I think the biggest problem of Sky Road are Lost World's controls. Jump feels so off. Nothing wrong with the level layout IMO,. Final boss within the level was a mistake though
Lost World honestly does a lot right, even if the final execution is... lacking. New, somewhat interesting stage gimmicks in almost every level, clean design, 3D controls that are pretty decent...I honestly think Lost World is superior to the boost games. If they fix the controls the upside is huge.
Boost gameplay is clearly way too difficult and expensive to be done right
Boost gameplay is clearly way too difficult and expensive to be done right
Occams Razor I guess. They constantly pad out boost games with 2d sections and due to sonics speed they would have to create a lot of content.I see a lot of people say this but do we have evidence on how expensive boost gameplay really is to make it work well?
Yeah, but Colors is good because it's gimmick was the wisp. Using fake classic sonic as future gimmicks was much worse in generations and forces because they also brought back wisp lolThat's why I like Colors so much compared to the others. The level gimmicks via Wisps were well thought out - Drill, Laser, Hover, Spikes were all real fun. Cube could go away though.
Lost World is just a fucking complicated game. The different speeds you have to deal with, the whole parkour system is stressful and not fun to deal with, and all the new wisps were 100 times worse, especially with the original Wii U functionality requirement.
Surprised they aint drop a Sonic Superbowl trailer. Has to be coming soon
Im not sure if I consider Mania multi styles. The characters have different powers but the play isnt that much different. The characters have different powers in sonic heroes and you said that was 1 style.Been wanting to do this for some time, so I went and looked at the mainline Sonic games from Adventure 1 onwards and the styles of gameplay they offered
1998/1999- Sonic Adventure: multi characters, multi-styles
2001- Sonic Adventure 2: multi-characters, 3 primary styles
2003- Sonic Heroes: multi-character, 1 style (style switching is on the fly by touch of a button, this isn't like SA2 where each character would use their one style for their route)
2006- Sonic (2006) : multi-character, multi-styles(?) [I never played it so I don't know]
2008- Sonic Unleashed: Solo, 2 styles
2010- Sonic Portable Ep. 1: Solo
2010- Sonic Colours: Solo
2011- Sonic Generations: 2 characters, 2 styles
2012- Sonic Portable Ep. 2: Solo (Tails can't be played solo, as such you control Sonic, Player 2 can control Tails, and the game gives you a set of abilities to use with them)
2013- Sonic Lost World: Solo
2017- Sonic Mania: Multi-characters, multi-styles
2017- Sonic Forces: 3 characters, multi-styles (tech, the Buddy you can create is based off modern Sonic but with tweaked paramaters etc.)
Bonus-
2005- Shadow the Hedgehog: Solo
This does not take into consideration the 2 Wii games, and any party or series-centric racing games. So for near a decade, the 3D Sonic games aimed to offer various gameplay styles via different characters, in the last decade they opted for a simple gameplay variance (eg Sonic Unleashed)
Ah I see what you mean. In Mania the stages are mostly the same (sans the Knuckles exclusive ones), but each character has their own unique skill; Drop Dash, Gliding, Hovering, etc.Im not sure if I consider Mania multi styles. The characters have different powers but the play isnt that much different. The characters have different powers in sonic heroes and you said that was 1 style.
Hmmm I dunno, to me extra characters is OK even if it is a case of playing as a different colour, but you could give them simple unique quirks.That said I think the next game should put multiple hedgehogs/sonic clones. (Like Shadow DLC in forces)
Having Tails and Knuckles playable would be nice but I want tight level design and accounting for climbing and flying opens things up way too much.
chance that there's no more comic honey the cat
Ian think she's considered a classic character now and she can't show up.
Just speculation on his part though
lol, The Classic Modern split is just dumb.chance that there's no more comic honey the cat
Ian think she's considered a classic character now and she can't show up.
Just speculation on his part though
Wouldnt shock me if instead of making mania 2, they made forces 2 but ths time they went mania style with the classic gameplay
Who the hell keeps making these decisions? She was an unfinished prototype character only discovered by the Sonic hacking community, and didn't appear in anything official until the end of 2012, which, by my watch, is pretty dang "modern".
Besides, splitting the characters up like this is damned nonsense. If there's legal issues, that's one thing. But if they're just making arbitrary decisions about who can appear with short spines Sonic and who can appear with long spines Sonic, their priorities are seriously screwed up. Start putting out decent games before you start obsessing whether Heavy Magician can appear with Sonic That Can Grind or not.
Wouldnt shock me if instead of making mania 2, they made forces 2 but ths time they went mania style with the classic gameplay
I'd be OK with that. I played through most of the game way back when and I gotta be honest I don't think it's bad at all but I'm also approaching it from more of a hardcore fastrunning perspective.
I concur.
