If anybody else has gotten their Amazon copy in, tell me: are the 25 lives a one-time thing, or is your starting life allotment permanently 25 lives from DLC code redemption on?
Why would his wrists be twisted? There's no twisting involved in controlling the special stages. Just turning your entire body along with the 3DS, like in Face Raiders.
Quick game reviews Dimps - your levels are too long and you have too many puzzles, but at least you stick to the core gameplay. Sonic is one slippery guy. Camera makes sonic adventure's camera look like fucking citizen Kane ie it's beyond awful. Special stages are god's punishment to humanity. Seems more finished than the Wii U version but that makes the bs almost less excusable. Currently 6/10, may/will prob go down as the game goes on. Pro tip that will go ignored by people who make these decisions - Dimps stop making Sonic games you don't know how. Sonic team - your levels are the perfect length and are great when done right, but you use too many gimmicks. Sonic feels good, camera is overall good, the mechanics are good but could stand some refinement. Wisps control awkwardly due to shoehorned motion controls or tablet controls. 1/2 the levels have boss fights which aren't sonicy at all and 1/4 of the good levels involves sonic bouncing around on springs to get from A to B. Also, and this applies to all sonic team vs Dimps games lately, why does the shitty Dimps version of the game get special stages and online multiplayer? Unfair. Can't decide if 6.5 or 7 out of 10. Protip - stick to your fucking gut sonic team and stop thinking people will get bored of the core gameplay. I can beat S3K completely in less than 2 hours. It's damn short but it's all fun. When will you people understand that sonic's length comes through replay ability and not padding. Take this game, cut it in half, make that half better, take out the bs, sell the game for $30 or $40, and go see a therapist to gain some self confidence in your work.
I would say the multiplayer is one of the only pros for the 3DS version. The main game is basically a perfect storm of bad Sonic. It's depressing and horrifying at the same time. The Wii U version is a flawed game, but at least there's a diamond in the rough there. Not everything is perfect, but the over all package is enjoyable. They can build off of it and make something truly excellent, like they did with Unleashed's day gameplay. As of now, I would say it's good.
That lava world. Fuck this game. I thought Sonic team finally got their shit together with colours, generations.
They made a game like that, Sonic Generations. The Metacritic was around 77, and all the reviewers whined about how short the game was. What Sonic Team SHOULD have done was design a more-refined game based on the same engine, but emphasized through reward systems, deeper rankings, and maybe even practice modes the importance of practice. It's not about limping through the level and getting to the end, it's about being amazing at it. Instead, they threw out everything that was working in Colors and Generations and went in the opposite direction. So, here we are.
Honestly they have to face facts at some point and realize that sonic games just cannot win. If the only problem is that it's short, justify it with a lower price tag and consider it a victory. That and people who review Sonic games are stupid, all they think is "Gotta go fast." Plus while generations was like that, it was bogged down by pointless side missions that just had no place in the game. They should have made another level per era instead of waste their time on those missions. Of course another problem generations had was its poor variety of tropes. I mean 77 isn't bad, it means it's a good game held back by a number of flaws that don't really ruin the experience. That's what Generations was. This game has a 60, and it's rightfully deserved as its flaws make you want to punch a baby
Honestly I thought the missions were a good way to add replay value to the game. It's just that it seems Sonic Team thought they were a good way to make up for the short amount of levels in the main game instead of just, you know, making more levels and then adding those missions if they had enough development time left. :/
I'm sorry, but... I think what you're saying is bullshit. Not just concerning Generations or Lost World, but when applied to Sonic games in general. Maybe it's just me, but I just don't care about leaderboards or rankings or silly crap like that. I honestly don't understand why anyone ever would. It's a completely alien sort or thing to me. I guess I'm less competitive than most people, but I just want a game to be fun in the moment, to give me things to do, not for it to be a race to see who can get the whole experience overwith the fastest. This is why I preferred the modern stages over the daytime stages. It was just more personal, because it gave you more to actually DO in the levels, and while, having played half of this game so far, I admit it's clunky and takes a lot of getting used to, it just has a lot of what I've been asking for more of for years. Sure, it might not be that impressive to speedrunners competing to reach the top of some leaderboard or whatever, but I can just tune out the world and have actual fun in the game, on my own, in the moment, and... that's all I need. That's all that matters, at least to me. But if that isn't enough for other people, oh well. Whatever they're looking for just isn't what this game is about... and I don't see how that's a bad thing, really.
As far as leaderboards are concerned, they eventually just turn into "who can abuse the game the most" and any normal player will soon be left behind for those guys that can skip over half of city escape act 1 with that spin dash glitch
Or folks like No1SonicFan who hack the game and take the top spot with a time of 00'00"01, because unfortunately some people exist solely to ruin fun things for others.
Pretty much. For a game where leaderboards make so much sense, they're abused throughly. Actually that's one good thing about lost world. It's lack of smooth transitions from 2d to 3d and the fact that it loads new sections of the level makes the levels far less abusable
I think Josh's point is that instead of making the game longer by adding things that aren't fun, Sonic Team should add reasons to go back to levels. It's seems to me that during the first half of Sonic Lost World, Sonic Team tried to make the levels varied the same way recent 3D Mario games do: by making them all have the same basic gameplay, but with different level design. But during the second half they either ran out of time, ran out of ideas or a combination of those two and instead began relying more on re-using assets from previous levels and gimmicks that are more often tedious or frustrating than fun. There are still decent levels in there, but they're overshadowed by the crap. If Sonic Team had instead focused on making a game half it's length with more replay value, it'd probably have been a better game in the end. As for the leaderboard thing, you can still compete against people in your friends list. Actually, recent racing games usually shows the first first friend who has a better time than you on the HUD, Sonic games could implement something like that as well.
