I'll be honest, a big part of why I never got into the Archie comics is because of characters like Sally, Rotor, etc. They just felt out of place and I didn't care about them. I wanted a comic specifically about the video game characters, with maybe a few comic extras on the side, but the Archie comics put a heavy focus on the non-video game characters and the world they were in.
The less said about how the majority of the comic's life cycle was complete trash, the better. I know it improved over time but for me, the damage had already been done. I'm kind of expecting the freedom fighters to at least return, but I personally hope they don't. I'll still probably give it a shot once it launches, as long as it's a reboot of some kind (and not a half-assed reboot like few years ago).
By "half-assed reboot" I actually meant "soft reboot" since I'm really not a fan of those. If you're gonna reboot something, you might as well go all out. I understand that Archie were more or less forced to do a reboot of some kind, thanks to Penders, but at that point I wish they threw the baby out with the bath water.
I'm sure I'm in the minority on this though since I know a lot of people like the comics. The amount of Sonic media I like that isn't the games themselves is pretty limited, I'll admit.
I was talking to a friend about dumb sonic stuff. And we got to talking about the whole " two worlds" thing and I don't mean two worlds, human and animal worlds thing. I mean the " now classic sonic is from another reality thing" I asked why is that even a thing. Despite my many issues with generations " story" the concept of classic sonic being younger sonic and them kind of fitting every game into a singular timeline and just showed sonic growing up was a genuinely cool thing that made it feel like sega appropriated all parts of sonic
She then reminded me of something, while they could have before, but they can now just make classic versions of new characters, and new characters entirely with out having to be held to too many previous standards. To give an example, before people asked about classic shadow. The response was, shadow was in a tube under a government facility. Now the answer is you can have classic anyone, its a different universe.
I'll be honest, a big part of why I never got into the Archie comics is because of characters like Sally, Rotor, etc. They just felt out of place and I didn't care about them. I wanted a comic specifically about the video game characters, with maybe a few comic extras on the side, but the Archie comics put a heavy focus on the non-video game characters and the world they were in.
The less said about how the majority of the comic's life cycle was complete trash, the better. I know it improved over time but for me, the damage had already been done. I'm kind of expecting the freedom fighters to at least return, but I personally hope they don't. I'll still probably give it a shot once it launches, as long as it's a reboot of some kind (and not a half-assed reboot like few years ago).
While I can't say those characters completely turned me off I agree 100%, they were hold overs from a cartoon that had long since been gone and for whatever the fuck reason, were still around. Sonic X was annoying at many points, but cosmo went out like a fucking G and I don't have to see chris's dumb face anymore. It always felt weird when I say wanted more blaze stories but I was being told by the comic's writing that no this princess who's family I never cared ever is the more important princess because reasons. Like the archie characters importance was never earned. It felt like those characters piggy backing off a brand and never really cemented a reason why they should have ever stuck around.
Whats weird is that some of post reboot characters did that just fine, the post reboot exclusive characters are much better implemented and designed to be quite honest and I wouldn't mind them coming back. They never really forces their importance on you for the most aprt, and they do a good job explaining who these characters are, what they are about and why they are important to their own cause but none of them were a world changing entity that needed story focus. The closest thing that got to that level is the introduction of sea mobians, which are dope and should be in the games.
I don't think the FF are coming back and if they do, they wont be doing much.
Sonic X was one of the few different takes on Sonic the Hedgehog that I didn't mind a ton since, outside of Chris being obnoxious and his friends/family, most of the show felt like an actual Sonic show. Season 2 even gave alternate takes on Adventure 1, 2, and Sonic Battle for some reason. Season 3 got a little weird in some places but it still felt mostly in line with what I'd expect from the games.
In comparison, even as a little kid back in the 90's I didn't buy into Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog or SatAM. Adventures had an ugly, unappealing art style (which, imo, is the worst thing you can fuck up in regards to Sonic, outside of maybe the music) and Sonic acted like Bugs Bunny and rarely actually fought anyone. It just felt weak, even has a 3 year old.
SatAM didn't fair any better. I once again didn't like the way Sonic and Tails looked (I always liked how he looked within the actual games. The merchandise at the time rarely looked like the Sonic I loved.) and the show had this large focus on these other characters that weren't from the games and everything looked brown and murky. I wanted to see Knuckles (first saw the show after Sonic 3 came out) and what I got instead was a squirrel who was leading Sonic around!
So while Sonic X was just about as flawed as those other shows (poor production values, bad writing, etc) it actually FELT like a proper Sonic show at the time and that made it worth watching to me at the time (probably wouldn't want to watch it now, though).
I'll be honest, a big part of why I never got into the Archie comics is because of characters like Sally, Rotor, etc. They just felt out of place and I didn't care about them. I wanted a comic specifically about the video game characters, with maybe a few comic extras on the side, but the Archie comics put a heavy focus on the non-video game characters and the world they were in.
The less said about how the majority of the comic's life cycle was complete trash, the better. I know it improved over time but for me, the damage had already been done. I'm kind of expecting the freedom fighters to at least return, but I personally hope they don't. I'll still probably give it a shot once it launches, as long as it's a reboot of some kind (and not a half-assed reboot like few years ago).
This is somewhat similar to how I feel, despite growing up watching Sonic SatAm and reading a few early issues of the comics. I was actually surprised at how long it lasted because it seemed ripe for cancellation even before the "dark ages".
The only characters I liked from that group were Bunnie, mainly because she was the most "Sonic-like" even pre-reboot in terms of design and gimmick, and Nicole and Antoine to an extent. Sally was boring at best and terrible at worst, same with Rotor(though he was less terrible more redundant), Dulcy was all around garbage in design and concept and she had some of the most cringe-worthy stories in the entire run. Granted, they all got better in the reboot, but it wasn't enough that I would miss them if they were permagone.
If these characters show up in the IDW universe, I rather them have significant reduced appearances and have them be rebooted into individual characters, maybe with different roles, instead of being stuck as "Freedom Fighters". I feel like them being stuck to a group limited their individual development.
Colors gets points over Unleashed for being a more consistently-designed game, but I don't feel consistency is a virtue over more creative or contextually-driven design which Unleashed has in spades. It also doesn't help that I've never given a damn about the Wisps from the outset. At best, they're unnecessarily-gated instances of Sonic's old abilities that he used to be able to activate in far more interesting circumstances. Like, seriously, whose fucking idea was it to tie Sonic's boost ability to the white wisp that's only available on certain stretches of certain levels in a style of gameplay called boost?Otherwise, they either replace actual level design, they're just annoying to control, or they're utterly useless and forgettable. There's no sense that they augment Sonic's basic move set or provide thoughtful platforming challenges. All they do is to serve to slow the game down. And then it's not even fun to control regardless. You can't aggressively speedrun the damn thing like you can Unleashed's day stages because it's just slower and more on-rails, meaning all of the physical limitations of the style are that much more apparent. Just jumping alone in Colors just feels even more abysmal than in Unleashed, especially since even the Werehog had a more satisfying and helpful double jump and other recovery maneuvers. Seriously, the Werehog feels better to control than Colors Sonic; I'll stand by that shit to my grave.
Overall, I feel Colors gets as much of a pass as it does because it was the first 3D game after significant backlash hit with ShtH to not do anything weird conceptually or control wise. Otherwise it's as mediocre as the rest of the games that came afterward and wasn't worth the price of admission when companies were dropping shit like Rayman Origins and Donkey Kong Country Returns. I literally can't stand the thought of ever playing Colors again.
I have to completely disagree with this. Tying your boost meter to the whisper added a lot of decision making and meter balancing to the game. One of the things that Generations and Unleashed fucked up (on top of Massively inferior scoring systems) is giving you meter for rings when rings are given out like meaningless candy in those games. It makes boosting brain dead and I enjoyed learning and anticipating level design in Colors and being rewarded for smart management of my boost in a way that wasn't just 'gotta go fast'.
