Sonic Free Riders
Sonic Free Riders[a] is a motion controlled racing video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the Xbox 360. The game requires the use of Microsoft's Kinect peripheral and was a Kinect launch title in November 2010.[2]
Sonic Free Riders
Kenjiro Morimoto
Kenjiro Morimoto
Hideaki Moriya
Yasushi Otake
Tomonori Sawada
Koji Sakurai
Sonic Free Riders is the seventh racing game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and the third entry in the Sonic Riders trilogy. It is a direct sequel to Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. The game's story centers on the series' main antagonist Doctor Eggman, disguising himself as "King Doc of Toreggmania", announcing a second World Grand Prix, secretly planning to gather data from the riders to program into his robots.
Free Riders received generally unfavorable reviews from critics, mainly due to game's motion controls, which were often described as unresponsive and inaccurate. However, some praised its presentation, multiplayer capability, and amount of content.
Plot[edit]
The story takes place after the events of Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. Unlike past Sonic Riders titles, Free Riders takes a more arcade-style approach to its storytelling, omitting full CGI and in-game cutscenes in favor of static character images and short dialogue exchanges between races.
Doctor Eggman, disguising himself as "King Doc of Toreggmania", announces another World Grand Prix and promises vast riches to the winners.[4] Though everyone sees through the disguise, four teams enter the competition, each seeking to prove themselves the best or win the prize money. However, at the award ceremony, Eggman reveals himself and his true motive: to gather data from all the racers to program into the ultimate Extreme Gear. The other racers defeat Eggman, but his E-10000B robot reveals itself to be a disguised Metal Sonic, who deceived Eggman and stole the data for himself. Metal Sonic challenges Sonic to a final race, but loses and is forced to flee. Though many of the competitors are disappointed that the promised treasure was fake, they are happy to have enjoyed their time racing.
Development[edit]
The game's soundtrack was written by Tomonori Sawada and Koji Sakurai. The game's theme song, "Free", was written by Jun Senoue, with lyrics written by Johnny Gioeli and performed by Chris Madin.[5] An additional cover of the song performed by Senoue's and Gioeli's band, Crush 40, was included on the game's official soundtrack.[6]
Sonic Free Riders, alongside Sonic Colors, marks the first title to be released following a major recasting of the series' voice actors in 2010. Sonic titles released between 2005 and mid-2010 featured voice actors from the cast of the Sonic X anime, recorded at 4Kids Productions in New York City. However, Free Riders features an entirely new cast of actors under the direction of Jack Fletcher, recorded at Studiopolis in Los Angeles, with only Mike Pollock reprising his role as Doctor Eggman. Although both voice language tracks are included in the game disc, the text and voice language is determined by the console's region settings, with no in-game option to change them, with English voices being used in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, and Japanese voices being used in Japanese. The voice changes resulted in mixed reactions from critics and fans of the series.[7]