Sigh...After Mania was such a smash hit, I was hoping for Origins to be an utter slam dunk as well. I had a lot of hype going into this. The CW versions of Sonic 1 and 2 on PC, finally. Sonic 3 getting the same treatment FINALLY after Whitehead was denied doing so a decade ago, fancy new intro/outro animations for every single game to provide context for each game's story and a bunch of neat little extras, such as concept art, animatics, extra songs, etc.

All of that sounded great, even if I think the price for it is way, way too steep for games that are nearing 3 decades in age. But where does it crumble apart? Behind the scenes is where it crumbles apart.

Playing any game in Origins, you can immediately tell corners were cut. The physics, while remarkably close to the original games, still feel slightly off. For example, in Sonic 3's Launch Base Zone, you can't enter the pods if you're standing right next to them because your jump is just ever slightly too high. In Sonic 2, the Aquatic Ruin boss fight becomes weirdly difficult due to the aspect ratio, making it feel more like an oversight. In Sonic 1's Green Hill Zone boss fight, you can effectively cheese the boss by standing under the platforms (which wasn't possible in the original, you still had to dodge).

The one thing that gets me though, is the music. Yes, I'm partially talking about the songs in Sonic 3, but I just mean the quality of the songs overall. Again, launching any game aside from CD, you can just hear the compression and crunch of every song. The quality of the songs is astoundingly low quality. It feels like they're using heavily compressed 128 kbps YouTube rips for every single song, and that's genuinely a shame. You don't need to be an audiophile either to hear the low quality, you can just immediately notice it as soon as it transitions from the Origins menu to the game.

And of course, Sonic 3's changed music. Contrary to what others may think, I don't hate the replaced tracks. And if you don't know - they replaced the songs with compositions from Sonic 3's November 1993 prototype. Except, for some reason, they based the songs off of the MIDI compositions from the S&K collection on 1997. Zones like Ice Cap and Launch Base sound fine, if anything I think they genuinely recomposed the 1993 proto. ver of Ice Cap and cleaned it up, and it sounds legitimately wonderful, but Carnival Night Zone...god, it sounds awful.

And then Sonic 3's Super Sonic theme they added. It's...awful. It sounds like something ripped out of Sonic 4. The baffling bit? They included the Unused Theme in the game's Museum Mode for Sonic 3's soundtrack. Why...couldn't they just...use that? It's just baffling. They can include it in the collection but apparently not use it in the game?

I don't wanna keep going. Sonic Origins is a disappointment. I pre-ordered the Digital Deluxe edition by selling my CS:GO knife to buy it, and honestly - I kinda want my knife back now. The animation work done here is incredible and the extras they gave in the game are nice, but none of it makes up for what feels like shoddy ports of mobile games, poor audio quality and just overall lack of polish.

I read some behind the scenes stuff on Origins' development, including this tweet by Stealth on Twitter and it just saddens me how Sega continues to mistreat its developers and its beloved properties.

Shame on you, Sega. Shame on you.

Overwatch 2...I'll be the first one to say - I haven't played much Overwatch 2. This is more-so a recap of my time with Overwatch 1, why I stopped playing it, and why I never came back, even with the release of Overwatch 2.

Let's wind the clock back to 2017. I was getting very bored of Team Fortress 2 by that point. The "Meet Your Match" update, which likely released to try to compete with Overwatch, had killed the way I was used to playing the game for about 4 years at that point, ruining the experience by making it feel more "competitive" rather than a fun, casual, silly game to mess around in. By that point, I was craving something new.

Most of my friends had gone to Overwatch, so I started to want to play the game. Sometime in March 2017, Blizzard hosted a free weekend for Overwatch, which is when I made my account and tried the game. Surprisingly - I enjoyed it. So much so that I started to want to play it, but problem is - I was an 18 year old without a job struggling to finish school. So I couldn't afford it. One of my friends at the time caught wind of this and gifted me a copy of Overwatch (thank you, by the way, Hitzip). I really appreciated this, and started playing, and at that time - firmly left TF2 behind.