And that's _fine_, really! What I find fun might not be what you do. I like blasting through levels to the point that it becomes muscle memory, haha. To that end, I could even find a LITTLE fun in crap like Sonic '06, because for all its faults, it still COULD be played well if you stuck with it long enough and knew where to avoid the glitches. I always preferred Sonic 2 to Sonic CD, is what I'm saying. With Lost World, I'm on the opposite side of things. This game emphasizes the slower, exploration-platforming playstyle, and doesn't do it all that well to boot. The classic series had an advantage in that stages could be designed that would allow either style to be fun. I think that's why S3K is so universally adored. Sonic 1 and CD were quite a bit more exploration-based. Sonic 2 went pretty far in the direction of speed and twitch reflexes. S3K hit a perfect balance. I really don't think a 3D game, being so much more complex, could match that. So while I know the boost games didn't appeal to everybody, I still think they had a good thing going, and I certainly believe that emphasizing its strong points would've been better than starting from scratch, ESPECIALLY given what we've ended up with. Maybe the best-case scenario would be bi-yearly releases of Generations-style and Lost World-style games? Have two full dev teams within Sonic Team, and give each new game two full years of development time And as much as I'm frustrated with it, Lost World's control style COULD be refined to be a lot better in future iterations. Better yet, I think more classic/modern games could make everyone happy. Classic Sonic was by no means perfect in Generations, but I think the two divergent gameplay styles really compliment each other. I know they've said over and over that it's not happening, but I'm just throwing out ideas at this point.
How about something they haven't tried since 1994? A new Classic-only Sonic game? I mean, the remakes have sold awfully well, haven't they? Which means that many young fans are already hooked on the style. Also, the current Sonic Team has proven they know how to make nice 2'5D levels (Generations) and classic-looking badniks (Lost World), so why not give the old, tried and tested universe + game mechanics another chance? It would be an instant must-buy for many of us older fans. Of course, I'm not saying Classic should replace Modern; they can coexist just like the Storybook side-series did back then, or just like Toon Link hasn't replaced his more realistic iterations. Having an alternate Sonic design would be more than enough to make people discern between the regular Sonic releases and those that use the old formula (in case somebody would fear that people could "get confused", or something).
I'd have love to have seen a series split after Generations, where the games switched between one Modern iteration and one classic iteration, but there's always that risk that they'd just hand off any 2D entry to Dimps rather then Sonic team working on the game themselves and we'd just end up with another Sonic 4. I will never understand why they chose to partner with Dimps, and not only have they partnered with them, but they have for almost 15 years (Starting with Sonic Pocket Adventure and including its development time of course). What do they see in them?
I'm playing the Wii U version, and I'm having fun. There are some definite flaws here and there, and frustrating moments, but nothing to ruin the game. I can see why though people are dreading Lava Mountain though. Yikes. I do see potential in this playstyle though. Hopefully SEGA will produce something better in the next game.
okay here's my impressions so far. GOOD: I know that some of you don't agree but the more I play the game, the more I'm actually finding Lost World's art style nice and carefully considered rather than my previous assumption of just compensating for technical limitations - particularly when paired with the 60fps framerate the Sonic series has so desparately needed on consoles. aside from some finicky controls the parkour system is really cool and rewarding once you learn it. another hit-it-out-of-the-park soundtrack from Tomoya Ohtani and co. I'm particularly digging its willingness to dabble in entirely new styles of music for the series, like the ska-tastic zone 2 boss theme. writing quality and comic timing is up. actually laughed a couple of times. the Deadly Six are one-dimensional as fuck but are at least amusing and well-acted. BAD: inconsistent jumping horizontal speed makes platforming frustrating. especially noticeable in 2D. inconsistent controls in general, really. sometimes it's twitchy and sometimes it's smooth, and sometimes Sonic just doesn't do what you want him to. I'm enjoying the gameplay more as I gain practice and get better at it but it really shouldn't be so finicky to begin with. this is by far the biggest problem with the game. Roger Craig Smith's vocal delivery is still forced and stilted. I wish he'd at least drop back down to the pitch/intensity he was using in Sonic Colors. lame, easy bosses. it's not a common occurrence and as such is only a minor gripe, but there's a few spots in the game with some seriously baffling framerate drops. for a game that flagrantly takes so much inspiration from Mario Galaxy, it's frustrating to see only two types of gravity environments - "tube" and "ball". Oh god these are the most sorry-ass broken-ass fucking pile of fuck ice physics ever somebody shoot me. Frozen Factory 4 is basically the worst thing ever I know I have more Bad than Good stuff but all in all I'm enjoying this more than I'm not. It's just a kinda average, not truly great, platformer.
It's more like "Tomoya Ohtani and co." this time around. I was seriously surprised by how small the sound team was. I think Naofumi Hataya might only on there because of the NiGHTS stuff, as he's only listed as an 'additional composer'.
yeah I actually looked up the credits while making my post. I would have said "Tomoya Ohtani, Kenichi Tokoi, Fumie Kumatani, Naofumi Hataya and co." if they'd all contributed to the soundtrack. by "and co." I meant the arrangers, cutscene music composers, musicians and etc it is surprising, but if anyone can handle a whole soundtrack themselves it's Tomoya Ohtani
