R2TRRFF: High-speed Hedgehog Monogatari & Knuckles

[ryu]

Honestly, I think the moment you have any sort of assumption or expectation about Sonic you already lost. I loved playing Sonic on Mega Drive as a kid. And really I just played the games. Didn't even know Sonic existed or what to expect prior to just playing. The games were just fun because they were fun games and that was that. Going slow? Going fast? Who cares, I'm not even 6 years old and I just want to clear this damn level already

[Steven]

Yeah, I was the same way, but younger. The earliest memory I have is Sonic 3. Not Sonic 3 & Knuckles, just Sonic 3. It wasn't until 2020 or so that I studied their designs in detail, but when I did I was rather surprised at the depth of these seemingly simple games, but I do think it largely only becomes apparent after close study and a lot of practice. I have over 200 hours in Sonic Mania now, and I still find new stuff on occasion.

Anyway, I started kind of replaying Superstars for some reason. Might have a chance to try multiplayer soon, which I am simultaneously looking forward to trying and dreading because I have a feeling that it's going to be a miserable experience. Almost every time I play it I find some new glitch. This game is a mess... they're probably done patching it, so I don't expect any fixes for the remaining bugs. It didn't sell as well as Sega expected, so who knows if they'll make a new 2D Sonic again for a while, but whatever happens, I hope they learned from the countless mistakes of Superstars and can make something better next time. The worst part is that Superstars isn't a bad game at its core, but it's really one of those death by one thousand paper cuts things combined with also being less than the sum of its parts. I think that it has a lot of the stuff that it needs to be solid, but it wasn't really put together properly or something. Better music would also help.

[Air Master Burst]

the best 2D platformer that isn't Super Metroid or Sonic Mania again with a slight variation of the normal gameplay, so there you go.

Rayman Origins, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Sonic 2 are the best 2D platformers.

Sonic and Knuckles makes an excellent case, but it's woefully incomplete without adding the massively inferior Sonic 3 levels. S3 Complete at least fixes the level order, but you still have that annoying Marble Garden - Hydrocity - Carnival Night slog to get through before getting to any of the fun levels.

S3+K does handle the best of the classic Sonic games, though, and the OST might be the best too. Once you get past Carnival Night it's mostly smooth sailing, although I admit Sandopolis can drag a bit.

[Lemnear]

the best 2D platformer that isn't Super Metroid or Sonic Mania again with a slight variation of the normal gameplay, so there you go.

Rayman Origins, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Sonic 2 are the best 2D platformers.

Sonic and Knuckles makes an excellent case, but it's woefully incomplete without adding the massively inferior Sonic 3 levels. S3 Complete at least fixes the level order, but you still have that annoying Marble Garden - Hydrocity - Carnival Night slog to get through before getting to any of the fun levels.

S3+K does handle the best of the classic Sonic games, though, and the OST might be the best too. Once you get past Carnival Night it's mostly smooth sailing, although I admit Sandopolis can drag a bit.

+1 by me for Rayman Origins.

Off topic best Sonic game : Racing all Stars Transformed ?

Best Kart Game Ever, hands down.

It's really sad that just removing half of the game would make it better, but that's how it is.

Is the description of Sonic Unleashed...the night part is incredibly horrible..while the day parts are among the best i've ever played in a Sonic 3D...never seen Sonic run so fast!

[Air Master Burst]

Off topic best Sonic game : Racing all Stars Transformed ?

Best Kart Game Ever, hands down.

I thought the first one was the best kart racer ever. I didn't really enjoy the air or water sections of the tracks in Transformed at all.

[Lemnear]

Off topic best Sonic game : Racing all Stars Transformed ?

Best Kart Game Ever, hands down.

I thought the first one was the best kart racer ever. I didn't really enjoy the air or water sections of the tracks in Transformed at all.

