R2TRRFF: High-speed Hedgehog Monogatari

[Despatche]

I'm gonna need you to stop telling me that my posts are "completely unhinged", and then drop the exact same obvious bait that everyone's heard for the past twenty years. It doesn't matter how long you say it, and it doesn't matter how many people say it, it's always going to be wrong.

I've got no idea what the fuck you're trying to say about my comments on Superstars, and quite frankly I'd like to keep it that way if it's anything like the rest of your posting. I don't think (i.e. "I know for a fact") that you have no idea what my actual problems with Mania are, at least. Hint: it's got nothing to do with it being a post-Sonic 2 game. Another hint: I fucking typed it out already.

[XoPachi]

My headstone is going to say "Sonic Unleashed was a good game". I will take that with me to my grave.

[Squire Grooktook]

On a semi related note (and I don't know if it's been mentioned here or in the action platformer thread) but I really really really like Pizza Tower. Probably my GOTY unless something utterly mind blowing gets released within the next six monthes.

[Despatche]

You know, the usual and very obvious comparison is Wario Land 4, but there's a lot of that mascot platformer vibe in that game too. Of course, you could argue the same about Wario Land 4 itself. That was a different kind of game than everything near and around it.

[XoPachi]

Pizza Tower is like a continuous Speed Booster puzzle. It's great.

[Sumez]

Marble Garden genuinely isn't fun with the sheer amount of "hey, you're moving fast and here's a set of spikes lmao" bullshit that isn't present in the rest of the game

Mania has a lot more of those moments throughout the entire game than Sonic 3 though, it's my primary gripe with the game outside of the awful boss fights.
It really kills the momentum, and the game only really gets away with it because taking a hit doesn't actually matter in a Sonic game. The only way losing all your rings is a real consequence is if you don't want to ever lose a single ring, which would be just as bad.
Mania, having a game feel that is so close to S3&K, is incredibly close to being a game I'd cherish dearly. But when it repeatedly goes "Hey are you having fun? here's a minor annoyance!", that piles up quickly.

I was wondering if I'd end up with a radically different experience of it after seeing Sumez rabidly hate on it so much but...honestly it's still really fun? I kinda stand by my old stance that it's janky but fun and one of the more interesting 3d platformers of the time. Honestly don't understand the hate (granted I'm not a fan of the tails/eggman stages but hey, I even like Knuckles/Rouge gameplay so 2/3 ain't bad).

Hate is a strong word, I don't hate Sonic Adventure 2, at least not rabidly . In theory it's the 3D Sonic game I want to play - there's a lot to the game that I imagine could have been incredibly enjoyable if it was executed well.
I just think it's a really bad game for the simple reason that playing it was a drawn out and unenjoyable experience for me. I could go into details about how the Knuckles stages are a tedious waste of my time, and the Sonic ones are all about painfully fighting the controls, camera and numerous glitches. But if other people enjoy that, it doesn't really matter. Ultimately it just comes down to the game not being fun to me, at all. I almost envy people who are able to enjoy it.

What I'm so confused about however, is how quick people are to hate on Sonic 06 while repeatedly praising Adventure 2. I think those games share nearly the exact same strengths and weaknesses, both on a game design and a technical level. In fact I find that a lot of the enjoyable things in 06 are less obscured by its issues than the equivalent for SA2.

[Steven]

I like Marble Garden... but I also like Marble and Labyrinth, and I also like all of these three zones more than I like Spring Yard, which I think is the actual low point of Sonic 1, so maybe I'm weird.

[Squire Grooktook]

I might be one of the few people who genuinely likes Knuckles stages and always have. Exploring a huge sandbox (even as a kid I genuinely just loved exploring and getting immersed in these huge colorful environments) with extremely fast 3dimensional movement tools is a lot of fun and makes for a great change of pace. Unironically I'd take that gameplay over most other 3d platforming "collectathons".

For me the real stinkers are the tails/eggman stages, which are just painfully slow and easy and usually fairly lengthy.

and the Sonic ones are all about painfully fighting the controls, camera and numerous glitches.