Additionally, Wisps are good. Sonic should continue to have power ups in levels. It's kind of a crime that wisps are so controversial when people loved elemental shields in Sonic 3 and we almost never get even the original power ups of shield, invincibility, or shoes in modern games anymore. Power ups should be a thing that dynamically effect the experience. Be they wisps or something else.
On the note of rings, they seriously give you too many in most of the the modern games with no way to recover your count from a single mistake that it destroys the satisfaction of ring acquisition and the tension of having a high ring counter knowing that you're one hit away from losing everything.
in modern Sonic games they have a pathetically small amount of rings come out where you are hit (20 max I think?), so it doesn't matter if you had 50 or 500, say goodbye to even a token recovery of your hard work because there isn't even the possibility of getting a fraction of that back.
In this sense the terrible ring recovery potential effects levels with 500 and 5000 rings in an equally detrimental way. There's no tension or appreciation for your ring score because it doesn't matter, they're just there to stop you from getting killed.
What I'd like to see them do in future games:
SOME QUALITY OF LIFE TWEAKS TO RINGS THST MIGHT BE NEAT
1. Decrease the sheer amount of rings you get so that they feel coveted again (Sonic Utopia does an ok Job at this)
An alternative to this would be to keep the ring counts the same, if it's decided that people love grabbing those clumps of 10 point rings, but to increase the cost of earning a 1UP. More on that in a second.
2. Higher paths with more dangers reward the player with more potential rings than lower paths. But these rings might more consistently be combo rings or risk/reward.
You want them rings? Prove it.
3. Increase the threshold for earning a 1UP but don't make it all or nothing.
Something like: every 100 or 200 rings permanently earns you a third of a 1UP.
while I might not like how abundant rings are in modern games I also recognize that it's hard to get away from with the 3D gameplay. The nice thing about a change like this is that it rewards your ring count but you don't have to start from scratch after basically 1 hit.
4. Halve the recovery time from taking a hit or make Sonic behave like the 2D games where he bounces back with some hang time but recovers instantly after hitting solid ground (implement invisible barriers if he's going to drop to his death but allow him to fall to lower levels or other platforms otherwise)
If you compare the incapacitated duration between the modern games and the 2D ones, the 3D games have massive down time. The 2D games had a somewhat interesting element of knocking you back in an arc, but your recovery after hitting the ground was instant. The 3D games just plant you there while Sonic lays on the ground for an eternity before he slowly kick flips to his feet.
It's boring, it interruptes the flow and the rings start flashing almost as soon as you're up.
5. Drop more rings when you are hit, with potential combo rings spreading further from the center and give the rings more physics/Randomness again.
6. Potentially drop your 1UP shard but make it able to be targeted by a homing attack.
This might be neat because you would in the fly be making split decisions about your 1UP shard and its position versus where a juicy clump of rings is bouncing and the time lost getting that shard will result in.
I'll be honest, a big part of why I never got into the Archie comics is because of characters like Sally, Rotor, etc. They just felt out of place and I didn't care about them. I wanted a comic specifically about the video game characters, with maybe a few comic extras on the side, but the Archie comics put a heavy focus on the non-video game characters and the world they were in.
The less said about how the majority of the comic's life cycle was complete trash, the better. I know it improved over time but for me, the damage had already been done. I'm kind of expecting the freedom fighters to at least return, but I personally hope they don't. I'll still probably give it a shot once it launches, as long as it's a reboot of some kind (and not a half-assed reboot like few years ago).
I hear ya. I actually really disliked SatAM growing up because it felt so different and the Archie comics were pretty strongly connected to that. Adventures of Sonic did too but in that case I liked how Sonic and Tails were a team and I just really loved the villains in it. Now the OVA... I have watched that probably over a thousand times, it just hits so much of what I love about Sonic as a franchise.
I would check in on the comics every now and then but it never really appealed to me much until rather recently. I absolutely adore how they went back to tell stories of past games and bring in all sorts of characters from throughout the universe. Honey the Cat is especially appreciated, and I hear Jane from Fighting Vipers got an animal form too? That is so rad. I hope the new comics follow a similar pattern.
I like how in Adventure (and SA2? I forget) Sonic would fall back after getting hit but could recover in mid-air if you pressed A with the right timing. I'd like for that to come back.
I actually hated Amy for the longest time... but then Ian Flynn came along and made her a solid character for me. I absolutely love the Dynamic, in comics and games, that she's been sharing with Knuckles lately.
Well that version
Game amy, for long time arguably even now is garbo. Comic amy was pretty cool for a bit, boom amy is also pretty cool.
Amy has this scene with knuckles in the 2nd shadow and knuckles arc that's like... really good. Like it's bright shining star of characterization for the comic. This moments that's like " I don't agree with what either of you are saying and shadow is right, but I understand you and believe both of these characters would think they way think think" its really done well. Grows both of the characters too, like its a moment that's like that kind of reminds me of my disdain for sonic boom.
I like how in Adventure (and SA2? I forget) Sonic would fall back after getting hit but could recover in mid-air if you pressed A with the right timing. I'd like for that to come back.
I am a big fan of this too, I might be wrong but I swear I recognized it in Forces? Could someone test that? In any event, Unleashed in particular desperately needed something like this.
Honestly I am sorta shocked with how people react to female characters in video games lately that I never see anyone mentioning Sonic Team's stuff. Pretty much every female character made by them in the series except maybe Blaze could be summed up with two words with the last word always being 'girl'. Amy is kind of the worst there and she is randomly forced into almost every game just so they have a female rep at all. She and Sticks are alright in Boom but none of those writers will ever work on the mainline Japanese games.
I think Amy is like the one 'yet to be really playable' character that would translate extremely well to being in her own game. Potentially staring in a Mario-like platforming-centric experience. It could sell decently to what I think is a somewhat untapped market (young girls looking for a teenage girl YA protag) if it was budgeted modestly, game-play first, marketed well, and of competent quality. Something a little more heart felt and softer edged than modern Sonic (while giving her agency, brains, and determination) that massively expanded what she could do in Sonic Adventure in terms of utilizing her Hammer. Maybe incorporating the little animals that pop out of robotnicks machines in some capacity.
I'd be more excited to see what the heck an Amy based game would play like than another Edgey Hedgey entry.
Though a stand alone Shadow game in the hands of a good developer would pretty much design document itself. Have high speed Sonic like gameplay that mixes in very fast paced action game combat, making use of chaos control and the like. Maybe even... weapons... (no guns! Or At most only as temporary items that come from properly disabling an enemy or something).
Sort of like a Devil May Cry for babies (with a dash of Rising speed based traversal?) in the same way that the Werehog was 'my first God of War'.
I like how in Adventure (and SA2? I forget) Sonic would fall back after getting hit but could recover in mid-air if you pressed A with the right timing. I'd like for that to come back.
I vaguely remembered this but I couldn't remember if it was actually a thing. I almost put it some sort of split second recovery on that list. Something that's just timing based, sort of like the better reload in gears, but without a GUI. Maybe you can get a single ring back if timed right, but it's very tight. Maybe you would not drop any or only drop a certain amount.
But seriously, the Ring-System has been completely fucked in Sonic games since Sonic Adventure (though it sidestepped the flaws somewhat by giving you rings as a reward for exploration and being very easy). It's no wonder that Sonic Team, not understanding that there's even a severe problem, has been trying to force Rings into a health bare like system since Sonic Unleashed. They don't understand the value of them as anything but instant gratification and stopping you from dying in one hit.
edit: As long as I'm on the subject I'm going to take the opportunity to archive my Amy hacks writeup over here for future reference.
