General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

What personally annoys me about that is that I played the original Sonic Adventure games and personally found them nothing special (to me) really. I enjoyed Sonic Heroes (although damn that voice work is really bad looking back on it) a lot along with Unleashed, the first Sonic Rush, and the Advance games. I played the classics and liked them.

I was very iffy about Shadow the Hedgehog when I played it even as a kid. There was some interesting ideas there like the cyberworld level, that one carnie level, and the alternate paths (albeit they were very linear and what judged them was kinda stupid for the time). But the rest was just...bleh. The guns from what I recall were never really that fun to use, the actual more speedy parts did not last very long, and oh boy were the aliens a really lame villain. The game also had this battle style multiplayer that was very meh. Shadow himself also had issues too obviously with his character and such like that.

The only spin-offy games I liked were the Sonic Riders games (up until Free Riders because kinect ruins everything accept dance games) and the older ones like the Pinball game and Bean Machine. I played that old Tails spin-off but didn't quite like it nor do I remember much.

I know this has been said a thousand times, but it's always surprising just how much the fanbase varies in their opinion of Sonic games.

Outside of most people agreeing that Sonic 2 is pretty good, and that 06 is a travesty to the art of video games, you can name pretty much any non-spinoff title and get a pretty divisive response about it.

That IS weird.

Usually people say the Knuckles levels are better designed than Rouge levels.

Because Knuckles was in the game from the go-get...

While Rouge, Tails, and Shadow had inferior designed levels than their counterparts because they were added later on.

Adventure has... Problems, such as being quite glitchy. The character animations are really poor too imo, especially when it comes to lip synching, they didn't even try. The gameplay is alright, but some levels feel quite barren to me.

Adventure 2 is pretty good, though I don't really like the shooting levels that much.

I personally way prefer Unleashed to Colours, but Colours' gameplay is pretty solid apart from some weird glitchy hiccups that you probably won't run into in normal gameplay anyways.

My only issue with Unleashed was obviously the werehog levels.

As a noob to the Sonic franchise, the Werehog levels kept me playing when my reflexes simply weren't good enough for Sonic levels. As I played the game more I ended up enjoying the Sonic levels too.

Same. Not about the Werehog levels, thought they were terrible. But my reflexes suck, and the day levels were too fast and linear for my taste. The Generations levels were done far better imo.

I enjoyed the Sonic levels just for the sheer speeds you could reach. My reflexes were not great but were okay enough that I made it through a lot of them (obviously no S-Ranks though).

One thing I can say I like from all of the games is the music of course.

I don't think there's a Sonic game with bad or even generic music really.

Clearly this is where Sonic Team's strength lies.

edited 1st May '17 2:13:32 PM by Soble

Thing is, once you master the Werehog in Unleashed, you'll find it's pretty easy to speedrun through night stage with the right combos.

Sonic games in general have great replay value because you want to learn how to, well, go fast and be efficient with every playthrough.

@Soble on last page: Oh yes. You couldn't talk about Sonic without people going "Man I miss when Sonic was good. After SA2 it's been all downhill from there."

Which is funny because Heroes isn't really bad. in fact I think it has the best level design of the 3. I know bottomless pits but really it's still quite fun and has the least holding it back.

But I feel people really overblow the shooting/treasure hunting levels. They were far from unbearable unless you have ADD and I like how the the treasure levels encouraged exploring the levels which funnily was a complaint in how later games were too linear. But i notice that people who play sonic games tend to hate any level that gives them trouble.Very much a case of It's Hard, So It Sucks! for a portion of the complainers. This doesn't apply only the adventure games either, ask someone their least favorite level and a lot of times you'll find it to be one of the more difficult levels in the game.

edited 1st May '17 2:42:07 PM by Vertigo_High

I don't mind the hunting stages. The shooting stages are just a little boring to me.

And yes, it's pretty easy to go fast with the Werehog once you've played a little.

Hey, remember that one time these guys got their hands on Lemon Sundrop Dandelion and made a powerful psychotropic drug out of it, but instead of, you know, selling it people, they put it in the hot dogs they sold at an amusement park so that people would become addicted to their hot dogs?

