Little things that annoy you most in a Sonic game?

I always though Sonic called him it to insult Robotnik, and he adopted it as a major "Screw You!" back to Sonic and the gang.

Something that ticks me off...that bloody moon. It irks me how they always show a full moon in the recent Sonic games.

 

You know what? I'll add to my list. EVERY SINGLE BADNIK IN METROPOLIS ZONE IS A BASTARD.

 

Nothing mentioned ever really gave me problems.

I am surprised however that nobody has mentioned that area in the Casino Night Zone act 2 with the U shaped pit and the 3 circular bumpers leading to another area with a 4 sided bumper.

The trick is to spin up and then bounce backwards towards the bumpers to allow them to send you through.

Seen many people get stuck in this bit as well as the underwater yellow blocks in the chemical plant zone.

 

Hmmm...

The level layouts in Sonic CD bother me. The fact that it's often necessary to get consistent speed in order to time travel, but it can be hard to find places to do it safely... oh, and if you don't do it correctly, you lose that chance. The time travel dynamic would have worked a lot better with Sonic 2-like levels.

Us in Europe getting the US soundtrack for the Sonic CD re-release. I don't actually dislike the US tunes, it's more the fact that you still have the Japanese Past themes in there and it's jarring going between one and the other. In addition, I've never got Sonic CD to work properly on an emulator - I'm forever encountering a bug where the level music ends and then goes to the next track on the CD, rather than back to the beginning.

Sonic Heroes' Special Stages. They were what broke an already bad game for me. Kind of hard just to get into them, the controls are ridiculous... and only half of them are of any use to you anyway.

Huh. The things I mentioned so far are more medium-sized to quite-big things. Let's try again...

The manuals! I have problems with the manuals. It bothered me when I found out that the Japanese manuals actually explained the story. Hell, I'd already played Sonic Adventure by the time I discovered that a lot of the plot was based on stuff established in the manuals as far back as Sonic 3. Now, the argument is often made that this was done so that the Western market was free to establish its own continuity for the franchise. But then we got three animated series, plus two comics, and none of them were consistent with each other... and none seemed to completely fit with the games either. In light of all of that, being exposed to another continuity would not have made my brain explode.

I also remember being troubled by the Sonic 3 manual explicitly mentioning glitches. Mainly, I think, by the lame 'explanation' they gave for them, but also just because... well, it's just weird to acknowledge the existence of glitches in the manual.

The word 'COPE' inexplicably displayed all over the Spring Yard Zone like some kind of mystical Engrish instruction. Although I could see it coming in handy if you were very depressed at the time.

The fact that none of the programmers were arsed to make a sprite for Eggrobo in the Flying Battery Zone.

Hidden Palace Zone as Knuckles. I completed the game as Knuckles first, and I remember being blown away by its pointlessness. There isn't a whole lot more to it as Sonic, actually...

The backdrops to the Death Egg Zone in S&K. First off, the fact that they didn't move. Act 1 could hve been rendered awesome with some sort of rotational effect... eh, it's hard to describe, but you might know what I mean if you've played Dynamite Headdy. And Act 2 had an infuriatingly obvious copy-paste in the cloud patterns. It bothered me that the last Zone proper had some of the laziest art.

Angel Island Zone in particular always struck me as very buggy. That problem where you got the Act 2 music in Act 1, getting stuck in the big long tube before the boss at random intervals, Tails constantly being hit by bombs... My cart also seemed to develop a problem where the sound would cut off abruptly as the island was being set on fire. I don't think it was there when I first played the game, and I haven't encountered it on emulators or re-releases, so I think it may have just been my copy.

I have to say, though, that the swich to Eggman didn't bother me in the least. I dunno, I kind of prefer the name.

 

The pitfall. Probably my most hated enemy in Sonic games -- especially the newer ones.

I honestly think if pitfalls were done away with, or lessened to the extreme, I would almost enjoy titles like Sonic 2006.

 

The holes are the biggest problem with modern Sonic games.

 

Not about the games, but more about perception: how everyone seems to think that the name "Mobius" came from a mistranslation. The interview they cite is from 1992, but a comic in 1991 used the name.

 

Well, it's clearly a city. Or somewhere nearby.
Try to bring some sense into Collision Chaos. Surrealistic Zones? That's Classic Sonic for ya ;D

Also Sandopolis, Act 1 wasn't very entertaining and Act 2 busted my nerves with Time Overs and rising sand that somehow, I always manage to find a glitch on it.

