That instrument NiGHTS is playing is your emotions.
As fans of anything and everything Sega, we all know what it’s like to clutch desperately onto the smallest, vaguest indications that our favorite forgotten characters will finally return to consoles. One of the most commonly mentioned of these fallen gaming icons is Sonic Team’s ambiguously gendered mascot, NiGHTS. Sure, we got our long-awaited sequel on the Wii a couple years ago, but the uneven and occasionally awkward gameplay just wasn’t the triumphant return that people were hoping for.
Well, Eurogamer recently held an interview with Sega’s Takashi Iizuka, and you might like what he had to say about the subject.
“Personally I’d really like to make a third NiGHTS game,” Iizuka says, “but it all depends on SEGA.” Now, this isn’t much to go on, but like any good little gaming blog, we’re gonna close our eyes, click our shoes and wish really hard until it happens. I personally enjoyed NiGHTS on the Wii quite a bit, but I’d love to see Sega take another shot, this time hitting a little closer to the original target.
If there’s anything we Sega fans are good at, it’s grasping onto the smallest hope, no matter how weak the prospect. Keep the flame burning, guys, and we may get that HD NiGHTS game we’ve all wanted for years (well, at least I want it).
[Source: SegaBits]
I’d love another NiGHTS but there was a LOT wrong with that Wii sequel…unskippable cutscenes, a long winded story, terrible platforming levels, that whitewater rafting level. It was classic Sega in the sense that they took a great game, shoved what was great about it into the background and padded it out with a bunch of bad ideas poorly executed. I call this “werehogging”.
You win for best photo caption
I’m mostly just happy that NiGHTS is being talked about again.
Please don’t, Iizuka. PLEASE don’t. The Wii NiGHTS was awful. Giving it a voice, adding subcharacters, adding minigames, all of the STUPID CRAP that modern Sonic Team insist on doing, destroyed the game.
I didn’t mind the expanded story and overall execution of Journey into Dreams, even if it didn’t compare to the original. I don’t think anyone could ever make a game that compares to the exhilaration the first game is able to consistently achieve with its speed and beauty.
That said, the fault of the game was more superficial, and that was that without a concave analog stick like the Saturn’s, it’s a really hard game to control. With NiGHTS, you basically have to have your thumb on the stick pushed down hard the entire time. There is no time to readjust, and with the Saturn pad you could dig your thumb in and it would stay there. Almost all new pads, from the GameCube and Wii to the PS3, have the beveled pads that makes it easy for your thumb to slip off of. The only console a new NiGHTS game could work on controller-wise is the Xbox.
As someone who mastered the original NiGHTS game (I’ve got a few records on scoreattack.net), I found it near impossible to get any kind of precision control on the Wii version. I retain hope, though, that one day we’ll get a proper sequel that isn’t broken in that regard. Xbox, I’m waiting!