I'm not saying there aren't any physics, it's just when it comes to Classic Sonic in Generations... I don't like 'em. Especially when compared to the 2D games. The spindash was the main problem for me that tied into it. The "classic" part of that game was more in the visual rather than game-feel.
Agree with you there, but I really do like how multilayered the classic acts are. Super engaging to me
I would like to see that as well, but I think it's worth noting that that approach is way less newcomer-friendly. Sonic Colors is going to be way easier for someone to pick up and immediately understand than a game that plays like Sonic Utopia. The skill celing would be so much higher in a game with little to no automation, and that could be really fun and rewarding for replays, but the learning curve would be much more difficult for someone new to the series. Which makes me doubt that Sega would try to make a "3D classic" game, since it seems the last game they made was specifically designed (or perhaps redesigned mid-development) to be easy so little kids could just pick up and play it.
A prospective 3D "classic" game with ball physics etc. wouldn't have to be something as expansive as the Utopia demo or GT. Super Monkey Ball and Marble Blast/Marble It Up show how viable a game based on ball physics can be. I don't think the skill floor for new players would be that high as long as the game controls as simply as the classic games and is well designed.
I think it was less incompetence on ST's part and more just laziness. If it wasn't obvious by now, when they find a winning formula, they just tend to rehash it with a new gimmick. True, but there's a small group of younger fans who didn't care for Mania due how classic games are structured. Someone couldn't finish Mania due to its difficulty versus beating Forces in a single sitting. Casual players aren't used to actually having to master a game's mechanics past the first playthrough. This is why games like Colors do well, because they're simple to pick up and play for the young kids who just want to have fun. It's easy to forget, but not everyone is like us older fans who feel the need to master this stuff and Sonic's target demographic are children at the end of the day. Its probably why they haven't tried a 3D classic game at all. If someone found the game too hard, more often than not they're going to move onto something else.
Mania is a bad example in my opinion because it has a lot of garbage difficulty in it. Sure, some people have a hard time getting into the actual classic games too, but most of those people aren't children from what I've seen. I think you're underestimating the amount of bullshit a kid is willing to put up with.
Looking back, it's kinda ironic that Colors is recognized as a "safe" game now. In execution, it is pretty safe (I don't think this is an inherently bad thing), but conceptually, coming after the gimmicks of the previous games - "Sonic transforms into a werewolf," "Sonic is transported to a storybook world" etc - "Sonic uses the power of an alien race to take on different transformations" is a similar brand of wacky I think. I actually remember at a point that certain people were more excited for Sonic 4, which was also coming out that year, because Sonic Colors was read as "ANOTHER 3D Sonic game where Sonic uses a tacked-on gimmick." But look how the tables have turned! Now they're both bad! Seriously though, happy 10 years of Sonic Colors. It's not my favorite game, but I do have a lot of love for both versions of it. The summer after its release was a pretty pivotal point in my life (in a good way) so I remember the games I really got into around that time (largely, Sonic Generations, Portal 2, & Mario Galaxy 2) very fondly.
The first time I finished it, it took about three hours, I ended up with like 25 lives, and I never got a Game Over. The only death I had that I felt wasn't entirely my own dumb fault was when a block crushed me, because that definitely IS touchier in Mania than it was on the Genesis. This is entirely my own anecdote, of course. But it's something I point to as an example of how rote memorization and/or learning your way around "garbage difficulty" isn't a necessary component of enjoying a well-designed Sonic game. Getting a handle on how Sonic moves is the most important thing. And while it definitely wouldn't be easy to design, I do think a 3D classic-styled game could ease a player into that. I KNOW. It's wild to see that 10 years ago, Colors' biggest detractors weren't upset with it for being too much of a _break_ from the 3D games that came before, they didn't like it because they saw it as _more of the same_. To quote Destructoid's review: It really goes to show how much the context of the time and the expectations of the playerbase can shape the discourse. When it came out, Colors was bad because it didn't do ENOUGH to get away from the same old awful trends that the series had been mired in for a decade. Now, Colors is bad because it broke away from those very same elements. Personally, ever since I figured out how to just play the "real" levels, I can find more to love in it more now than I ever have.
