In no small part because that's the point at which you stopped discussing and started ranting (another reason will be presented two paragraphs down). Yes, you presented your failures with the game, but it was laced with bitching and moaning over my audacity to enjoy the game more than Heroes (this is not saying much, btw; I do not think highly of Heroes). When you whine, people don't want to talk to you, deal with it.
Since you're so adamant about this, I'll grant your wish and pick up where I left off, all without any further quote tags. But before I do, some clarification of earlier statements:
You misunderstood me when I mentioned lacking the urge to continue a discussion based on a game I would shelf in favor of Adventures/Storybook. I was referring to Shadow, not to NiGHTS JoD. See, I don't think Shadow is THAT great, but I don't think it's THAT bad either, and I can see how some minor tweaks would have made it much better (ease up the mission restrictions and eliminate the final boss split, offering 5 more mission-free stages instead of only one). If I'm going to read and write walls of text to defend a game, I'd frankly rather be defending a great game, not a mediocre game. I don't particularly care if you don't appreciate a "so-so" game. So I wasn't terribly motivated to defend Shadow.
The misconception I noted earlier was your citing an alleged need to avoid killing particular enemies. That's not the case unless you're one enemy away from completing a mission which you don't want to. When you spend that amount of time complaining about a nonissue, it says that you are not well educated about the game you're complaining about. This is, incidentally, why I don't go into terrible detail with my complaints against JoD, I haven't been able to put up with it long enough to reach my second boss fight. I realize that I could stand to educate myself further, but it takes a LOT for me to drop a title that early; the only other game to hold a candle to that level of badness in its early impressions is the GBC Animorphs game. And I know there are many with more patience than I who have found much more to complain about in the late-game of JoD, so it is not terribly encouraging for me to drudge through what I already find a fun-sucking husk of a disc in order to find out.
Visuals? Ironic complaint given your defense of JoD, one of the jaggiest titles I've seen. But I won't argue against that; you'll never catch me defending the visuals of any Sonic Team title in the period between SA2 and Secret Rings.
Missions, I conceded, were tedious and overly strict. However I do find you to blow it out of proportion a little, both due to the above enemy misconception, and the fact that missions basically exist only to unlock stuff. You can free play from the menu and never worry about them.
Dialogue? Absolutely and totally cheesy. That's why it's enjoyable, because it's laughable in that MST3K kind of way. I mean, how do you not smile at, "Where's that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?" I'm glad future games did not continue along this route, but it was fun as a one shot deal, and I will take it over Heroes beating you over the head with child cliches (Because...we're Sonic Heroes! *shudder*)
Shooting, assuming we MUST put up with it, is presented as it should be: a tack-on. It's a side item to the main platforming focus. Shadow is unusual in that its gimmick doesn't completely override the platforming formula to the point of being utterly incompatible with it and resulting in an alternate play mode that gets more focus than the proper hedgehog action (read: Werehog), and it's a lot less intrusive than Hereos' character formations.
You flipped out when I compared it to Heroes, apparently thinking that I thought highly of Heroes. I don't. It has its strong points, most any Sonic Team effort (yes, even JoD) does, but it's on the lower end of the spectrum to me. Visuals are as bad as Shadow, team difference is negligible, and the sheer number of mandatory maneuvers makes the game as a whole feel cluttered and lacking focus. Oh yes, and it introduced us to the wonderful concept of non-boss enemy HP counters, something which to this day I maintain does not belong in a Sonic game (you hit them once, they die, you move on; that's the way it should be).
Finally hit the button, huh? And you couldn't even keep it in PMs either, like I asked. Alright, alright. Let's get on with the spectacle, then.
You say I presented my failures with the game. Other than my general use of capitals in some ways to emphasise certain points I deem specially outrageous, and my general sarcasm when describing a game I feel no love for, I don't see any bitching in there. Again, you fail to provide me with any example whatsoever to what my bitching or illogical arguments were in the first place. Bricks to glass houses, I'm afraid. You think my arguments are "whining", while yours so far have been complaining about mine, without giving me any context whatsoever. You throw stereotypical reasons into the air for being right without explaining any of them, and conclude with saying I'm whiny, simply because you don't feel like reading my replies.
I never asked for walls of text to defend a game, I simply asked for reasons as to WHY in your mind, Shadow was better than Nights: JOD. And I do believe I got my answer. You played about 10% of Nights, which you just revealed now, and you think you can even give an opinion about the game?