I'd be OK with that. I played through most of the game way back when and I gotta be honest I don't think it's bad at all but I'm also approaching it from more of a hardcore fastrunning perspective.
My problem with forces is that they had a template on how to do it with generations and still flopped.
My problem with forces is that they had a template on how to do it with generations and still flopped.
All the other sonic games had some excuse. New gameplay style, hardware launch, rushed, bugs. etc. But forces doesnt really have that to our knowledge. I never cared for boost gameplay, but I accepted they finally had a formula that worked so they can continue it in their best interest. Turns out that wasnt true.
Will be really interesting to see if they managed to kill off boost and 3d classic (this shouldnt return either way) just like Sonic 06 killed of "adventure" style
Perfect description lol.I would argue that forces is actually bad but it occurs so quickly that a bunch of people pass it off as mediocre.
Well Rumor is , it was supposed to be an entirely different game there's still some dialog in there that suggests this. Forces being a game made of salvaged parts of a game that they couldn't make and decided to ship makes sense to me
Perfect description lol.
This is an interesting theory. Wasnt it made in hedgehog 2 engine though? Which is apparently the lost world engine modified or something.
So I look at it like this. On some level I sort of respect keeping the brands separate, they are two separate products and trying to make them distinct on some level so they can offer different things is something on a hypothetical level , I can understand as a strat.
That said on the other end of this, it is also very stupid. Because well, not only could they be an opportunity to introduce characters from the past who never got an official in game chance to be updated, it could be used to retrofy popular characters. A hypothetical sonic mania with a classic blaze or shadow in it? Pretty tight and a free excuse to make new toys. The " Adventure " retro line of toys? Free money
So I get it, but its also kind of dumb. But hey ain't nothing I an do, and this is all speculation on flynn's part. He could ask in a year and it would be fine
Them not knowing how to use generations engine/code makes sense.There's a bunch of engine stuff about this game I don't know is true or not so i'm not gonna speak on it. There was some skuddlebutt about no one there knowing how to use generations's engine. The only reason I mention the different game thing is that I heard the shit from a bunch of places, one of those being the guy who leaked the game before the game was announced. Given that, the alleged leaked script and some other people speaking on it and just the sheer unfinished of the entire thing im inclined to believe that.
But hey I could be wrong, maybe they thought this was their magnum opus
I do understand it to some extent, this is a concern a lot of primarily Japanese developers have when crossing over properties. It's why Layton and Wright had to be transported to another world separate from either of them. It's why Sonic and Mario still primarily only meet in thr Olympics. (Sonic's just sort of "there" in Smash.)
But when you're going at it with that fine-toothed a comb, when there are far bigger fish to fry, it is ridiculous, and really encourages me to think that the people with their hands tightest on Sonic right now need to be pried off it, and let someone else drive for a while.
Them not knowing how to use generations engine/code makes sense.
Of course we may just be making excuses for them as we usually do. It's possible the people there just arent good at making games/levels.
- Man, the final boss sucks. Looks like the Death Egg Robot fused with the Egg Emperor, stole a few of the Nega Wisp Armor's moves, and didn't learn how to do anything else. Not even a climactic final attack. Colors remains the only good iteration of this fight.
- Almost every boss kind of sucks, really. There's a lot of them and they've all got unique mechanics going on, and I like how they just show up at the end of a level, but they also all wind up going down in two hits because the homing attack's weird charge mechanic is busted.
- I don't know why the homing attack has a charge mechanic. The multi-lock feature is cool, but the single target charge up has almost no uses outside of bosses. The homing kick is there to mix up how you attack enemies, but it's not obvious when you need to use it. Kicking one badnik into another and taking out a whole line at once is satisfying, though. Feels like they could've rolled that into the homing attack somehow and simplified the system without losing anything important.
- Oh my gosh the badniks. Not only are they outright called badniks and have little animals inside, which is a bit of series flavor I always miss when it's not present, every last one of them has an adorable new model that looks great and animates well and I love them to bits. And there's so many of them. Not just your standard Motobug/Crabmeat/Buzzbomber/Masher (Chopper? Jaws? I can never keep all the fish straight)/Caterkiller/something else from Sonic 1 lineup, but there's a ton of stuff from 2 and 3&K running around here that even Mania didn't touch and I never expected to see again, and a few new ones on top of that. And they all do different things, injecting some long-needed diversity and threat into 3D Sonic's enemy lineup. They put a ton of time and thought into these, it's absolutely ridiculous and in contention for the most diverse lineup of any game in the series.
