I played through this a few times since SAGE and something always felt off but it was difficult to put into words. I've now gone back and studied the problems I feel keep the hack from being great. I should note that I only played through the first 2 zones in classic mode though I have done so a few times now. First your level design feels like you are trying to mix forced speed Dimps style platforming with more precise platforming segments more Mario than Sonic. While interesting in theory it presents some real problems in your hack. As I said I see a lot of Dimp's style forced speed. This seems problematic with the original Sonic physics or perhaps its the level design itself. Either way moments of forced speed often don't turn out as intended. Usually this is caused by Sonic not hitting a spring or boost pad correctly. Leaving the player at a stand still in an area of level that was intended to blast through. These areas are where the level design really breaks down, because the spin dash doesn't get you up a lot of the extremely big loops you've created. Leaving the player to back track looking for a boost pad, spring or hopefully finding another way to speed back up. With springs specifically there's even more of a problem because in some cases you need speed before hitting the springs for the spring to launch you in the right direction with enough speed. Backtracking in Sonic is never good. Its also worth mentioning that the peelout would fix some of this. When the speed sections do work they zip you back and forth so fast its very difficult to know which direction you are supposed to be going once you get to a slower area. Which leads to more backtracking... The slow areas of your levels have a different set of issues. Platforming is very precise too precise for a Sonic engine. It makes jumps that would seem easy in Mario much more frustrating in Sonic mostly because he moves a lot faster. Wall jump areas wall feel like a chore most of the time due to the back and forth button pressing to jump up a wall. It would feel a lot more natural and fun if the wall jump worked more like Mighty's in Chaotix. There are a few slow areas where the goal is to move Sonic upward. These too are problematic because Sonic is a fast character and when moving vertically its a lot of stop and go something Sonic isn't best at. That's way Sonic games use springs, moving platforms, half ramps, and level gimmicks to mostly avoid that kind of vertical climb up, fall down, try again kind of platforming. Badnik placement could also use work it seems like you place the badniks right at the transition from speedy areas to slower areas. But this doesn't give the player a chance to defend himself because you have so little control over Sonic at high speeds. This is even more a problem with the spider from CCZ because not even the spin stops his attack. The graphics while decent don't do the level design any favors. Sonic games use a lot of subtitle hints as to your position in the level. Higher up paths are often stacked on top of the lower paths rather than just floating in the air. This not only helps give the levels a sense of believability, structure, and keeps different areas of the level from looking too much alike as is often the case in your first zone. Emerald Hill is a good example of this. Notice how most of the upper path is actually physically resting on the lower path, resulting in some cave like sections in the bottom of the level and more open sections at the top of the level. There are other hints too top level paths generally have more gaps to jump and you on the top level you see very little additional ground above you. I played Choatix ealier today. It to has a lot of these same problems. May I suggest you look over Chaotix level maps and then go back and look at the original Sonic games. Study the difference between the level design in Chaotix vs the classics it might help you understand where I'm coming from a little more.
If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me, but classic mode is a tacked on afterthought. The game proper centred around adventure mode and the level designed entirely with the adventure and exploration gameplay in mind. As I recall, Classic mode was tacked on to please the braying, mooing mob who praised the innovation of a Mario 64 style mission system, but couldn't be fucked actually, you know, playing it. Further proof perhaps, that trying to please everyone, leaves you pleasing no-one. They weren't designed to be whipped through in a race to the finish like a classic sonic game. I feel that a lot of your criticism is vague and can be explained more by your expectations and your ability as a player, than it can by the level design, which does it's job of housing the scores of missions and challenges superbly. Everyone is entitled to their opinion of course, and I doubt you'd have put so much effort into adding a response if you didn't think you had a point. If I may, though, I'd suggest that you actually play the game how it was intended before passing judgement. Judging all of RR by Classic mode is like judging all of Sonic 3 by its 2 player mode.
