Bashing Sonic Generations

So it's not reused garbage, it's just garbage garbage. Understood.

 

Yeah, pretty much. I'd still take new garbage over reused garbage, at least it makes it seem like they're trying.

 

I dunno. I have nothing but bad things to say about Time Eater and the ensuing fight with it. I can kind of muster up some positive, or at least neutral comments about Sand Scorpion or Nega Wisp Armour and its clones. I don't hate fighting any of those, even if they're all basically the same thing.

Like, I totally get where you're coming from, but duuuuude Time Eater is just the worst. It's such a poorly design and poorly executed fight that I don't think it's really worth the points you could give it for originality (as that's kind of such a bare minimum standard).

 

Oh God Time Eater. After all these years I still don't have that dodge stuff achievement on Steam (I got it on the 360, but that was years ago). I just refuse to play that level unless I have to. It sucks. And I like most of the other bosses in the game! Like why in this overall good/great game is the grand finale such a wet fart?

Ya I'd rather a 5th version of the sand scorpion/nega wisp/lost world "Eggrobo"/forces death egg robot (which, BTW, fuck you writers and your lazy ass naming. It doesn't look like a death egg robot, it doesn't act like a death egg robot, IT'S NOT EVEN ON THE FUCKING DEATH EGG THAT ALREADY BLEW UP. Here, name with 10 seconds of thought... The Phantom Egg. It's probably not great but it's better than Death Egg Robot, which in and of itself is an awful name).

Hey actually back to Generations. Was it always called the Death Egg Robot? What was it called in Sonic 2 did it have a name then?

 

I think the official name for that robot is "EggRobo", which is odd because it looks nothing like the real EggRobo.

I didn't really mean it like that. What I meant was that this franchise isn't going anywhere if it just keeps reusing tried-and-true concepts over and over again. I will concede that the Sand Scorpion template is much better than the Time Eater, but... I just have a bias against it. It was fine in Colors IMO (it actually was cool how it incorporated the Wisps in its attacks), but then I played Lost World, then I learned it originated in Secret Rings when I played that game, and to see it AGAIN in Forces was just annoying as hell.

Shifting gears a bit, I thought it was worth noting that Time Eater in the 3DS version is actually one of the few areas in which it outdoes the console version though, if only by a little. It's much more engaging, harder, and does a better job of distinguishing Classic and Modern Sonic, though that's all I can really say about it.

 

In Sonic 2 it was called "Death Egg". Really! That's what the robot itself is called in the official Sonic 2, Sonic 1 & 2 and Sonic Mega Collection guide books (and one episode of the Sonic manga) in Japan. The Sonic Jam Official Guide calls it ロボ・エッグマン (Robo Eggman) in Japanese and "Robot Eggman" in English.

So "Death Egg Robot" is a bit of revisionist history that distinguishes the robot from the space satellite. (In the Japanese Sonic Generations it's デスエッグロボ "Death Egg Robo".)

 

I got lost here, because the one I hate is the 3DS one; played it once and never again (yeah, game not beaten, as I said before). I'm not in love with the main one either, but I least beat that one.

 

Sonic Heroes designed to have a slower pace than other sonic games. I like its design choices but not everyone happy about it i guess.

 

Of course I would’ve liked more main levels, perhaps another game or two represented in each era.

Level selection could’ve been better in both versions but especially the 3DS. Imo the 3DS should’ve been:

Classic Era:

• Green Hill Zone (I would’ve preferred Bridge Zone but contextually GHZ is the only appropriate way to start a game like this)
• Sky High Zone
• Sunset Park Zone
  
• Bouncy Boss Robot (Boss)

Advance Era:

• Secret Base Zone
• Ice Paradise Zone
• Chaos Angel Zone
• Gemerl (Boss - 2 phase fight mixing his solo fights and Nonaggression form)

Modern Era:

• Water Palace Zone
• Machine Labyrinth Zone
• Asteroid Coaster Zone
• Egg King (Boss, complete with a Jun Senior arrangement of Bomber Barbara! :specialed

Also why does Classic get the Homing Attack as an automatic upgrade halfway through the 3DS version??? He doesn’t need it, it’s mandatory and only feels redundant given that Modern has it from the start in a game where he’s played almost entirely in 2D.

 

I found it forgettable and the graphics were suck. I played through once and never revisited. Can't give decent criticism other than feeling underwhelmed enough to where I can't even bring up anything decent to criticize.

