Support NeoGAF

[deriks]

man, you young folk now days are softer than unicorn shit.

Just play the game and let blast processing do its job.

 

[Crayon]

Which is exactly my point. They aren't made to just run through as fast as you can, but Sonic's moveset is designed entirely around that. It plays like an exploration platformer with the controls of a racecar. The design of the character and the level design are at odds with each other.

Are the movement and levels both bad, both good but bad together, only one's good, etc? Without that this criticism sounds like saying the game is simply made wrong.

 

[DeVeAn]

The original sonic games are like arcade games. They’re meant to be played over and over learning the level and seeing your skill reflected at the end.

Even more so in the new games, hence the S ranks.

 

[Unknown?]

No, everyone else handles speed just fine, even the ones that come close to Sonic's level of speed. It's just that Dimps and Sonic Team are the wrong people for the job. That's why they should stick with 3-D sonic games(even against the wishes of fans), because it's the best they have when it comes to the franchise. Leave it to other devs to do it right.

Sonic Team hasn't done a 2D game since Genesis. Advanced, Rush, Rivals(2.5D) were all outsourced.

 

[Scotty W]

Are the movement and levels both bad, both good but bad together, only one's good, etc? Without that this criticism sounds like saying the game is simply made wrong.

I would like to introduce a new concept into gaming discourse. I call this concept Immediate Thrill. IT is the thrill you get immediately as you do it, the thing that releases dopamine every time.

In Contra, it is shooting stuff. In Doom you will run out of ammo if you just hold fire, so the IT is a mixture between shooting and moving the correct way at the correct time. In Pacman it is outsmarting you enemies and them destroying them on your heels. Actually, a lot of early games are similar, being victorious under constantly increasing pressure- Space Invaders, Tetris.

Some games have a very low IT, say Final Fantasy, where the interest is mostly generated by the story.

Nights is an interesting case because it is so similar to Sonic. It is about quick, beautiful acrobatic movement. The speed is important. You can go slow, but why would you? Holding Go for a few seconds will make you go fast. But there are 2 important points here. Nights rarely approaches limits of human perception, and it does not punish you for doing so.

In Sonic IT is speed. The physics are designed for speed. If you hold Go for a few seconds, you will start going fast. Now, the game plays well fast. Even people with slow reflexes will have a certain amount of finesse at high speeds, at least in early stages. The game makes going fast easy and fun. So fast that it puts Sonic right at the limit of and often past the limits of human perception.

When you go slow, the physics fight you every moment. I think of this part in Sonic 1 stage 1 where you don’t have enough room to get momentum to run up a slight slope. It is so painfully slow. If you jump, you actually end up jumping backwards!

Sonic slow has very little IT. You would not accept a slow Sonic game unless they altered the physics like the MS game. Only going fast does the game have IT, but only for about 20 seconds at a time, because, unlike Nights, the game will put a spiked enemy in your path that you might not have even seen!

 

[March Climber]

Sonic Team hasn't done a 2D game since Genesis. Advanced, Rush, Rivals(2.5D) were all outsourced.

That’s why I mentioned dimps as well.

 

[dreamcastluvr]

OP is not alone. Way back in 1993 when I got my first Genesis, the 12-year-old me could not get into Sonic. I remember trying to play it like I played Mario, but there were mechanics that didn't really click for me; like the parts where you have to gain momentum in order to jump to a higher or farther location. So it always felt like I was going slow at first as to avoid spikes and pitfalls, and then having to backtrack and roll to build up speed. I wasn't motivated to spend too much time "gettin' gud," so I ended up trading it in and didn't touch another Sonic 2D game until almost a decade later.

Fast-forward to 1999-2000, and I really enjoyed Sonic Adventure I and II. Then I started dabbling into the first 2D Sonic game that was included in the Dreamcast Smash Pack compilation, and found I was able to do much better. It took me several hours, but I finished the game in one sitting. I know that's no big deal to most gamers, but it was to me at the time since I was previously pretty terrible at it all those years ago.

So I'm not sure if I had just gotten better at video games overall at that time? Or maybe by playing the Sonic 3D games got me more into sync with playing the 2D games? Maybe both? Anyway, I'm still not a huge fan of the 2D games (the only other one that I've beaten was Sonic and Knuckles), and I'm not great at them, but I can still hold my own and play them pretty decently.

Despite arguments back and forth about Sonic "never was good" and "you just gotta git gud," maybe, just like a lot of games out there, Sonic 2D games are just an acquired taste/ skill.