HACK REVIEW: Amy Rose in Sonic the Hedgehog, Amy Rose in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic 3 & Amy
By: E-122-Psi, et. al.
Originally written: August 1st, 2016
Sonic Mania has certainly triggered Sonic mania across the internet, and I'm no exception. In an effort to quench my thirst for classic gameplay that I haven't already played to death, I gave Sonic Advance another spin. And while that didn't quite cut it, which is a whole different subject I won't get into here, a second go around with Amy did serve to remind me just how very intriguing she is, conceptually. For the uninitiated, Amy's moveset in Sonic Advance is a loose derivative of her Sonic Adventure gameplay, all the way down to the fact that she can't spin attack or even roll.
As opposed to other Dimps games where the physics are so bad that you simply shouldn't roll, nyuk nyuk nyuk.
If this sounds completely insane, well, you're not wrong; Advance 1 loves few things more than placing enemies right in the player's path, and it would be another three years before Dimps thought of the boost to make rolling properly obsolete.
So there's a lot of faceplanting going on, including the one move that is a literal faceplant. But every so often, when the badniks aren't so thick and there's platforming to be done, it all starts to gel, because what Amy does better than anyone else is jump. Between her hammer flip and spring smash, she can catch more air from a flat surface than anyone else short of Tails, and she's a lot faster about it. Being so much better in one way and so much worse in another makes her the most different character in a 2D Sonic game this side of Charmy, and stands as one of the cleverest things Dimps ever did with the franchise.
What, then, if you could try her out in other, better designed games?
Thanks to the eternal industriousness of the Sonic community—and readily available, documented source code—that dream is a reality.
These being the classic games, the spritework uses Amy's handful of Sonic CD assets as a base and builds the rest of her sheet out from there, using her Advance sprites as an animation reference, along with what are likely edits of Sonic's sprites for some of the tougher poses. It's all very well done and manages to avoid coming off as Sonic in a dress any more than her classic design usually does.
And unlike the lesser character swaps out there, this redraws every asset, including the title screen, special stage sprites, and ending, and gets extra points for maintaining the original colors of most of the plethora of objects in Sonic 1 that rely on Sonic's palette.
Enough gushing over how pretty it all is, though, when the more important question remains: How does it play?
Answer: Really damn well.
The first, and most personally surprising reason why that's the case is that rolling... isn't actually crucial to these games. The conventional wisdom whenever someone complains that the level design throws you into enemies all the time is to just roll constantly, but being literally unable to do that doesn't wind up being too big of a deal*, because the levels are smarter than that to begin with. There simply aren't that many ground level badniks throughout the games, and most of the ones that do exist are either placed such that you come up on them slowly, or they are themselves slow-moving or come to a stop on sight to give you a fair chance to react. I wouldn't make her anyone's first experience with the games, and Sonic 3 in particular expects you to be spindashing a bit more often than I'd previously realized, but she doesn't have it all that much worse overall. Once you get used to her attack timing, most of what you'll get hit by is stuff that would hit the other three characters as well. The lack of rolling also means she can't reach the sort of high velocity you expect, but she's usually still fast enough for any given speed check.
The second reason is that she retains almost her entire Advance moveset (minus the faceplant, plus the Advance 2 "spindash" sans actual spinning), but buffed in some critical ways, which renders her by far and away the most agile character of the four (with, I will begrudgingly admit, the sole exception of Hyper Sonic).
Her normal jump reaches merely a normal height, but her hammer flip sends her soaring higher than even a Super Sonic jump, which opens up incredible movement possibilities straight out of the gate:
I can't overstate how entertaining this is. It's most of the fun of Super Sonic's maneuverability without being completely broken in every other regard, without having to worry about special stages, and with the subtle benefit that pressing Down + A to initiate a special jump is quietly satisfying.
The other major game changer over Advance is that her aerials are usable after a hammer flip now and can be chained together. Given that her aerial attacks are still much better moves than her grounded swing anyway, Amy absolutely thrives on flinging herself into the air and raining down death from above.
High jumps, short hops, timing all your attacks; she's just plain fun, and genuinely freshens up all three games.
It gets even crazier when you throw super mode into the mix, as she gets all of Super Sonic's benefits and a height buff to the hammer flip, which opens up yet more jump possibilities. And Sonic 3 even has a unique hyper form flash attack coded.
She can bash through Knuckles' walls. Typically Amy follows a mix of Sonic and Tails' scripting, but if she can reach a Knuckles path, she can take it, and the game will adjust smoothly. She can also get enough height to grab some of Tails' low hanging personal goodies, and as a Sonic replacement, can have Tails tagging along, so she winds up dabbling in a bit of everyone's unique content without wholly superseding any one of them, which is exactly what you want for additional Sonic 3 characters.
I have some minor quibbles, like how one of her super transformation sprites in Sonic 2 is glitched out—
—or how the code edits have left Sonic 2's 2P mode in a flaky state, or how the hitboxes of her attack sprites are larger than those of the rest of her sprites, so initiating an attack directly next to an enemy (e.g. trying to hammer an orbinaut from below) results in it immediately hitting you.
Overall, though? It's nearly professional grade work and comes off very much like the legit fourth character option she was in Advance, buffed up to a competitive shine that feels neither overpowered nor underpowered, and I'm going to be very sad when she's not in Mania.
As the screens indicate, the two main differences are that Amy has her Adventure design, and Cream tags in for Tails.
Cream is no mere sprite swap, but instead plays exactly like she does in Advance 2, including the ability to sic Cheese on anything that moves using what I assume is a backported super flicky targeting routine.
When Cream is on her own, Cheese gets to have his own palette, but in Amy and Cream mode technical restrictions come into play, and are then cleverly handled a la Advance 3:
All that yellow combined with her pink fur is way too much light on the eyes. Amy with green being a dominant color works because it compliments her pink on the color wheel(pink is just a light tint of red). Her red and darker pink outfits also works due to contrasting shade to her fur.
About Amy's character, I like both her classic and modern designs. Personality-wise, her best was in the Adventure games, Sonic Boom, and the comics and that's because she was more than just Sonic's obsessed fangirl there. Nowadays, it seems like the games toned down her crush compared to her character over a decade ago, and just made her a generic Sonic cheerleader like everyone else.
I do think Amy is one of the easiest characters to write well since she isn't bound to any Macguffin or timeline/dimensional mess or permanently locked to a group or organization. She can appear in any game without people asking "why isn't she guarding the x" or "isn't she from a different time period?" She's just a "normal" girl who likes Sonic and fight for her friends, and maybe still does tarot readings. To be honest, character-wise, it makes more sense to hang around Sonic and have more appearances in games than say, Knuckles because of the above. They were really reaching on how to involve him with Sonic and Tails and as a consequence, it made him look like a really shitty guardian.
It is actively bizarre to me that SEGA is seemingly not interested in Sonic spinoffs. Tails and Knuckles could easily be the stars of their own popular line of games. Amy and Robotnik are recognizable enough to work too for sure. I do not think Shadow is as popular anymore as people act though.
Something I would personally love to see is SEGA reworking some of their older licensed games with some of their own characters. Perhaps Alex Kidd would be a better fit for this, but I just really want to see the Illusion series and stuff like Quackshot and Astro Boy: Omega Factor return.
It is actively bizarre to me that SEGA is seemingly not interested in Sonic spinoffs. Tails and Knuckles could easily be the stars of their own popular line of games. Amy and Robotnik are recognizable enough to work too for sure. I do not think Shadow is as popular anymore as people act though.
Sega's been really conservative concerning the Sonic franchise in general. Notice that the budget on Sonic games have shrunk after Sonic Unleashed and the only successful spinoffs they had were various crossovers of other franchises such as Mario & Sonic Olympics and Sega All Star Racing.