But that's the thing, you know your way around Sonic's movement already. I'm sure I finished the game first time similarly, though probably with fewer lives. My problem with Mania's difficulty is that there's a lot of random spikes in bs. Flying Battery is a good example, in which I've seen multiple new players say they got stick on because it was too hard (the huge bottomless pit section you can get flung into if you hit the wrong route, and the spider boss are not friendly design). In fact, most of my difficulty complaints have to do with some of the terrible boss fights. My point was that referring to Mania to say newcomers are turned away by the classic gameplay isn't a good example in my opinion, because I don't think Mania is as well designed as the original Sonic games. Not to mention that a 3D "classic" game most likely wouldn't be anything like Mania. But I agree that rote memorization isn't necessary to enjoy a Sonic game, as was apparent to me when I first played Mania, or any of the fangames/hacks I've played over the years before that.
Sonic Colours delivered exactly what a lot of people were asking for at the time - Sonic Unleashed, but without the Werehog. That they added some Mario Galaxy style power-ups as the big new feature was rather quaint compared to the unpredictable variety pack nature of the previous decade's worth of games.
Well it varies from person to person obviously, so I'm gonna say that it is a universal case. But in usual cases, unless the person is REALLY invested in what they're doing, then they're not gonna bother before moving onto something else. Sure, Mania has BS difficulty, but I am of the mindset that the classic games don't exactly ease you into their mechanics all that well. It's very much a "Git gud" ordeal in that you're going to get your ass kicked a lot before you start mastering the game. That's not a bad philosophy mind you, but that only worked in the 90's because gaming wasn't as big as it was back then, and the assumption that kids wouldn't have much else to play anyway; the high difficulty ceiling was to incentivise replay value. But nowadays, kids have much more options for video games, so if they find something too hard to clear, they can just move on to something else. That's why I feel like most games nowadays make a lot of effort of "hand-holding" to keep people invested in continuing to play. Its also why Mario remains so consistently popular, because you really don't need much skill to pick up and play a Mario game; it's a game anyone can play no matter if you're a casual or hardcore. You undoubtedly need skill to MASTER a Mario game, but if you wanted to just do the bare minimum to beat the game, it allows you to do so. By comparison, most Sonic games require you to get the basics of Sonic's moveset down to get the most out of the game and then it ramps up the difficulty as the game progresses and testing you on how much of the game you've learned. It's not something you can just pick up and play, you need to actually learn a bit. Sonic's very much like a DMC game in that respect, and might explain why I like the series so much.
I'd like to know that too. I mean, you don't see me going around saying that Modern Fans prefer cringe to decent storytelling. I've always had a fondness for the Adventure style of gameplay. I mean, for me, if the choice is between the adventure formula and "the game that singlehandedly saved the whole franchise": I'd play the adventure stuff any day of the week, any week of the month, any month of the year. This x1,000,000. People talk about Wisps and Classic Sonic right now in the same tone of voice that fans discussed Shadows guns, Silver's ball puzzle and other such gimmicks back in the "dark age". They just had to not overstay their welcome but then Iizuka or some other Sega exec got the genius idea to make them a standard for the series going forward so now even people who liked them initially are tired of them, ironically becoming the very gimmick they were praised for not being in their introduction. Me personally, while I don't like them and I won't weep for them if they were to completely disappear tomorrow, I'll concede that Colours was definitely built with them in mind with regards to its level design, compared to Lost World and especially Forces where they were just "skip level" buttons. As if Forces' tiny levels needed to be beaten any faster.
We wouldn't be Sonic fans if we didn't nitpick everything we didn't like or care for now would we Eh, I may prefer Sonic Adventure over Sonic Colors, but that doesn't mean the latter has nothing to offer and more than a few bad levels isn't going to change that. It's not like Sonic Adventure didn't have bad levels either.
