Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

I think your points are fair. Even classic-oriented games don't really need lives, and Origins is there to show it. As in, they still exist and can be played and enjoyed. What you did was to examine how lives interact with the rest of the game and made an argument about how they don't add much to Gens due to its structure and how they want people to engage with it. That's fine. Forces benefits from no lives for other reasons, I'd say: being a game so focused on collecting stuff and expressing yourself through your OC, as well as taking in the cinematic aspect of stages, fail states don't shed light on them.

I do take issue with thebidea of progress though. The material conditions behind the act of playing a linear game having changed doesn't mean they have qualitatively supplanted anything that was there before, or that the logic behind lives is obsolete. We do live in an age of increasing popularity of roguelikes and incremental failure as a progression mechanism. So for Gens I'd argue the changes it does to the core loop is beneficial -- not that I hate lives on it either. I just think it's important to examine the mechanic for what it does. Which you did there. So that's cool.

 

I bet half of you guys complaining about the removal of lives don't ever see a game over anymore, anyways. Sorry, but I will never think of lives as anything but an archaic remnant of video games' penny-pinching arcade days, and after that, they immediately no longer served a real purpose. Having to redo a single section and failure alone are punishment enough for a player, anything else on top of that (especially having to repeat the whole stage, or worse, the whole world/game) would be considered extremely dick game design by anyone that's not blinded by nostalgia.

As an aside, I really hope they change up the Time Eater fight. It's one of the most consistently-complained about aspects from the original Generations game...

 

I’m guessing jump dash is still on jump, always hated the jump dash in Generations the air boost in Frontiers felt more like a return to the utility of the Adventure jump dash. Drop dash would be useful here if could stomp cancel into it like you can with the spindash in Frontiers.

 

I feel like we go through this with every Sonic game released in the past 20 years. People need to learn to let go, but Sega isn't helping by constantly dangling the possibility like a carrot on a stick.

 

Unfortunately, a smart company knows NOT to ever take options off the table. You never know when you might need to pull out an old hat trick to keep an audience involved... Ever notice how SEGA/Sonic Team tends to not outright say they WOULDN'T do something again? Hell, in the interview where they ask if Shadow would use guns again, they go "he'd use whatever he needed to, he just hasn't needed to". And they've been keeping the Sonic Adventure 3 possibility on a carrot for far longer than the carrot could ever thrive for. That's one rotten carrot!

 

Man I remember caring about them removing lives from video games too, 4 years ago.

Ultimately lives are an outdated system from the arcade era that never really had a place in console gaming outside of making people feel good and making it that you had to actually buy the game in rental days instead of beating it in one weekend.

Is Mario 64 really a worse game because you had to game over when you ran out of lives instead of just being able to keep jumping in the same painting over and over to get the star over without that unnecessary pace ruiner?

I've been playing through the Metal Gear Solid games and they got rid of lives from day one. Sometimes the boss and level design gets frustrating but it's never as frustrating as if there were a life system and I'm forced to start all over if I die to it.

The game is still hard but any frustrating parts are reasonable if my only punishment is having to do that section again.

Generations is getting rid of lives, but so what? The timer is still rising whenever you have to go back. They haven't removed the perfect bonus for completing the level without dying. And it keeps the pace of the game moving instead of making you go out the level and back in, because this isn't sonic 1 or 2 so your progress is saved per beaten level, when you die.

I thought live systems were neat too but they were something that needed to go a long time ago.

 

Apparently I missed the controls/physics changes in my previous post--personally speaking, I think (as far as M. Sonic goes) keeping the original controls for Generations would had been the better way to go, rather than redoing them to match Frontiers. If this was a full-on remake or a spiritual sequel to Generations, then sure, I can see the argument for going for something closer to Frontiers, since doing something different is the goal. But given the remaster branding (and how it visually looks very close to the original from what I've seen), I think preserving the original gameplay (feel) would had been more ideal.

 

Spot on, but its Sonic so people have to bash it and find the slightest little flaw in it.

 

I think the main reason some games might make you redo more than a checkpoint's worth of stuff when you run out of lives is to encourage you to not let that happen. It's to add tension in a way the player can't just choose to ignore like funnymoney for costumes or whatever. That doesn't have to be the only reason though! Mario 64 has finite lives and a game over state probably just to encourage the player to try a different painting instead of grinding the same star over and over. There's really all kinds of good reasons to still put them in your game. But yeah sure they're from the arcade like most game mechanics. Yeah they only ever existed to make me feel good like literally all video games.

Mind you I think infinite lives work fine for Generations. It's just the essentialism that bothers me.

 

Im not convinced at all by the logic re:64 there. If a player is getting frustrated with a specific star, they'll move on themselves, they don't need the game to tell them to. Hell, I distinctly remember as a kid, playing mario 64 ds, and struggling on some of the later levels (cause they suck ahem) and leaving after a few deaths because i only had one life left and didnt want to run through the whole castle again. I just went to an easier level and got the stars I needed there without risk of dying.