I think the critical failure of Shadow and the falling sales of Sonic games recently, Sonic Mania exception, has scared Sega into not investing in any more character spinoff games.
I have to completely disagree with this. Tying your boost meter to the whisper added a lot of decision making and meter balancing to the game. One of the things that Generations and Unleashed fucked up (on top of Massively inferior scoring systems) is giving you meter for rings when rings are given out like meaningless candy in those games. It makes boosting brain dead and I enjoyed learning and anticipating level design in Colors and being rewarded for smart management of my boost in a way that wasn't just 'gotta go fast'.
I don't believe there was a "lot" of decision making added via the white Wisp because- like the rest of the Wisps- they're placed directly next to the obstacle they're designed around. On top of that, Wisps are generally one-time use and have no passive or secondary abilities, meaning there's no point in saving them for other parts of the level because the game simply isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory. Like Heroes' gates that switch you automatically to the best team mate for the only job they're good at instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're smart enough to switch to Tails when you see there's a huge cliff since only he can cross, a puzzle's answer in Colors is right next to the puzzle itself. Hell, even the door puzzle near the end of Windmill Isle Night at least required that I find the two keys first, but there's no satisfyingly engaging thought necessary to get through Colors. Wisps are just glorified ability keys (aside from Yellow Drill because they at least gave that one a bit of interesting contextual use by allowing you to drill through both dirt and water, and it actually augmented Sonic's logical movement in a way that makes sense and is fun.) On the other hand, Boost is a different and slightly incomparable beast in Unleashed and Gens because of the reliance on rings, because the point is not in using speed to extend Sonic's reach as in the classics, but in maintaining the speed for as long as possible despite the ridiculous obstacles around you and the speed at which they were approaching. The point of Boost gameplay is to make the player feel like they're playing a Sonic similar to the one in the cartoons and cut scenes where he doesn't need much to get going and stay going. While we can argue about whether or not that's a good thing design-wise, Unleashed and Gens at least gets it. Colors fucks that basic premise up completely by tying what was initially presented as an innate ability to Sonic to a random alien all of a sudden that you can only use meaningfully in certain sections of the stage now. It'd be like making Mario only able to jump with a limited-time rabbit upgrade. Da fuck?
Additionally, Wisps are good. Sonic should continue to have power ups in levels. It's kind of a crime that wisps are so controversial when people loved elemental shields in Sonic 3 and we almost never get even the original power ups of shield, invincibility, or shoes in modern games anymore. Power ups should be a thing that dynamically effect the experience. Be they wisps or something else.
The elemental shields are loved for two reasons that the Wisps miss the point of: They augment Sonic's inherent abilities without gating them completely behind their activation, and they have passive effects that are dictated through the player by basic context of the game's world and common sense. The elemental shields not only give Sonic an extra hit and last as long as you can keep them- already taught to a player with normal shields- but they strengthen his basic movement in a certain direction(s): left and right (fire shield), up (electric shield), and down (bubble shield). In effect, you're playing as Sonic+ when you've got one attached. Second, their passive effects reward exploration and understanding in the game's rules. The fire shield naturally protects Sonic from fire hazards which you can only learn by jumping into such obstacles (which isn't too punishing because you already know the shield will protect you in case your decision is wrong) and it washes away when he hits water, which anyone can figure out. This isn't telegraphed to you by dumbed down placement. Rather, it's taught to you through proper context.
So if we have to have these goddamn aliens around who really should've gone the fuck home like they supposedly did at the end of Colors, then they need a total rework. I'd pare down the list of Wisps considerably, starting with the ones that take the place of Sonic's basic maneuvers, meaning White Wisp (Boost), Green Hover (Light Speed Dash), and the Magenta Music Note little shit (why can't the player just Homing Attack or jump on obstacles themelves) would need to go. Heck, I'd probably get rid of Yellow Drill too as much as I like it, because I don't see any reason why Sonic's basic move set can't allow a player to drill on their own. Let Sonic be satisfying and powerful to move in a context devoid of Wisps first. After that, I'd make Wisps more permanent in the game world and able to be broadly used like the paint in Sticker Star/Color Splash: Allow Wisps to be used literally anywhere, even in wasteful contexts, but tie their use to a meter that drains as you do so. That way it allows a player the leeway to experiment and discover how the little guys work in the world. Third and most importantly, give them more work to do by designing for the environment and their abilities. Cyan Laser is a fucking laser. Instead of only allowing Sonic to ricochet off of floating crystals that are dissonant with the environment they exist in, let Cyan instead let him melt ice, take down Eggman's security systems, solve related laser and light puzzles, and blind bosses and large enemies as well as damaging others. For god's sake, do something creative and interesting with the little bastards. Like, have we learned nothing from Breath of the Wild?
It's the one thing I'm keeping an eye out for in the long term, but AFAIK writing custom objects is more sophisticated hacking than anyone has pulled off yet.
I don't quite agree, but I think that's sort of one of the limitations on sonic spin off games. Or spin off everything. The people who could get it are extremely limited in number, you would have to sell people on an amy rose game and a lot of folks find her annoying. Tails knuckles, or shadow would be easier I feel. I feel like blaze would also be an easier sell if they actually advertised her and did things with her but they don't.
looks down in sadness.
But I would like more spin off games, I wanted a tails adventure game where you solve a mystery while a sonic game is going on in the background. I Knuckles game, where its just treasure hunting. I also Want shadow revengence. I really want that last one
I don't believe there was a "lot" of decision making added via the white Wisp because- like the rest of the Wisps- they're placed directly next to the obstacle they're designed around. On top of that, Wisps are generally one-time use and have no passive or secondary abilities, meaning there's no point in saving them for other parts of the level because the game simply isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory.
It isn't wholly true that the levels and mechanics weren't exploratory. I'd point out that it wasn't totally uncommon for the wisp usage to at times be optional, which is an exploratory element. But Like I said before, tying them to your boost meter added decision making to your boost usage, and sometimes you might fuck your boost, realizing that if you had some at this section you can reach something, so you'd look for a boost capsule and backtrack.
Other times you might have taken a path and missed a wisp that you could clearly use at a point, so you might look around to try to find another one, or you might of missed it because it was on a rail you didn't choose in a split second. Then of course there are instances where the wisp became a skill challenge in itself and you messed up, maybe you went back to try again, or maybe you kept going, but on repeats it gave you choices, options, and a lot of paths not taken while you were also looking for the red rings.
And it wasn't even all that rare that there would be instances where the game gave you another optional instance past the obvious one for using a certain wisp.
To say that the game isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory is not true. In the first level alone they reward the player for exploring with DRILL by having alternate paths and red rings. They even reward you in smaller ways for your curiosity, like giving you a 1UP for tracing a path of circular rings with it.
There might be times when a wisp ability took you beyond a point of. No return unless you found another type, so you might search for it and use it to go back instead.
Like Heroes' gates that switch you automatically to the best team mate for the only job they're good at instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're smart enough to switch to Tails when you see there's a huge cliff since only he can cross, a puzzle's answer in Colors is right next to the puzzle itself. Hell, even the door puzzle near the end of Windmill Isle Night at least required that I find the two keys first, but there's no satisfyingly engaging thought necessary to get through Colors. Wisps are just glorified ability keys
But as I've already laid out, in addition to them creating decisions for boost usage and level exploration for red rings, there is more to wisps than them just being binary key abilities. There is also the scoring system to consider and how your decisions impact it, if you're doing great on speed but bad on rings and see a red ring gates behind a rolling wisp, do you go for that? If you fuck up and have to get the capsule again have you spent too long on it? Often times even the most binary capsules (not laser) can still give you a choice between a left and right path. They were not as free form as they could have been, but in practice they are a far cry from what you say they are.