When I got into the game proper in May 2017, I was having a blast. I enjoyed the fact that, despite being more competitive than what I was used to with TF2, a lot of the skills I had from that game transferred over. I wasn't the best, but I was having a fun time. Being a Medic main in TF2 meant that I found my home with Mercy. Yes, I was a Mercy main, before the Mercy rework at that. There were a lot of things I genuinely enjoyed about Overwatch when it came out. The Sombra ARG, the Doomfist arc of piecing him together and even wondering if Doomfist will ever be a playable character. I was around for all of it, and following along both with YouTubers & Reddit, solving these cryptic mysteries, piecing it all together - it all reminded me of, well, Team Fortress 2. And its old updates, like Love & War and the bread stuff that came with it.

When I first got into Overwatch back in 2017, it felt like I was part of a growing, accepting community. Jeff Kaplan's videos addressing the state of the game & ways they're taking to improve things was also a breath of fresh air compared to what I was used to with Valve, who would often just sit silent and do nothing, even to this very day. Legit, it was very exciting to play & be a part of the community by then.

However, I bounced out of Overwatch in early 2018, last playing sometime in 2019 before giving up on Overwatch as a whole. And mainly because they started doing mass-reworks of, what felt like, every single character. First came the Mercy rework, which sucked for me as a Mercy main, but I could understand the logic behind it. She was stupidly easy to play and was ludicrously effective with her ultimate being a CTRL+Z keybind put into gameplay. But then came Symmetra, Torbjorn, the nerfs to Roadhog & Junkrat...it all became too much. I felt like I had to re-learn and re-adapt to what felt like every old character being tossed out and replaced with new ones everey 2 or so weeks. It became exhausting to keep up, so I tapped out.

Over the years, I saw Overwatch going in decline. Player numbers dropping. Allegations against Activision-Blizzard. Overwatch League dying - this one particularly stung, as I knew a friend of mine who was actually part of OWL and he basically lost a career out of it - and Overwatch being left in a vegetative state. All for Overwatch 2.

Come announcement of Overwatch 2. I'm sure you know by know. Overwatch 2 was originally meant to be a single player campaign game, where Overwatch 1 would be, well, Overwatch's PvP. Content from OW2 would get ported back to OW1, and the two games would co-exist.

The idea was:
- OW1 for PvP
- OW2 for PvE campaign stuff

This never happened. Instead, Overwatch 1 was effectively killed off and replaced by Overwatch 2. PvP, now instead of 6v6 is 5v5, much like CS:GO & Valorant. Loot boxes have been removed, which, at first glance - awesome! Loot boxes are a tumor in modern gaming, regardless of what company is doing it - be it Blizzard, EA, Valve - I viewed it as a positive that Blizzard was removing the loot box system, and thought they'd replace it with something better, like what Valve did for Dota 2.

Nope. Battle Pass. Two versions of it. Basic one, which gives you ♥♥♥♥-all, and a Premium one, which even has stuff like outright brand new characters. Ones that players who do not pay for it - DO NOT GET TO PLAY AS. One of the core selling points of the original Overwatch is that you buy it, and all future content - maps, events, characters - are FREE. Overwatch 2 ditches this by going free-to-play and opting for a Battle Pass system.

There are other things that drove me away from Overwatch in 2018 as well - role queues in particular just made it feel unwelcoming to play. But what drives me away from revisiting Overwatch with OW2 is the monetization model, the convoluted leveling system which feels like they're trying to reinvent the wheel for no reason, and many issues from Overwatch 1 not being addressed.

Ironically enough, I've fallen back in love with Team Fortress 2 since then. And that's probably the game I'm going to continue playing, even 11 years later. I don't see myself having the same attention span for Overwatch 2.

What a shame, really.