Nintendo, you're not exactly free of criticism either because Nintendo, you have no quality control in your eShop. If you did, you would have saw how broken this game was and not let Sega release it in the first place. That would have been the ultimate, you know, finger to Sega being like, hey, we're not letting this game on our platform. Of course, you can argue it's a similar criticism to things like Cyberpunk PlayStation where PlayStation let it come out and probably shouldn't have, especially on PlayStation 4. So, I don't know. I know it's kind of a bit of a ranty video here on the weekend, we usually do weekend videos anyways, but I just really wanted to get this, I wanted to scratch this itch because it was a little frustrating yesterday, scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and just seeing all this hate on Switch over something that's not Nintendo Switch's fault, inherently. So, I guess we'll end this video the way it started. Maybe Blind Squirrel Games can find a nut after all.