On the other hand, Boost is a different and slightly incomparable beast in Unleashed and Gens because of the reliance on rings, because the point is not in using speed to extend Sonic's reach as in the classics, but in maintaining the speed for as long as possible despite the ridiculous obstacles around you and the speed at which they were approaching. The point of Boost gameplay is to make the player feel like they're playing a Sonic similar to the one in the cartoons and cut scenes where he doesn't need much to get going and stay going. While we can argue about whether or not that's a good thing design-wise, Unleashed and Gens at least gets it. Colors fucks that basic premise up completely by tying what was initially presented as an innate ability to Sonic to a random alien all of a sudden that you can only use meaningfully in certain sections of the stage now. It'd be like making Mario only able to jump with a limited-time rabbit upgrade. Da fuck?
Your Mario analogy doesn't work and isn't the same thing. The MARIO equivalent of the difference between normsal running and boosting would be having normal jumps and super jumps gated behind a pickup, not MARIO only being able to jump with a time limited upgrade.
Or Mario unlock super jump by collecting coins. Super jump sounds better as a power up to me.
By your definition how is boosting actually inmate to Sonic in any of the games you mentioned when they both rely on him acquiring an external resource to use the ability? Also there are paths in Sonic Colors that allow you to consistently boost if you want to, and levels that are made for speed.
Beyond the fact that, contrary to your argument, there is nothing inherently wrong with Colors having a different approach to the meter mechanic (it just happens to incidentally be superior).
You do this a second time when you clearly attempt to defend the scoring system in Generations and Unleashed by saying that the goal of those games are different than Colors. So why is Color having its own approach not ok for Colors but fine for Generations?
This is a fallacy. That makes no sense, the point of each is different, Colors is just superior.
Colors gives the player an overall score based on evenly weighting your performance consistent with the design of the in game experience and it does so with greater transparency versus the shitty system in Unleashed and Generations that creates confusion between your grading and what you are rewarded for in game.
So I will argue that from a gameplay perspective that the scoring system in Generations and unleashed is garbage compared to Colors and Forces. The problem with a focus on just maintaining speed being the primary determine factor is that it does not communicate this aspect well to the player. Players are apparently 'rewarded' in game for getting a lot of rings through 1UPs as well as the tangible enjoyment of building that ring counter. They are suppose seek out those big juicy Red Rings, but in reality they are only punished for doing so in a way they can't even deduce at the time.
The game mechanics and experience communicate a false importance of different aspects only to have you then 'graded' by an obtuse scoring system that does not cleanly communicate why you were punished for seeking out red rings or stopping to get extra rings for a 1UP.
And if you 'get' the intent of the scoring system early on and adhere to it? more often than not that makes the levels in Generations more one dimensional as you miss secrets and alternate paths.
This dissonance is bad design, period.
I don't even need to make a somewhat flawed arguement about how the scoring system and approach taken in colors is more true to the values and scoring in the original games.
So if we have to have these goddamn aliens around who really should've gone the fuck home like they supposedly did at the end of Colors, then they need a total rework. I'd pare down the list of Wisps considerably, starting with the ones that take the place of Sonic's basic maneuvers, meaning White Wisp (Boost), Green Hover (Light Speed Dash), and the Magenta Music Note little shit (why can't the player just Homing Attack or jump on obstacles themelves) would need to go. Heck, I'd probably get rid of Yellow Drill too as much as I like it, because I don't see any reason why Sonic's basic move set can't allow a player to drill on their own. Let Sonic be satisfying and powerful to move in a context devoid of Wisps first.
Sonic should not just be able to tunnel anywhere, characters are as much defined by what they can't do, and if you have Sonic that ability by default it would have massive design implications. Part of the fun of DRILL is that it gave you the opportunity to explore by breaking the games rules for what was possible with Sonic.
If you want a drill like character, make knuckles playable again. Sonic should equal pinball not a jack of all trades. There are ways that you can expand on his core mechanics with stepping into abilities that are better realized for with other characters. If he is going to step on those toes, they should be facsimiles through power ups imo.
After that, I'd make Wisps more permanent in the game world and able to be broadly used like the paint in Sticker Star/Color Splash: Allow Wisps to be used literally anywhere, even in wasteful contexts, but tie their use to a meter that drains as you do so. That way it allows a player the leeway to experiment and discover how the little guys work in the world. Third and most importantly, give them more work to do by designing for the environment and their abilities. Cyan Laser is a fucking laser. Instead of only allowing Sonic to ricochet off of floating crystals that are dissonant with the environment they exist in, let Cyan instead let him melt ice, take down Eggman's security systems, solve related laser and light puzzles, and blind bosses and large enemies as well as damaging others. For god's sake, do something creative and interesting with the little bastards. Like, have we learned nothing from Breath of the Wild?
I think the problems you have with wisps has more to do with how they have been realized through the game design ethos of 3D Sonic as a whole.
Wisps aren't perfect, but they can still get you halfway back to that more dynamic and exploratory feeling from the classic games in the very binary framework that is modern Sonic games.
It's assumed that M and A mean Metal and Amy, but that's the only asset that even hints at the idea, so it seems like a placeholder that never got any actual dev time towards it.
It isn't wholly true that the levels and mechanics weren't exploratory. Like I said before, tying them to your boost meter added decision making to your boost usage, and sometimes you might fuck your boost, realizing that if you had some at this section you can reach something, so you'd look for a boost capsule and backtrack.
Other times you might have taken a path and missed a wisp that you could clearly use at a point, so you might look around to try to find another one, or you might of missed it because it was on a rail you didn't choose in a split second. Then of course there are instances where the wisp became a skill challenge in itself and you messed up, maybe you went back to try again, or maybe you kept going, but on repeats it gave you choices, options, and a lot of paths not taken while you were also looking for the red rings.
And it wasn't even all that rare that there would be instances where the game gave you another optional instance past the obvious one for using a certain wisp.
To say that the game isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory is not true. In the first level alone they reward the player for exploring with DRILL by having alternate paths and red rings. They even reward you in smaller ways for your curiosity, like giving you a 1UP for tracing a path of circular rings with it.
There might be times when a wisp ability took you beyond a point of. No return unless you found another type, so you might search for it and use it to go back instead.
Note that I said "meaningfully exploratory," as in emotionally and psychologically satisfying, as in what Nintendo just did with BotW and Odyssey, as in not what Colors does.
Regardless, White Wisps functionally the same as rings, except they're a little more sparse. However, boost is always best used in straight lines, which incidentally is where the white wisp was pretty much always found, because Sonic Team can barely design puzzles that aren't immediately preceded by the answer. Figuring out when to use boost isn't all that satisfying because of how simultaneously overpowered and context-sensitive it is, but again figuring out optimal boost strategies was never the point of boost in the first place. The point of boost gameplay is to use it liberally to maintain top speed for as long as possible through twitch reflexes to avoid the obstacles during. Colors inherently misses the point by shoving the gameplay style and engine into amateur Mario level design instead.
That contrast in turn further devalues whatever exploration exists in Colors at all. It's got boost gameplay, meaning the goal the controls imply is to get to the end as quickly and cleanly as possible, meaning much of the stuff or extra areas you can possibly find in the levels either doesn't matter in the long run or inherently slows you down to the point that it's antithetical to how Sonic controls to go out of your way to find them. But then because the designers really want you to use these damn Wisps in spite of that, the scoring system rewards you for simply activating them. You actually don't have to find anything with Drill to rack up a high score (not that there's anything particularly helpful in terms of immediate gameplay action to find in Colors, which is admittedly a problem many devs don't solve when shoving in collectables); all you have to do is spam using him in the ground for awhile, and you're on your way to an easy S Rank. There's a bunch of design disconnects all caused by shoving an inherently linear play style into a mediocre puzzle-y platformer stage design. It just doesn't work as well as it does in Unleashed and Gens where they at least know the linear play style is, surprisingly enough, best served by linear design.
