You will say holy shit.

[A Black Falcon]

Sonic does look awesome, watching the videos I see what Sega did; combined Sonic Adventure's 3-D worlds with platforming, adventure, quck puzzles (like the old school sonic) and gave it the mechanics of Sonic Riders. Now, Sonic Riders has a grading curve that basically goes straight up and doesn't really have an end (I still cant beat the CPU players on the hardest setting on some levels), so if Sonic on Wii is remotely as difficult then it's going to be awesome. Nothing felt better than navigating the course in 3rd level boost nearly the entire time while hitting every shortcut with perfect timing... just to miss one by a hair, plummet to your death and end up in 5th even though you were 12 seconds ahead of everyone.

Supposedly Sonic and the Secret Rings (Sonic Wii) is 10 hours long and has 70 'trials' (stages?), with replay value for doing better in the stages (like the grades in the SA2 stage missions I guess, or something like that). It's also going to have some minigames... that seems to be a trend here -- minigames in Sonic, Rayman: Raving Rabbids as a minigame game, Bomberman Land as a minigame game, WarioWare: Smooth Moves as a minigame game... Monkey Ball too, of course. If they're good that's alright though. :)

Anyway, Sonic sounds like a good rental, but I'm not sure how good a $50 purchase it would make... Sonic Adventure 2 was so short that I regretted buying it, though I definintely had fun while it lasted... (the stuff they put in to make it last longer, such as the mode where you raised those creatures and the missions which you had to try to figure out and then get better grades in, just weren't really fun enough to hold my interest...)

It certainly is true that the Genesis Sonic games were short, but those were designed for replay... newer games aren't really done that way.

I didn't play the first one but I loved the second one. Once you figured out the puzzles though it lost alot of replay, but the multiplayer more than made up for it. The Wii version looks great with its cel shading and the controller will be perfect. I wish I could afford two games at launch. :/

I rented the first Monkey Ball twice, it was fun, though it's one of those games I never got around to buying...