I'm gonna be up front with this: I'm a strong Nintendo supporter. I don't care much for the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Nintendo keeps dishing out good games and I like it. I don't care for good graphics, nor do I care much about realistic ones. A game with great gameplay is good enough for me, and that's what Nintendo does! So what if the Wii has a bunch of bad games, don't buy them! Stick to the ones you know, like Mario, or Zelda, or Metroid. Yeah, those other two are over-rated! But, if you come of over to my place, you'll see something odd. How did an Xbox 360 get into my home? Well, it's my brother. He helped my buy the we with the promise that I'd help him buy a 360, and, being a man of my word, I did. So, that's how that thing got into my home.

But, now that I have a 360, I can finally play a game that I always wanted to try out: Sonic the Hedgehog for the 360, or as some people call it, Sonic 360 or Sonic next gen. Now, for four years, I've heard people talk smack about it, and I couldn't disagree, because I've never played it. Well, those days are gone, and now I can see once and for all if the game lives up to what they say about it.

Okay, let's start out with the bad. You can say I was kind of prepared for it. The camera is atrocious, it flys wherever it wants to or gets stuck and often causes you to die. I really hate that camera! Next, is the control. It's very sloppy and sensitive. Case in point, how do you jump forward? By pushing up and the jump button, right? What happens when you let go of the control stick in midair? You start going down. But, in this game, you keep going even if you let go. That cane be a serious problem, especially if you're trying to get on a small platform. Sonic's stages are frustrating because, when you're going through a loop it doesn't lock in place completely. The first loop I went through, I missed the jump ramp completely and flew into the water and died.

But, worst of all, the loading screens. I knew they were long, but what caught me off guard was that some loading screens were placed at the most rediculous places. For example, when you fight a boss, it loads for 30 seconds, pretty long for a loading screen. Then, we see the intro to the boss screen where we get the name and the dialog, then, it has to load again! Was that last loading screen just for that part?!? Then, finally we fight the boss. We beat the boss and, it loads! Then we get the boss defeat screen and the results, then, of course, it has to load AGAIN! And finally, we continue. Couldn't they have put that on one loading screen. I mean a long loading time is bad enough, but at least it would be ONE loading screen and not FOUR! You get the loading screens on everything! That's what they did in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2.

When you get a game over, you think you get to go back to the very start of the stage, but no, it's worse than that, you go back to the character select screen, that means... MORE LOADING SCREENS!!!

There are plenty of bugs in the game, too, but, I can't list all of them, so I'm moving on.

I've gotten the bad out of the way, now let me talk about the good. The graphics are great and the music is fantasic! I love the music! And a lot of people agree with me, isn't that right? Don't believe me? Listen to some on youtube. They're good. But most of all is this game has a lot of good ideas. Let me name a few.

The hub worlds. When you're not zooming through actions stages your messing about in the hub worlds doing whatever you want, that's a big plus. We haven't seen any hub worlds since Sonic Adventure and I'm glad they brought them back for this game. We don't have much exploration in games anymore and that's just sad. This game gives us something to explore as Sonic... or Shadow... or Silver. I just love the hub worlds.

Another plus is the rings. In any other Sonic game what happens when you get hit? You lose all of your rings no matter how hard you get hit. In this game, the amount of rings you lose depend on how hard you get hit. If you get hit by a bullet, you lose one ring, but if you get hit with a missile, you lose all of them. That's another good idea.

The storyline is okay, I just wish Sonic was more involved with the main plot. Instead, he's chasing after Eggman AGAIN, thus leaving Shadow and Silver to do the important stuff. I'm sorry, isn't Sonic the main character, WHOSE NAME IS IN THE TITLE!!! But, I can sit through it and not hate it. But if Sega's gonna be biased towards a character it might as well be the main character because that's what the series is about, right?

The new character Silver. He's alright. I find him appealing. He's not rediculously dark and sinister like Shadow is. He's actually a character you can put into a classic Sonic storyline. I'm talking Pre-Sonic Adventure, before he got the design change. Silver is, as Blaze points out, naive and that works with those kind of games. (I also find Blaze appealing, too). I like Silver, not as much as Sonic, but I still like him.

So, with all that said I can say that the game is not bad. It's not great, but it's not as bad as Sonic and the Black Knight, that is a BAAAAD game. It just is. This game is way better. I can see where Sega is going with it. I enjoyed the game, and isn't that the goal of the game, to enjoy it? Not sit around an critisize every single little thing? It's playable and if you're a big Sonic fan, you might want to give this game a try, if you can handle the frustration, that is. I'd give it a 6/10, maybe a 7. Why? This game has a lot of good ideas, it just wasn't presented properly.

Before I end this, I'd like to wrap things up with my opinion on the whole Sonic/Elise relationship: It's not that bad! Really, guys! It's not that big a deal! You're making a big stink about something small and insignificant! Yeah, so what if a human girl kisses a hedgehog? So what?!? It's not real! It's all fictional! Get over it!

So, that's my opinion on the whole thing.