By your definition how is boosting actually inmate to Sonic in any of the games you mentioned when they both rely on him acquiring an external resource to use the ability? Also there are paths in Sonic Colors that allow you to consistently boost if you want to, and levels that are made for speed
Also you clearly attempt to defend the scoring system in Generations and Unleashed by saying that the goal of those games are different than Colora but somehow that is a sin against Colors? This is a fallacy. That makes no sense, the point of each is different, Colors is just superior.
Colors gives the player an overall score based on evenly weighting your performance consistent with the design of the in game experience and it does so with greater transparency versus the shitty system in Unleashed and Generations that creates confusion between your grading and what you are rewarded for in game.
So I will argue that from a gameplay perspective that the scoring system in Generations and unleashed is garbage compared to Colors and Forces. The problem with a focus on just maintaining speed being the primary determine factor is that it does not communicate this aspect well to the player. Players are apparently 'rewarded' in game for getting a lot of rings through 1UPs as well as the tangible enjoyment of building that ring counter. They are suppose seek out those big juicy Red Rings, but in reality they are only punished for doing so in a way they can't even deduce at the time.
The game mechanics and experience communicate a false importance of different aspects only to have you then 'graded' by an obtuse scoring system that does not cleanly communicate why you were punished for seeking out red rings or stopping to get extra rings for a 1UP.
And if you 'get' the intent of the scoring system early on and adhere to it? more often than not that makes the levels in Generations more one dimensional as you miss secrets and alternate paths.
This dissonance is bad design, period.
I don't even need to make a somewhat flawed arguement about how the scoring system and approach taken in colors is more true to the values and scoring in the original games.
I will give you fair dues on noting that Sonic needs rings to boost, however I will say that it's gotdamn fucking stupid lore wise to make Sonic suddenly reliant on aliens he has never met before Colors to boost when the substance he was using to do so in the immediately preceding game is apparently so damn abundant that it exists on other planets in the galaxy. This is just straight up incompetent writing and design that shouldn't get a pass.
And what about the scoring system? It doesn't do anything in Colors except get you bragging rights. If it were tied to Super Sonic or an extra world a la SA2's Green Hill, that would be one thing. But the score has no real effect on your immediate experience with the game, so once again I rhetorically ask what the point is? Ultimately the scoring system has little to nothing to do with what I'm arguing anyway. I'm outlining the design purpose of the boost and saying why it works in Unleashed and Gens and why it doesn't in Colors, and that's all down to how Colors' level design simply doesn't accommodate it much- to the point that if you got rid of those sections you'd still be left with roughly the same game- which would honestly be fine with me if the rest of the game held up as a genuinely amazing platformer in its own right like its contemporaries Rayman and Donkey Kong, but it simply doesn't. It's a pretty brain-dead experience overall because Sonic Team just aren't that great at level design for whatever reason(s). You considering the lack of focus on boost a good thing (which, again, in an extremely vacuous context I don't really disagree with) doesn't really detract from my point in regards to Sonic Team's design intention with the boost in the first place. Like, if you hated the original Crash Bandicoot games because they're designed in all aspects to be linear, but preferred some hypothetical Crash sequel because it had a level design style that was more open even though it was paired with controls that weren't suited for it, it still wouldn't aid the argument that the latter game is better designed.
Wisps aren't perfect, but they can still get you halfway back to that more dynamic and exploratory feeling from the classic games in the very binary framework that is modern Sonic games.
What's going to get us back to the dynamism of the classic games is making a series of games with a robust physics engine and control scheme that supports greater variance in velocity and higher freedom of movement, not by tacking on millions of shitty power-ups to a gameplay style that was never meant to meaningfully imitate the classic games in the first place.
I see white wisps as a means to an end. There is no story implementation of them because their implementation is mechanical only. I am sure we all know Iizuka is infatuated with aliens but I think in this case they just wanted to pull back the boost gameplay to be in line with what Colors did, but in doing so they just took it in the most literal direction possible.
Honestly I think they missed out on a some serious potential with not bringing back the gems in Sonic Runners. Those did a good job at being something beyond rings that were fun to collect and potentially could have made the games feel more skillful while also toning down the amount of rings that show up everywhere. There is no reason for the player to have several hundreds of rings in a level that is about a minute long.
I think Sonic Forces is the last boost Sonic game but I expect wisps to return. They just really want levels to play out in a specific fashion and seem clueless that fans want to play more than just Sonic again. Sonic Team management is to blame for most of the issues but I think a lot of what people outside of Japan request is lost in translation or misinterpreted poorly, like how they keep hearing how much we want physics in the games and make it so that platforming feels like controlling a high speed boat in the air.
Honestly I think they missed out on a some serious potential with not bringing back the gems in Sonic Runners. Those did a good job at being something beyond rings that were fun to collect and potentially could have made the games feel more skillful while also toning down the amount of rings that show up everywhere.
I (thankfully) never played Sonic Runners. What did the Gems do? Just give points? Rings already give points, plus the a couple other benefits so that would make Gems pointless if that is the case.
Wisps were a clever way to add intrigue and replay value to levels on a shoestring budget that couldn't afford many level-specific gimmicks and lots of unique geometry.
The flagship titles should not need to rely on them for the same purposes.
I (thankfully) never played Sonic Runners. What did the Gems do? Just give points? Rings already give points, plus the a couple other benefits so that would make Gems pointless if that is the case.
They were for points yes, but their bonus would multiply depending on how many you collected and how fast you got them. After a period the bonus would slowly drain - think sort of like how the combo system in Devil May Cry works, I suppose.
They came in different colors and sizes which were all different point values and encouraged you to go in potentially trickier segments of the levels. Some were set up as images or messages to the player so in a way it would fit in better than the gaudy bottomless pit cation signs. I generally disagree with the speedrunny focus of the franchise as of late but I think these would work incredibly well with their current vision of the Sonic games and it just seems like a complete waste to drop them after one experimental game, but I guess Sonic Team has a history of that.
Also they were a lot easier on the ears to collect in bulk than rings.
Note that I said "meaningfully exploratory," as in emotionally and psychologically satisfying, as in what Nintendo just did with BotW and Odyssey, as in not what Colors does.
Your original argument that I contested as stated has nothing to do with being as 'emotionally and psychologically' satisfying like what Nintendo is doing in BOTW/Mario Odyssey.
Your original statement that I contested was over meter being refilled by the white wisp being a mistake. I said I disagreed because it introduced more decision making. You responded with:
"I don't believe there was a "lot" of decision making added via the white Wisp because- like the rest of the Wisps- they're placed directly next to the obstacle they're designed around. On top of that, Wisps are generally one-time use and have no passive or secondary abilities, meaning there's no point in saving them for other parts of the level because the game simply isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory"
I have provided you countless examples of how all wisps, not just the white one tied to your boost meter, added some welcome decision making to the game even if they were not perfect. How there are routes in Colors to allow you to frequently use Boost and a lot of levels designed for speed.
Your response is to hold years old games with completely different design goals to the two most recent games from Nintendo, with Zelda taking inspiration from open world game design.
In addition to all of the circumstantial ways that wisps created decision making and exploration, I never brought up how Wisps are slowly unlocked throughout the course of the game, encouraging you to go back to back and explore new areas of and routes of previous stages with the new wisp abilities that you could see before, but not use in previous levels.
To say that the game isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory is a very hard claim to make. It encourages you to explore previous levels and makes a big deal about rewarding your curiosity.
