Why Sonic meeting Mario at the Olympics will be a disaster

Angus Kidman
Thursday, 29 March 2007 05:14

Your IT - Entertainment

The gaming community has erupted with excitement over the announcement that Nintendo's long-time mascot Mario and Sega's most successful character Sonic the Hedgehog will officially be included in the same game. However, while Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games might sound like a great concept, there are plenty of reasons to suspect the finished product will be something of a damp squib. Here's the top five potential problems with the project.

(1) It's only going to be available for Nintendo's own platforms. OK, it's no surprise that Nintendo aren't about to let their most profitable character jump ship onto rival consoles. Sonic may have become something of a multi-platform groupie ever since Sega exited the hardware business, but Mario remains a Nintendo-only deal, and the new game will only appear on the Wii and the DS.

Sure, sporting games and the Wii's motion controller have proved a good fit so far, but it would have been nice to see Sonic, whose high-speed motion has always pushed console processors to their limits, really pushing a PS3 or Xbox to their limits. That may well happen in another title, but not in this one.

(2) It's an official sports franchise title. The Olympic movement is notorious for exercising tight control over absolutely everything to do with the Games, which is reflected in the fact that this new game is being published in a partnership with International Sports Multimedia, which has locked up the rights to the Olympics in electronic form. Control freaking at the committee level rarely makes for a good game. In fact, to make that point broader . . .

(3) Too many cooks may well spoil the broth. Nintendo has the rights to publish the game in Japan, while Sega will handle the rest of the world. That's probably a reasonable commercial division of the spoils, but the need to compromise to meet the needs of both sides may well result in a title that offends no-one, but doesn't excite anyone either.

Read on to learn how the Olympics building program and the fundamentals of games physics could also cause problems for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.