Sonic Adventure DX (Director's Cut)

The Good
Sonic's gameplay is timeless. This is a department in which the original Sega Genesis game has hardly aged. The old ring-grabbing to stay alive and fight evil concept is as addictive as hell, which is why it's been carried over to this, Sonic's first real 3D game. Interspersed between these fast-paced levels ("Action Stages") are the Adventure Fields. These are stages filled with generic human characters who wander around and of course, are not surprised by, and are perfectly happy to talk to Sonic about anything that's on their mind, be it their "burger shop", love life, or what's hot around the city of Station Square. On release it became apparent that these areas didn't go down too well with gamers, who would prefer a more straightforward level-after-level running layout. Personally I found these stages a nice break from the action, and helped add a lot to the game's atmosphere.

As far as presentation goes, aspects like the game's menus aren't bad. They're nice, smooth, and slip on and off the screen pretty quickly with load times that aren't too long (although for some scandalous reason, longer than the Dreamcast version).

The Bad
So it's a Dreamcast port, right? A first-generation Dreamcast port. Obviously Sega would have to beef the game up a little before letting it ship, but sadly, in reality they have done very little. The glitz of the lovely pre-release screens of this "remake" falls apart as soon as you see the game in motion - a constant 60 frames per second obviously seems to have been too much to ask for. Sometimes for games, this is understandable. For a game as old as Sonic Adventure, it most certainly is not - the game was originally released in 1999. The graphics most certainly have been changed, but have they been changed enough? The texture work is definitely passable, but a lot of the game's areas retain a dated low-poly style. Wedded with the already discussed intermittent frame rate, you'll understand why the overall package doesn't exactly shine in this department. Added to this there are a whole host of glitches and things that really should have been fixed. Sonic can still get stuck and fall through certain objects. Fly up too high on one of Tail's levels and you'll reveal a pink transparent color where the background hasn't been drawn. Sometimes the characters can walk through certain objects, even some large, solid ones, which looks pretty sloppy. A lot of the time you'll see small white pixels moving around where two polygon surfaces should connect, a problem apparent on many Dreamcast titles, that should not have made the jump onto the GameCube version.

When the original Sega Dreamcast version launched, the then fairly new IGNDC reported that the voice acting should be "illegal in at least five states". This is a near-perfect analysis of the horrendous English dub, although the fact that the voices haven't been re-recorded after all these years of grated ears and complaints shows that Sega obviously haven't had a large-scale improvement in mind. For this reason more serious action is required - this voice acting should be illegal in at least five COUNTRIES. It really is diabolical. Thumbs-up however, to the fact that any combination of Voice and Caption settings can be chosen, so Japanese voices with English subs aren't a problem. While I don't speak Japanese, it seems that the voices in that language are acted with much more emotion than the American actors, which sound more like they're bored and want out back to light up. As an added bonus, the Japanese voice samples also usually fit the lip assignments, making them far less laughable than their American counterparts.

Also while the music tracks are, on the whole, pretty good, they could have been put to better use. It's not uncommon to hear music that's so loud it drowns out the voice acting (although since the voice acting is poor, maybe it would be better seen from the perspective that the voices are too quiet rather than the music being too loud). At other times, music stops at the end of one scene, and the same track begins to play at the start of another, rather than continuing over it. It's hardly a huge setback, but it feels sloppy and unpolished.

The extras added to the GameCube version are a nice enough addition and it's good to see they went to some effort, but they will most likely fall short to most people's expectations. Once you're done with completing a character's main story, or "Adventure", you're allowed to run around the game finding Mission Cards of some sort. These unlock mini-missions for you to solve. Occasionally you'll find some ones at the easier end of the scale ("Bring the man in front of the burger shop to the target"), but many of these are more cryptic and will require some knowledge of the actual levels - for example, one tells you to "run down the side of the building and pop the balloons". People who've played the Dreamcast version to death like me will most likely instantly recognize the running down the building reference to part of the "Speed Highway" level, but newcomers to the game will be stumped with little incentive to actually collect these bonuses. Get enough of these missions cleared and you'll unlock some fun GameGear Sonic games, although even these are jerky, poorly emulated, and like the rest of this disc, a quick cash-in.

The Bottom Line
On arriving in New York City and going shopping, I naturally checked out some (OK, most of) of the games stores in the area. One of which being GameStop, where I snapped this game up for $40 after quite a few months of anticipation, and that's even although I'd already owned the Sega Dreamcast version and played it to death. Maybe this set my expectations a little too high, but I believe a Director's Cut should be perfect. This most certainly isn't, and seems more of a quick money-spinner that's not worth buying if you already own the Sega Dreamcast version. If not, give it a rental and see how it fares - it's still a fun platformer.

OVERALL: 4/10 (lyris.tk) (American NTSC version reviewed)