it was never good.
There's a distaste the broader culture develops around a property when they get the feeling that it has a fan-base bigger than what the quality of the thing warrant (see: twilight). If there's a franchise that has a massive, incredibly rabid fan-base but the entries in that franchise are all mediocre at best the go-to line is "that franchise should just get back to when it was good". And I'm here to spoil for you why Sonic doesn't get back to when it was good.
The problem is it was never good.
People aren't fans of Sonic bc the games were good. Most people who are fans of Sonic never played a Sonic game they liked, or even played one at all. They're fans bc of its marketing.
A 15 year old in 2009 wasn't posting OC bc the old games were good -- they'd never played the old games; they had never even seen an NES. They were posting OC bc before they had a PC with MS paint, their parents bought them coloring books & they spent their free time before they had a PC making Sonic OC on Sonic coloring books.
The games were never good to begin with tho. All of the best Sonic games of all time had exactly 1 good level each. Sega spent an obscene amount of time & energy marketing the franchise -- they even went so far as to collaborate with Michael Jackson in several ways (the character is partially based on him), but in terms of actually making the games they only put in the time & effort of making 1 good level for each game, made it the first level which everyone would play the most bc the game would kick you back to the main menu when you ran out of lives and then just shipped it.
TLDR; the games were never good, Sonic only had its fandom bc of the coloring books, there is no golden age of "Good Sonic Games" to go back to & if you've spent your whole life thinking or mis-remembering that there was you have been fooled by a marketing ploy.
I'm not even a sonic fan and I know this doesn't hold water. People do genuinely love these games. You can say it's based in nostalgia, or you can point out that different people think whichever one they played as a kid was the peak of the franchise, or make a case that it's not "organic" success (as if such a category even makes sense in the capitalist cultural marketplace), but it's completely wrong to say that fans of the series have never actually played the games.
This smells a lot to me like /v/'s attitude of "I don't enjoy this game, and it's literally incomprehensible that anyone has different tastes from my own, so they must all be lying to me and to themselves."
it also never came out on NES, so im guessing OP wasnt around when it was first released. probably thinks the 90s where one big vaporwave pepsi ad too
I hate/love it. Sprites from Mario Bros 2, very controversial material here!
i actually really like the first 3 sonic games & have defended them in these comments lol but most ppl posting OC on deviantart when they were tweens had never played the original 3 that everyone says were the only good ones bc they came out b4 they were born.
I think there's definitely a second wave of fans rooted more in the Sonic Adventure series than the 2D platformers.
I played the original on the Genesis even though it came out before I was born. I grew up poor and there was no chance of getting the latest console or games, but I was given it by a relative who didn't want it anymore.
Why wouldn't they have played them? Emulators have been around forever, and the games have been rereleased a zillion times. Just because they weren't born early enough to have played the original release doesn't diminish their fandom.
bc they werent old enough to have played Sonic when it came out on the NES in 1983
NESticle came out in 1997 though, so the only people who couldn't play Sonic when they were growing up are millennials from 1984-1996
I was just a bit older than that at the time and my youngest days were filled with playing sonic on my nes smh
I was just joshin’ friend. But I really did play the four genesis games a lot when I was a wean
SA soundtrack had some bangers tho
Sonic has a lot of really good soundtracks like sonic R is one of the worst games i've ever played but the soundtrack is just BANGERS
Sonic 3 plugged into S&K is the pinnacle of gaming and I will never recapture the joy of having 3 things to blow on at once
I agree with all of this except, I think adventure 2 is overrated af. I know I’m the only person in the world that feels this way, but I liked 1 more tbh :/
The only good parts of Adventure 2 are chao garden and the soundtrack to the first level.
What about the Knuckles and Rouge levels? I remember those being super boring.
At long last, the annoying Sonic kid from my elementary school who lied about everything gets BTFO. Fuck you Cristoph, you probably-weird-home-life-having asshole.
I've never played a sonic game I'm just here to watch people fight :meow-coffee:
I think that people remember the amazing parts of the stages while forgetting the more platforming aspect of Sonic. Sonic, had good moments. But a significant portion of the game was devoted to waiting and precise puzzle jumping that I personally didn’t like.