So I am really sick today (as opposed to somewhat sick since Monday) and stuck home from classes. I e-mailed my professors to let them know I'd be absent and to ask to make up a quiz I'm missing, then clicked over to Retro and found quite a large post to sift through. Usually I just shrug and move on, but I really have nothing better to do today than to pick it apart for better or for worse. Full stop. To play 5 acts of 13 in the game's secondary play mode does not bode well for how much I'm going to enjoy reading the rest of this post. I am! That is why the adventure mode has a resemblance to Super Mario 64. For the next release I've added the ability to uncurl from a spin dash like in the Rivals games, so this should let you climb up steeper areas since you won't roll to a stop while going up a wall. I don't quite know what you're getting at with the springs, but I suppose you mean that I have some upwards springs at ground level that you can run into with speed to go soaring. In these cases, not once is it required for finishing the level nor does it ever happen over a bottomless pit. Heck, it's rare that it's even part of a route so much as a way to end a path and let you drop back onto the lower path, and I do believe I've been careful about badnik and spike placement in these areas to avoid any awful landings. While you have me thinking about it, lemme mention for anybody reading that I now have the option of making springs with Sonic 2's solidity or with Megamix-style top solidity only, so springs should be a bit more versatile. Also, sifting through the code to find how diagonal springs get their weird solidity and programming around that was a bitch. The correct direction is the direction you didn't just come from. No, seriously. It should be pretty clear what way you just got shot in, but maybe I'm not understanding you correctly. I don't have any high-speed areas designed to take you in reverse... the worst I have is the ever-popular "spring pointing the opposite direction" and I've kept them yellow for easy recovery. The wall kick is another thing that's been modified since the last release. After latching onto a wall with the A button, you can now simply push the D-pad at the wall to do consecutive wall kicks. You don't need to use A to latch on again until you hit the ground. I've tried both using the C button the entire time and using no button at all, but both methods interfered with normal gameplay. Mighty's wall kick in Chaotix lets you scale a single wall. My answer to that is "hell no". I'm not sure what to tell you about the platforming being difficult for you. Frankly, I think the lower paths in Star Light Zone put the difficulty of my platforming to shame. The only way moving upwards is "stop and go" is if you're timing hops on moving platforms. But you just mentioned that moving platforms were a legitimate method for upward movement in Sonic games. *scratches head* If you're going to use a half pipe to propel Sonic upwards, you need a large build-up of speed, which you already stated doesn't work well for you. Yes, badniks are exactly where you say they are. Putting them in the speedy areas themselves can be an accident waiting to happen, but putting them in slower areas is a good way to make platforming way harder than it needs to be. What makes enemies in early Sonic games different than in other platformers of the era is that you still have to be deliberate about hitting them most of the time, but you don't need nearly the level of precision as you would in a game where you need to land right on top of the enemy. The only really in-your-face Grabber placement I can think of is an area in Chemical Plant 2 where you head down a rather steep wall, level out, run down a short but steep hill, whip around two loops, and then come to a dead stop against a wall right under one. I found that it was easy to dodge without actually trying, because you're probably rolling from the speedy area. You end up on a descending staircase, so continuing to hold the down button will make you duck and put you out of reach of the Grabber as the floor drops. Man, this post is getting a lot longer than I anticipated. Going to have to split this thing into two!
