So I downloaded the Sonic The Hedgehog demo on Xbox Live…

Jesus fucking Christ. This just sums up everything that’s happened to Sega over the last few years. The trailblazing company that brought us so many great and innovative titles on the Saturn and Dreamcast just seems to have rotted away, leaving a festering carcass that just churns out complete pap.

The anticipation that I used to feel for a new Sega game is replaced by a creeping dread that somehow they’ll have fucked up the unfuckupable like Phantasy Star Universe. Even Sonic for that matter should be easy – run really fast through some pretty landscapes and that’s it. No digging for emeralds, no dark emo hedgehogs, no vehicles, and certainly no cats fishing for their frogs.

If you haven’t played the Sonic demo, it’s rubbish. Complete pish. For a start Sonic isn’t fast, which is like making a Zelda game where Link doesn’t have uncomfortably effeminate personality traits. The camera is so slow that it has to be a joke (maybe the whole game is a joke). You spend more time watching Sonic fall to his death than actually doing anything that resembles gameplay. Twitchy controls, slowdown, and it looks like Sonic Adventure 2 in 720p. Just wrong, and that’s even without Shadow in it. What the hell is Sonic without a sense of speed?

This isn’t the Sega that could do no wrong. Only a few years ago they gave us Shenmue, two pretty competent 3D Sonics, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio, Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi, F355 Challenge; the only recent Sega game that I’ve enjoyed can’t be described without the word ‘flawed’ in there. They didn’t put out rubbish like this on Dreamcast or even in the early days of their multiplatform life: Jet Set Radio Future and Panzer Dragoon Orta were as good as anything they’ve done. Sonic Heroes wasn’t.

So what’s happened to them? Is the current Sega an evil imposter or something?