Pff Tearaway Tomas? Slick, sure. But it was really, really embarassing. Sloppy character design, incredible abuse of Copper and laughable level design. If anything, we should compare Sonic to Zool, problem is that the character played too much like a feather and there was no feedback when collecting stuff from the ground - not to mention the relative impossibility of noticing collectibles from the often chaotic backgrounds. And the inertia - wtf. I thought one would learn after Cool Spot.
I don't know what went wrong with programmers when they made potential gems like Fire & Ice and Rolling Ronnie but the character felt and played like a freakin' brick. What a shame.
There were already masterpieces like James Pond, Robocod, Flood, P.P. Hammer (Spelunk anyone?) and Silly Putty, so westerners know how to do
great platformers that play like a charm.
I won't start with the overrated Bitmap Brothers platformers (Magic Pockets? Urgh) and Team 17 (Assassin? OMG. Superfrog? Please - they wanted it to be the new Sonic).
Huh... I digress.
I don't know why but I've always hated sonic games. I was so envious of Sonic when I saw it appearing on Amiga magazines as "the game that the Amiga will never have". So I rabidly tried it at some friend's house and boy did it feel unplayable. It was like playing with a gameboy. When you run, everything blurs and you can't possibly react to ANYTHING in time unless you've got a bionic eye. When you don't run, it's like playing underwater. No, under a freakin' sea of JELLY. And I'm sorry, this is not really good to my tastes.
Not to mention the usual screechy music and daunting sound effects, but that was a limit of the machine itself and can't complain, even though it was really annoying.
I bought a megadrive years later and bought sonic 1, 2 and 3. Then I bought the Sonic Collection for GC. See, I gave it a try. But no, thanks. A game that gives its best when it's completely unplayable (aka. full speed missile sonic) and show its limits when you can actually play at normal speed is crap to me.
It was like that in the early nineties and it's still like that.
The only sonic I
really really enjoyed was the first Sonic Adventure for DC. The balance between what you had to do while running and what you had to do while walking was well conceived, even in appearantly messy levels like Windy Valley.
Sonic was like a prime time at the Moulin Rouge. Explosive, happy, young, jaw-breaking to see, but behind the bunch of flashing lights and frills there was just a lot of heavy clothings that hindered movements
And btw, what's with his bully attitude? I've never seen such an annoying, bratty and irritating character in my life. I'd like to smack people like him in the face.
Augh.
) were literally littered with secrets.