There's a lot of things I want to pick apart here. I'll start with the speed booster count from several pages back: CV1: 7 CV2: 5 CV3: 4 CP1: 27 CP2: 31 FP1: 0 FP2: 0 CN1: 0 CN2: 0 MTZ: 0 You admitted that you only played the first two zones, and in classic mode no less. A lot of people have done exactly what you've done and therefore haven't seen the more challenging zones. This is one reason I want to have a different first zone for the hack in future releases (the other being that it would be nice to start a 2D Sonic game with something besides a green, tranquil, waterside area, like how Sonic Advance 3 does it). The other plan is to remove classic mode altogether to get rid of the "plays itself" comments because it just doesn't work on levels not built for it (iojnekns is entirely right in that it was tacked on to try to appease people, but backfired miserably). Now that I've gotten the homing attack to chase targets instead of just moving at their original position really fast, I'm going to try implementing an emerald radar to make adventure mode easier. I've also gotta question why you would link one of The Sonic Center's maps for me to look at. <a href="http://www.soniccenter.org/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=797" target="_blank">I'm an administrator there</a>, so trust me, I've seen it. However, I see your map of Sonic 2's first act and raise you a rather outdated but still pretty accurate map of our first act (large, uncompressed image alert). I think that stacking effect you ask for is used in many places, particularly how the bottom and right end of the act are large caves. You are now 0 for 2 on knowledge of The Sonic Center. I know Chaotix pretty damned well. :P While you have me thinking of Chaotix, lemme mention that the Chaotix drums have been axed in favor of pulling over the entire S3&K drum set. =============================================== The biggest thing that kills me about reading most of this is that if DNX and I corrected a lot of the things you mentioned---getting rid of upwards platforming, getting rid of backtracking, designing the game around classic mode, changing the art to be better than "decent" to you, segregating the speed sections and platforming sections, redesigning the levels so that every path connects to a lower one---we would directly contradict everything we've been praised for. Seriously, look at which trophies we won, then look at your complaints: they're almost exactly opposite! So I'm just going to have to say "deal with it" because this really, really is a case of "you can't please all of the people all of the time".
Sweet. How do you go about doing that, press the A button to uncurl? You know I found the wall kick a challenge to learn when I first started using it but over time it became second nature, like throwing hadokens. Is it really necessary to change it to this new way. I shouldn't be judging the new control method without trying it but it sounds like it's going to be a bit of a pain with this auto latch, it's like I've lost flexible control over Sonic's movements for the benefit of noobs. I would like to beta test that move set before you release your new hack to the public so I can give an opinion if it's better or not. It will piss me off having a crippled move considering the awesome abilities you've added to Retro Remix. Shift your Casino Night, or Fun Factory whatever you've called it the start with new level design, and also add a morning, noon, evening and night time shift everytime you leave an act. Move Cascade Valley much latter on and make it alot harder, I personally like a decent challenge for a grassland area. I found the classic mode pointless for this type of game, I can say it won't be missed on my part. I hope you haven't got rid of the B for dash, C for homing attack. Bloody useful having both of these. I thought the placement of arrows around acts worked perfectly. Making it easier with a radar takes fun out of the searching from the clues your given at the start of the level title card. Having some beep (if that's what your thinking) would annoy the shit out of me. You've got a good system and this sound like a bad new feature, bit like jumping in Bionic Commando Rearmed 2. Also Thorn, are you going to consider doing new bosses? It's the one thing that lets down the game (being hyper critical when I say that). I've thought that it would be good to not only have new bosses but a separate giant ring to jump through for them. You have to unlock the boss areas by collecting so many emeralds and can only advance to the next zone by beating the boss and getting a special emerald. Also, it would be cool facing Eggrobo instead of facing Robotnik as a boss. There could be loads of them working together as a team in some zones and even do some kind of combined Megarobo as a final boss. It would keep the boss battles separate for when you just want to speed run through levels as it gets boring repeating bosses over and over again. @Overbound I can understand that the direction this hack has gone is not to your liking as I'm sure you expect it to play like the classics, but for me this hack is the greatest hack ever. Thorn and DNX are gods at this and keep building fresh ideas and mechanics that just blow my mind everytime with their new release. I personally find it hard to enjoy the classics as much as I enjoy their hacks, this is what a true successor of the classic Sonic games should have been all those years ago as it just so much damn fun and has huge replayability
Now I feel bad for only reviewing the classic mode only at the last SAGE, but in my defense I was short on time... I'll have to give this a proper playthrough now.