How can you say no to AGES, the Daytona car that becomes a dreamcast pad when in water? or the plane from After Burner when in the air?
(I admit I never played the first one)

Spoiler

[Sima Tuna]

sonic design philosophy

The design philosophy of the Yasuhara-designed games is that you will only be fast if you are good, with sufficient skill being something that you achieve only by replaying the games, and there are interviews with someone (I think it was Naka) where it was explicitly stated that Green Hill Zone was specifically designed to be replayed infinitely for this reason. Inversely, if you are bad, you'll be slow because you suck at the games because you didn't practice. This is not my opinion, but rather what the developers, or at least Yasuhara, wanted. Part of this is understanding path selection (yes, it matters a lot) and the unique physics, neither of which are things that anyone really thinks about for some reason. Notably, Sonic 1, 2, CD, the 2011 remake of CD, 3&K, and Mania all have different physics, so you have to learn each game's unique traits separately, and no, despite what people will incorrectly tell you, Tails and Knuckles do not run or accelerate more slowly than Sonic. The only difference is Knuckles having a lower jump height.

Despite what the marketing shows, speed is not to be given to the player just for the sake of being fast, but is your reward for not being bad, so in that sense it's not really a case of the game design failing the players but instead the players failing to live up to what the game provides them with. This is something that most of the 3D games fail at spectacularly, although you could argue that maintaining your speed in the 3D games, even in the boost games with their dedicated instant go fast buttons, still requires an amount of practice that most people don't put into the games because nobody cares about replaying games anymore and instead people now prefer to move on to the next 100-hour empty open world fetch quest slog.

Coincidentally (or not...?), Sonic games started to become largely terrible immediately after Yasuhara stopped working on them. It's like he was the only person working on Sonic that actually knew what he was doing until the Sonic Mania devs came along. What's (probably) not a coincidence is that the best game in the entire franchise is the only one where he worked not only as game designer but also as director.

So, yes, what I am saying is that you should indeed go (re)play a (good) Sonic game for about 20 hours or so and then you'll see how brilliantly designed that one chosen game actually is... but only if it's one of the good ones.

Yeah, it's a major failing of Sonic's marketing, or maybe just the design philosophy of older games, that players assume they're always supposed to move quickly. Momentum is the name of the game, not speed. Speed is a reward for mastering the momentum and the level design. Often, the solution to "unfair bullshit" hitting you in the older Sonic games is just to *slow down.* If you haven't memo'd the stage, then you probably can't afford to be careening around at breakneck pace. Although I will say that the ring system conferring functional invincibility somewhat encourages recklessness... The player runs fast everywhere, gets hit but keeps picking up a single ring. They think that's how the game is supposed to be played. Then they reach a portion of the game where that strategy no longer works and rage, assuming the game is broken bullshit.

[orange808]

There's a distinct difference between "good" at games and memorization. If you put them together, you certainly can blow through any game quickly--including every single Super Mario Brothers game. Memorized speed running works in lots of platformers. So?

Thanks for the Sonicsplaining, though.

But, I didn't stay in this hobby from my days on an woody Atari VCS until now because I suck at games.

It's the same reason we all love DoDonPachi. Most of the time: if you die, it's your fault. That applies from your first playthrough. It's a pure skill game.

I'm also frustrated with Sonic games that require jumping down a pit to move ahead. Once you make going down pits part of exploring the environment, deaths violate the LucasArts rule regarding players exploring the environment.

It comes down to your personal preferences, I suppose. But, a lot of people agree on multiple tenets of quality game design. The Prince of Persia leap of faith is decidedly poor design.

[Sima Tuna]

The Prince of Persia leap of faith is decidedly poor design.

It is, yeah. That's a universal metric we can apply to most games. "If jump = impossible to see in advance whether or not you'll make it, then game = bad."

Part of why I like Tomb Raider 1 so much is the degree to which the most precise jumps can be reliably and perfectly replicated on command. Thanks to the grid system, there is zero randomness. That isn't really possible (for my small brain, anyway) with a momentum game like Sonic.

[guigui]

Off topic best Sonic game : Racing all Stars Transformed ?

Best Kart Game Ever, hands down.

I thought the first one was the best kart racer ever. I didn't really enjoy the air or water sections of the tracks in Transformed at all.

Have only played the 1st one on the DS, where it had lots of slowdown so was not very enjoyable.

I must agree that the flying sections in Transformed are not the best (actually the worst) parts of the game. Water parts though are really pleasing to me and remind me a lot of Wave Race, can control them very nicely once you get the hang of it and create a good variation in gameplay.