Jesus, why didn't you just say so in the first place? Because I don't remember reading "I didn't play enough of the game to make any kind of good judgement about it", unless you fully expected the game to turn into a mish-mash of boat levels one after the other, each one with a worse control option. If you decided to simply drop a title because of such a thing, it's perfectly fine. There's a blogger on Joystiq that dropped Nier because of a fishing minigame near the beginning, and ended up not reviewing the title he was supposed to. But why didn't you say that you hadn't played enough of the title to warrant a decent opinion instead of going at it with pointless bullshit? And avoiding killing particular enemies IS necessary. You got good and evil characters pointing that fact out to you. You can unlock a health gun to restore enemies back to health. Just because you don't screw up the level unless you're close to the enemy limit, it doesn't mean you should kill them. That not only removes immersion, but it's like complaining about the poor teammate AI in a squad-based third person shooter, and someone replying to you with "you can let them die and finish up the mission yourself, though". Just because crap like that happens, it doesn't mean you should let it happen. If the game wants you to make a distinction between enemies, they should make the gameplay capable of making that distintion, instead of letting the shooting mechanic and homing attacks be incredibly hard to control when you want it to hit one certain thing in a scenery full of targets.
Visuals, then. I think it's hard to actually find any Sonic Team game with graphics that are as bad as Shadow's. But Nights, having mediocre graphics itself, is still leagues better than Shadow was in that department. Heck, I'll pull up Google Images and look for screenshots of the games. Let's look at some for Nights.
http://i.neoseeker.com/p/Games/Nintendo_Wii/Action/Adventure/nights_journey_of_dreams_profilelarge.jpghttp://www.jameswoodcock.co.uk/wp-content/gallery/nights-journey-of-dreams/NiGHTS__Journey_of_Dreams-Nintendo_WiiScreenshots11647Bomb_005.jpghttp://static2.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/wii/nights_journey_of_dreams/screens/nights_journey_of_dreams_232.jpgAlright, basic textures, but some work in there, the character's face looks like crap, but it's still a bit worked, and the models aren't that bad. Now let's take a look at Shadow.
http://static2.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/ps2/shadow_the_hedgehog/screens/shadow_the_hedgehog_24.jpghttp://www.dignews.com/legacy/screenshots/shadow_h_11.jpghttp://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/8/89/Shadow-the-hedgehog-20050825004605315.jpg/400px-Shadow-the-hedgehog-20050825004605315.jpgWooow. That's a big difference, isn't it? I picked screenshots pretty much at random, not focusing on any pretty or ugly moments for any of the games. But Shadow, as you can well notice, the scenery seems like it came from a 32-bit game, the world looks like it's made of square shapes, the textures are unforgivable, and... well, it pretty much looks like crap.
Missions? The missions are NEEDED for actual progression of the game. You can't get to certain levels unless you fulfill those missions. And each and every single one of them is not just confusing, but hellish to do, in the clusterfuck of level design which the game brings us. That one timed mission to locate bombs in a city, and having to use vehicles to get across shiny green textured roads which sapped your rings is pretty much the epitome of bad level design.
Dialogue is "good" cheesy? That's like saying House of the Dead is a good movie because you can laugh while watching it! The story, unbearable as it is, is actually intended to be taken seriously, unlike Heroes' story, which was there just to fill up space between the levels and bosses. With Heroes, they just made up crap in 5 minutes and told us to play the bright colorful levels and fight the bosses. In Shadow, they intend the story to be something dramatic at times, and it ends up being lousy Sonic Adventure 2 fanfiction continuity sequel.
Shooting, is horribly tacked-on to the Heroes engine that Shadow runs in. Since you can't just homing attack everything (and the homing attacks don't really make much damage to begin with, as the dreaded energy bars return), you have to forcefully use the weapons. And since they all take a strange "shoot where you're pointed towards unless it's a small weapon and you are near an enemy", it takes away nearly all control from the player, leaving it at random. Heroes' character formations were well-suited to the levels at hand, the platforms weren't as small and tight as in other platforming games to allow space for all characters, and you switched formations at your own leisure.
I didn't flip out when you compared it to Heroes because I thought you thought highly of Heroes. I expressed my dissapointment because Heroes still has some enjoyable sections and although it's filled with bullshit, aside from the bosses and having to go through the game 4 times (and yes, the health bars are bullshit, but aside from Shadow, no other game followed it to my knowledge), it's actually a solid game, while Shadow, pretty much hasn't even got one single redeeming feature to it.
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