Sonic The Hedgehog Games

[StraightShooter2]

Agreed.

Kaizo Sonic is an interesting one. It's a study in how Sonic is merely a tightly-packed platformer, whereas Mario has dozens of assets that can be twisted into traps. All Sonic has are spikes. It's woven into his DNA.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4A9qGa0e5o

Those "Kaizo" mods look hard, but at the same time pretty awfully designed.

 

[Delicious Result]

Now you're getting to the Engine Room of our topic.

Super Bunnyhop goes into some of this. Sonic was Sega's answer to a specific gaming platform. Since then, he's been stuck following trends. The obvious answer is to focus on endless running or speedrunning. But Sega are money-grubbing schlubs: they don't want to fork out the money to make it shine. And they're guaranteed to break sales records no matter how shitty it is. Recall that Shadow and Sonic '06 sold extremely well. It's a cynical product aimed at mongs who will buy a dog turd if you dyed it blue.

View attachment 2209181

you could honestly say the same about Pokemon's current state, remember Sword & Shield?
honestly Sonic Unleashed is an objectivly better game than SW/SH. atleast the former actually looked good and played good, the day stages were fun, and the night stages aren't that bad either just a pace breaker, but a rather fun hack and slash, it's no DMC or Bayonetta but it's still good and polished, ill be gladly buying the next sonic game, wich i can't say the same about Pokemon wich i left after SW/SH.

Basically the original games were flawed - they were always kind of an "all flash, no substance" thing, and arguably aspects like the art style and music were "better" than the actual games themselves. They never figured out how to use the "speed" gimmick in a way that didn't end up just being mindless running, dashing, and jumping.

The best way I can think of to improve the series, would be to go back to the original formula and alter it - basically make the challenge all about racing against the clock (rather than defeating enemies) - such as giving you a much shorter time to beat the stages, and allowing you to collect items to increase your allotted time - then the "speed" formula would still fit, and the games would have more of a real challenge rather than just being mindless running and jumping.

But I have feeling that Sega (and the idiotic fans) won't be willing to tinker with the original formula and acknowledge that the games were always flawed to begin with.

Sonic games are still platformers, the speed was used to reach higher areas, wich were faster, using a spindash in a small platform and then jumping to reach a higher ledge is just so satysfyng, removing enemies in Sonic would be like removing enemies in Mario or Kirby, you could also bounce on enemies at a high speed to reach high areas, or use stage gimmicks at your advantage, such as running/hoping on water or using platforms, that kind of creative level design is what Sonic truly needs.

and while i do agree Sonic used to try and chase Mario a lot, sometimes they struck gold, Sonic Battle, Sonic Riders, the Sonic & SEGA allstars games, they all could challenge Mario's spinoffs or even out-do them. it also does a very important thing Mario doesn't do, take risks, even if they fail they might be good the next time, and sometimes it is good, Generations, Mania, there's a reason fans still hope for a good game, some may look at at cynical but most of the time the games fail is because Sonic Team had a lot of complications, Sonic 06 sucked because they had an important asset leave halfway trough, teams divided to make other games, and strict deadlines, blame SEGA's poor descicions and management. because a lot of people at Sonic Team and SoA really care, Naka, Oshima, Maekawa, Flynn, the Mania team....

Sonic is really fascinating to me, it's not that im seriously a huge fan of the serious to the point of preffering it over Mario, even if Mario has objectivly better games, but also because the trainwrecks are so fascinating.

 

[StraightShooter2]

you could honestly say the same about Pokemon's current state, remember Sword & Shield?
honestly Sonic Unleashed is an objectivly better game than SW/SH. atleast the former actually looked good and played good, the day stages were fun, and the night stages aren't that bad either just a pace breaker, ill be gladly buying the next sonic game, wich i can't say the same about Pokemon

I haven't played any recent Pokemon game and don't plan on it.

Sonic games are still platformers, the speed was used to reach higher areas, wich were faster, using a spindash in a small platform and then jumping to reach a higher ledge is just so satysfyng, removing enemies in Sonic would be like removing enemies in Mario or Kirby, you could also bounce on enemies at a high speed to reach high areas, or use stage gimmicks at your advantage, such as running/hoping on water or using platforms, that kind of creative level design is what Sonic truly needs.

No it wouldn't be removing the enemies - the enemies were never much of a challenge to begin with since you had an abundance of rings.

Basically it could keep the same identical gameplay, but you wouldn't have 10 minutes of time in every stage (when even Mario games only gave you 3-4 minutes) - you'd start with a short amount of time, and be under pressure to go fast and collect time power-ups in order to beat the stages.