[null1024]

There are only a few stages in all of Sonic that feel like I was hit with something I absolutely could not react to while going through in an "as-intended" way.
Marble Garden is absolutely one of those stages.
Sonic 3 would be improved tenfold if you just skipped the stage entirely. I used to like the stage for the theme and music, but even now that I know what's ahead after having played it so much, there's so much dumb bullshit that's really hard to not get hit by. Blind spiketraps ahoy.

Most stages, even in like Advance 2 [a game that has a bad habit of throwing "think fast" sections in levels, where you absolutely could react to it... but you stand a very, very strong chance of not doing so and having to redo half the level because of the checkpoint system being the way it is], generally let you go fast and stay fast without dying if you don't fight it. There are a fair few spots that will actually just kill you if you slow down throughout the franchise.
Levels almost universally slow you down before you need to go slow, and speed you up [or provide a decent bit of running room] when you need to go fast.

One thing I noticed regarding the games slowing you down -- Sonic 1 feels like it has the most sections where the game slows you down to do platforming but things are designed for you to actually go fast anyway. There's the pit area with the moving platforms in GHZ where you're fast enough to just jump over them from fixed platform to fixed platform, the right-to-left moving block section in Marble after running from the lava wall where you can just hop across the walls at full speed instead of waiting on the block, and several spots in Scrap Brain that immediately come to mind. Later games tend to feel like you're not actually doing something specifically designed, the games seem to try and make you actually do the slower platforming challenge, and you can go fast through them anyway because you're just that good/did some really precise platforming at speed.

Also, orange808 does bring up a very good point -- jumping down into a pit to proceed sucks. There's not much I can think of off-hand where this happens, but I absolutely have died from thinking I was supposed to go down and did not. Often, rings are placed to specifically tell you it's safe, but that's not consistent at all.
Later Sonic games started adding road sign pit warnings for this, which feels a bit lazy. Advance 2 has a tendency to kind-of mark places with death pits, but it's not consistent about it at all and later games didn't adopt the type of environmental cues it used. Techno Base has [relatively] well marked death spots with a hexagon background pattern in the area, for example.
Sonic 1 had a relatively good way to tell too -- if the screen isn't scrolling vertically downwards after a point in an area, you can die by falling there, since pits were mostly placed near the actual bottom of the level, rather than being a big chasm that went straight down for ages. The game gave you a good sense for it early on too with the moving platform gap area in GHZ. Later games, not so much.

[Sima Tuna]

Sonic Advance 2 has the air trick system as a way of saving yourself if you accidentally run too fast off a cliff or take a blind jump. Assuming you stored your air trick, that is. Sonic Advance 2 is more of an extreme sports game like SSX than a momentum platformer. Reaching max speed is trivial and there are boosters everywhere to bring you up to top speed instantly. I understand why people don't like Sonic Advance 2 but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. I would say it's not until about halfway through the game where Advance 2 starts introducing bottomless pits frequently enough to be a problem.

[Lemnear]

I would never have said it because usually this kind of commercial operations suck...but..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSu6i2iFMO0

holy shit

[ryu]

I was making jokes with friends that the first two movies were so dreadful they made Jim Carrey retire. How is he back for a third one? lmao

[Lemnear]

I was making jokes with friends that the first two movies were so dreadful they made Jim Carrey retire. How is he back for a third one? lmao

it's a mystery...for two roles at once!
They probably paid him with a working prototype of Dreamcast 2 with Sonic Adventure 3...or he just really liked the role at this point o_0
Anyway they know how to sell this movie, the trailer is awesome.
Oh...if only they knew how to sell games like this too

[ryu]

Yeah the trailer is really making the movie look a lot better than the first two.

I'm contractually obligated to twatch the movie anyways so hopefully the trailer doesn't disappoint lol. The second one spending half its play time on that wedding scene was beyond abysmal.

[XoPachi]

They made Shadow a MENACE.

[XoPachi]

https://x.com/team_daw/status/176801109 ... B0oHpK4Hhw

[Steven]

Sanic thread, rise from your grave!!!!

I finally checked out Sonic 1 Forever, Sonic 2 Absolute, and Sonic 3 A.I.R. over the past two days for some reason. I was under the impression that the first two were impossible to get without a smartphone, so I never bothered trying to get them, and for A.I.R. I was just too lazy to bother + I'd rather play Sonic on a real Mega Drive than anything else. Turns out that no, you don't need an overpriced phone to get the stuff for the first two games.