This is exactly why the 3d games implemented the homing attack/aerial dash. The issue with the platforming of the old Sonic games is that Sonic has a big aerial jump but no horizontal acceleration when jumping, the aerial dash gives him that horizontal acceleration and improves the platforming tremendously when you want keep it a fluid constantly moving thing.
I disagree with OP that there are no good Sonic games. I enjoyed Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 tremendously, I don't really enjoy the 2d titles.
The jump>dash aspect also greatly improves on the slow startup of spindashing. Just get straight into it.
Let's make a 2D sidescrolling game were the objective is to build up speed and race through the level! What do you mean, "they won't be able to see anything"? You just run fast and hope spikes don't appear from out of frame to instantly kill you!
this particular complaint is really common but is actually kind of incorrect. It would be bad design for a game meant to be beaten in a single run, but sonic was never meant to be beaten in a single run. If you play a remake of Sonic with saves where losing sends you back to the start of the level you lost on you are actually being wronged by the version you're playing & not the game's design itself; the reason they designed a game about speed to have obstacles that come at you from off-screen too fast for you to react to is bc ur meant to play them slowly to start with, get as far into the game as you can, lose & get sent back to the first level and then replay the whole game a little faster than last time. In games meant to be beaten on the first try, the power fantasy of the game (like Batman being able to beat up thugs without a scratch in Arkhum Asylum) is a given. In games where you're meant to lose (like Dark Souls) the power fantasy is earned by the player by mastering it. Mario is the former, Sonic is the latter. People forget this but Sonic was originally a roguelike
People forget this but Sonic was originally a roguelike
No, it most definitely was not ever a roguelike.
u were meant to have all ur progress hard-reset every time u lost & kicked back to the start to re-play the parts of the game u beat before, getting better & better at the earlier levels of the game until you get good enough at a later part to make it further. Kind of a roguelike. I'd say it's not a dungeoncrawler roguelike, but it also kind of is that too
Okay, I see. I consider procedural generation of levels to be a defining feature of roguelikes, which Sonic certainly didn't have. But for the aspects you mention, yes, it fits the bill.
expanding brain meme: nethack is a roguelike -> binding of isaac is a roguelike -> dead cells is a roguelike -> sonic the hedgehog is a roguelike
Mario is meant to be beaten on the first try
why do i keep losing on world 5 of SMB2 then, smh
You're supposed to give the controller to your older brother for that one.
This is true, and it highlights the core problems with the 3d games. Speed in the original games wasn't a constant, it was a reward for skilled play. You went fast only when you knew what you were doing.
The 3d games treat speed as a core feature at all levels of play, and that's why most of them were pretty bad until they finally figured out how to sort of make that work in Generations.
yeah it turns out that what specifically doesnt work about Sonic in 3d is that a facing-forward perspective lets you see the obstacles ahead of time. It sounds like its what the series always needed, it lets the player go faster, but it removes the core challenge of the original games by just letting the player see the obstacles way ahead of time
Yep, and that's why the 3d levels in Generations are just roller coaster rides
Sonic was always the product of focus groups, he was literally invented specifically to fill a perceived marketing void in competing with Nintendo. Mario came from somewhere; he had some flicker of human inspiration behind him back in 1981. Even the 16-bit Sonic games don't really hold up that well.
unironically the greatest troll posted on this website, ign/10 👏👏
my only real complaint about the sonic games is how hard it is to actually go fast. you can't see very far ahead in a 2D platformer, so you just keep bumping into shit
its made that way on purpose, ur supposed to go thru lvl 1 really slowly, then run out of lives on level 2 & have to redo level 1 but slightly faster until you beat level 2 very slowly, then run out of lives on level 3 & repeat the process but improve on level 2 too, until ur speedrunning level 1, then speedrunning level 2. The format doesnt work with save games, & a lot of modern versions shoe-horn in save games bc theyre standard without thought of how that affects the metastructure of the game. Its a bad game on a single playthru for sure
Your analysis doesn't stand up to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which had saves. Restarting the game when you ran out of lives was the standard in platformers at the time - it doesn't make the design good, per say, but putting it into context is important.
The game is built so that speed is something you can achieve when you start to get good at it. It's a running theme to the games that they get more fun the better you are at them, and 90% of the time when I see people whining about the game design of Sonic being bad it's because they're shitters who can't beat a single level without Game Over-ing it first.
You comrade, have never played any of the Sonic Pinball games have you?
:squidward-nochill:
