Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Rökkan]

Eh, well, I might not post here anymore because I don't like all this going against every Sonic game and character...

Anyway is there a Sonic game someone here DOESN'T say is bad (besides the classic series, the Adventure games, etc.)?

Didn't say that Colors was bad, Colors was pretty good, as good than the Adventures. But it was still held back by bad design elements. I don't know about Unleashed because I didn't play it (at least the 360/PS3 version) but it also seems to be good, although a lot of people complain about the high-speed Sonic stages being a lot about memorization, filled with cheap deaths because of the super speedy nature of the gameplay on stages absolutely filled of deathpits.

It's not really much - I just want a game that's very well designed as the classics were. Sometimes you see some genuine effort, like on Sonic Unleashed. Sometimes you see that they didn't care at all - like on Sonic 4 Episode I. There's a reason why the classics are so great, they were very very well designed, but the bar isn't astronomically high, Sonic Team just needs to actually care. They need to realize things that the original Sonic Team - Naoto Oshima, Hirokazu Yasuhara and Yuji Naka, had realized over 20 years ago. In a gameplay in which you must valorize speed as a sign of skill, and reward skill with speed, you CANNOT let the player be AFRAID of going too fast because he won't be able to see a hole and die. "Punish" players that are not good enough to avoid certain obstacles by just stopping/delaying them or making them fall to a lower, less favourable path - that way, you'll be rewarding skilled players and not taking lives from players that aren't that good by trying to go fast. And also, speed should be conquered by the player by being good at the game, exploiting the character's moves and how it moves, and the level to gain speed, not just giving it away. Fuck, the only ways to actually lose lives in the original game is by either having 0 rings, which is nearly IMPOSSIBLE, because you can always recover at least one ring whenever you get hit, or either by falling on a deathpit, which is really rare on classic games because of the reason I already said before, or being squashed, which is also sort of improbable, or drowning - which only happens on water levels, which are only 1/5 of all levels most of the times - it is not that common to effectively die on the classic games because the game is focused more on mastering levels to go really fast on them to score more bonuses (to take on harder levels) than mastering levels to just get through them, because, as I said, you can't punish the player with death by trying to go too fast in a game which speed is usually rewarded.
But what do I mean with harder levels? Aren't all levels supposed to be difficult to actually die? No, because that'd make the game too easy, this is why the original Sonic the Hedgehog had two sorts of levels - speed based and slower paced levels. The slower paced levels are more dangerous and are a bit more like traditional platformers that don't follow that design all the way through like the speed based levels does (don't be fooled, there are still shortcuts and those levels definitely rewards skill by making sonic go faster through them).

SEE HOW MUCH I WENT ABOUT THE DESIGN OF THE FIRST SONIC THE HEDGEHOG GAME. And that's only half of it - on a game that's much much shorter than every other Sonic game nowadays - THIS is good game design. This sort of care and thought is what I WANT from Sonic games nowadays, you don't need a lot of levels - just make them GOOD and very enjoyable to just replay and offer different experiences by replaying it over and over. You don't need a lot of moves - just make them useful in different situations and have it so that there's a certain skill curve to using it/mastering it. That reminds me of something that really pisses me off about Sonic Colors DS - There are certain places that you have to slide to get through (which are only there just to give the sliding ability a meaning, therefore being completely useless), and what pisses me is that you can CURL INTO A BALL by pressing DOWN instead of having a whole button just to slide, and yet still, you can't get through these parts by curling :I Why is there a slide ability, why do you need those stupid walls to slide through them, why didn't you give any meaning to an ability that already existed. I'll tell you why: bad, lazy fucking design. Don't be fooled, Dimps is a fucking lazy developer when it comes to Sonic games at least.

WELL ENOUGH RANT ALREADY GOING TO BED NIGHT.