I finished all of them and mostly like these overall. Thoughts on Forever and Absolute:

It is most unfortunate that Forever and Absolute do not seem to allow the player to rebind the controls because of some unknown reason. That's really stupid. These are PC games, so there is no excuse for this. Also don't really like what they did to the music in these for some reason. It sounds... odd, in a slightly disturbing manner, and I don't like it. Otherwise, these are mostly excellent, and what I wish Origins had been; for Origins, I wanted Mania-style true per-pixel sprite rotation, at least as an option, and max control, but neither of those happened. I know you can get max control on Origins Sonic 3&K, but I don't think it's possible on the others. You can play these at 16:10 but all it seems to do is chop off the sides to make a 16:10 image instead of adding vertical screen space, so it's kind of 100% completely pointless to play in 16:10.

Two other somewhat more major disappointments: first, both of these are unfortunately stuck at 60 FPS. Come on now. The higher-than-60Hz-future came a long time ago, so let's get these games running at higher refresh rates already. Spoilers: Sonic 3 A.I.R. can go above 60 FPS. I played that one first, so maybe I wouldn't be so disappointed with the other two if I'd played it after the others, but too late. You can choose 50Hz for some reason, though. Who the hell wants 50Hz?

Spoiler

nobody

Other major disappointment, and the one that honestly was more disappointing than the refresh rates: the version of Sonic 2 Absolute that I played does not have Hidden Palace. I was really looking forward to playing Hidden Palace, but when I jumped in the hole I died and got sent back to the beginning of the Act. I guess you can mod Hidden Palace back in or use an older version that has it, but my disappointment is quite immense. Oh well. Still a good time. Just now realized that I forgot to check if the color palette glitch in Emerald Hill is there, but it's probably gone.

Sonic 3 A.I.R. & Knuckles:
So this one's kind of extremely super ultra platinum important because Sonic 3&K is the best Sonic game and this version of it is mostly good.

Unfortunately, I began playing the Linux Flatpak version, which I completed. DO NOT PLAY THE LINUX FLATPAK VERSION! It's out of date. I also was not able to find my save file and move it over to the Windows version, assuming that it's compatible anyway, which means that I had to start all over. Obviously, I am displeased, but I guess it gives me an excuse to play the game again.

I really do not like having to complete arbitrary tasks to unlock things that should be unlocked by default, and in this case that's the drop dash and peel out, but debug mode is also an unlockable thingy. Otherwise, I like the ability to play the game at refresh rates above 60Hz and the optional Sonic Mania sprite rotation, and most of the other options are good, if superfluous, like the option to muffle the music when you're underwater. It kind of sounds like a typical Super Nintendo game like this, but it's cool I guess. There's an option to make the music sound weird like Forever and Absolute, but, importantly, it's an option, so you can have the normal music if you prefer, and I think the weird music sounds less weird here than in the other two games. I was disappointed that the modified Sonic & Knuckles title screen wasn't used as part of the Launch Base 2 -> Mushroom Hill/Valley 1 transition like in Sonic 3 Complete and Origins, but I will survive without it. Same with the scaling Eggman at the end of Launch Base 2 that got cut from the original MD game but got reimplemented, albeit rather awkwardly, in Origins. It also seems to lack the ability to put Flying Battery between Carnival Night and Ice Cap, where it's supposed to be, unless this is another unlockable thing that I haven't gotten yet.

In general, I still would probably rather play Sonic on a real Mega Drive than anything else, but I'm retiring Origins now, as there is no reason to play it unless you really want the drop dash in Sonic CD... but the AtGames Genesis soundtrack mod is pretty rad and I will miss that.

Compared to Origins, these have less glitches (but you can enable or disable glitches in A.I.R. if you want, which is super cool!), way more options, more accurate physics, and Forever and Absolute have one really cool advantage that Origins doesn't: THEY ARE FREE. Sega is literally giving away the files you need to play these for free, so yeah, go forth and do free game stuff. I like free stuff, and whoever is reading this right now probably does too, especially when it's good free stuff, and that is the case here. If you don't like free stuff... well, you're weird. So am I, so don't worry about it too much, but I do at least like free stuff. Would I take these over my MD cartridges? Eh, probably not, in all honesty, even if they are likely objectively better. Obviously, these won't work on a real MD, so if you're like me and like playing on your Nomad, that's not happening with these.