BOTW and Odyssey didn't even come up until the tail end of your last post when you were talking about how you would hypothetically use wisps in your own Sonic game.
Regardless, White Wisps functionally the same as rings, except they're a little more sparse. However, boost is always best used in straight lines, which incidentally is where the white wisp was pretty much always found, because Sonic Team can barely design puzzles that aren't immediately preceded by the answer.
This is of course ignoring that you are overstating the scarcity of Boost meter acquisition since you also get meter from destroying enemies which are liberally placed.
And boost is not best used in a straight line, Boost is best used in Colors when you can anticipate that boosting off a ramp or jump will yield a higher path or reward. Unless you;re going for a speed run, and the game facilitates that style by generally allowing you to keep the boost party going through white wisps and enemy kills.
Figuring out when to use boost isn't all that satisfying because of how simultaneously overpowered and context-sensitive it is, but again figuring out optimal boost strategies was never the point of boost in the first place.The point of boost gameplay is to use it liberally to maintain top speed for as long as possible through twitch reflexes to avoid the obstacles during.
Colors doesn't miss the point of boost, it identified the pitfalls of the approach from Unleashed and addressed them through balance, mechanics, and adjusting the score system.
I've already gone into how just going for speed in even Generations, a game made for Unleashed style boost, makes the game less interesting. There's a reason why people have said that Boost game-play is played out. Colors at least tried to and arguably succeeded in giving the mechanic more depth and decision making.
No one was saying 'well I really did love how 2D Dimensional Boost was in Unleashed!'. People always had to argue in defense of a pretty boring reflex oriented mechanic that relied mostly of level memorization to succeed at.
Colors inherently misses the point by shoving the gameplay style and engine into amateur Mario level design instead. That contrast in turn further devalues whatever exploration exists in Colors at all. It's got boost gameplay, meaning the goal the controls imply is to get to the end as quickly and cleanly as possible
Sonic Colors does not and never communicates to the player that speed is the only important factor. This becomes obviously not true within the first few minutes of Tropical Resort Act 1 when they actively encourage you to smell the roses and explore. You can just keep going, or you can use that tasty drill wisp to go digging underground into the unknown.
The more you play Colors, the more it encourages exploration through giving you more avenues to explore.
You might go into Sonic Colors thinking it would be just another Sonic Unleashed, but the game quickly teaches you otherwise. A potential first impression from someone who didn't pay attention to any of Sonic Colors pre-release media or interviews doesn't hamstring the game once you are playing it.
meaning much of the stuff or extra areas you can possibly find in the levels either doesn't matter in the long run or inherently slows you down to the point that it's antithetical to how Sonic controls to go out of your way to find them.
If this was true then they would not have added the double jump to better facilitate platforming and exploration. I can't see how anything high concept in how Sonic controls is antithetical to the design goals of the game.
Saying that much of what you find doesn't matter in the long run is silly when the joy from exploration freedom is enough. There are no rewards in Colors that are greater than the ones they gave you in the classic games for exploration, but people still talk about how exploration is a pillar of classic Sonic design because those 'little things that don't matter in the long run' still leave and impression.
But then because the designers really want you to use these damn Wisps in spite of that, the scoring system rewards you for simply activating them. You actually don't have to find anything with Drill to rack up a high score (not that there's anything particularly helpful in terms of immediate gameplay action to find in Colors, which is admittedly a problem many devs don't solve when shoving in collectables); all you have to do is spam using him in the ground for awhile, and you're on your way to an easy S Rank. There's a bunch of design disconnects all caused by shoving an inherently linear play style into a mediocre puzzle-y platformer stage design. It just doesn't work as well as it does in Unleashed and Gens where they at least know the linear play style is, surprisingly enough, best served by linear design.
I never ever aid that Colors had a perfect scoring system, merely that it is leagues better than the terrible one from unleashed. And to be clear you have done nothing to defend the points I made as to why Unleashed and Generations have a terrible scoring system, merely attacks a superior system from some things it could improve on. This paragraph might as well read 'Scoring systems don't matter, so who cares', if that's your opinion then you could have left it at that.
Even if Colors used the same terrible system as Generations, it would still have the better scoring system since Colors has one that's interactive to gameplay and rewards you for messing it up with lives and coins.
I will give you fair dues on noting that Sonic needs rings to boost, however I will say that it's gotdamn fucking stupid lore wise to make Sonic suddenly reliant on aliens he has never met before Colors to boost when the substance he was using to do so in the immediately preceding game is apparently so damn abundant that it exists on other planets in the galaxy. This is just straight up incompetent writing and design that shouldn't get a pass.
Rush established that he didn't get Boost from Rings and instead got it from the mid air trick system yet you're fine with Unleashed changing that because....?
Let's go one step further:
Why are there rings anywhere? Why can Sonic only now boost from getting Rings? Seeing as Sonic has always gotten Rings and never before gotten a Boost system from them this change is so patently idiotic that it shouldn't get a pass.
I think you're making a massive deal out of this one mechanic from a video game about a bipedal hedgehog called Sonic because you have an axe to grind with this particular game.
And what about the scoring system? It doesn't do anything in Colors except get you bragging rights. If it were tied to Super Sonic or an extra world a la SA2's Green Hill, that would be one thing. But the score has no real effect on your immediate experience with the game, so once again I rhetorically ask what the point is? Ultimately the scoring system has little to nothing to do with what I'm arguing anyway.
1. Most Scoring systems are only about bragging rights.
2. Sonic Colors does tie your score to your immediate experience in the game: You actually get more rewards the better your score in the form of 1UPs and lot that gets dropped on the ground for you to scramble to pick up before the scene fades.
3. Generations and Unleashed do it worse and are just as guilty, or exclusively guilty of every single thing you brought up
I'm outlining the design purpose of the boost and saying why it works in Unleashed and Gens and why it doesn't in Colors, and that's all down to how Colors' level design simply doesn't accommodate it much- to the point that if you got rid of those sections you'd still be left with roughly the same game- which would honestly be fine with me if the rest of the game held up as a genuinely amazing platformer in its own right like its contemporaries Rayman and Donkey Kong, but it simply doesn't. It's a pretty brain-dead experience overall because Sonic Team just aren't that great at level design for whatever reason(s).
But you have failed to sufficiently demonstrate your premise.
This just flat out is not true. A lot of the game is playable for 'speed'. The very fact that you CAN S rank on speed, that you can choose to white wisp and bot bash your way to almost constant boost and ignore a ton of the side content in a level disproves you.
You considering the lack of focus on boost a good thing (which, again, in an extremely vacuous context I don't really disagree with) doesn't really detract from my point in regards to Sonic Team's design intention with the boost in the first place. Like, if you hated the original Crash Bandicoot games because they're designed in all aspects to be linear, but preferred some hypothetical Crash sequel because it had a level design style that was more open even though it was paired with controls that weren't suited for it, it still wouldn't aid the argument that the latter game is better designed.
Colors does not lack focus on boost, it merely does not focus on it almost to such a degree that it does not accommodate everything else, like Generations did. The only issue with Sonic in Colors, in terms of exploration, is that he's a little stiff in 2D sections. That is a small problem at best. That's not within the realm of saying that he 'isn't suited to' exploration. He runs he double jumps he has a ledge grab, he has a homing attack for quick traversal. That's what you need.
What's going to get us back to the dynamism of the classic games is making a series of games with a robust physics engine and control scheme that supports greater variance in velocity and higher freedom of movement, not by tacking on millions of shitty power-ups to a gameplay style that was never meant to meaningfully imitate the classic games in the first place.
