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WANT
This looks like the best piece of Sonic I’ve seen in a while. With the level designer from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, too! Why was I not informed??
Lurrve.
Yeah, I was really excited when I saw this. It’s episodic, but I can only hope that we’ll still get all the nice frills like Chaos Emerald special stages, maybe even Hyper Sonic. To be perfectly honest, I’d even like another no-text all there in the manual story as well.
I do hope that they don’t take “retro” too seriously and introduce a new mechanic, however. Sonic 2 has two-player via Tails and the Spin Dash. Sonic 3 had saving and to a gameplay extent the special abilities of Tails and Knuckles. Chaotix (which wasn’t great, but good) had that power ring slingshot mechanic, and CD had time travel and the non-spin-dash speed rev. If you want to include Advance/Rush (which, to be honest, I consider the “spiritual” Sonic 4/5/6 etc already) they introduced the speed burst and tricks. It really would be nice to see another mechanic, even though I’m sure ANYTHING that wasn’t in Sonic 2 or 3 other than graphics will cause every reviewer and fanboi in the world to stomp and throw a temper tantrum.
Fun fact: on a few forums I browse people saw the reveal trailer (which only showed the logo in silhouette form) and the “Sonic fans” got pissed off that they were introducing another new character. Apparently people can’t recognize SONIC’S ORIGINAL AND MOST FAMOUS LOGO. :smack:
Sweet. I hope this one has Dust Hill zone
Nice. Really looking forward to this, even if I never did end up beating Sonic 2. I’d get all the way to the final boss, and could never touch him, ever - I just died, all the time. So I gave it up as a bad job.
That boss is brutal, you have to hit him twice as many times as a normal boss, and do it at a fairly precise angle. All without getting hit once. I only managed it recently.
It’s okay, you didn’t miss much, platformers from that era aren’t exactly known for their riveting endings, Sonic… falls, and lands on the Tornado and flies of Mobius. Oh and you see little snapshots off the animals you freed flying around.
That’s about it.
I never understood why Sega found it so hard to make a good Sonic game on the next-gen platforms. All they had to do was rip out the good Sonic levels on Sonic Adventure (Windy Valley, sigh), and make a whole game out of those without the stupid fishing levels.
It’s a really complicated, interesting story, actually. It has to do with the friction that existed between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. What are generally the most popular and loved Sonic games, the 2D games made after Sonic 2, were actually heavily workshopped by the US team. As I understand it, Sonic was always more popular in the West than the East, and as such we had a lot of creative input after the debut title became such a good seller here. I’m not sure on actual figures, but I’ve heard that SOA actually worked on the majority of Sonic 3, Knuckles, and CD, that is to say, the US had more input than Japan. I’m not sure if “majority” is truly accurate, since I believe most of the lead level designers and such were still Japanese, but I do know for a fact that we had a lot more input than we had on most games with shared development. That’s not to say Japan, or even SOJ sucks, but rather to set up the politics that were going to end up occurring and show why the style changed so much.
The reason Adventure has such a shift in attitude and design was because of a mix between politics and development woes. There were actually two contenders for the game that became Adventure (though they originally were meant for the Saturn). The Japanese one, which we now know as Sonic Adventure, became the one used (obviously), while the US one (codenamed Sonic X-treme) was actually rather reminiscent of Mario Galaxy.
Now, to be perfectly fair, even the videos that exist of candidates closer to release have clear issues, not the least of which being it looks really slow for a Sonic game. The boss stages apparently had the biggest issues and never really game to fruition. The entire development process was more or less a complete nightmare and contributed heavily to the more straightforward Japanese product being the one chosen for full funding and release.
While I have a bad history regarding Gamesradar’s opinions on the Sonic franchise, they do, admittedly, have a very good overview of the whole situation of what happened to Sega and Sonic in the interim period between Sonic CD and Sonic Adventure here.
I just finally got the original Sonic games a few days ago. Bought the Gamecube Sonic Mega-Hits game for my Wii.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t put in the hundreds of hours as a kid like I did with Mario, so they stages and mechanics aren’t second-nature to me, but it’s frustratingly hard. And no save, as far as I can tell. I kind of sort of like it but at the same time I kind of sort of think I’m going to have to be really bored and have a lot of free time on my hands if I’m ever going to play it again. I no longer take well to putting in significant time on a game and then losing all my lives and continues and having to start over from scratch.
You mean they didn’t add saves? That’s stupid. Even Sonic 3 had saves. As did every Mario re-release.
Oh, and dispite everyone telling you about the speed, the best way to play Sonic is to go slow until you know the course. Except the first few, which you can just press right the entire time, and jump occasionally.
Iunno. Maybe they did and I’m too dumb to figure out how to use them.
I got a “Best of Sega” for the 360 pretty much solely for Sonic2.
I found that the classic sonic series pretty much got easier over time. Sonic 1 was pretty brutal, especially the Labrynthe and Scrap Brain stages. Sonic 2 got quite a bit easier, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles I can pretty much complete without losing a single life.