 

[Crayon]

I would like to introduce a new concept into gaming discourse. I call this concept Immediate Thrill. IT is the thrill you get immediately as you do it, the thing that releases dopamine every time.

In Contra, it is shooting stuff. In Doom you will run out of ammo if you just hold fire, so the IT is a mixture between shooting and moving the correct way at the correct time. In Pacman it is outsmarting you enemies and them destroying them on your heels. Actually, a lot of early games are similar, being victorious under constantly increasing pressure- Space Invaders, Tetris.

Some games have a very low IT, say Final Fantasy, where the interest is mostly generated by the story.

Nights is an interesting case because it is so similar to Sonic. It is about quick, beautiful acrobatic movement. The speed is important. You can go slow, but why would you? Holding Go for a few seconds will make you go fast. But there are 2 important points here. Nights rarely approaches limits of human perception, and it does not punish you for doing so.

In Sonic IT is speed. The physics are designed for speed. If you hold Go for a few seconds, you will start going fast. Now, the game plays well fast. Even people with slow reflexes will have a certain amount of finesse at high speeds, at least in early stages. The game makes going fast easy and fun. So fast that it puts Sonic right at the limit of and often past the limits of human perception.

When you go slow, the physics fight you every moment. I think of this part in Sonic 1 stage 1 where you don’t have enough room to get momentum to run up a slight slope. It is so painfully slow. If you jump, you actually end up jumping backwards!

Sonic slow has very little IT. You would not accept a slow Sonic game unless they altered the physics like the MS game. Only going fast does the game have IT, but only for about 20 seconds at a time, because, unlike Nights, the game will put a spiked enemy in your path that you might not have even seen!

I wouldn't say nights and sonic are so similar. In fact, drawing the through-line between them is not straightforward. Sonic was pretty similar to many platformers of the time. Nights was a new concept, in comparison. It was not very similar to mario 64 or crash bandicoot.

I hear what you are saying here, but Sonic does not lack IT at lower speeds. 2d sonic moves seamlessly from low speed to high speed. The slow acceleration and speed decay makes him less nimble than mario and having highly exaggerated inertia. The way he stands and jumps perpendicular to surfaces is practically sacrilege. I always thought it was bold that while everyone was trying to get their character to handle like mario, these guys went so far out of their way to make it handle completely different than mario. Amazingly, that handling rivals 16bit mario.

Yes, the way sonic jumps back perpendicular to the surface of a slope he was running up, setting you backwards, yes that is a good thing. You learn to approach a slope with a touch of speed, knowing that you will lose some. You can actually feel the input you add holding the dpad fighting the gravity of going up the hill. Crest the hill just right, and you can do just a little hop and hold down to backside and roll dow the hill, increasing speed. A boost of speed comes that you got from playing angles and inertia. Not a boost to start you on a track of loops and jumps (what is mistakenly seen as the reward) just enough boost for a jump to launch right to the top of the next little hill. Just a tiny bite of the level made easier and more fun by applying something new you had to learn for this game. It's a platformer with a difference. It doesn't act just like mario.

The levels are no mario, tho. That's why mario is better. Sonic levels are more messy and confusing than mario. Not terrible, though. With a fair share of memorable moments and a small number that just weren't that good. The movement and control are equal to mario, though. That's what made the game good: Awesome and unique control, decent levels, great graphics and music. And there was a flashy hook: Isolated parts of levels that play themselves and look really cool with loops and corksrews. Set-peices that are infrequent because too many would be boring.

 

[Scotty W]

I wouldn't say nights and sonic are so similar. In fact, drawing the through-line between them is not straightforward. Sonic was pretty similar to many platformers of the time. Nights was a new concept, in comparison.

I have to disagree. I think Nights was Naka being aware of the drawbacks to the Sonic formula and trying to get around them.

And there was a flashy hook: Isolated parts of levels that play themselves and look really cool with loops and corksrews. Set-peices that are infrequent because too many would be boring.

Set pieces is a good way to think about this. Sonic occasionally does a great job of integrating set pieces into the action as, the boss of level 1 of Sonic 1 shows. But it is very difficult to maintain this for a whole game, too have your entire game be a set piece. Sonic Arcade is an example of this, as is Nights.

As a side note I have a theory that because Sonic moves so fast, the levels must necessarily be very large. While Mario levels are much smaller by comparison. In terms of storage space on those old systems, this is what allows Mario to have so many more levels than a Sonic game.

 

[hyperbertha]

I've never played a single sonic game, mostly because the videos of it always confused me. Like how the heck am i even supposed to play this thing? It just didn't look fun, and the speedruns made it seem on-rails, even though for newcomers its anything but.

