for context, with the vast improvements for emulated netplay (especially for gamecube and wii games via dolphin) over the last few years i've seen several sixth and seventh generation games receive renewed interest in their multiplayer modes, with some even sprouting brand-new competitive multiplayer scenes. an incomplete list is below (with corresponding videos where available): sonic riders (i didn't care about this game at all as a kid, but i've tried the dx version and it's pretty great!) super mario strikers & mario strikers charged kirby air ride revenge of the sith (PS2) this trend of multiplayer revivals is immensely fascinating to me because there is an unbelievable amount of untapped potential and depth that some of these games have once they're taken seriously. much like melee, they blossom into entirely different experiences when a dedicated group of people is sitting around trying to push them to their limits. i didn't play much sonic multiplayer as a kid, but i would be very interested in seeing if there was any interest in diving back into the multiplayer modes of sa2, shadow, s3&k, or any of the other multiplayer modes sonic has had to see if there's anything worthwhile in there. additionally, if any of you actually did play multiplayer sonic a lot on the genesis or in the gamecube / wii era, i would be interested in hearing what the extent of your experiences were and if it was any fun.
Great competitive game play isn't Sonic's strong suit. The only ones that come to mind right now are Riders and Sonic R. When it comes to Sonic, we always passed the controller around or watched each other play.
Some 15 years ago we at a Brazilian community did a Mega Drive Games championship that kinda worked like Sonic 2 multiplayer mode but applied to any classic game stage. So we'd record ourselves (via emulator input or video) playing and compete in brackets. Time wasn't the only thing that mattered (the criteria was similar to Sonic 2 multiplayer mode after all), so that was pretty cool. I remember losing to my brother on Spring Yard. Sure it's not quite the same thing, but it was an experience. I was glad to learn Sonic the Fighters gained a new competitive scene, and I do wish Sonic R would get the same chance, even if it meant being heavily modified.
I don't know if there's much competitiveness to it but I had a lot of fun with SA2B's multiplayer back in the day.
sa2b seemed like the most obvious candidate, and given that the game has its own speedrunning scene where they literally do races sometimes it always seemed weird to me that there was never an attempt to do mp tournaments (at least as far as i was aware of). i'll try to see if i can wrangle a few friends over the weekend to put it through its paces and see if there's some horrific rng mechanic or performance issue or something that would kill it on arrival
The special moves can be pretty tedious and SA2/B's stupid B-button roulette kinda forces you to use them even if you don't want to. It's good fun especially when you're a kid but is pretty bullshit as far as proving who's faster at City Escape. If there's a cheat/hack that turns the special moves off though...
iirc those are dependent on the amount of rings, so maybe routing your ring gain would be part of routing, who knows i've looked at the available ar codes and there's nothing to disable abilities on the gc version, which is a shame because that would be by far the easiest way to play online. there *is* a code to disable them on the pc modloader, but i'm not sure if that's compatible with the battle network mod, which is the only way to play the pc port online that i'm aware of. i might test it out over the weekend.
2P VS split Screen in Sonic 2 and Mania is pure multiplayer joy. The only thing that holds it back is the low number of levels. It’s a shame that they didn’t expand split screen to more levels in Origins. Granted, some levels (especially with mid-level transitions) might need tweaking. And some of the longer S3K levels might need splitting in two. But there’s nothing that makes it impossible. 2PVS in the classics also lends itself to missions. You could have races to see who gets 100 rings first or destroys 20 bad nicks first. On the Mega Drive original Sonic 2, you could have Super Sonic in split screen. And you could use the teleporters to steal the super powers. Which made for a super fun game of tag. It should be made an offical feature. There’s so much possibility with classic 2PVS split screen. And because it’s just one-button gameplay it’s very accessible. It’s a crying shame Sega has never done much with it. I guess the Sega execs making the decisions must be only children.
They should add a 6-player split screen mode to the 8-bit games. It you lay them down on a 3×2 grid, you almost fill up a 16:9 screen (480×288 is 15:9).
Now that I think about it, they should add a multiplayer mode to Sonic x Shadow Generations. I always thought the Shadow boss fight in Generations would work really well as a 2-Player versus mode or something.
Sonic Adventure DX actually let you run two instances of a single Game Gear together at the same time, which was ace for multiplayer. Games like Sonic & Tails lend themselves very well to multi-player racing. It was a bit rough around the edges, as you had two instances of the background music playing out of sync. But it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to fix these issues. Sadly, with later Game Gear re-releases, they nixed this feature (outside of GG titles that supported the link cable). Another missed multiplayer opportunity.
Didn't Sonic basically invent split screen multiplayer? It almost seems like it could be ideal for multiplayer if Sega dedicated the resources to make a proper multiplayer game.
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is an obvious candidate, although it's basically the worst multiplayer puyo puyo game.
