Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Rökkan]

Woosp! David Caruso is absolutely right! Sonic 2 was sort of rushed and therefore that is why many ideas (scrapped or not) were re-used in Sonic 3/Knuckles (Hidden Palace, a snow zone, a desert zone, Death Egg, Flying Battery, more "cinematic" approach with cutscenes and all, etc).

The problem with Wing Fortress' speed boosters is that you can actually continue to move while they are being activated, resulting in, if you're still running or walking forward when you activate it, your forward launching not starting from the very beginning of the thing, and therefore, only slightly throwing you forward, which makes you fall and die. Wing Fortress is one hell of a shitty level, because the whole game says that you can and you SHOULD run forward without worrying about dying, only worrying about keeping that pace, and Wing Fortress says "hold the fuck on, if you run so fast you'll fall down and die instantly". And you know what, the level IS designed so that you can jump from platform to platform fast, but no one would try to do this because running on that level means you're 500% more likely to die. On other levels, it'd just mean that you could be thrown down to a slower path or that you'd get hit if you're careless, not that you'd actually lose lives and that you'll have to restart the level all over again just to fucking forget about the speed booster bug and die again.

Oil Ocean is another level that just bothers me, the level isn't just about going rightwards, there are a lot of times that going rightwards = backtracking, and going leftwards = going forward, and it's not like Sonic 3 & Knuckles, in which it is really intuitive to know when you actually have to go leftwards (big fucking walls are quite a help!) So, a lot of the times, specially because you're thrown several platforms down because you got hit by that octopus badnik, you end up somewhere that you don't know which direction to take.

And regarding gimmicks in which you have no control over them, I thought that those were more like nudges to let you know that you're not in the fastest path, that having to wait Sonic go through tubes and cannons delays you, and that there is a faster path that lets you avoid those sections, like Sonic 1's Spring Yard's incredibly slow moving blocks, which takes a lot of your time to get through them, but if you're smart and skilled, you can get in a higher path before facing them and going over those sections entirely. I don't know if that actually holds true though, as I didn't study Sonic 2's levels that much. But yeah, I honestly agree with you, Sonic 2 is pretty much the classic game that is my least favorite out of all of them, because of the reasons you mentioned, and because the levels there just are mostly more straightforward and less enjoyable overall.

But I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say that the other classic games didn't have its bad moments. Well, Sonic 1, not really, it was really well-thought and executed, and its problem is mostly some blandness in some aspects of it in comparison to other Sonic games, but that's excusable since it was the first one, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles had some really stupid and boring bosses, and I also don't like how it doesn't quite reward much the player for trying to go fast and keeping its speed like the other classic games motivates you to and all. And Sonic CD, which is my favorite game, has a bunch of faults, like its programming, which isn't as good as the main Sonic games', how underexplored was the time travelling mechanic, which was supposed to be its main mechanic, but by far isn't one of the main things that makes Sonic CD so good, and actually some numerous level design parts that didn't have enough beta testing on it, or are just incomplete, etc.

That reminds me, I replayed Sonic Colors today, and while I love how they tried to give it more exploration, more genuine platforming, and trying to come back to a level design that favors both exploration and going really fast, etc, etc, I reached a point that I got mad while playing it and turned it off at once - Sonic Colors just suffers from a lot of unthoughtful design (just like most 3D Sonic games), in which the player sometimes needs to guess what the designer intended him to do, because it's not only not very clear, but also because doing anything else other than what specifically the designer intended (which isn't the only reasonable course of action you can take, most of the times) will punish you hard. Deathpits. Everywhere. It's almost like I'm playing Wing Fortress all over again.

Sonic Adventure on the other hand, instead of putting glitches and cheap deaths for players who actually wants to be a bit more explorative and curious, the designers actually put power-ups. Go ahead, play as Sonic and try just being explorative, trying to take completely different routes to the one you usually take, or trying to get to places that you'd be fearful to try to explore in other 3D Sonic games because you'd only get killed. You'll see Ring capsules, shields and 1ups instead.


It's late and I'm very sleepy. I apologize if this text is slightly or mostly incomprehensible. bleh.