One thing that I have not yet done is to test the bugs in A.I.R., so that may influence my opinion. I seriously hope they left in some of the cool stuff like the ability to take Knuckles through the Sonic/Tails Ice Cap Act 1 path but skip the boss and then complete Act 2 without completing Act 1. This got fixed in Sonic 3 Complete and there is no option to unfix it, so I kinda hate Sonic 3 Complete because of that. I haven't done a Knuckles playthrough yet, so I'm going to test it when I do.

I guess that leaves the new movie as the last thing to talk about for now. Sonic × Shadow Tokyo Mission comes out here on the 27th. I have seen none of the promotional materials for this and am not going to, so I have no expectations either way. It took nearly half a year for the previous movies to release here in theaters, so it's nice that it won't be that way this time. That's the final day of work for me this year, so depending on when 大掃除 and whatever is finished, I will try to go see it, especially since it's playing at a place that's like a 5 minute walk from my house, but their schedule hasn't been published for that day yet so I'm not sure when the last show is. If not, I guess I'll go on the next day because I won't have anything to do on that day anyway.

[Steven]

There's another new Sonic movie coming now. How many of these are they going to make? I wasn't impressed by the first one, which seemed to be more about Donut Lord and Sonic just happened to be there for some reason. Does anyone actually care about Donut Lord? I sure don't. The second one was not perfect but better, so hopefully this new one... ah, wait, these new two continue to improve. What are they even going to do for the story of the next one? They've already got Sonic Adventure 2 for the third one and that has the best story of all of the Sonic games, and that doesn't say much. What's next, Sonic Heroes?

Speaking of the third one, apparently it actually is good WTF? Well, I'll find out in a week or so when it finally releases here.

[XoPachi]

They've already got Sonic Adventure 2 for the third one and that has the best story of all of the Sonic games, and that doesn't say much. What's next, Sonic Heroes?

Next one is

Spoiler

Sonic CD

.

[Steven]

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one somehow! That I'm good with because it could be fun. Probably won't get to see this movie until the 28th, though.

They've already got Sonic Adventure 2 for the third one and that has the best story of all of the Sonic games, and that doesn't say much.

I must have been extremely tired because I wouldn't have written this otherwise; 3&K has the best story by far, and I guess since that story starts in 2 I guess you could lump that in there with them if you really want. I've played 3&K so much that I forget that it has a story. Being able to fast-forward through and/or skip that story in A.I.R., which I continue to play on an almost daily basis, Sonic 3 Complete, and Origins has also not helped.

Anyway, apparently this new movie is actually good not just as a game movie but maybe even as a movie in general? That's crazy to think about. I don't watch movies and don't know anything about them, so I guess that's good in this case. I'm kind of... looking forward to it? Most unexpected.

[Steven]

Well, I saw the movie. It was... okay, I guess.

My ultimate impression is that it felt like it tried to do and be so many things but didn't have enough runtime, and that it might have benefited from being an extra 10 to 20 minutes longer. I also wish that movie Sonic would shut the hell up for at least just one moment. It seems like he NEVER stops talking. They seem to be reducing the screen time of Sonic's weird boring human family with each movie, which is good. Maybe they'll just not be in the next one! Wouldn't that be nice?

Uh, yeah. I wish that some additional elements of the game had been in here, and that it had taken itself more seriously instead of alternating between spastic and Edgehog-interspection, and Shadow felt strangely under-utilized. He is only playable in the game like 6 times in total and has by far the least play time of anyone in the game, but I would have liked to get more out of him in the movie. I also wish that Shadow never appeared in any game other than Sonic Adventure 2 because doing so significantly cheapens him as a character, but that's a different topic.

They also gave everyone seeing the movie a very short tie-in manga, which was cool, even if it's only like 8 pages long or something like that.

It was also really fucking weird to go from Shibuya to Roppongi Hills to see the movie... which has fucking Shibuya in it. Like damn dude I was just in that shithole I don't want to go back there lol!

[Gamer707b]

the best 2D platformer that isn't Super Metroid or Sonic Mania again with a slight variation of the normal gameplay, so there you go.