 

[Captain Syrup]

So I'm browsing some of these fan games, beginning with Time Twisted.

And while most of the comments are supportive, there are a few tragic fools who resent the lack of involvement by Sonic Team. As though Sonic Team would know a "polished" game if it bit them in the taint.

 

[Delicious Result]

I haven't played any recent Pokemon game and don't plan on it.

No it wouldn't be removing the enemies - the enemies were never much of a challenge to begin with since you had an abundance of rings.

Basically it could keep the same identical gameplay, but you wouldn't have 10 minutes of time in every stage (when even Mario games only gave you 3-4 minutes) - you'd start with a short amount of time, and be under pressure to go fast and collect time power-ups in order to beat the stages.

My problem is that Sonic also relies a lot on exploration, later games required you to go to specific paths and look for nooks and crannies to get 100% or had some actual platforming that breaked up the speed, replacing bottomless pits with another path, a strict time limit would also limit the level design a lot, considering how huge the stages in S3&K or CD were.

And while most of the comments are supportive, there are a few tragic fools who clearly resent the lack of involvement by Sonic Team. As though Sonic Team would know a "polished" game if it bit them in the taint.

again it isn't Sonic Team's fault, it's SEGA's, and even then Sonic Team did make some good games like Unleashed, Colors and Generations, while i do admire fans for their dedication, i do think it's still pretty unfair to compair fangames to official products.

 

[Captain Syrup]

My problem is that Sonic also relies a lot on exploration, later games required you to go to specific paths and look for nooks and crannies to get 100%

It's rarely worth the effort to explore. Incidentally, I think Sonic Team knew this, which is why it's easy to bumble into giant rings in 3. You careen into them left and right.

Compare that with, say, Sonic 1 & 2 for the Master System, which seriously expected you to find emeralds scattered in levels without scrolling past them. And how you were supposed to do that without the official strategy guide is beyond me.

The only time it might be advantageous is in Sonic 1, back when extra lives were valuable.

 

[Delicious Result]

Right, it's rarely worth the effort to hunt for bonuses.

Incidentally, I think Sonic Team knew this, which is why it's easy to bumble into giant rings in 3 by accident. You careen into them left and right.

Compare that with, say, Sonic 1 & 2 for the Master System which seriously expected you to find emeralds scattered in levels without scrolling past them. And how you were supposed to do that without the official strategy guide is beyond me. It's like trying to find all the members of Aerosmith in Revolution X. (Remember that shit?)

The only other time it might be advantageous is in Sonic 1, when extra lives are valuable.

sometimes it's like that in earlier stages, but later on i did have to look for guides to wich paths to take.in both S3&K, Triple Trouble and Mania and especially in those early Master System games.

 

[TyrasGuard]

Now you're getting to the Engine Room of our topic.

Super Bunnyhop goes into some of this. Sonic was Sega's answer to a specific gaming platform. Since then, he's been stuck following trends. The obvious answer is to focus on endless running or speedrunning. But Sega are money-grubbing schlubs: they don't want to fork out the money to make it shine. And they're guaranteed to break sales records no matter how shitty it is. Recall that Shadow and Sonic '06 sold extremely well. It's a cynical product aimed at mongs who will buy a dog turd if you dyed it blue.

View attachment 2209181

I just think it's a legitimate lack of talent from the team, Forces took 2-3 years (I think) to be made and it was mostly Generations' assets with worse controls, story and stages and production values, even the music while not one of the worst OSTs in my opinion, took a big hit. (Synth, synth and more synth, you guys like synths right?).

Spoiler: SEGA/Sonic Team is a horrible company

Even the best games in the eyes of most of the fanbase are terribly designed, they are bad games with good moments in them, if it makes sense. The highest offenders are games that require multiple playthroughs of the same levels to be beaten (Shadow the Hedgehog being the worst offender but this goes back all the way to SA1), characters nobody wants to play as and are badly written, half-assed gimmicks that either slow the game to a crawl or are outright not interesting or not necessary to beat the game (Treasure Hunting, Parkour, Wisps), outright clones of gimmicks from other games (Colors being a worse Mario Galaxy, Wisps, Werehog) and so on. I'm just using Sonic as an example of a badly handled franchise but SEGA has a tendency of ruining everything they touch. A lot of people praise the Yakuza series but that might as well be a very enjoyable VN, more than half of your play time is going to be spent watching a movie. It's also rumored that the worst aspect of Mania (The returning stages) were also ideas from Izuka and Sonic Team, props for the Mania team for still making the stages really fun regardless.

Even good ideas like the boost button to go super-fast are squashed when all you do is see Sonic plowing through enemies that do nothing, it seems like not only they have bad ideas they also ruin whatever good ones they might come up with.