Idk, The posts linked from Laura make solid points but even then I'm not convinced they are a net positive even if the game is designed with them in mind. I think that just softens the blow

anyways:
Legacy Controls are confirmed
Someone else who played the game (NintendoLife i believe but i cant find the source anymore) said that A -> A still works for the homing attack in base gens, but A-> X does as well, but only A-> X works for shadow, and legacy controls makes it so that only two jump presses will do the homing attack. Thought that was interesting and a weird way to handle it.

 

https://x.com/GamesCage_/status/1799991205733786047

Even more gameplay showing even more alternative paths.

 

All you have to do is reward people in a way that makes it worth it to not die over and over.

Sackboy A Big Adventure handled this well, you have an unlimited life option but each death still takes points away from you that will allow you to unlock costume and be considered top player at the end of the level. Super Mario Odyssey did something similar with the coin system.

Sonic Generations does that. Whenever you die the timer in the level towards your total time doesn't decrease. And you only can get an S rank by not dying.

That's all you have to do to handle getting rid of lives, make sure it's still not worth it to die. And Generations is doing that.

 

Yeah I'm not choked up about Generations removing them. Generations is a fairly easy game (bar the difficulty spike near the end and some later challenges) and I only really think lives work if they inflict a more severe punishment for poor play. They kinda started becoming dated around the time save systems in platformers became something the player had access to all the time.

They work in an arcade context where the primary goal is seeing how far you can go in one go while also aiming for a high score. You Game Over? Bam. That's your one shot. Try again with the new knowledge you have now. See if you can get farther than last time.

I'd also argue they sorta work in games like Mario World where there are limited save systems in place at the Castles or Ghost Houses. You can only save at those levels after they've been beaten. I do think they might discourage newcomers from trying the game again if they Game Over right at the Castle where they could've saved, but the longer trail between levels I think gives the lives a bit more meaning in this context.

When you can save whenever though? Or if the game autosaves after everything? Eh. The most severe punishment they can inflict in a platformer is simply booting the player out of the level with a finger-wag right in front of your face in the form of a Game Over screen, with maybe your checkpoints being reset. It just creates extra wait time before you can try the same level you saved at again. It's kinda obnoxious.

I think if you wanna do lives, I'd do something more akin to the LOVE series of games where they're tied to an optional difficulty level, and losing all the lives forces you back to the start of the game.

 

I'm a big proponent of lives but I don't think they fit well in Boost games. Generations is far too easy to benefit from a lives system. So I'm not bothered at all if there is no option to play with lives. And when Boost is hard it is usually because of trial and error nonsense which is usually very badly suited to a lives system in my opinion.

 

Level's definitely looking better as we see the other ways to tackle it I think. I knew you'd get something from being able to reach that G.U.N. Beetle halfway through the level, nice to see that it spits you out onto a higher and quicker path in the next room. Hopefully this is just the first level and things get more substantial than this because it's a promising start. Getting original staffers from Gens back in may be just what the doctor ordered.

 

I wasn't even trying to get into a a huge thing over this - I just wanted to say something is lost along the way with convenience of not having to sit with failure and retry from the top as a consequence, even in a game where that isn't a huge part of it like Generations. With a well designed level, that's a perfectly valid form of stress and release and elevates the accomplishment when you actually do get it if it gets you stuck. + - but Mania Oil Ocean wasn't that.  

Whether or not I would see that *now*, is irrelevant, since all it means is the point where it would have been a benefit is long past me. Having already played something like Unleashed when I was younger, I've already had that sort of experience, my point is that I still find value in that and wish it could stay for all the players it could possibly be effective for. and the idea that you can recreate that with self-set goals and limitations is kind of wrong simply because it's something you don't actively realize is happening and you have to go out of your way to enforce the rules. on top of that it can be really hard to even get in the mood if the game doesn't acknowledge it in even a tiny way. do YOU try to set your own s-ranking criteria in Sonic 1-3?

 

So is the drop dash forced onto you or is it a skill? I’m not particularly fond of the idea of modern sonic having a drop dash tied to the same button that also does your homing attack and air dash, starting to approach Naka territory here with button claustrophobia.

 

Not like I'm ever touching the Sonic portion, but even if I would, I don't think I'd ever actually deliberately use the Drop Dash. I never used it in Mania, aside from that one level where the game forces you to do it near the end I never used it in Forces (ugh, those Classic stages made 100% Forces a living hell, definitely never revisiting those levels again), and I sure as hell never used it in Frontiers. The Spindash just made it even more pointless, and even if you go into TFH without the Spindash Sonic will have it unlocked right off the bat. I swear, I'd rather have the Insta Shield. I don't give praise to Classic often, but that Insta Shield was super useful. Made it so I didn't have to wait for those stupid Orbinauts to throw their spikes, and it especially helps against bosses.

 

They actually changed Homing Attack button back to Square, not on the same button anymore

 

They did this with frontiers, which was an absolute saving grace. Music must not be interferes with! The tunes are too good to water down with effects like the boost one.