Rayman Origins, Rocket Knight Adventures, and Sonic 2 are the best 2D platformers.

Sonic and Knuckles makes an excellent case, but it's woefully incomplete without adding the massively inferior Sonic 3 levels. S3 Complete at least fixes the level order, but you still have that annoying Marble Garden - Hydrocity - Carnival Night slog to get through before getting to any of the fun levels.

S3+K does handle the best of the classic Sonic games, though, and the OST might be the best too. Once you get past Carnival Night it's mostly smooth sailing, although I admit Sandopolis can drag a bit.

I'll chime in on this and say, I wouldn't even compare Super Metroid to platformers like Sonic, Mario, Rayman, DKC, etc. Yes, Super Metroid has platforming, but it's not really a "platformer", It's more of a 2D adventure game. Back then the term "Metroidvania" didn't exist, so the magazines called it "an action-adventure" game.

As far as the second comment on best 2D platformer. I was lucky to have grown up in the 80s and early 90s and had a chance to play the who's who of platformers. It would be next to impossible to narrow it down to just a few. I can easily name 20 games and they all can easily be considered the best.

[Steven]

Yeah no Super Metroid is absolutely a platformer, and probably the best one ever made, just one that's really really big. Sonic 3&K is pretty equal in quality, though, as is Sonic Mania.

[Lander]

They've already got Sonic Adventure 2 for the third one and that has the best story of all of the Sonic games, and that doesn't say much. What's next, Sonic Heroes?

Structurally, '06. Though I don't expect Sega are eager to unearth that particular landfill.

Might as well revisit the batshit insane Fleetway comics at that point!

Feat. Insane Mass Murderer Super Sonic!

[Steven]

They've already got Sonic Adventure 2 for the third one and that has the best story of all of the Sonic games, and that doesn't say much. What's next, Sonic Heroes?

Structurally, '06. Though I don't expect Sega are eager to unearth that particular landfill.

Might as well revisit the batshit insane Fleetway comics at that point!

Feat. Insane Mass Murderer Super Sonic!

You know, I completely forgot that Sonic 06 exists and has a story... a story that never happens because of what happens in the ending of the game. It's like they knew the game was so broken that they decided that shouldn't have ever happened. Really want to go finish that game eventually because although it is bad, its badness is quite exaggerated and it is very playable... mostly.

I do want to go check out the Fleetway comics, though. From what I've seen of those they look absolutely silly and that makes them (probably) pretty great. Apparently Fleetway Sonic is an ass to everybody for no reason, which is just so strange to me. I don't know if they ever got printed in an easy to obtain format like an omnibus, but I'm sure the original issues are probably easy enough to get, and, should all else fail, scans probably exist, although I greatly prefer reading books as books and not on a screen.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah no Super Metroid is absolutely a platformer, and probably the best one ever made, just one that's really really big. Sonic 3&K is pretty equal in quality, though, as is Sonic Mania.

A game having platforming in it doesn't make it a platformer imo, just like having a projectile attack in a beat em up doesn't make it a shooter.

sonic design philosophy

The design philosophy of the Yasuhara-designed games is that you will only be fast if you are good, with sufficient skill being something that you achieve only by replaying the games, and there are interviews with someone (I think it was Naka) where it was explicitly stated that Green Hill Zone was specifically designed to be replayed infinitely for this reason. Inversely, if you are bad, you'll be slow because you suck at the games because you didn't practice. This is not my opinion, but rather what the developers, or at least Yasuhara, wanted. Part of this is understanding path selection (yes, it matters a lot) and the unique physics, neither of which are things that anyone really thinks about for some reason. Notably, Sonic 1, 2, CD, the 2011 remake of CD, 3&K, and Mania all have different physics, so you have to learn each game's unique traits separately, and no, despite what people will incorrectly tell you, Tails and Knuckles do not run or accelerate more slowly than Sonic. The only difference is Knuckles having a lower jump height.

Despite what the marketing shows, speed is not to be given to the player just for the sake of being fast, but is your reward for not being bad, so in that sense it's not really a case of the game design failing the players but instead the players failing to live up to what the game provides them with. This is something that most of the 3D games fail at spectacularly, although you could argue that maintaining your speed in the 3D games, even in the boost games with their dedicated instant go fast buttons, still requires an amount of practice that most people don't put into the games because nobody cares about replaying games anymore and instead people now prefer to move on to the next 100-hour empty open world fetch quest slog.

