Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Rökkan]

Impressions of Sonic Retro member Chimpo of Sonic Generations, the demo he played at Sonic Boom.

Alright. lets get this shit out of the way:

Classic Sonic:

He's heavier than Modern Sonic. A lot heavier. This takes some getting use to but after a while you get a hang of it. Jumping is a lot better than its ever been since the Genesis days. It's not perfect but it's not Sonic Rush either. Bouncing off badniks functions more like a double jump than it did in the original game. No matter how high you bounce on them from you always jump back at a fixed height. I actually like this change because it was used extensively in the level design. Now my second biggest problem is the rolling.

Like I said before, it's completely useless. It shouldn't even be there if that's how its going to work. I tried numerous the demo numerous times to try and in numerous locations. I tried it the Genesis way and the Sonic 4 way (hold forward while rolling) and no matter what, Sonic would eventually slow down. I found a sweet ass steep hill with a loop there and tried rolling. Still nothing. It's worthless and you're better off spin-dash canceling than rolling if you want to go down those hills fast.

My biggest problem with the game is not the controls. It's the scripted events. I'm sure we've all seen numerous videos where Sonic goes down the S Tube, runs over a crumbling floor, hits a yellow spring and is launched back down into the pit to hit another spring. I'm sure a lot of us thought we could hit that but unfortunately its scripted and there is no way out of it. Another event happens at loop before the mountain. A lot of the springs in the game are fixed as well. Jumping on them causes your horizontal control to be locked until a certain point so you can't get that extra distance from the climb up that you normally would. This was very annoying in one section of the level where you hit a yellow spring to get to a swinging platform above you, but just to the right of you there's a breakable platform you can run on and use to get to another spring that will let you get past the platform section. These fixed events are annoying and just take control away along with the enjoyment.

I didn't get to try out Modern Sonic too much but it felt like a much more refined version of Unleashed and that's a good thing.

If they can reduce the number of scripted events and make rolling on its own actually useful then Classic Sonic would be absolutely perfect. It may not be Genesis Perfect but it's damn close and damn well enjoyable. Pre-ordering the shit out of it.

P.S: 3D Mode is awful. Don't try it. The game runs at an awful frame rate and there's input delay. Avoid it at all cost.

I'm... Honestly, sorta disappointed. Not only they didn't fix how rolling worked in Sonic 4, but it's apparently even worse. How the springs work and specially the scripted events sound extremely retarded. It also seems like they understood how the level design of the original Sonic sort of works, but not how the game itself works, so they're like "oh why do we need just one button?" "oh why can't Sonic uncurl? why is the only way to uncurl is to do a rolling jump that makes you lose all of your speed?" "why should the player lose so much time into stopping and then crouching to charge his spindash?" I really hope they fix those annoyances regarding rolling, springs, and the usage of scripted stuff where there's no need for that, or that at least those things won't annoy me as nearly as I imagine they will, because that seems like it will compromise my enjoyment of this game quite some - why making sure Classic Sonic looks exactly like Classic Sonic and have its animations exactly the same when the gameplay can be so far off? :/