- They swiped an awful lot from Mario—definitely a little too much in places, we really didn't need this bouncy cloud mechanic to show up so much, and I could've lived without the DKC minecart stages too—but it means the level conceits are constantly changing up in the same way that Nintendo puts so much time into. Coming off of Forces which had virtually no unique level gimmicks at all, it's night and day. Even when they're falling back to 2D, there's some new idea always coming into play. It's wonderful. I haven't felt like this about mainline Sonic Team output since SA1. Even when it's frustrating because some section is unpolished or generally ill-conceived (looking at you, Katamari level, although I still liked you more than Crazy Gadget), it's never tedious in the way I was worried the slower pacing might cause.
- Yeah the controls are super weird. They finally remembered how to implement momentum, and got there by completely sacrificing acceleration. So on one hand we're stuck with a couple of run buttons to shift gears, but on the other hand I can confidently do precision platforming even in 3D, which feels good enough to override the weirdness for me. It's definitely not fast—I think you could get there with liberal use of the spindash and a good amount of foreknowledge of level layouts, but it's the sort of thing where it's going to take time and practice like the classic games, not the instant gratification of boost.
- Parkour is wonky, never really does feel good, and is never explained properly either. Mapping it to the run button means it kicks in when you want it to, but also in a ton of situations where you don't want it to, and the whole system is stiff and kinda misses the point of parkour being about smoothly navigating diverse terrain. Horizontal wallrunning is the only time you maintain momentum and it's still finicky, especially when you start trying to walljump. Right idea, needed more time in the oven.
- The wisps are... here. Every stage has zero to one of them, they're almost completely optional outside of a tiny handful of red rings, and almost all they do is let you skip some platforming. There's so many of the things now that they're practically unique level gimmicks, but I'd rather just mess around with the parkour. Drill is still fun, but it's mandatory when it shows up anyway, so there's none of that "oh the stage is actually twice as big" feeling from Colors.
- So the level design is slow-paced and a bit janky at the best of times... and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. It's not at all the thrill ride that Unleashed et. al. are (outside of thecoinring heaven sequences which I enjoy while they last), but it tickles the same fun center for me that S3K and other games with sprawling, wide-open levels do. They're satisfyingly big (again, coming off of Forces, breath of fresh air) and give me plenty of freedom to choose my own way and futz around and see what all's tucked away in the corners, just out of sight. I enjoyed wandering around them so much that I collected all the red rings as I went through the game. And since that unlocked Super Sonic, I went back and dicked around with him after the fact because being constantly invincible matters again, and he's got a soft boost and some other contextual advantages that made it worthwhile.
- Also, for all that there's a lot of 2D segments, almost none of it is the obviously blocky "my first custom level" stuff they usually do to pad out the level count. It's nice.
- The writing's dumb. The broad idea is cool, but the Deadly Six are all cardboard cutouts and they skip over all the setup that would get the player invested in the first place. There's a constant parade of cutscenes such that the story is at least coherent, but the tone is all over the place, so one level you get a twenty second scene to deliver a corny joke and the next you get a twenty second scene about Eggman saving Tails' life or Sonic beating himself up for being too slow and then it's right back to the bots doing another comedy bit. There's no pacing in any sense of the word. Some of the dialogue's not bad? Eggman's got a degree of real menace from time to time which I like, but it's offset by Sonic and Tails being constantly insufferable. At least the bots are fun, as ever.
- There was something here. They really tried this time. It's rushed in the end, as these things almost always are, but there's a lot of heart and pride in this game that comes through. I wish we'd seen a sequel, but it's forever going to be this quirky one-off now, a project that reached for the stars and didn't quite make it, just like its home platform. And they went on to make Forces instead, cripes.
Sonic Mania 2 & Honey
This honestly kinda makes me want to give Lost World another whirl.I just played Lost World for the first time about a month ago immediately after going through Forces for the first time as well, and hammered out a bunch of thoughts about it in a private chat which I'll go ahead and copy here, since the subject's come up.
tl;dr it's a janky and obviously unfinished game that had a lot of love and ambition poured into it, which I found incredibly refreshing coming hot off the heels of Forces having no ambition whatsoever. Wish it had gotten a little more time to cook and wasn't shackled to a dead platform.
It is on sale on steam atm if ur intetested.This honestly kinda makes me want to give Lost World another whirl.
I wonder how much used Wii Us cost these days
This honestly kinda makes me want to give Lost World another whirl.
I wonder how much used Wii Us cost these days
My PC is ass and likely couldn't run it, but upgrading it (or just getting a new one altogether) probably makes more financial sense than rebuying a Wii U, now that I think about it.It is on sale on steam atm if ur intetested.
I am still waiting for the dang thing to hit $5
My PC is ass and likely couldn't run it, but upgrading it (or just getting a new one altogether) probably makes more financial sense than rebuying a Wii U, now that I think about it.
Plus u can mod it :pMy PC is ass and likely couldn't run it, but upgrading it (or just getting a new one altogether) probably makes more financial sense than rebuying a Wii U, now that I think about it.