Coincidentally (or not...?), Sonic games started to become largely terrible immediately after Yasuhara stopped working on them. It's like he was the only person working on Sonic that actually knew what he was doing until the Sonic Mania devs came along. What's (probably) not a coincidence is that the best game in the entire franchise is the only one where he worked not only as game designer but also as director.

So, yes, what I am saying is that you should indeed go (re)play a (good) Sonic game for about 20 hours or so and then you'll see how brilliantly designed that one chosen game actually is... but only if it's one of the good ones.

Yeah, it's a major failing of Sonic's marketing, or maybe just the design philosophy of older games, that players assume they're always supposed to move quickly. Momentum is the name of the game, not speed. Speed is a reward for mastering the momentum and the level design. Often, the solution to "unfair bullshit" hitting you in the older Sonic games is just to *slow down.* If you haven't memo'd the stage, then you probably can't afford to be careening around at breakneck pace. Although I will say that the ring system conferring functional invincibility somewhat encourages recklessness... The player runs fast everywhere, gets hit but keeps picking up a single ring. They think that's how the game is supposed to be played. Then they reach a portion of the game where that strategy no longer works and rage, assuming the game is broken bullshit.

I think my big problem with Sanic in general is that if you haven't mastered the stage, it's not just "not sanic speed" it's actively slow. Mario and Mega Man X allow for faster paced gameplay when you're just cruising through blind, but Sanic becomes the slowest, most puerile hop and bop platformer ever thanks to how sluggish his inertia is. Which, in turn, makes me want to turn off the game before I even get to the end...let alone replay it multiple times for mastery to ACTUALLY go fast.

Further doesn't help that all these games are so fucking looooooooooooooooong by retro single sitting standards. 3/Knuckles is the only game you can play in spurts thanks to the save function, but otherwise my most resounding memory of the last time I booted up Sanic 2 was turning off the game at oil ocean zone because I was getting bored. That game is literally as long as Gradius V, and unlike that game there is 0 intensity if you don't already know what you're doing.

This actually gets at a point though that I think often gets lost with hardcore gaming: the experience of learning and the "beginner phase" needs to be fun too. A game can't be defined entirely by what it's like once you git gud. A "perfect" game will be fun to learn and discover, fun to master, and fun to play optimally. It's not a fatal flaw for one of these things to be missing - nothing is perfect after all - but it's a legitimate grievance / criticism if you gotta sling out the action game equivalent of the classic mmo "it gets good 50 hours in"

[Steven]

Yeah no Super Metroid is absolutely a platformer, and probably the best one ever made, just one that's really really big. Sonic 3&K is pretty equal in quality, though, as is Sonic Mania.

A game having platforming in it doesn't make it a platformer imo, just like having a projectile attack in a beat em up doesn't make it a shooter.

Like I said before, it's definitely a platformer. The gameplay primarily focuses on traversing a maze-like obstacle course that is very much like what you'd find in any other platformer, minus instant death pits, using the exact same techniques that you'd use in any other platformer. It's different from most other platformers, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a platformer. Consider it to be an open world platformer if you must, because that's possibly exactly what it is. People like open world games, right? I sure as hell don't in most cases.

I think my big problem with Sanic in general is that if you haven't mastered the stage, it's not just "not sanic speed" it's actively slow. Mario and Mega Man X allow for faster paced gameplay when you're just cruising through blind, but Sanic becomes the slowest, most puerile hop and bop platformer ever thanks to how sluggish his inertia is. Which, in turn, makes me want to turn off the game before I even get to the end...let alone replay it multiple times for mastery to ACTUALLY go fast.

Further doesn't help that all these games are so fucking looooooooooooooooong by retro single sitting standards. 3/Knuckles is the only game you can play in spurts thanks to the save function, but otherwise my most resounding memory of the last time I booted up Sanic 2 was turning off the game at oil ocean zone because I was getting bored. That game is literally as long as Gradius V, and unlike that game there is 0 intensity if you don't already know what you're doing.

