Sonic 3D Blast was fun.

This reminds me. I need to let off steam after hearing so many months of Sonic bashing. I am not expecting to get into a debate with anyone here (although feel free to start one ), it just helps my sanity to type this out and post it, even if no one reads it.



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"Why are my 2D games horrendously overrated?!"

Let's say speed = playing the game while holding down right on the d-pad the entire time, but still jumping and avoiding obstacles intelligently.
Holding right on the d-pad but doing nothing else does not count because you are not playing, you are just sitting there.
Letting up on the d-pad TOO often gets rid of any sense of momentum. Also, stopping COMPLETELY in a stage is a no-no, the player should always be moving.

Freakin' Super Mario Bros. 3 has a better sense of speed than Sonic 1. A lot of SMB3 stages can be played without letting up right on the + control pad, but try that with a d-pad in Sonic 1 in some place like Marble Zone or Labyrinth Zone and you don't get anywhere. Sonic 1 in general has a decent sense of flow, though, it's not too bad aside from those two zones.
Sonic 2 has a vague sense of speed. Highlights are Casino Night Zone and Metropolis Zone--both have complex stage designs yet still never invite the player to stop (in order to analyze the environment), they just tell the player to keep going. Still some stopping involved, but on the whole much better than Sonic 1.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the most overrated of the series. Instead of having speedy platforming, it has speed segments and platforming segments. This means you'll go really fast through some loops, holding down only right on the d-pad. Then the game will stop you and you'll make some mundane and slow jumps. Rinse and repeat. Maybe it is popular because of the spectacular sense of atmosphere.

Sonic 3D Blast is fun but has 0 sense of flow. I would have no qualms with it if it starred some other character, but Sonic's promise of speed makes the game deceiving. Oops takin' Fred literally.

Now play a game like Sonic Adventure 2 or Sonic Heroes.
Sonic Adventure 2's Sonic stages (do not bring up Tails or Knuckles, they are not at all speedy, though they do have neat and individual senses of flow) are all about not letting go of up on the joystick. You are constantly homing from enemy to enemy, catching rails, and swinging into light speed dashes. These (and other) obstacles are placed just so you have to perform one right after the other, or even jump right from one to the other (for example, a stage might have you jump from a rail to homing attack an enemy to grab a line of rings with a light speed dash). However, instead of forcing the player to stop, the obstacles invite the player to continue racing ahead--they are placed only to give enough resistance so the gameplay is intelligent but not so much resistance that the player has to stop. Also, the player has the choice to stop, but the player is clearly a wimp if he or she stops.
Sonic Heroes does stop the player, but with an awesome intent. The game will put you at a dead end unless you defeat a group of enemies. Here, you exercise a sense of flow when you have to quickly figure out which character you need to be in order to defeat the enemies before you. You might need to switch to Sonic to remove some enemies' shields, then Knuckles to destroy them, then to Tails to paralyze some flying enemies before using Knuckles to destroy those as well. The sense of speed comes from clearing the screen of all the enemies who swarm you--a proper battle with the standard enemies should end in literally 5 seconds, assuming you need all three characters. It should take much less time otherwise. Not to mention the game's stage design is otherwise smart, giving a sense of flow comparable to Sonic Adventure 2 (though not using gimmicks such as rails or light speed dash ring trails as wisely as SA2).

Cool kids get a sense of speed and flow from Shadow. That means you are hardcore awesome and basically built to play Sonic games. The stages are definitely built for speed, but sometimes the stage designs are so complex that it is hard for your brain to keep up.

The problem is, a lot of people who hate Sonic Heroes (and all 3D Sonic games) are able to get all A's in Sonic Heroes. So they know perfectly the game design. This means that they either A) don't find a sense of speed and flow fun or B) I am off of my rocker. If it's A, they should go back to playing Sonic CD or something. I remember what Sonic CD told me one day.

Sonic CD: Screw speed! Sonic is all about KOOKY PLATFORMING PUZZLES WATCH ME I AM ALMOST AS SLOW AS SUPER MARIO BROTHERS THE LOST LEVELS AND MY PUZZLES CAN BE AS AGGRIVATING AS SMB3. WHOOPS I LEFT ALL CAPS ON.

Golem: You took my innocence!!

Final word: I like Gamechamp's stance on the "wtf controls suk" issue. He said their argument pretty much works like this: "hurf durf I can't figure out how to use a freakin' joystick."

I feel better now.

Your text is too small and hurts my eyes. But your reasoning sounds good.

Seems like I've seen this somewhere before. Where is Lupus. Surely he loves to argue about this.

I don't know. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were fine by me, but Sonic Heroes felt extremely clunky to me, and had almost no sense of flow whatsoever. I couldn't even get past the third level. I'd would've much rather they build on the gameplay of the Adventure titles than completely revamp it to something else.

