Riff Table Arcade Episode 10 Sonic Boom Goes With Everything

Sega hit off some pretty big spikes in gaming media from this past week as they plan on 2014 to be the year for the Sonic the Hedgehog brand to get revitalized with new merchandise, a new CGI cartoon, and most importantly; the third, exclusive game for the Nintendo platforms called "Sonic Boom"! RRPG and FighterXaos discuss the trailer of both the game and the cartoon as well as the character designs as much of this stuff has been showing both praise and criticism from the masses. What do they think? Find out today as 2014 is now the Year of Sonic! Gotta juice!

Just as a disclaimer, the new Sonic game tied to the new cartoon is not replacing Sonic Team's mainline of the franchises as modern Sonic will still be present for everyone as Sonic Boom is only in a spin-off fashion to appeal more to the Western crowd.

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Laid Back Comics Watches: Avengers Assemble!

Back when I went to SDCC I had the pleasure to see a trailer of an early version of Avengers Assemble and watching it I was a bit, underwhelmed. Of course it was just a animation and voice test, to give the audience there an idea and feel of the show, so it was a little rough, and that was just the stand in voice cast. Now here we are almost a year or so later and the show has debuted and it is still a tad rough but for the most part watchable.

To say Marvel wants to capitalize on the Avengers movie success is the no brainier statement of the day. And Assemble does little to nothing to hide from that fact, for the most part the two casts are completely identical save for the addition of Falcon being added to the team, who Tony first had suggested to use War Machine suit before Sam ignored it and get the suit he wanted. That wasn't the only real difference to the whole first two episodes.

The story takes place sometime after the Avengers disbanded for some reason that isn't fully explained just yet. But, Tony is keeping tabs on everyone in the Big Brother fashion when he sees that Red Skull suddenly killed Captain America. This is the events that leads Tony into bringing the group back together and go out and Avenge Cap by finding Red Skull and MODOK and bringing them in. And here is where the show begins to struggle a bit as that while the group does want to help after hearing the news, it was a lot of bickering back and forth between the characters on the way to the arctic to find villains. Once there they end up fighting some unnamed soldiers and more bickering and in fighting. That is main theme going out through the first two episodes here where if this was just a stand alone would fall under the more annoying side, but as the second episode hits we see that getting pushed much further with some nanobot help.  The big free though is this will be a constant thing as the series progresses and will start to feel old and forced the more it is used.

The story also has some problems like motivation of Red Skull who is dying, though never explained why. So he switches brains with the not so dead Captain America, but when that fails he just steals Tony’s armor. In hindsight that plan seemed to be the much easier one, heck had he gone that route there would be a good chance the Avengers wouldn't have reformed.  But, in the end they push for the humiliate route which ends up giving the heroes reason to stay together. But, they aren't the only ones, the hook at the end of the second episode is Skull asking other villains to combine their forces as well. That could be interesting in its own right to keep watching the show.

What hurts the show the most I feel is the voice casting and animation. While we get some returning voices from EMH we are also getting some new ones and they don’t sound right. Tony sounds extremely young and Red Skull is a few accents shy of a bad stereotype.  And the animation can go from wonderful fluid and detailed, but then you get these static shots were a frame of animation is paused and then slide across the screen, it is obvious and jarring to see and it is used several times.

In the end even with all of these negatives, there wasn't one time that I would call the show bad in anyway. But, I said the same thing about Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and half way through the first season it hit its stride and became an excellent show. So here is hoping the same thing will happen to this one and in a few months’ time we will be all in love with this new show. Hopefully it being connected to Ultimate Spider-Man scare too many people away.

OVERALL: 6.0 out of 10

Bryan "BAC" Clendening writes for Broken Infinite and you can follow him on Twitter @BAClend