The worst part is they still market their stuff towards the manchild in their 30s rather than trying to attract a younger audience, except for the movie which, while mediocre, a lot of kids still enjoyed.

This also extends to Sonic outside the games, where they have an obnoxious presence on social media, excessive amounts of self-referential material (Especially in the BOOM cartoon), awful comics (The latest issues are literally "The Walking Dead: Sonic edition) and so on. Even if you take a look at the merchandise, it's subpar (Literally selling Chris Chan tier medallions now)

It doesn't matter if you give them a million dollar idea or they outright steal it, it also doesn't seem to matter if you give them a huge budget or just pocket change, the end product is always average at best. The best rated Sonic game in 20 years was one that pretty much involved a different team (almost) entirely.

tl;dr: Games are badly designed, gimmicks are either ruined or not used enough, bad writing and cringe all over social media.

The only thing i'm kinda positive about is that concert thing with an orchestra playing songs from the games, other than that i just keep tabs to see how bad they fuck up the next thing, the 25th anniversary was amazingly awful and the 30th anniversary stream was horribly bad and short, can't wait until i see the Netflix series where Sonic is turned into a tranny given some of the dialog i've heard.

I'd suggest a reboot at this point but i don't think that would make it any better. The only thing that keeps the franchise alive is that no one has tried to emulate what Sonic does successfully, that and Chris Chan's dimensional merge of 'tism refusing to let Sonic die.

 

[Liquid Marlon]

Yeah Sonic games are known to be pretty mediocre like there's always something in each of them that always brings them down like Color's short level and abundance of 2D.

Hell even my debatably favorite modern Sonic game SA1 has been said to be a huge mess in it's own right, I can't fully speak on this matter cuz I play it heavily modded but at the most I can say that the sky chase sections are pretty shit.

On that note modders have been known at this point to always come and fix Sega/Sonic team's crap and there are alot of good mods that do alot to really improve the experience of most Modern Sonic games but....

They still are Sonic fans and really run the spectrum (no pun intended) you'll either have some retard's edgy oc or trannies turning Sonic trans.

(It's kinda sad cuz both of these modders appeared to have some level of talent)

Now thankfully this seems to be a small minority of the modding community, it doesn't take away from the great mods out like Knuckles in Sonic CD, BetterSADX, both of the Classic Sonic improvement mods and etc but it just reminds you of the nature of the fandom.

But even with the good mods it's still disheartening that so many games are so broken that the fanbase has to go out of their way to fix, I really fucking hope Sega/Sonic Team start to get their shit together.

The fanbase is one of the greatest strengths for Sonic right now but they are alot one of it's greatest weaknesses and that's not even referring to the weirder half of the fandom, that's talking about the fans that will buy anything with Sonic's name on it just because.

 

[Captain Syrup]

the weirder half of the fandom, that's talking about the fans that will buy anything with Sonic's name on it just because.

Feels like things took a turn for the worse once Sonic was voiced. He went from being a cute blue rodent who can run really fast to a big brother figure; someone who "got me through some tough times."

These are the fans Iizuka was chasing. The ones who think Sonic's friends are "complex" and deserve their own solo games.

 

[The Last Stand]

Sonic 06 sucked because they had an important asset leave halfway trough, teams divided to make other games, and strict deadlines, blame SEGA's poor descicions and management. because a lot of people at Sonic Team and SoA really care, Naka, Oshima, Maekawa, Flynn, the Mania team....

If you look at the development and potential Sonic 06 had, I would say it's more disappointing than outright bad. It had a great soundtrack, some aspects of the game were legitimate fun. The issue like you said, it was rushed and several corners were cut to meet deadlines.

I'm sure it would've been a good game in its own right. That story, however, was shit.

 

[starborn427614]

If you look at the development and potential Sonic 06 had, I would say it's more disappointing than outright bad. It had a great soundtrack, some aspects of the game were legitimate fun. The issue like you said, it was rushed and several corners were cut to meet deadlines.

I'm sure it would've been a good game in its own right. That story, however, was shit.

Weirdly, I think Silver's stuff worked out the best. Except for...that one puzzle. You know the one.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Weirdly, I think Silver's stuff worked out the best.

A character whose self-image (Cable from X-Men) is so at odds with his personality (a silly moron) that it completely undermines every scene.

Sega plays up his naivety and meme potential. Because pandering relentlessly to a minority of customers = 7 million copies sold.

 

[Delicious Result]

If you look at the development and potential Sonic 06 had, I would say it's more disappointing than outright bad. It had a great soundtrack, some aspects of the game were legitimate fun. The issue like you said, it was rushed and several corners were cut to meet deadlines.