I have never played a Mega Man game, so I have no idea what they are like, but I will recommend that you try the arcade version of Sonic 1 if you haven't already because it addresses all of these grievances aside from lacking a save function. Every Sonic game has different physics, and in the case of Sonic 1, a strict limit on how fast the player can actually go when running or jumping, which means you can run as fast as possible and still not have any difficulty because the game's pretty slow if you aren't rolling. The arcade version cuts all of the disliked levels from the game, which is half of the game, and it also means it's only about 15 minutes long. It also drastically reduces the time limit on each Act from 10 minutes each to a specific, much shorter value that is assigned on a per-Act basis. Even with the time limit changes, it's still probably one of the easiest no-miss clears in arcade history outside of Karous on easy. Just don't fall in that one part in Scrap Brain 1 and you'll be fine.

Also, press down. It helps.

I also feel that Sonic 2 is of a perfectly acceptable length, especially if you don't get the Chaos Emeralds, which feels like it doubles the game's length. I don't know if it actually does, but it certainly feels like it. I used to dread replaying Sonic 2 because of how much the Special Stages slow down the game's pacing, and then one day I decided to not do any of them and I had a lot of fun with it. Well, at least until Metropolis because Metropolis is not very fun, ultra rad music excepted. It's fun to be Super Sonic before you even get to the Emerald Hill boss, but it also ruins actually playing Emerald Hill.

I've also only ever beaten like three Mario games: World (GBA version), 2 USA (GBA version), and Odyssey, despite playing most of the games in the series, so I don't know how long a typical one is because I invariably get bored after 10~20 minutes playing them and turn them off. Those games are pretty long if you go for 100%, so I know they are the outliers, but at least with World you can do the skips and go to the last boss game in 15 minutes. Maybe I'd take a long time to finish the ones I've never played, and maybe longer longer than a typical Sonic game, but maybe not. Yes, I had a GBA as a kid and not a Super Nintendo, so that is what I played. I also played Donkey Kong Country on GBA for the same reason. I don't think I've ever played any other version of that game, now that I think about it.

This actually gets at a point though that I think often gets lost with hardcore gaming: the experience of learning and the "beginner phase" needs to be fun too. A game can't be defined entirely by what it's like once you git gud. A "perfect" game will be fun to learn and discover, fun to master, and fun to play optimally. It's not a fatal flaw for one of these things to be missing - nothing is perfect after all - but it's a legitimate grievance / criticism if you gotta sling out the action game equivalent of the classic mmo "it gets good 50 hours in"

A LOT of arcade games struggle with this. Pretty much the entirety of bullet hell struggles from this aside from like... I don't know, Mushihimesame Original? I don't know anything about that game and have barely played it, but it seems straightforward enough.

[Squire Grooktook]

Yeah no Super Metroid is absolutely a platformer, and probably the best one ever made, just one that's really really big. Sonic 3&K is pretty equal in quality, though, as is Sonic Mania.

A game having platforming in it doesn't make it a platformer imo, just like having a projectile attack in a beat em up doesn't make it a shooter.

Like I said before, it's definitely a platformer. The gameplay primarily focuses on traversing a maze-like obstacle course that is very much like what you'd find in any other platformer, minus instant death pits, using the exact same techniques that you'd use in any other platformer. It's different from most other platformers, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a platformer. Consider it to be an open world platformer if you must, because that's possibly exactly what it is. People like open world games, right? I sure as hell don't in most cases.

I would still suggest that "platformer" isn't the right genre moniker for it, since the main focus of the game is exploration, discovery, finding your way through a maze, etc. Sure platforming is there and it's fun but it's definitely an adventure game with platforming and not a platform game with some adventure. I know a lot of genre terms are batty but if you were to call it a platformer in mixed company people would likely come away with a very different impression of what the game actually is, what progression and structure looks like, etc.

A LOT of arcade games struggle with this. Pretty much the entirety of bullet hell struggles from this aside from like... I don't know, Mushihimesame Original? I don't know anything about that game and have barely played it, but it seems straightforward enough.

I think shmups are generally a little better about this because the act of shooting and dodging bullets is fundamentally appealing, which is why cramming a deep scoring system for replay value generally works decently. But it can be an issue in some games. Dangun Feveron is one of my favorite shmups ever, but it took me what felt like an eternity before it "clicked" with me.