Sonic Shuffle

Pros • Smooth cel-shaded animation • Imaginative, humorous mini-games	Cons • No modem/internet support • Long load times • Rounds take too long to hold the interest of most players • No option to disable CPU players
Bottom Line Light-footed, speedy Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends enter the slow-paced world of board games. Like a board game, Sonic Shuffle provides quaint, addictive fun for a small gathering of family or friends for a short while, but such a group will most likely lose interest in the quest before completing a round. And also like a board game, it’s almost no fun at all for solo players.

The existence of Sonic Shuffle would seem to be a tribute to the olden days of 8-bit gaming when Sega mimicked the every move of Nintendo, then the undisputed king of console games. Shuffle is based heavily upon the concept of Mario Party and does little to either distance itself from that game, or expand the boundaries of the budding “party game” genre.

The cast of Sonic Adventure find themselves trapped in a dream world held at the mercy of Chaos, where four of them must embark on a journey through several game-board landscapes to recover gems called Precioustones. Thus, four characters are chosen by either human or CPU players to chase one stone after another, completing various mini-games along the way. The two things that separate Sonic Shuffle from Mario Party, aside from the characters and the mini-games themselves, are the facts that only certain spots on the board trigger a mini-game or battle event, and that movement on the board is done by drawing from a deck of numbered cards that are distributed in hands among the players. Players can see their own cards but not their opponents’, which offers a bit of strategy since one must pay attention to what cards have already been played in order to make the best guess when drawing from an opponent’s hand.

The mini-games are fun and imaginative, most often consisting of one player borrowing one of Eggman’s wacky inventions to harass the other players, stealing rings, etcetera; however, there does not seem to be a large number of them, and they do not change between the various boards. As the game progresses, players will earn special items they can use to both positive and negative effect on other players and on the board itself, but these items are robbed of some of their value because one cannot determine their targets directly – the player affected, like too many things in this game, is chosen by the spin of a roulette-style wheel. Similarly, Eggman will appear to wreak various forms of havoc upon the board, but his antics lack variety and quickly become predictable.

As in most Sonic Team games, Sonic Shuffle is graphically impressive and its controls are both responsive and intuitive, however, there are many issues with this title that really ought to have been addressed before its release. First, Sonic Shuffle really does little to tax the capabilities of the Dreamcast, which makes the game’s long and frequent loading delays that much more annoying. With all the lip service given by Sega as well as other game producers to the concept of online gaming, it’s quite disappointing to see yet another title that would have been perfect for online play miss out on the opportunity – especially since without this option the game does little to satisfy single players. Additionally, it would also have lent a better element of strategy to the game if multiple Precioustones appeared simultaneously, or if the stones did not always appear in the same places, in the same predictable patterns. And finally, though this is a small point, it was another disappointment to find that this game did not include the option to select English or Japanese voice samples as Sonic Adventure did.

All of these things leave the impression that Sonic Shuffle is a half-finished title, rushed through its production simply in order to be on store shelves by Christmas. As such, there is no reason to rush out and buy this title, and even die-hard Sonic fans will tire of it quickly.

James Tapia

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