I'm sure it would've been a good game in its own right. That story, however, was shit.

honestly that applies to both the game and the plot, they had good ideas but they had to overcomplicate it a lot.

 

[starborn427614]

A character whose self-image (Cable from X-Men) is so at odds with his personality (a silly moron) that it completely undermines every scene.

Sega plays up his naivety and meme potential. Because pandering relentlessly to a minority of customers = 7 million copies sold.

View attachment 2210371

Silver is Trunks, mate. Same way Sonic is Goku, Knuckles is Piccolo and Shadow is Vegeta.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Sonic is Goku, Knuckles is Piccolo and Shadow is Vegeta.

This made rainbows shoot out my eyes.

The rainbows were made of blood and urine, though.

 

[Dark Edea]

Sonic 06 sucked because they had an important asset leave halfway trough, teams divided to make other games, and strict deadlines

If you look at the development and potential Sonic 06 had, I would say it's more disappointing than outright bad.

No no no NO.

Don't make excuses for Sonic 06. What excuse is there for the controls to be absolute shit? Your primary interface with any game is the controller and by extension the player-character's movement. Sonic 06 failed the most fundamental and important aspect of game design. Sonic, a character that is supposedly all about movement can't move for shit and flies all around haphazardly. What's the developers' excuse for that?

Mario 64 did it better by several orders of magnitude a decade earlier. He went across the land, slid down slides, swam under water and flew through the air just fine in 1996. Don't claim corporate problems and poor management when the developers clearly had no grasp as to what Sonic is supposed to be and how Sonic is supposed to behave. Poor management in this case is entirely secondary to the absolutely damming fact that Sonic Team fucked up the most important part of their game despite an entire decade of experience and example in their field of work. It is a joke.

Sonic controls like shit on the land, bouncing off of obstacles and randomly losing velocity. Mach speed segments are a total mess with even worse controls. They didn't even bother to program in controls for aquatic environments and opted to have water be an instant death condition. And the moment Sonic ever left the ground, the control sensitivity jumped from 11/10 to 12/10 and good luck if you managed to land where you intended. And their workaround for this, the lock-on targeting thing. I am sorry but that has always been shit to me. In some contexts it is neat as a QTE type of thing to establish a "cinematic" style, but I personally do not like the lock-on mechanic. Sonic's older means of spinning mid-jump to attack enemies a short distance away from his body was and still is much better. And it doesn't rob control from the player.

And that's kind of it. All of 3D Sonic's design decisions end up stripping away player control for the sake of making it look like Sonic is doing what he might have done in 2D. And that is only the bare basics of this series' problems.

Beyond the above, you have absurd and confusing level design, poor programming that leads to bad player experiences, inconsistent art and music direction and holy shit the stories and scenarios. Now on some of these points and with Sonic 06 in mind, we can talk more about poor management at Sega and Sonic Team. But there is no excuse for bad controls ten years after the establishment of an effective 3D control scheme. No sir.

That's my hill and I will die on it.

 

[Liquid Marlon]

Weirdly, I think Silver's stuff worked out the best. Except for...that one puzzle. You know the one.

Sliver had a cool concept and idea behind them but it just wasn't done well/it was too unfinished.

P-06 does a really good job with him tho, too bad the maker of the mod seems to be occupied with other shit.

 

[Delicious Result]

I just think it's a legitimate lack of talent from the team, Forces took 2-3 years (I think) to be made and it was mostly Generations' assets with worse controls, story and stages and production values, even the music while not one of the worst OSTs in my opinion, took a big hit. (Synth, synth and more synth, you guys like synths right?).

Spoiler: SEGA/Sonic Team is a horrible company

Even the best games in the eyes of most of the fanbase are terribly designed, they are bad games with good moments in them, if it makes sense. The highest offenders are games that require multiple playthroughs of the same levels to be beaten (Shadow the Hedgehog being the worst offender but this goes back all the way to SA1), characters nobody wants to play as and are badly written, half-assed gimmicks that either slow the game to a crawl or are outright not interesting or not necessary to beat the game (Treasure Hunting, Parkour, Wisps), outright clones of gimmicks from other games (Colors being a worse Mario Galaxy, Wisps, Werehog) and so on. I'm just using Sonic as an example of a badly handled franchise but SEGA has a tendency of ruining everything they touch. A lot of people praise the Yakuza series but that might as well be a very enjoyable VN, more than half of your play time is going to be spent watching a movie. It's also rumored that the worst aspect of Mania (The returning stages) were also ideas from Izuka and Sonic Team, props for the Mania team for still making the stages really fun regardless.