I really don't get this. There's a little bit of late 90's 3d platforming jank, but for the most part it felt fine and Sonic feels good to control. I don't recall encountering a single glitch either.

What I'm so confused about however, is how quick people are to hate on Sonic 06 while repeatedly praising Adventure 2.

I haven't personally played 06 but way back I watched a good friend play it for me for an extended period of time (while another friend did the worst impression of Tails voice you could ever hope to hear), and it was an absolute fucking nightmare of a game. There's a huge difference between small amounts of 00's or late 90's 3d camera/controls jank and falling through the floor in an unfinished game.

[Steven]

There's a huge difference between small amounts of 00's or late 90's 3d camera/controls jank and falling through the floor in an unfinished game.

Good old Sonic Adventure DX, which has all of the above. Actually, you can fall through the floor in the original Dreamcast version as well, but it's significantly less of an issue.

[Sumez]

There's a huge difference between small amounts of 00's or late 90's 3d camera/controls jank and falling through the floor in an unfinished game.

I don't know if there's a version of Sonic Adventure 2 that fixes all the issues with the game, but I feel like if the GC port did that, people would have been talking that point up a lot more.
"Falling through the floor in an unfinished game" describes SA2 perfectly. I'm pretty sure I've literally fallen through the floor in the SA games much more than I did in 06 in fact.

[Squire Grooktook]

Definitely feels like one of those "did we play different games?" moments.

I don't remember ever getting a glitch like that in childhood, and revisiting the game recently, I didn't encounter a single glitch in the now. I would never have characterized it as an even remotely buggy game. Camera spazzing out a little and hiding platforms from you if you get too close to a certain corner the devs didn't want you to rub up against? Okay, sure, that's part of the late 90's 3d platforming experience, people were still figuring out how to make solid cameras in different genres. Actual bugs and glitches or things not interacting the way they're supposed to? Can't name a one.

I'm not sure I'd call the game "polished", but functional and finished? Absolutely.

[Steven]

You can fall through the floor in SA2? I don't think I've ever had that happen to me, and I've always had the impression that it's much less glitchy than its predecessor, but I also kind of really dislike that game, so I don't play it very often. Any locations that come to mind as being easy to fall through the floor? I kind of want to go try to fall through the floor in SA2 now.

[XoPachi]

I might be one of the few people who genuinely likes Knuckles stages and always have. Exploring a huge sandbox (even as a kid I genuinely just loved exploring and getting immersed in these huge colorful environments) with extremely fast 3dimensional movement tools is a lot of fun and makes for a great change of pace. Unironically I'd take that gameplay over most other 3d platforming "collectathons".

For me the real stinkers are the tails/eggman stages, which are just painfully slow and easy and usually fairly lengthy.

I think the mech stages are really good and offer a different kind of speed to the mix. The mechs themselves don't move particularly quickly, but you're trying to chain things together to get a higher point bonus. It's less "velocity" and more "frenetic" in it's solution to going fast. If you're trying to get A rank anyway.
But in a perfect world with a Sonic Adventure 2 remake, I'd like the mechs to be more active. Like having dashes and sick evasive mechanics you see in stuff like Vanquish or Gundam games.
It took me a while, but I learned to appreciate the mechs especially as their levels really do get more exciting and layered. But they're a mixed bag for sure.

And yeah, Sonic Adventure DX I've definitely fallen through certain seams in the game. But that was only ever in Emerald Coast. I still avidly love that damn game though.

[null1024]

I've never, ever, ever fallen through the ground in SA2, on DC or on GC.
I've fallen through the ground a bunch in SA1 though. Almost exclusively as Sonic, and it's pretty rare, maybe less than 20 times in 20 years, but it happens enough to be notable. Emerald Coast is common, but I've had it happen in Speed Highway and Windy Valley too. I haven't played as much of SA1 on DC, so I can't say how common/uncommon it is vs SADX on GC, but I've definitely fallen through solid ground at least thrice in Emerald Coast on DC.
Grouping the two Adventure games together is pretty common [hell, I do it], but it does muddy things when talking about them. SA2 feels much more rock-solid underneath than SA1. SA2's issues are more game design [the single action button, the overly gimped knuckles radar, the clunky mech jump, there's more but these are three of the big ones] than glitchiness in my eyes.

