Tables of Contents for the Summer of Sonic;
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| Sonic the Hedgehog |
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| Sonic 2 |
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| Sonic 3 & Knuckles |
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| Sonic CD |
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| Sonic 4 E1 |
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| Sonic Heroes |
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| Sonic Adventure 2 |
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| Sonic ATS |
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| Sonic Lost World |
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| Sonic 4 E2 |
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| Sonic Generations |
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| Unleashed + Dolphin Colors |
Favorite Game: Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
S3&K retains its title after all these years on the back of its clean gameplay, satisfying length and excellent presentation. The game still looks good to me, the music still sounds great, basically it's still quite a lot of fun to play. I didn't go into this expecting this to change, though I was worried the game wouldn't live up to my nostalgia.
But you know what? It's still solid all these years later. The TV 'curving' that the steam hub does really adds to the nostalgia as well.
Favorite modern Game: Sonic Generations.
And no, I don't mean it's my favorite recent game because of the 2d stuff. The perfect convergence of level variety, reward cycle and sense of humor just makes the 3d stuff a blast to play. This is the blueprint they should be using for current Sonic games, as it manages to make 3d Sonic really fun and rewarding.
So of course the next two games have nothing to do with it and we have to wait six years for a follow up to a game that sold 4 million copies. I do not understand Sonic Team.
Games worth playing in the Sonic series that I covered: All the classics, Sonic CD definitely, Generations and Colours are all solid to outstanding games. Sega needs to HD remake Sonic Heroes; there's a core of an excellent game there. Stick it in the Hedgehog Engine and maybe make the levels a bit less easy to fall off and it'll handily recoup its investment.
It's also probably the best game you can actually play as Shadow in, at least to me.
I really wish they could port Colours to PC as well. The game just isn't as fun with Dolphin as I think it would be.
Games I was disappointed in: Mostly just Sonic Lost World. I thought it would be better. It wasn't. I wasn't too shocked at disliking SA2, except for the motion sickness in the Knuckles levels. It's been a while since I've felt that. SA2 is a product of trying to build something in a 3d world that doesn't necessarily want to be.
I think it's a bad game but I also think it's an incredibly difficult game to make. I get that a lot of people like it, too, but it's still from my perspective an extremely difficult game to recommend.
Three things I wish Sonic Team would learn:
Number one, in no uncertain terms, is stop it stupid with all the damn bottomless pits. In playing 3d Sonics, you die more often than you die playing games from the 90s like 2d Sonics, or Mario, or even games imitating 2d platformers like Odallus the Dark Call or Shovel Knight. It's completely it's own thing, and it's baffling. It's almost ironic - You look at Classic 2d Sonic and it's almost jarring compared to modern platformers. You fall down and it's just another path.
What's the appeal of the new standard? It doesn't add anything to the game. Even the silliness of Sonic Lost World is sullied with randomly hurling Sonic off a cliff all the time, and this wasn't really part of early Sonic. It's completely ass backwards design: Sonic is difficult to control in 3d, so stop punishing the player over and over for no reason. It doesn't "add tension" or make the game fun, it makes it more boring as you flip back to a checkpoint or re-do a zone.
You can do goes fast and barely under control without doing pits and tiny platforms. Most platformers don't have bottomless pits under nearly every platforming section. Platformers like, you know, the entire 16-bit Sonic collection? The best selling Sonic games?
And to add to that: Stop killing the player so handily. The games have a serious issue with rings being plentiful and making you nearly immune, so stuff just bags on you nonstop. Make rings less common, make enemies more consistent, make dying to random garbage less common. Sonic Lost World brings this to the maximal, with enemies I seriously can't figure out how to damage crowding the screen.
You are not making the Dark Souls of platformers. No one is raving online about the sloppy mess of difficulty that is 3d Sonic games. Maybe people don't want to admit it, but after two decades, "hurls Sonic off a cliff" loses its appeal. And by that I mean it never had any appeal at all. There's a reason racing games don't have cliffs to drive over or have the car explode every time you so much as touch a wall.
Number two, lay back on the gimmicks. Even in S3&K the gimmicks were getting out of control, and they continue to crowd out the core gameplay. I swear, in S3&K the game is like 75% core gameplay, 10% dying, 15% gimmicks. By Sonic Lost World I'd be hard pressed to even tell you what core gameplay even is. It's all dying to bottomless pits and gimmicks. There's no confidence in the core game to be fun. I can forgive Sonic Heroes and Colours for being good games, and I like those gimmicks, but stuff like forcing the Wisps into SLW is just baffling.
And to extend to that... Make a Sonic series again. Make a good game, then make another good game in that series. Make a Sonic Colours, then a Sonic Colours 2. When people look at the Sonic brand, it's a mess. What does it even mean? Does Sonic mean anything? No. A big part of why Sonic 1-3 holds such a high place in people's hearts it is represents an era. It's something you can argue over, which do you like better, 2 or 3? And then you say "but they were all good" and everyone who likes Sonic nods sagely. They need to install a meaning to the brand. Even if it's for a new generation, even if I don't like it, make a game and build from there. The hedgehog engine is fantastic, although maybe it's super hard to code? It feels like no, given the Unleashed mod.
Making one-ofs make Sonic feel like he's perpetually locked in spin-off mode.
Number three, and this ties to both points above but it's worth repeating - have some damn confidence in your gameplay for once. Make a good game, it's good, say it's good and make another one. Sonic is 25 years old, he's gotten his fasters degree, he's stuck it out. The number of surviving 90s mascots is grim, even from far more successful companies.
People like Sonic, and I think sometimes Sonic Team doesn't like Sonic. If Sonic Mania is good, and I feel like it will be, then maybe it's because the people behind it like Sonic. Let them like Sonic, as Sonic, doing Sonic things.
Sega has a good attitude
I played After the Sequel and Sonic CD, which are - more or less - varying degrees of fan involved, and Sonic Mania is coming up. In the same timespan I was playing those Nintendo fired off cease and desist letters for two fangames and Warner Brothers submitted a piracy report for their own website.
I'm not saying Sega has never done anything wrong, but the Sonic official twitter is run by a fan who makes sassy posts about chili dogs.
An Epilogue!?
I'm going to play Freedom Planet next, which is vaguely a Sonic fan game. I plan on buying Sonic Mania day 1 on Steam, assuming it's a reasonable price ($30 CDN or less) and that's actually not that far off. I might buy the collector's edition the Sonic twitter (https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog) hinted at even.
Closing Remark
I like Sonic games after all this time. I don't think every game I reviewed was good, but you know what? I still had fun with all of them, just sometimes not enough fun to overcome the frustration.
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