The Wisps were just handled very poorly in Lost World and Forces. But then, most things were handled very poorly in Lost World and Forces. I don't think the wider audience is tired of Wisps so much as they're tired of bad Sonic games. I don't think they should be in every game, but if Sonic Team ever wants to explore the idea further and make a Sonic Colours 2 that's better than the original, I'd be more than okay with that.
I may utterly loathe wisps but I actually do like what they did in Forces. Not Sonic needing white wisp capsules to boost for some baffling reason, that's dumb, but rather the concept of Wispons, which I think are fantastic. Firstly, they take the sole good thing about wisps--their powers--and section it off away from the wisps themselves. Second, they allow for the animal characters to wield firearms/weapons that actually coherently fit with Sonic's aesthetic as opposed to the hilariously incongruous weapons seen in ShTH. Wisps can disappear and I will throw a damn party on their grave but wispons are great imo.
Mania had loads of annoying difficulty segments. The notorious moving platforms in Chemical Plant, the part in Flying Battery where if you press the wrong button on the dpad when running on the ceiling then you lose all momentum and fall to your death. the Heavy Shinobi boss, the Oil Ocean Act 2 boss, Titanic Monarch's constant unseeable crushing hazards, penchant for time overs, and it's Act 2 boss. There were also a ton of bugs when it first launched which would result in crushing hazards which weren't supposed to happen (the Mirage Saloon guns and Titanic Monarch Eggrobo carriers off the top of my head). Right now it also has that awful glitchy Metal Sonic Kai boss fight, which can easily drain all your lives. It's intensified by going back to Act 1 when you lose all your lives in Act 2. I think that's the biggest problem of the game.
I'm primarily a classic fan. I'm also a Sonic Adventure 2 fan. I don't like Sonic Colours and didn't see it as a return to form in anything else than maybe actually being a cartoon for kids, which was the nicest thing they did here. Mostly, I don't like boosting, and I even like wisps less, but I think those concepts can fit in Sonic games if done differently. In those regards, refining those mechanics, implementing them in a different way (like Wisps being an alternate take of classic shields, as someone said before) and/or giving them their own series without overruling other playstyles would be fine for me. The true issue of Colours is Dimps again, who implemented boost fine in Sonic Rush but got worse later; who made decent level design in Pocket Adventure and Advance 1, but started going worse later, if not for the whole of each subsequent game, at least for good chunks of them; who made those gimmicky sub-levels in this game. And a sweet factory isn't a Sonic level, just like a haunted castle wasn't when Sonic Heroes decided to add the trope, or weren't a music plant and a toy factory when the Advance games had them. Well, they can be Sonic levels, that is, if you want Sonic to be a generic mascot instead of the one he used to be. I played Colours after Generations; I liked the next gen 8-bit gameplay of classic levels of the latter, I somehow enjoyed boosting in that game, and wisps were limited to a single zone (the least fun part of said zone they were). Colours was a massive letdown after that despite playing a lot better and having more to do than unwiished. I only bought Colours and Unwiished because of Generations, the first and last 3D game I've loved after Sonic Adventure 2. On a side note, be careful about what you say, because I loved Sonic Shuffle and played it a lot both solo and with friends.
I have to mention that I find it really funny how people praise the soundtrack of this game (which is, admittedly, very good, though not Sonic in the slightest outside of a few pieces like Terminal Velocity and the vocal songs) and also awkwardly avoid the elephant in the room of the awful wisp jingles making sure you spend 90% of your playthrough not hearing the actual OST
Man, I just can't believe it's been 10 years. Anyone else remember, I think it might have been Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta Page, had a counter keeping track of how much time had passed since Sonic 2's release. I remember how I couldn't really comprehend the scale of the 7 or so years it had been. And now Colors is 10!? Ridiculous.