It still surprises me that they haven't made another Mean Bean Machine. I've sat with the cast of Puyo Puyo a few times now, and they lack the universal appeal of Tetris, despite starring in a better game. You're always "putting up" with the characters rather than embracing them as heroes of our time. It would be incredibly lazy and annoying to just "put Sonic in it", but in this era of bringing back old television shows from the 90s, you'd think AoStH Robotnik and pals would be an open goal. You don't even need the gimmicks - the Puyo Puyo Tsuu ruleset is still the best one, but it's never really had time to breathe in the West. Fever pushes its own thing, Puyo Puyo Tetris is half-and-half, and while the games turn up on obscure systems and Yakuza (and that one very easy boss fight in Sonic Mania), it's not exactly the mainstream attention the series probably needs. Scratch, Grounder, Coconuts, Robotnik - four-player battles fronted by characters who spend the cartoon series doing pointless exercises and getting in each others' way. They're made for this stuff - get some fun animations together, put the disc in a box and slap a $20 or $30 price tag on it. As far as normal Sonic games go, multiplayer tends to struggle because the characters need to be forced onto an equal footing, which is why they're usually put in cars. Otherwise you get situations like Sonic R where nobody is equal and Amy always loses. Sonic 2 gets away with it because Tails is a clone of Sonic and can't fly on demand. But you can't have a dozen clones of Sonic, especially when a precedent has been set where some have special abilities or are physically different sizes. Once upon a time Vector the Crocodile woke up to find he had shrunk by half. The better plan, if you want a multiplayer focus, is to make something entirely new. Even Nintendo worked that out with Splatoon.
Really I'd love for any excuse for Sega to revive the AoStH version of the cast. I'm a sucker for that version of Robotnik and there were a lot of fun recurring character designs that would be fun to play as/square up against that weren't touched upon in MBM (Wes Weasley). Outside of Long John Baldry, I think a majority of the cast members still do voice work from time-to-time too. I don't see Sega really officially acknowledging those divisions of the franchise now though since they want a more 'unified' look for the character and cast, but a dumb little Puyo reskin would be fun. Maybe just do another 'April Fools Day' game akin to Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog? I think you could then get away with the game being scarce in content and have a smaller development team. Have the game revolving around Eggman's modern design and the game of Puyo-Puyo has the new context of being some type of 'training' Eggman is throwing his goons through. Something that doesn't really screw with the status quo and the operation blows up in Eggman's face. You can probably get away with one or two nods to the original game if the designs are a concern. I'd be down for that. I also think another thing that might have initially hurt Puyo's popularity in the West (in addition to localizations being scarce) was the cast switching that began with Fever. I do think it makes sense to further separate Puyo from Madou Monogatari due to Puyo becoming more popular, but they kept bringing Arle back anyways and I don't think the academy setting resonated with an audience here. It might have something to do with the plot of most of the games kinda forcing the students to get ugly with one another (I think that's what you're getting at?), which feels less heroic than stopping a guy from destroying dreams in some place called Mobius. I've actually always wanted to see a Mean Bean Machine hack that brings the game closer to representing the cartoon it's based off of as a whole with some re-written dialog and junking some of the pilot robot designs in favor of other characters that appear later on in the series under the context of them testing you/wanting to challenge Robotnik themselves. But uhhh yeah at this point I'm getting off-track. I had a great time with Adventure 2's multiplayer when I was young as a kid! Played it a good couple of times with my brother and we even raised some Chao together using an AR code to force 2 players in the Chao Garden (before we stopped after we got scared from a game freeze). The multiplayer exclusive content in the form of characters and levels was really cool too and each game type offered enough variance with the different goal types to keep you occupied for a bit with friends. I will also echo thoughts here and say the only thing really holding it back are the Special Abilities ranging from useless (the Power Laser for mechs) to kinda cheap. Amy was slower but could access Special Abilities quicker. The Time Stop ability I remember being particularly nasty. While you could button spam through it to make the countdown end quicker, I think she could still access a fair amount of Rings and get a lead that's difficult to recover from. You kinda have to hog the rings away from someone using her or play really aggressively. Sonic 2 is another decent contender if you ban the use of the Teleporter items and there was a hack that was trying to flesh that out more anyways shared earlier. Get netplay set up and bam. A more fleshed out version of Sonic 2's multiplayer is at yer fingertips.
so i did a bit of a test run of sa2's multiplayer to put it through it's paces today. fyi, i was playing on dolphin with a us-to-eu connection, and i was also playing with someone who was not that experienced with sa2. take my observations with a grain of salt. thoughts on speed stages: the biggest issue is stage length and selection. the truncated multiplayer levels are just not as interesting or dense as their singleplayer counterparts. this compounds the issue with the annoying special attacks - because there's not as much level to go through, there's not as much incentive to actually make decisions about how to use your special moves because you're liable to just lose the match while you're sitting there trying to play 5D chess. also, i could imagine that if the stages were full length, you'd have to make interesting decisions about which routes to take based on the number of rings you have to use specials vs. how behind you are in the race, but they're just too short to care about stuff like that. also, the special moves are simply not costly enough. they become available every twenty rings you collect, but they don't take any rings when you use them, which incentivizes spam - especially with amy. with the handicap on it's even worse. it'd definitely be a huge change for the better if the abilities cost rings and the cost for each ability was increased vastly. i wasn't able to really test the emerald stages (my opponent was not at all familiar with sa2 and its jank so we quickly moved on) and i didn't even bother with the mech battles because i hate them in singleplayer anyways. more data is needed - i'll try to rope in folks who are more experienced with sa2 next time, and i'll also look into see how hard it is to create ar codes that can modify the special move costs.
Considering how the Sonic franchise is already thematically inconsistent with the classic, modern, and movie continuities being used at the same time, I don't see anything stopping SEGA from partnering with Wildbrain to bring back AOSTH. I would unironically watch a reboot of that show. The world needs more Robotnik. Plus, the show's a classic meme. It would likely make bank from Egg-belly's face alone.
