General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

I used the Mushroom Hill trick when getting the Super Emeralds.

Also I am thankful that the Steam version lets me save state, makes it less worrying when I do screw up.

There are some really hard games this generation (Cuphead being the biggest example), but yeah difficulty has gone down as gaming has gotten bigger.

Edited by powerpuffbats on Jul 1st 2020 at 8:34:33 AM

Dark souls proved there was still a large public of people who enjoyed those type of games even in triple a, so naturally a lot more games from the last decade or so have been more open to being more difficult provided you pay the overhead to make it interesting. Cuphead is one of the many games that exemplify the trend but I'd dispute he's anywhere near being the most emblematic of it.

Edited by Yumil on Jul 1st 2020 at 3:41:59 PM

Sonic Unleashed was definitely on the hard side, but people called it unfair...which to be fair, isn't wrong.

Never played Dark Souls, so Cuphead is my biggest example.

EDIT: I also think the reason why Cuphead springs to my mind is because of the journalist who failed at the tutorial.

Edited by powerpuffbats on Jul 1st 2020 at 10:05:58 AM

The Crash Bandicoot remake is also a hit so clearly people love games that give ya a stabbing pain in your hand.

It's also using a PS 1 game as it's base, though.

It's largely AAA games that decide that they have to make things accessible towards everyone. AA and Indie games largely don't.

Games didn't deliberately get less difficult, they got fairer.

The thing that people who go on about "how easy games are these days" never acknowledge, is that games only used to be so difficult because of bad design. Nobody had any idea what they were doing when video games were new, leading to tons and tons of Fake Difficulty. Unintuitive controls, confusing level design, overpowered enemies, arbitrary limited attempts, etc.

Edited by Primis on Jul 1st 2020 at 11:04:37 AM

I mean, unfair difficulty was sorta implied when I said it was the cheapest way to extend games's lifespan.

But putting that aside, it's not just a matter of games getting fairer. Early 2010s had set a trend that a correclty designed game had to hold your hand through the mechanics and essentially be completable by a child. At the time, if seemed as if that was how you made a game with wide appeal, end of story. Sure, exceptions existed, but they were moslty relegated to the indie scene. It wasn't just a matter of being fair, difficulty was on it's way to become a flaw in a game.

One of the reasons dark souls stood out so much during that time is that it ran counter to a lot of those tendencies. It was a painfully obtuse game where most mechanics weren't explained, it's plot was told by environment and item descriptions mostly rather than heavy-handed cutscenes, and it was designed to kill you over and over, yet it managed to be a great financial success, and it inspired a lot of games to take a page from that.

Edited by Yumil on Jul 1st 2020 at 8:17:18 PM

Hard difficulty kind of feels like the equivalent to black and white films, where once upon a time it was essentially a necessity because where the technology was at that point. And like B&W films it faded away a lot before finally returning, this time as a deliberate choice for the kind of media they were putting out.

Eh. I feel like as badly designed as older games were, it made them more memorable since you'd have to persevere to win and much for much more rewarding experience.

Looking at Sonic Forces, that is so easy and pretty much eliminates any type of control from the player. Sure, it's great if you just wanna get through the game, but it really doesn't leave any kind of impression on you either.

I get the times change, but I feel like a lot of people hate ant kind of challenge presented. I get I'm a minority in that opinion, but its honestly how I feel.

As much as people rag on the Kirby series for being super easy, the way they've done tutorials since Epic Yarn is one of the best methods out there imo; harmless background elements show up to tell you which button does what, gives you a small obstacle to test it out, then lets you go wild.

Note that I'm more saying that modern games are more accessible than older games.

While I do prefer a challenge, I understand that some aren't going to have the patience to beat a lot of older games. Heck, even I can't beat Sonic 2 without using cheats.

I do have a limit with how much challenge I can take, and it seems to be stuff like "the Unholy trio in Metropolis Zone" or the "Wall Turret boss in Mega Man 2", yet I can enjoy Cuphead despite how hard it is.

I honestly think that is a result of casual gaming blowing up around that time thanks to the Wii, as well gaming becoming more popular overall.

Kirby, even though I find the games to be really fun, has always been designed to be a "person's first video game".

Edited by powerpuffbats on Jul 1st 2020 at 1:54:22 PM

yeah, it's probably one of the biggest reasons things got to that point.

Really, the whole series tbh.

First they gave no rings during final boss battles, leading to the infamy of guys like the Death Egg Robo. Then they give rings, but didn't design the boss too well, and we got the extremely easy Sonic CD final boss. They ended up with a shaky equilibrium with final bosses that weren't bad but all still had major issues, but still - most of the classic game has better regular bosses than final ones.

The big exception I remember is Sonic 3, which finally wised up and gave rings during a final boss in a non-exploitable way with Big Arms, and then (my favorite classic boss) S&K's Knuckles vs Mecha Sonic. But then S&K introduced Super Sonic final bosses in S3&K, and imo the whole thing went downhill. They really cannot figure out how to make bosses with Super Sonic challenging (and usually end up just making them tedious instead), but they're obligatory at this point so you just have to deal with it.

Nowadays, it's pretty clear that making decent bosses in the Boost style tends to be pretty hard. You have to have those "running battle" type bosses, and there's only so much variation you can get out of that.

My favorite final boss in the series is the Egg Viper, which I wish got more attention from the series. It felt a lot like the great translation of the best things classic bosses had, combined with the best things 3D bosses can offer, into a cool single package.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 1st 2020 at 2:10:32 AM

I would like the Viper if it wasn't for the fact that surviving the final attack seems luck-based. Either I don't move enough and get killed, or I move too far and fall off the platform.

They're not obligatory...they haven't been for 3 games.

I'm pretty sure he means the Generations fight.

Edited by randomness4 on Jul 1st 2020 at 2:28:14 AM

Best sonic boss fight is Metal from CD, fight me.

Eggman dies.

I notice most platformers either have pathetically easy final bosses or unfairly hard ones.

CD's interesting, as most of its bosses are experimental attempts to flip the script for platforming bosses - for better or worse. So like one of the bosses is actually just a race, another is a survival bit where you have to stay in the same place and not die for a while, one is just a literal pinball machine level, another is a platforming / timing challenge where you can't touch the floor, etc.

It means that they're all really interesting and new the first time around, but for nearly all of them once you figure out the "trick" to each they become even easier than the average Sonic boss might be. CD has some of the least challenging bosses in the whole series for that reason.

Still, I think some of those ideas bear revisiting. My favorite boss from CD is the Quartz Quadrant boss (the survival one), which is a prime example of "gets really easy once you know what to do," but that sort of thing with a few more layers and bells and whistles would be interesting.

And then the final boss is just a regular boss that's extremely easy to cheese if you don't mind losing rings.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 1st 2020 at 3:12:51 AM

Really, bosses, final or otherwise, have never been the series' strong suit.

My favorite CD boss is the underwater one surrounded by bubbles cause really, what was Eggman thinking? XD Another good one is the one where you're on a treadmill and have to run on it until it breaks. That reminded me of the laser boss from Flying Battery that does basically the same thing.

...Metal is the only Sonic boss that actually uses his speed in an interesting way. At least in CD, he's the only boss that plays like normal Sonic, which I love.

The same is true for the final Shadow fight in SA 2.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Jul 1st 2020 at 6:45:30 AM