 

A lot of you seem to suffer from time overs. I don't even think I've seen a time over before. I'm not bragging but Sonic games aren't that difficult.

 

I guess people had trouble with the sandslides in that one section.
PROTIP: the platform that you see as you're sliding to the left is something you need to hop on -- the sandslide moving the right that's there will take you to the next part of the level.


I had a tipsbook with a walkthrough. When I look back I guess if I didn't have it I might have actually got lost on that area, but I never have. Instead I just go with the flow and enjoy what I feel is honestly a fairly clever set of traps. Going back to it I think Sandopolis Act 2 is awesome.

Act 1 is meh, though. Far too sprawling.

 

Well, it depends on how much you game, how you think, if you found solutions by chance, and even how old you were when you first played it.

I was really young at the times I suffered from these problems, like the Sonic 3 Barrel, and the sandslides. I got time overs because of these two, I remember clearly. The ghosts annoyed me too.

It's all dependent on the player -- not everyone will have the skill or knowledge to fly through things like you may be able to do.

 

Fair point, I was 8 and I almost always played it with a friend, two heads are better than one I guess. I remember we had no idea that hyper Sonic etc existed at the time (as the internet barely existed in '93 and magazines were too expensive for us) and it was such an awesome surprise when we finally secured that last emerald.

 

You don't need to hop on it. In fact, as soon as you see it all you need to do is jump and you'll land on the opposite sandslide.

I only say this because every time I tried to land on the platform I'd miss =P

 

Well, fair enough. I suppose "need" was a poor word choice. I myself rarely use that platform anyway.

 

I think it's more of the fact about time overs with Sonic 3 and Knuckles, which has some pretty darn long levels. Plus, the level boss for Sandopolis which you have to knock into the sand pit can take a very long time to defeat. So if you're falling behind in the level, you gotta hope you have enough time to defeat him.

 

It takes about 20 seconds. Just jump into the sandpit and wait there, about 3-4 leaps and he follows you in.

 

Kind of remedied with the act 2 one, who you can destroy before he gets a chance to move.

 

That's what I do. When I get to that one just hop across. Simple. Not sure what bothered me really...though speeding to time travel in Sonic CD, only to ram into an obstacle was VERY annoying. And speeding into pitfalls in the modern games.

 

Okay, so I know I'm resurrecting a dying thread, but I now know what annoys me the most: the music programming. Namely, Hill Top Zone and IceCap Zone. You know why? Most of the sound effects are on the fifth FM channel, and it just so happens that both songs use that channel. Hill Top Zone uses that channel for high notes played over the main melod that I almost never hear in-game because collecting rings turns the sound off and it never comes back.

IceCap is more of a botch. The problem is in the first part, the part with the baseline and chord structure everyone claims to be Michael Jackson's. Here is what the channels are used for:
FM 1 - Bass
FM 2 - Chords 1; fifth note (G[dotted half] F G[half] F[half])
FM 3 - In-song effects and notes (use DGen to see what I mean)
FM 4 - Chords 2; root note (C Bb C Bb C Bb[dotted half])
FM 5 - Chords 3; third note (Eb[dotted half] D Eb[half] D[half])
The notes I just gave, which I got from turning off channels in DGen, prove that IceCap's "chords" aren't really chords at all, but the individual notes being held down give the effect of chord structure. Once you lose one of the three channels, the whole illusion falls apart, and along with it the power of this song. The effect is more drastic when you kill the third note, leaving you with... no sense of chord type. This shatters the whole chord structure, since you can no longer call these chords!

FM 3 has very few notes in this section: switch 3 and 5, and everything should work. Keep the second section the same, though: FM 5 is harmony to FM 4, which make the bell accompaniment; getting rid of the harmony does nothing to the rest of the song.

If all this is too technical, I'll make it simple: it takes a note off the violin, and that ruins it for me.

 

...what? How are the chords "fake" simply because they're on multiple channels? That's the only way to play chords on sound hardware with monophonic sound channels. Not only that, but every song in the entire game uses the 5th FM channel in some capacity. Granted, it's usually smart to keep minor segments of the song on the latter three FM channels since sound effects also use them, but to say the sound programming is bad simply because of factors that can't be avoided is extremely ignorant.

Please learn how sound hardware works before complaining about it.