Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Rökkan]

nobody said that the game isn't good

everyone was saying that although quality is present there are worrying faults that should be fixed

the faults can be easily fixed but they make the game feel a lot worse than it is or could be

spin-dash is completely broken

the player is rewarded by spamming a broken move instead of legitimate skill

the original classic games were defined by rewarding skill with speed and having speed as a sign of skill

if you want to make classic sonic work you have to follow this for it is the core concept of it

rolling is the most essential ability in the original game and it is useless here

taking away control from the player when it is not needed is extremely dumb

blablabla metaphor about a fighting game with a character with the ability to spam broken hadoukens blablabla


since everyone is not getting it why having a useless roll and an extremely broken spin-dash is a big deal, i think it has to do with people not understanding this:

sonic is not about just playing stages to get through them, otherwise it'd be a dumb, easy, game, for you always have one ring with you, making deaths be extremely situational
and if it were about it, why have multiple paths, you're only playing the stage once, right?

sonic is about replaying levels to time-attack and score attack, it's about learning how to be efficient at the game, it's about going fast by being skillful and playing it well. this is the core of it. compare the video I posted a couple pages back on the player being really fast at GHZ in Sonic 1 to a first-timer.

i won't complain if modern games doesn't have that design, for they can be really good and well-designed games by themselves (Colors for instance), but if you're mimicking classic sonic gameplay, you can't just do the opposite of what it was meant to be like. specially if it's broken by itself, making Sonic (which is already an easy game) even easier and a lot less interesting.

see: playing a game in which you use cheat codes to max out the level of your characters or to make you have a special bar that is always full and it doesn't deplete after using the special move. it makes the game be fun for five minutes, while the game itself, without those cheat codes, might be frustrating at times, for sometimes you'd wish to use a special move when you couldn't, or that you wish your character was stronger in certain heated battles that you felt being really pressured by the enemies' deadly attacks, but that's what makes it be compelling for long periods of time, it is the challenge and what can you make of a game with its restrictions and liberties, for a game doesn't exist if you don't have the possibility, or the feeling of the possibility, to lose.