Whatever Happened to Sonic

[Frogacuda]

are there no fans of the gba sonics here? i enjoyed advance 3. i still need to give 1 and 2 a shot. i'm glad we have portable around to keep things simple with a lot of these games.

The Sonic Advance games were each exercises in the different ways to subtly fuck up the level design and ruin the game in the process. It really is a testament to just how hard it is to pull off a game like Sonic.

The first Advance had this very stop-and-start level design with no flow, and a lot of cheap deaths. It's the whole cliche of zooming along at 100mph and slamming into a wall of spikes. Which was never actually true of the Genesis Sonics but was of that one.

Advance 2 went the other way, for pure speed. But because of that it ended up destroying the exploration aspect with levels that literally just required you to hold right and win. To make it worse, they hammered in a really ill-fitting exploration aspect with the chaos emeralds that was one of the least fun things I've ever tried to do in a game, and they somehow wanted you to do it with every character.

Advance 3 was the best of the bunch for not being obviously broken as a game, but as a Sonic game it was weak. The levels weren't fun to play for score/time, they didn't have a great amount of depth, and they started to tinker with puzzle elements that just didn't work in this kind of a game. Advance 3 reminds me a little of the Game Gear sonics, actually, which isn't a terrible thing, but not classic Sonic.

What was fairly shocking to me was how well they turned this around with the Rush games, which had tremendous depth and flow and were perfect for time attack. The first Rush had a lot of bottomless pits, which frustrated some people who weren't good at reading the levels, but even that minor flaw they turned around in the second.

[Fe 26]

Then do it through some methodical platforming or something. Don't just stick a fucking fan in my face and tell me I can't play your videogame for a little while.

have you watched any speed runs? There are still ways to get through that level pretty fast!

And I'm with rama, the obstacles were part of increasing the difficulty. Which is something nice about the sonic games. Everyone can pick them up and play the first two levels. Then they start to get a little harder. This was pretty nice for the time. Back then a lot of games were either balls hard the whole time or stupid easy, the whole time.

In that regard, that is one thing sonic shared with Mario.

[Frogacuda]

All four Genesis Sonics would've been great, but every one of them had way too many moments where Sega figured we were getting bored of the reason we were playing -- that we were bored of the reason we weren't bored -- and threw a slow-as-molasses water level or something equally pace-breaking like Sandopolis at us. There were little things too, like the horizontally aligned fans in Sonic 2's Oil Ocean. In a game about speed and momentum, here are these riskless, unavoidable obstacles whose only purpose is to break the purpose of the entire game for a few seconds.

Shit like that is all over every Sonic game. They are baffling and self-defeating decisions of design. Come to think of it, they are a perfectly fitting representation of contemporary Sega. The Oil Ocean Fan should adorn the "SEGA" intro screen of every Sonic Chronicles, Golden Axe 360 and Shining Force Neo from now on.

I agree with Labyrinth Zone and Sandopolis Zone. Sonic 1 got away with it because it really was going for a pretty different pace/vibe in each stage, and it wasn't a pure speed game yet, but Labyrinth is still a lowlight.

That said, I don't feel like Sonic 2, 3, or CD had anything that made me want to turn them off. I've played those games front to back a million times each.

[NeoZeedeater]

Labyrinth and Sandopolis are the only ones that really bug me, too (Sandopolis much moreso).

And one thing I loved about Sonic CD was that you could choose to replay the levels you wanted in Time Attack mode, an underused concept in games at the time.

[Hero]

where he became more and more meaningless as he was softened for children.

Sorry, but just because 10-year old you thought he was "edgy" doesn't mean he was softened up later down the road. If anything, your blue dud with 'tude was more generica XTREME bullshit that pandered to the youth. Design-wise Sonic's look has become more edgy, out there, graffiti-esque over that soft round "safe" set of proportions used in the original.

[Fe 26]

I liked that the sonic CD levels were all mostly designed so that you could rush through them or explore them. The other sonic titles were very much either/or for most levels.

[Frogacuda]

I liked that the sonic CD levels were all mostly designed so that you could rush through them or explore them. The other sonic titles were very much either/or for most levels.

Sonic 3 was also great when played either way. There was a fuck ton to explore, but they didn't sacrifice the appropriate flow to make speed play fun.

[Fe 26]

Sorry, but just because 10-year old you thought he was "edgy" doesn't mean he was softened up later down the road. If anything, your blue dud with 'tude was more generica XTREME bullshit that pandered to the youth. Design-wise Sonic's look has become more edgy, out there, graffiti-esque over that soft round "safe" set of proportions used in the original.

hey, hey, hey, I was just asking a question!

did you miss this?

this was always my image of sonic. It is a pretty far cry from how he is portrayed in the DC titles.



lol at sonic teams horrid 90s ballads.

By sonic CD, Sonic had a personality that was his own. I guess being EXTREME was a trend at the time, but sega was able to sell it pretty well with sonic.

[Fe 26]

Design-wise Sonic's look has become more edgy, out there, graffiti-esque over that soft round "safe" set of proportions used in the original.

this is just wrong. You can not argue that the first image of sonic is pandering to kids and then argue that the newer design of sonic is NOT pandering to kids and is some how more edgy.

Did you miss the whole thing about rap music and everything around it becoming more popular in the past 15 years?

It is one thing to make a game and designing it around what is cool at the time. It is another to change it every few years to pander to a new group of people. Eventually the character becomes meaningless. So the Mickey mouse comparison holds. You can only change something so many times to make everyone happy before people stop respecting your offerings.

[Frogacuda]

Sonic was kind of a leader in that whole extreme thing, as I saw it. Bart Simpson kind of kicked off the whole 'tude in youth marketing thing, but it didn't really blow up until after Sonic when everyone had to have a technicolored anthrophorphic animal who said "dude" every other word.