Classic mode is at the top of the menu which is why I picked to play that. I wasn't aware I was supposed to play adventure mode sorry. I played through the 2 zones 3 times while figuring out what to say, I put a lot of thought into that post. If your intersted in getting down to specifics I can get show examples. A few of the things you said such as you reference to starlight zone make me wonder if you missunderstood what I was getting at, specific examples might help clearify things. But I won't waste my if your not intersted. It sounds like you've already made some iprovements with the controls which is good.
Oh dear, I haven't been active for so long here. However, unless there is a major bug going on in terms of how the level play, there is no entitlement in requesting for changes of the gameplay itself for the sake of one individual's own preference or comeplety altering a portion of the game itself. Suggestions are welcomed though. As far as I can remember there were complaints last year that kinda caused a cave-in for changes. Personally the hack has been heading in a vague but great direction and the results have been satisfying. Sorry to say this, but right now "haters gonna hate".
I was trying to give you guys some feedback I thought would be helpful. But it seems like I've just upset people. I regret ever wasting my time playing for and writing this post.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA. I'm not "upset", but when you give me an essay on what issues you have with the game, I'm allowed to have a rebuttal essay. What made it difficult to respond to your post was that most of the complaints were about things the hack's been praised for. Frankly, I thought I was pretty calm about it, but then again I am sick and irritable so maybe I wasn't. steveswede and iojnekns seem to be the two people that defend this hack through thick and thin (and I appreciate it!), so it's only natural that they responded too. iojnekns basically said that you should play more than a sliver of the game before drawing opinions, and steveswede basically said "sorry you don't like it, but I do". DNXDelta went on to make a general statement about change requests and cited the days surrounding the last release. Nobody was out to attack you... they just disagreed. You're more than welcome to dislike the hack.
I dunno about everyone else, but I found Classic mode to be very enjoyable. I hope it stays for future demos, since I'm not as patient with missions and unlocking things.
beep..........beep..........beep..........beep..........beep.......... Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep...Beep... BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-682pHOhJE[/youtube] Also why do I keep making "meh" SMPS music when I should actually be finding somebody better and leeching~
YEAAAH PC ICE CAP MUSIC I grew up on that you know. Funny thing, I didn't have a Genesis (had a game gear instead) and only had a friend who had one. It is true I played Sonic 3 on that but I only got as far as Hydrocity Zone. I didn't get to Carnival Night or beyond on a Genesis. When I finally got to it, it was on the Sonic & Knuckles Collection. I didn't even KNOW they had changed the music for many years, even though I listened to midis at vgmusic.com and was confused why they were different. To make matters worse, Sonic Screensaver didn't have Carnival Night, Ice Cap, and Launch Base music in its library. Strangely, I played Marble Garden Zone Sonic only at grade school, (the Genesis was in the lounge) showing off for everybody else getting to very end before the boss area only realizing "Hey wait a minute! I need Tails for this!" and stupidly reset the game. Yeah. Of course I know what happens now, but back then... I do know the Genesis tracks are more important, but the Sonic & Knuckles Collection music will always hold a piece in my heart. Screw the haters.
"I must find all the missing pieces of the Master Emerald..." It's been over two years since I last played SADX for real, yet I remember everything. Good idea with the "this is how close you are to a piece" thing. Should definitely help to make this game easier. As for the music, I don't see your problem, it sounds perfect to me.
Thanks for adding the emerald radar and actually making it possible for me to find them in the Acts. :v: And the music is great, I think. Panic Puppet is always a welcome addition to any hack, I say.
Did you miss the video he posted? This all looks terrific. I have to ask though, will Chemical Plant Zone be getting new art? It seems like a sore thumb when you have such excellent custom art on the other levels.
I did miss it until now actually... my new Hotspot proxy allows me to watch youtube from China... where I am working abroad... Before that, I didnt even notice there was a video. My bad. Yea, it looks pretty cool. I'm also digging the new music too.
