Wii Controller Saves New Sonic From Sharing Horrible Fate

Sonic and the Secret Rings is just now gracing store shelves, and if you were unlucky enough to have played the recent Sonic the Hedgehog (STH) you're probably too emotionally scarred to give this new title a try, but worry not, for Secret Rings is a completely different experience. You can thank the Wii controller for that.

Turns out that Sonic Team had planned on simply porting the incredibly broken STH to the Wii, but couldn't figure out how to make the controls work with the Wii-mote and decided it was a better idea to simply start from scratch. And gamers everywhere collectively said, "Whew!"

If it makes you feel any better, Sonic Team is very much aware that STH was broken. Team leader Yojiro Ogawa had this to say about why they let such a craptastic game out the door:

The reason why probably ended up with what we see today, involves a lot of reasons. One is that we did want to launch the title around Christmas and we had the PS3 launch coming up, but we had to develop for
Microsoft's 360 at the same time and the team had an awful lot of pressure on them. It was very hard for the team to try and see how we were going to come out with both versions together with just the one team. It was a big challenge.

Sonic Wii Interview With Yojiro Ogawa [Kikizo, via Kotaku]