Mania has a lot more of those moments throughout the entire game than Sonic 3 though, it's my primary gripe with the game outside of the awful boss fights.
It really kills the momentum, and the game only really gets away with it because taking a hit doesn't actually matter in a Sonic game. The only way losing all your rings is a real consequence is if you don't want to ever lose a single ring, which would be just as bad.
Mania, having a game feel that is so close to S3&K, is incredibly close to being a game I'd cherish dearly. But when it repeatedly goes "Hey are you having fun? here's a minor annoyance!", that piles up quickly.

Ooh, Mania's bosses. At this point, it's been ages since I've fired the game up outside of time attack mode.
I think I like the Hydrocity boss and that's it? Sonic as a franchise hasn't really had engaging bosses. I think the most fun I've had with them in the series was in Rush Adventure.

I never really felt like Mania flung you into things at any point nearly as bad as Marble Garden does, where I'll outright know there's something ahead and still hit it -- and this is with me having played for decades now.
It'll stop the pace, but not necessarily into spikes.

My headstone is going to say "Sonic Unleashed was a good game". I will take that with me to my grave.

I think that the parts of Unleashed that are great are absolutely stellar. I just wasn't a fan of coming out of a 7 to 25 minute long werehog stage and hearing that dumb jazz loop [why the HELL did they do that] after having experienced only two minutes of some of the most fun levels Sega has ever done with boost Sonic. I really wish Generations had level design as interesting as Unleashed.
The game just felt super padded out.

I like Marble Garden... but I also like Marble and Labyrinth, and I also like all of these three zones more than I like Spring Yard, which I think is the actual low point of Sonic 1, so maybe I'm weird.

Spring Yard bugs me more and more as time goes on. There are a lot of things that come from clear off screen that you are extremely likely to get hit by. Those spike ball bowls feel odd. There's a lot of fun platforming and it's not a straight gotta-go-fast level like Green Hill or Star Light while still being fairly quick, but then it decides to throw in those slow elevator sections that generally easy, takes ages, you'll occasionally screw up and just die lmao.
I wish Labyrinth wasn't so spiky. Needing to breathe stopped being a problem in the level as I got older, but boy, timing jumps in slow motion while a set of spikes cycle twice underneath you still feels painful.
I like a lot of things about Marble Garden, but the object placement throughout the level is really bad.

[edit] fixed a few things I thought I finished typing in this post.

[Squire Grooktook]

I really feel that "the game will abruptly stop your momentum when it feels like it" is just inherent to every 2d sonic (at least on the MD) and is only really excised by having played and replayed them long enough to have a mental map of the level layouts.

I owned the games since I was a kid but I never had as much affection for them as other titles and whenever I try to revisit them in adulthood I always do feel like any attempt at building momentum will be thwarted by lack of reaction time if you don't already have the stages memorized to some degree. You could argue this is the same for any game but I feel like even Mario lets you be much more improvisational while throwing caution to the wind and trying to run as long and as quickly as possible.

So I dunno as a complaint about Mania I could see this being a case of lacking foreknowledge that's become second nature over the years.

[Sima Tuna]

I've fallen through the ground in Sonic Adventure 1 a bunch of times. Seen it happen to people in '06 a ton too. I think it can happen in ShadOw the hEdgehog. Maybe Heroes as well. Can't remember any time in Sonic Adventure 2 where I've fallen through the ground or seen it happen. Except deliberate falling platform sections in Final Rush's boss fights, obviously.