There is a learning curve to Sonic Heroes. You have to get your head wrapped around the fact that you have to switch between three characters efficiently. IE, if you run up to the destructible block, then stop, and then switch to Knuckles, as opposed to running up to the destructible block as Knuckles, you aren't going to get flow.

I liked some aspects of Heroes, but the Chaotix missions were not included in that list. I liked the Chaotix characters, but playing as them sucked a great deal. I especially liked the Heroes boss fights: the stages themselves weren't anything really, really special and trying to A rank everything got boring quick

That shouldn't be though. The previous Sonic games had a relatively easy learning curve. That was one of the series' defining factors.

I have to agree that is one of the huge problems with Sonic Heroes, Chef. But you have to admit, the Knuckles missions in SA2 have a pretty big learning curve, too. That is, if you want to get A's in them like Sonic Team intended.

Shadow the Hedgehog had a fantastic learning curve. The collecting missions, while still not the best idea in the world, were incredibly easy compared to Chaotix. It had a good learning curve and a good sense of flow.

Fred - Chaotix missions are supposed to have a sense of flow in that the player has to keep flow while going out of their way to collect items. The problem is that Sonic Team hid the items so well that they're not only out of the way, they take 20 minutes to find.

That is why I thought the Knuckles stages in SA2 were the worst part of it. Another thing I'd like to state is that the claim that "Sonic is all about speed" is actually a bit of an exaggeration in terms of what truely made the original trilogy popular.

The speed was really just a small part of a larger package. An enhancement to what would otherwise be another attempt at a Mario-esque platformer. Other enhancements came in the form of off-the-wall level design, and an then-relatively new physics engine that was based on momentum and pinball-type gravity.

These imbeciles who keep saying "SONIC IZ ABOUT SPEED" over and over are fooling themselves, as they're getting the character's sales gimmick confused with how the games themselves worked.

Ah, yeah, I can't deny that. The original trilogy is fun but not fast.

It's just that after playing fast Sonic, I don't want to go back.

The problem is that adding to much speed kind of detracts from everything else. Sonic Advance 2 was fast, but it was so fast that you can't even sdee what you're doing, resulting in cheap deaths. That kills the easy learning curve and sense of flow that the Sonic series has always been known for.

These days, the games are either too much speed and not enought platforming, or too much platforming and not enough speed. There's no balance. A game without balance among it's mechanics typically turns out sub-par.

I never played Sonic Advance 2. I thought Sonic Advance 3 had a great mix of speed and platforming, though. Rush was definitely more about speed, though. Rush does have somewhat of a learning curve--when you start playing, you aren't used to the high speeds, and you crash into everything. But you get used to it, and the game does not end up becoming about memorizing levels.

I don't think Sonic games need balance between platforming and speed to be good. It's just that if a Sonic game focuses on speed and flow more than making a platforming challenge, it's a different sort of game from the one you want. It's like buying Harvest Moon when you really want Animal Crossing and getting disappointed.

That said, my rant against the old-school games is like buying Animal Crossing when I really want Harvest Moon, so I get disappointed.

Sonic advance 2 is both better and worse than Sonic advance 1: there's even more speed and you can only be sonic, so you'll pretty much run into every enemy you meet; it's impossible to see them coming because you're moving too fast to do anything (even jump)

There's no reason to turn around and kill them, either; you just keep running and you'll have rings back in no time. The only other danger is taking too many "down paths" and falling off without warning. The boss fights are interesting but not exactly fun - they have them at a run like Sonic Heroes (as in, Robotnik moves backwards really fast and shoots crap and you catch up to him) but without the third dimesion or you know creativity it's just an annoyance on what might have worked

All in all it's an awful game and manages to be worse than Sonic Advance 1. I don't think I even found a single emerald minigame, but that's mostly since the bloody pipe to GRIND UP WOW COOL MAN was already two screens behind by the time I'd registered and I was about to hit a spring and then three loops and another spring diagonally over an eight thousand foot gap and there was no chance of stopping at any point of it. And this happened three to four times a level. It was at best a GUESSING GAME OH MAN WHEN DO I JUMP TOO LATE MAYBE IF SOMETHING MADE SENSE

Actually maybe you can play as multiple players but I don't think so and it was bad really just awful and I think they introduced Cream in it so it loses even more points for that

It's pretty hard not to get dissapointed anymore but few games can sucessfully emulate the "flow" of SMB3 or Sonic 3. Sonic 2 has to be my favourite of the series by far (though 2-P gets the shaft in the end and that always pissed me off, not to mention that last bonus stage is freaking impossible as well as the very last level) but Sonic 3 and Knuckles though Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles are terribly different games seem to fit together really well.

Developers are too scared now to do good and clever platformers because, well, look how well KLONOA has done, and it could very well be the best of the recent lot (SPM doesn't count, I haven't played it)