Yeah, I've already done that joke on our Twitter channel last night, but whatever. I'm not above repeating myself for maximum lols.

SO! A brand new Sonic game was announced last night, in what was perhaps the worst kept secret in the world all last week. But it wasn't just a new game, but a remaster - a enhanced version of arguably the best Sonic game made in the last 20 years. Sonic Generations, on modern gaming hardware! I'm excited! It's exciting!

You might wonder if it's necessary to remake a game that's 'only' ten years old, but hey, if Sony can remake The Last of Us Part II - a game that is literally three-and-a-half years old - then SEGA should get a pass on this one. Besides, time is utterly relative; we complain that it's "too soon" for a remake of a game that's a decade old, yet at the same time moan that Sonic Team spends "too long" working on a single game for five years. Ten years is longer than you think.

Yeah, there's probably an argument to be made that everyone and his dog already owns a copy of the original Generations (I'd say that's more a testament to its quality than anything negative though, so... weird flex?), but that's exactly why Sonic Team has hacked on a completely extra "episode" of Shadow content, which is a move similar to Nintendo's recent remasters (Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, anyone?). The only question here is, as always, will it play any good? And, well, who knows really at this point? I guess that's all part of the fun - finding out!

Anyway, I don't want this blog to be about arguing the merits of a Sonic Generations remaster.

As we usually do, The Sonic Stadium covered the announcement of Sonic X Shadow Generations quite comprehensively last night - only this time, we were also able to fully take advantage of our amazing active community to help generate discussion about the reveal as it happened. We had some really bustling forum activity last night going into the wee hours of the morning - something that I've not really seen since the early 2010s (which, funnily enough, is around the time the original Sonic Generations was getting hype).

In the past, our crack news team would scramble to pull together all the news, screenshots and more for a live announcement like this - but it would usually be for a readership that was increasingly reluctant to comment on independent website/blogs (even before we turned off the comments entirely on our old Wordpress instance). It sort of felt like we were just throwing stuff into the void - even though we knew people were reading our stuff, we weren't getting much feedback in response.

Sonic X Shadow Generations was probably the first major announcement of its kind since we integrated the forums and website back in July 2023, so I wasn't sure how things would go. And, you know, in spite of even the best laid plans, there are always snafus as you and the team try to scramble to respond to a trailer that suddenly comes out of nowhere in the middle of a live showcase. But it's thanks to some awesome organisation from our forums mods and news staff that we were able to completely smash our coverage and successfully involve the forum community in what we do on the news side again.

And, OBVIOUSLY, it is simply thanks to all of you lovely people in the 'Stadium community that we were able to have any decent chat about the news as it happened at all. So I want to thank you again for continuing to use the forums, gallery, blogs, all the things we have to offer, and contribute to this wonderful 23-year-old hive of madness.

I'm really happy with where things are heading with the Sonic Stadium right now, leading into 2024 and beyond. With Sonic X Shadow Generations, our news team will be excited to write all sorts of follow-up features, stories and community roundtables to keep the conversation going. Hopefully you all are psyched to keep the chat going with one another too as we get closer to the release of the Sonic 3 Movie too, amongst other things. And there are going to be cool new features and upgrades to the site incoming that I can't wait to share more details on. For now, I'm going to be taking a look through the responses to our Reader Survey and see what feedback we can and should act on to make this place even more fun for you guys!

I'll end this blog by sharing that our User traffic for the month of January 2024 was by far and beyond anything we have ever seen before. In fact, it's the biggest January we've ever had on the Sonic Stadium website, topping our previous best which was January 2012! Like, back then we were all talking about Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Sonic 4 and Sonic Adventure 2 on the Xbox 360! That feels like a whole lifetime ago. And yet, Sonic Generations only came out the year before that.

Like I said, time is a funny bugger.