It's more to do that when you play a Sonic game, you're not exactly playing it to explore or get in a mech and shoot.

Pretty much what Yakuzu said. People play Sonic for fast platforming action. Not to play a sub-arcade shooter or a lame mini-collect-a-thon.

The complaints were about how Sonic's levels were too linear. Throwing Knuckles into a giant, boring, empty field that takes forever to complete isn't the solution to overly linear speed stages.

Your claim that people only don't like certain stages because they're too hard for them is also a weak argument. You can like something you think is hard, and you can also be really good at something and still think it sucks. I found Ristar to be pretty hard,but I still enjoyed it. Contrary-wise, Lost World from Sonic Adventure is my least favorite stage in the game, but it isn't at all a hard level; there's just nothing remotely interesting about it whatsoever.

Wrong thread?

edited 1st May '17 4:55:25 PM by PhysicalStamina

No. It was the plot to Knuckles the Echidna issues 13-15. In fact, Charmy's bud Mello overdosed on the stuff and straight up DIED. What's that? You've never heard of Mello before? Well neither had I, but he still died from a poison hot dog.

I don't read the Sonic comics.

Ah yes. That was when Knuckles was a bland everyman, the Chaotix were Knuckles' one-note yes-men, and the entire comic was regularly hijacked by a group of old crotchety Echidnas who didn't really do anything except spout meaningless exposition to the audience. Those were the days...

Did I ever mention I hate Pender's fucking guts?

edited 1st May '17 7:07:22 PM by kkhohoho

It's not as much the Unexpected Gameplay Change as it was that it was poorly done in SA2. In Adventure, the Knuckles levels were smaller and the radar would pick up the nearest shard. Then they made it so the levels were massive and you had to find the shards in order using vague hints.

I can't explain why preferred Gamma to Tails, the levels just felt shorter and less of a bore. Tails also shouldn't be in a mech. It just felt better and more appropriate as Eggman, and I honestly feel his levels were better designed. Might just be that Tails was added later in production as mentioned earlier in the thread.

So, you guys remember how Archie would send an email regarding the status of its Sonic comics?

Here's what it said.

Gamma's were better, yes. It helped there was an encouraging reason to lock on to as many things as you could in combos, it gave you extra time, the only really challenge that existed in his campaign. He was relatively fast, was agile, and the hover could be useful to slow down when needed.

Plus going through the levels after you played the other characters felt rewarding to just barrel through the place, picking up a crap ton of rings, extra lives, and decimating enemies. It was pretty fun.

Adventure 2 just did what it had with the treasure levels as shooting. Took a premise that worked fine but still could've been improved, and made it more restrictive and complicated than it needed to be.

If Gamma's bosses were made much, much faster, actually fired at you with their own lasers, and had better reaction time, you could've gotten some interesting platform/reaction-based shooting, using hover to dodge blast patterns, jumping on slopes and platforms to avoid the range of targeting lasers, and going in when they need to recharge.

Ironically the Eggman and Tails fights had some of what I wanted in Adventure 2, those were more engaging, though easy.

The cramped space, overly dark lighting, and enemies with wide range was pure Fake Difficulty.

I've been saying this so many times that I don't really care that the fandom understands this.

I want Sonic Team to understand this, fans of "variety" be damned.

So Archie's message is "wait a bit and we'll give you a message about what's going down." Honestly I thought that, if they weren't cancelling the comic, there was a chance that they were going to switch to bi-monthly.

The Knuckles comics weren't perfect but they gave Knuckles a supporting cast all for himself, and gave the echidna race a backstory years before Sega did. And I've always felt that the Knuckles issues were better than the Sonic issues for that stretch. Some characters were written fine and had memorably personalities, others were written terribly. Looking back at that time the thought I'm always left with is that they had some very interesting ideas, but the execution was terrible.

Gamma's better? Gotta disagree there, only hot shelter and red mountain really felt like a complete level made for him. Cosmic Wall is better than every Gamma level.