[XoPachi]

The few times I fell through the ground in SA1 it was so fast and abrupt that I couldn't really help but laugh at it. And it's not something I ever feared was a random occurrence I'd have to worry about. It only happened when I was trying to really *break* the game and find some more of the games INSANE skips which are always fun. I feel like I understand where and how to trigger it so I'm just careful around those parts and it's not a concern...I mean it's still jank and shouldn't be happening at all, but knowing the simple way to avoid it keeps it out of my mind. Hasn't happened to me in years. If I can handle unmodded Bethesda games, buddy, I can handle the world.

[Sima Tuna]

There's a loop in the first beach level of Sonic Adventure 1 that can reliably send you straight to hell if you're playing the xbox 360 version.

[XoPachi]

Some of Sonic Adventure 1's bugginess comes to a benefit of just having insane tricks you can pull off that are satisfying and a lot of fun. You can shave ridiculous chunks off your time with some really keen spin dashing, homing attack cancels, and just general fuckery. Sometimes you can just spin dash right up a random ass wall. Just right up the fucker.

[null1024]

There's a loop in the first beach level of Sonic Adventure 1 that can reliably send you straight to hell if you're playing the xbox 360 version.

I got launched out the side of the loop the very first time I played SA1 at a demo kiosk back in 1999.

It was simultaneously EXTREMELY stupid and EXTREMELY next-gen feeling; it absolutely hammered in the whole "woah, so this is Sonic in 3D now" into my head.

Some of Sonic Adventure 1's bugginess comes to a benefit of just having insane tricks you can pull off that are satisfying and a lot of fun. You can shave ridiculous chunks off your time with some really keen spin dashing, homing attack cancels, and just general fuckery. Sometimes you can just spin dash right up a random ass wall. Just right up the fucker.

The sheer bustedness of the SA1 spindash has to be my favorite thing in the game. It is way overpowered. They tried to tone it down in SA2 by adding the dumb somersault roll thing, but you can still do a lot of the same dumb things -- although sadly, a lot of SA2's level design doesn't give you opportunities for huge spindash jump skips like in SA1, where a well-paced spindash will skip like 30 seconds of level easily. Going straight up walls is still doable in SA2, if a fair bit harder.

[XoPachi]

SA2 makes up for the loss in goofiness with more opportunities to just naturally look cool. There's so much stuff in Sonic and Shadow's stages to string cleanly together and you get a lot more opportunities for legitimate shortcuts if you're good/daring enough to go for some of it. I don't end up missing the unintended ability to make my own, cool and funny as it is. But it certainly makes SA1 memorable and fun in it's own way for me.

[BrianC]

There's a loop in the first beach level of Sonic Adventure 1 that can reliably send you straight to hell if you're playing the xbox 360 version.

I got launched out the side of the loop the very first time I played SA1 at a demo kiosk back in 1999.

It was simultaneously EXTREMELY stupid and EXTREMELY next-gen feeling; it absolutely hammered in the whole "woah, so this is Sonic in 3D now" into my head.

IIRC, some of those demo kiosks were running the original JP version, which is even buggier than the US and International versions, though I remember falling though that loop in the US version.

[null1024]

Heh. I've definitely been launched out of the same loop on the retail US DC version.

[XoPachi]

My god, these games owned.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QanrgVhpCy8

[XoPachi]

Each time I play Sonic Heroes I enjoy it more and more. It will never be a preferred game and the things that annoyed me with it growing up still annoy me 20 years later. But the things that it does mostly right are a lot of fun. This game is so vibrant, festive, and really unashamedly colorful. Not trying to push some tonally inconsistent, super serious story. It's one of the best translations of classic Sonic's appeal to a modern look from an aesthetic angle.

I never hated this game as a kid but it gets maligned a lot harder than I I'd be willing to take part in. It's not nearly as buggy as I swear I remember it being. It's really just certain geometry jank, specific enemy sponginess, and the squirreliness of the speed characters that's throwing me off. I get why it's not liked, but I can take the good with the bad here.

This game is pretty brutal with it's A rank stipulations but I respect that. Losing rings HURTS in this game though. 5 minutes in, 350 rings, and you homing attack a stationary lance pawn from an angle the game disagrees with. Ouch.

I got kind of hooked to this game over the last few months. I just kind of can't wait to get home and play it some days.

[null1024]

20 years ago, I really wasn't a big fan of Heroes. I've grown a lot fonder of it over time.

I still think the increased combat focus sucks [this was my biggest gripe 20 years ago, especially with the bosses taking a bunch of hits], many of the levels drag on too long, and there were a few little aesthetic things that made no sense [why was everyone so shiny, why were the rings so fat, etc, etc]. The handling is still odd too. I hated the Chaotix missions back then, still not a huge fan.

Still, I keep popping it in every once in a while to see if it's as bad as I used to think, and it never is THAT bad.
I've always liked the way the levels look a lot, I liked the soundtrack, and I liked how many characters showed up, even if I was annoyed at how character switching still felt like it was designed to break your pace and slow things down [actually, I'm still a bit annoyed about that].

There were a few stages that really just feel bad too, in particular the rail stages and casino stages. I absolutely love the way like Bingo Highway looks, but as a level? Nah, fuck that shit.

I still won't say it's great, and it's not even like with how I feel about SA1/2 where there's a core gameplay element that's so good that my other gripes melt away compared to it, and I just don't have nearly as much fun with any of the levels either -- and apparently Takashi Iizuka [current Sonic Team head] came out on record that he crunched super hard doing level design in Heroes. Doesn't make the levels any better, but it does offer an explanation.
Still, you can tell they tried to advance things -- when I was younger, I felt like the game had abandoned too much of the parts of SA1/2 that were good; nowadays, I feel like the game had a lot of that DNA still in it and they wanted to improve on things and freshen up the gameplay formula, even if they arguably failed at that.

[XoPachi]

Rings do look like donuts. :9

Bingo Highway actually became one of my favorites. For some reason I used to die on it a lot but I just don't anymore.
Combat is minimal and the stage is well paced. But it certainly has the gimmicks that are absolutely hateable.

The special stages suck though. Borderline unplayable. They fixed them in the 3DS port of Generations but I can't stand that version of the game.
Heroes, its incredibly uncontrollable which is a shame because it looks and sounds fantastic. The special stage theme is my favorite Sonic song and its entire aesthetic and vibe are my favorite kind of Sega.

Whats incredible to me is how you can use speed for a LOT. As stupid as Rocket Accel is to use, when it works, you can use it as spin dash to get insane height off ramps or good distance. I skip a lot of flying and power gliding segments rocket jumping and using tornado as a mock double jump. And peak jump height is really generous. Sometimes they tell you to switch but you can just full jump as Sonic to clear stuff.

Trutfully I dont care for the other teams. I just play the Sonic story and leave it at that. As much as it was nice to see a new face with Omega (who went on to be a great character in the comics) and the surprising return of the Chaotix in a big way. But the straight forward nature of the Sonic levels and better difficulty balance make it the best.

[Steven]

The newest patch for Origins broke some stuff, but only on consoles. PC is fortunately unaffected (but still has Denuvo). Playing Sonic 1 as Tails will cause the game to crash when you enter deep water, so you are guaranteed to crash in all acts of Labyrinth Zone and Scrap Brain Act 3. In Spring Yard Act 3, Tails can also jump insanely high at the starting location for some reason. Even Sonic 06 doesn't crash as far as I know.

At least they finally fixed the graphics.

[Sima Tuna]

Sega continue to knock it out of the park.

I can literally go play Sega Ages Sonic 1 and 2 right now. Who the fuck would bother trying to play around with this weak-ass bullshit? For the other games, emulation. I mean, hell, emulation for all the games, really. But I'm just saying, even if you don't go unofficial emulation, you can still play Sega Ages instead of that overpriced sludge.

[Lander]

Sonic Team really needs a Hideaki Itsuno equivalent on staff; someone with enough clout and directorial talent that they can successfully threaten to quit every ~14ish years unless allowed to make a series-redeeming game of genuine quality.

Weird sounding bugs too. You'd think it would be a known quantity at this poi- [Segmentation Fault: Core Dumped]