Reading through this thread, it's clear the game is designed for trial and error, and only after memorizing the entire level can you truly unlock the movement's potential. But this isn't good design imo. You shouldn't give the player the wrong signals. Sonic's movement makes it seem fast is how its meant to be played. The fact that half the playerbase is confused about it should tell you something.

 

[Rykan]

Are the movement and levels both bad, both good but bad together, only one's good, etc? Without that this criticism sounds like saying the game is simply made wrong.

They aren't bad in isolation. They're just at odds with each other. Sonic is a momentum based character who's moveset and physics are specifically designed so that he can go at high speeds. The level design is specifically designed to make you stop and explore slowly, but Sonic controls terribly when he isn't going fast.

It's why Greenhillzone/Emerald hill zone are among the best stages in classic Sonic Games: It's because those stages are best suited for his moveset.

 

[Scotty W]

They aren't bad in isolation. They're just at odds with each other. Sonic is a momentum based character who's moveset and physics are specifically designed so that he can go at high speeds. The level design is specifically designed to make you stop and explore slowly, but Sonic controls terribly when he isn't going fast.

It's why Greenhillzone/Emerald hill zone are among the best stages in classic Sonic Games: It's because those stages are best suited for his moveset.

QED

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

Always heard the levels in Sonic 1 are kinda bad designed since they don't allow to actually go fast. Apparently the fixed that in 2 and 3, so OP might wanna go check those out if he haven't already.

I don't know myself, only tried Sonic 1 and didn't like it.

But Sonic 1 is the only one that’s honest about it. It’s “ha ha hedgehog go brrrr” through all of Green Hill Zone, then in Marble Zone you get slow platforming sections full of traps and absolutely no room to catch up speed and momentum. Something you’d get in a 2D Mario game, if 2D Mario games were made by far less talented people that is.

 

[SumJester]

Nah it's Mario's formula it's intrinsically flawed, after all i cannot roll into a enemy when I'm running too fast, it doesn't account that game-play style that i know very well since the 90s and it's part with my familiarity with video-games as a whole.
Based on my preconceived notions on what a platform game is, i hereby arrogantly declare that the Mario Series was never good.

(My favorites are Mario 64, Super Mario World, and the Super Mario/Wario Land series).

 

[travolta88]

I would like to introduce a new concept into gaming discourse. I call this concept Immediate Thrill. IT is the thrill you get immediately as you do it, the thing that releases dopamine every time.

In Contra, it is shooting stuff. In Doom you will run out of ammo if you just hold fire, so the IT is a mixture between shooting and moving the correct way at the correct time. In Pacman it is outsmarting you enemies and them destroying them on your heels. Actually, a lot of early games are similar, being victorious under constantly increasing pressure- Space Invaders, Tetris.

Some games have a very low IT, say Final Fantasy, where the interest is mostly generated by the story.

Nights is an interesting case because it is so similar to Sonic. It is about quick, beautiful acrobatic movement. The speed is important. You can go slow, but why would you? Holding Go for a few seconds will make you go fast. But there are 2 important points here. Nights rarely approaches limits of human perception, and it does not punish you for doing so.

In Sonic IT is speed. The physics are designed for speed. If you hold Go for a few seconds, you will start going fast. Now, the game plays well fast. Even people with slow reflexes will have a certain amount of finesse at high speeds, at least in early stages. The game makes going fast easy and fun. So fast that it puts Sonic right at the limit of and often past the limits of human perception.

When you go slow, the physics fight you every moment. I think of this part in Sonic 1 stage 1 where you don’t have enough room to get momentum to run up a slight slope. It is so painfully slow. If you jump, you actually end up jumping backwards!

Sonic slow has very little IT. You would not accept a slow Sonic game unless they altered the physics like the MS game. Only going fast does the game have IT, but only for about 20 seconds at a time, because, unlike Nights, the game will put a spiked enemy in your path that you might not have even seen!

Running fast as Sonic is a thrilling moment for sure. It reminds me a bit like the super-speeding of Mario in SMB3, where the speed adds up and eventually you can fly. Except in Sonic it's a much greater part of the game.

Sonic feels a bit like a race car as others have said, and the levels do feel a bit more suited to platforming than racing most of the time, so I understand why some may find the design and move set at odds.

Getting Sonic up to speed from nothing (for example after losing the rings) with the initial low momentum is sort of the low point. So you're being encouraged to get the dangerous thrill from having that speed which also helps you get to where you need to go.