Even good ideas like the boost button to go super-fast are squashed when all you do is see Sonic plowing through enemies that do nothing, it seems like not only they have bad ideas they also ruin whatever good ones they might come up with.

The worst part is they still market their stuff towards the manchild in their 30s rather than trying to attract a younger audience, except for the movie which, while mediocre, a lot of kids still enjoyed.

This also extends to Sonic outside the games, where they have an obnoxious presence on social media, excessive amounts of self-referential material (Especially in the BOOM cartoon), awful comics (The latest issues are literally "The Walking Dead: Sonic edition) and so on. Even if you take a look at the merchandise, it's subpar (Literally selling Chris Chan tier medallions now)

It doesn't matter if you give them a million dollar idea or they outright steal it, it also doesn't seem to matter if you give them a huge budget or just pocket change, the end product is always average at best. The best rated Sonic game in 20 years was one that pretty much involved a different team (almost) entirely.

tl;dr: Games are badly designed, gimmicks are either ruined or not used enough, bad writing and cringe all over social media.

The only thing i'm kinda positive about is that concert thing with an orchestra playing songs from the games, other than that i just keep tabs to see how bad they fuck up the next thing, the 25th anniversary was amazingly awful and the 30th anniversary stream was horribly bad and short, can't wait until i see the Netflix series where Sonic is turned into a tranny given some of the dialog i've heard.

I'd suggest a reboot at this point but i don't think that would make it any better. The only thing that keeps the franchise alive is that no one has tried to emulate what Sonic does successfully, that and Chris Chan's dimensional merge of 'tism refusing to let Sonic die.

Spoiler: In defense of Sonic...

While i do agree that Sonic Team doesn't seem to care anymore during this decade, i do think stuff like the early 3D games were still pretty good, the only bad gimmick in any adventure game were the fishing stages in SA1 and the Mech Shooting in SA2 and even those were done right the previous game, but everything such as the treasure hunting wich feels like a fun arcadish collect-a-thon experience, or the slow platforming with Amy wich feels more Mario-ish or the shooting stages wich have a fast paced arcadey feel to it, all of wich fit into the core Sonic gameplay style perfectly, even when the treasure hunting stages were slightly ruined in SA2 due to the shitty radar, they still were somewhat fun although a lot more frustrating than in SA1. but not any less fun than those motion control stages from Galaxy 1, and can you blame Sonic for wanting to ripoff mario when a lot of it's fans and haters straight up say Sonic should be more like Mario? same goes for the Werehog, a lot of the hate is exagerated if your good enough the stages might atleast last 10 minutes, wich is a lot but not as much as people want to make it out to be, if you forget this is a Sonic game, it's a solid enough hack and slash with some depth RPG mechanics and good puzzles. like i said it's not God of War, DMC or Bayonetta levels of good but it's still a fun enjoyable experience. Parkour also coud've been a good addition to the core Sonic gameplay, giving Sonic more flexibility, wich if Super Mario 64 told us something is that a lot of moves that are easy to learn but hard to master always make controls satysfyng. all three styles were used a lot in said games, beating the Treasure Hunting Stages was mandatory in both SA1 & 2 to get to the final boss and true ending, the Werehog took up a lot of the experience (id say too much but it's still not bad enough to make Unleashed a bad game), and the parkour was used a lot in Lost World for level challenges.

i also like the stories in the games, there atleast used to be genuinly interesting lore, character development, from a writting perspective the game sometimes did some pretty great shit, it wasn't until sonic haters started hating them because sonic should be lighthearted because it's cartoony even though there's a lot of cartoony series, including Nintendo's that also get really dark and do it spectacularily, i like to compare Sonic to Paper Mario, both series started excelent storywise, it seems Int-Systems and Sonic Team cared to make it as well written and consistant as possible, sure there were plotholes here and there but it was good enough that you could give them a pass, there was still some suspension of disbelief in both series, until eventually an external force such as haters or the creator of the series getting it's message misunderstoof started turning the series into a bland kiddy mess, plots didn't make sense anymore if there were any, nothing barely went on, the tones changed from that akin cool adventure book or a shonen anime respectively to a bland attempt to pander at casuals and ended recieving hate from both fandoms, although a lot of fans also started defending the bland approach, say whatever you want but Sonic's friends have way more personality and development than the Same 5 Toads

 

[Delicious Result]

This made rainbows shoot out my eyes.

The rainbow was made of blood and urine, though.

i mean he's not wrong is he? Sonic is bassicly a shonen protag atleast during the Adventure era.
and you could say the overall tone is that of a shonen just replace the fighting with boss fights and/or stages.