People should probably stop raging on pretty powerup mechanics like wisps lest Sega Team think 'gee they really hate power-ups' and instead rail harder against the overly linear level design and lack of an acceptable physics system. A lot of times people just say 'wisps suck'. Even flipping Forces, bad as it is, would still be a worse game without that shallow form of them.
When it comes to defending whatever, the scoring system, exploration, boost, it feels like you talk past my points and don't defend your own to instead nitpick small portions of what Colors still does better than Generations and Unleashed.
Also please do no take my words as derisive, I just like to argue about meaningless topics. :)
Your original argument that I contested as stated has nothing to do with being as 'emotionally and psychologically' satisfying like what Nintendo is doing in BOTW/Mario Odyssey.
Your original statement that I contested was over meter being refilled by the white wisp being a mistake. I said I disagreed because it introduced more decision making. You responded with:
"I don't believe there was a "lot" of decision making added via the white Wisp because- like the rest of the Wisps- they're placed directly next to the obstacle they're designed around. On top of that, Wisps are generally one-time use and have no passive or secondary abilities, meaning there's no point in saving them for other parts of the level because the game simply isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory"
I have provided you countless examples of how all wisps, not just the white one tied to your boost meter, added some welcome decision making to the game even if they were not perfect. How there are routes in Colors to allow you to frequently use Boost and a lot of levels designed for speed.
Your response is to hold years old games with completely different design goals to the two most recent games from Nintendo, with Zelda taking inspiration from open world game design.
In addition to all of the circumstantial ways that wisps created decision making and exploration, I never brought up how Wisps are slowly unlocked throughout the course of the game, encouraging you to go back to back and explore new areas of and routes of previous stages with the new wisp abilities that you could see before, but not use in previous levels.
"Emotionally and psychologically satisfying" are just adjectives to my argument, not the arguments themselves.
And aside from the fact that I noted Colors' competing contemporaries at least once in this thread (Rayman and Donkey Kong), let's also not act like age differences between games suddenly make comparisons unfair if we're fine with making positive comparisons to the classic games of which the 3D games inevitably rank worse in comparison to.
Overall though, I'm not going to get dragged into a major game of gish galloping and quote dissection. I got enough of that shit on other Sonic sites. I'll address the major point:
To say that the game isn't designed to be meaningfully exploratory is a very hard claim to make. It encourages you to explore previous levels and makes a big deal about rewarding your curiosity.
Meaningful exploration in games to me isn't simply a matter of how much backtracking is allowed or how many alternate paths exist. It's a matter of how new information is discovered and the value of that information on the gameplay itself. If information is discovered in ways that are repetitive, obvious, and banal, and/or if the information gathered is of low or no value to the player, then the exploration isn't meaningful. There are very few concrete examples of exploration in Colors that I would hold up as anything particularly engaging, unique, after the first hour or so. And the reason I bring up BotW is because there isn't anything particularly revolutionary about its exploration either inasmuch as other games have done similar things before it and Colors' time (rather, the revolutionary thing about BotW as a whole is how all of its various systems work together in a single environment); it's just that the game doesn't hold your hand. For example, fire has a multitude of practical common sense effects on the environment, enemies, and traversal which aren't all immediately telegraphed to the player once they stumble across some due to its placement or of limited implementation in the game world, meaning that experimentation is both necessary and objectively rewarding to the player. This isn't cutting edge game design theory; in fact, it's similar to how elemental shields in the classics work, just obviously more robust because of technological advancements since then. It's just that Sonic Team just isn't consistently capable of making games that assume you've got serious critical thinking skills for whatever reason.
Also, you're damn right I've got an axe to grind. Colors is an alright game that gets praised as one of the best Sonic games ever mainly because it wasn't as terrible as earlier efforts.
Sonic Forces is an incredibly weird and underrated game. After the (imo) superb Generations that rewarded great speedrunning skills with an incredibly replayable game, you'd think their next game would be awesome. Forces is just... odd. Everything is just okay and in many ways worse than the previous games, somehow, I don't get it. The graphics seem worse, the controls aren't as tight and are less reliable, the music is inconsistent (Albeit awesome at times), and it's just odd all around.
At least the story is whack as fuck and they don't even care! I love it, tbh, it's actually kind of cool to see characters like Shadow and Rogue properly characterized again. It's cheesy as hell but cool, I guess.
You don't get to claim a gishgallop because you can't counter very specific statements I made to very specific assertions you made and it doesn't make you right. I'm willing to go into detail to a degree of referencing a specific part of a level with a link when you say something that is wrong, I'm sorry if this annoys you.
Ok then. Your own personal measure of what is 'emotionally and psychologically satisfying' has no baring on if the game is constructed in a way to be exploratory within its framework. You have no ground to successfully argue that Colors wasn't built to be exploratory when it specifically encourages exploration and unlocking alternate route and rewards via going back over old levels with new abilities just because it doesn't measure up to you to a revolutionary open world title.
And aside from the fact that I noted Colors' competing contemporaries at least once in this thread (Rayman and Donkey Kong), let's also not act like age differences between games suddenly make comparisons unfair if we're fine with making positive comparisons to the classic games of which the 3D games inevitably rank worse in comparison to.
Absolutely. That would by why I brought up design goals. Sonic wasn't aiming to take design templates from Mario 64 (in the case of Odyssey) or open world game design (in reference to BOTW).
But this also does nothing to invalidate comparative judgement between those games, namely Unleashed/Generations and Colors. Whatever Rayman is doing isn't really relevant to comparing these Sonic games comparative implementation.
Overall though, I'm not going to get dragged into a major game of gish galloping and quote dissection. I got enough of that shit on other Sonic sites. I'll address the major point:
That's a fun way of saying 'ignore detailed comparison between the scoring and boost systems once you had nothing left but *oh gee man, but Unleashed wanted you to go fast!* which has nothing to do with if these systems are good or well implemented or not.
I've made very specific arguments about how the scoring system in Unleashed and Generations has clear dissonance to the in game experience and how changes to the boost system in Colors is in direct response to criticisms of the implementation Unleashed. Below you don't address the major points I have made. This exchange was founded on a debate to do with mechanics.
Meaningful exploration in games to me isn't simply a matter of how much backtracking is allowed or how many alternate paths exist.
It almost sounds like you are now back tracking on the adjectives being auxiliary to your actual argument.
It's a matter of how new information is discovered and the value of that information on the gameplay itself. If information is discovered in ways that are repetitive, obvious, and banal, and/or if the information gathered is of low or no value to the player, then the exploration isn't meaningful. There are very few concrete examples of exploration in Colors that I would hold up as anything particularly engaging, unique, after the first hour or so. And the reason I bring up BotW is because there isn't anything particularly revolutionary about its exploration either inasmuch as other games have done similar things before it and Colors' time (rather, the revolutionary thing about BotW as a whole is how all of its various systems work together in a single environment); it's just that the game doesn't hold your hand. For example, fire has a multitude of practical common sense effects on the environment, enemies, and traversal which aren't all immediately telegraphed to the player once they stumble across some due to its placement or of limited implementation in the game world, meaning that experimentation is both necessary and objectively rewarding to the player. This isn't cutting edge game design theory; in fact, it's similar to how elemental shields in the classics work, just obviously more robust because of technological advancements since then. It's just that Sonic Team just isn't consistently capable of making games that assume you've got serious critical thinking skills for whatever reason.
This would be relevant if we were having a conversation about how Colors and Generations compare to other radically different games, but the conversation basically devolved into you saying 'fuck whatever Sonic Colors different than Unleashed because deviates, but if it arguably does anything better fuck it twice because it's not exploratory like Breathe of the Wild, a game that reinvented the open world genre.
Also, you're damn right I've got an axe to grind. Colors is an alright game that gets praised as one of the best Sonic games ever mainly because it wasn't as terrible as earlier efforts.