 

The Classic acts of the Mega Drive era zones are all lazy C&Ps of the originals, to the point where Mushroom Hill even has a checkpoint followed by a straight line path with precisely zero obstacles before the goal. The new acts that they had to create for the four remaining zones have some incredibly S4-esque design about them, and they're arguably even more barren.

Whatever Dumps were doing, they're weren't trying to crate an authentic classic styled game. Generations HD is very inaccurate to the classics, but at least its consistent in what it does. Gens 3DS is so phoned in and lazy that I wish they hadn't bothered.

EDIT: Autocorrect changed Dimps to Dumps, and I'm okay with that.

 

I still love Generations, but let's be honest, the Time Eater boss is awful. Very possibly the worst final boss ever in any Sonic game.

 

I'd say a close second is Secret Rings, if only for the carpal tunnel that the final waggle QTE gave my wrist.

Back on topic, I'd say the biggest disappointment of Generations is how we never got that gem of a game that ironed out all the kinks while only giving us the great stuff: no reused levels, no 2D, just slick controls, a wealth of unlockables and maybe, hopefully, a decent-ish story and playable Knuckles and Tails?

Instead, we got Forces. The downgrade is, to paraphrase Todd in the Shadows, much like the gap between Usher and Chris Brown. Or as he put it, between "a Da Vinci" and "that Jesus monkey portrait that old lady painted"

 

It's the childish haunted castle what annoyed me as Mario-esque, not the level design itself. Well, King Boom Boo felt Mario-esque first, but that guy was funny so I forgive that a bit more. That was my feeling back in the day, anyways; after the many things Sonic Team has Nintendone throughout the years, I'd probably far more tolerant with that now, but the haunted castle was still too generic an unsual for a Sonic game. The ghosts of Sandopolis felt like too much too, but they were so mechanic they could have passed as some trap made by Robotnik.

 

I’m a little wary of derailing the thread but I’ve never felt that 2D sections in Modern Sonic’s playstyle is an intrinsically flawed concept. There’s definitely been an over reliance on them in Colours and Forces (as well as Generations to a much lesser extent) but I think they absolutely have their place in the formula.

 

2D sections in most Boost games (and Lost World as well) strike two bad notes in that not only is the ratio between them and the 3D gameplay ridiculously unbalanced for what are billed as 3D games, the 2D platforming is that slow precision/puzzle platforming design that doesn’t match up with the 3D gameplay focus and pacing at all. It’s very jarring and only further adds support to the argument they’re largely there to be filler/a gameplay crutch for what could had been actual 3D level design.

Unleashed is the only Boost game that got it right in that the 2D sections there were less common than the 3D sections and they were designed to still keep the player moving fast, throwing obstacles to dodge and shortcuts to reach to keep the players on their toes and test their reflexes. Generations to its credit still followed on this reflex-based 2D design as well for Millennium Sonic’s gameplay despite having more 2D sections than necessary; unfortunately this approach to 2D gameplay starts and ends with only those two games.

By this point I’d say I’m been burned out with this imbalance of 2D to 3D gameplay ratio/gameplay focus to the point that I can’t complain if another team came along and made a 3D Boost game with little-to-no 2D sections at all in its levels. But I would say that a good compromise would be to have fully 3D Boost games that had an additional game mode where you would have the 2D Boost gameplay there with their own campaign of levels, and having a parallel/separate story from the 3D campaign. You could even continue the Rush label and gameplay with these campaigns; you could bring back the Rush Boost system, the trick mechanics, and Blaze (playable and/or as part of the story).

 

I'll go further and say they don't match up with anything the series have ever done, that's my problem with them. They deadass don't feel like what a Sonic game should be.
If the 2D sections in the boost games were designed like the Rush games I honestly wouldn't mind them too much. But Unleashed is the only game were they did this, from Colours onward it was "Welcome to blocky slow-paced generic 2D platforming town" and it never got better. I'd even disagree with you and say that Gens' 2D sections are just as guilty of this, while not being as bad as Colours' at least.

 

Someone here around Forces' release ago summed up the main problem with Gens 3DS's gameplay as being able to pick fast platforming with G. Sonic or pick faster platforming with M. Sonic; which I'd say was a pretty apt description. Besides some token mechanics there isn't much that sets the two playstyles apart at all, not like how it is in the console version. You could mod and play each Sonic into the other Sonic's levels and be able to complete those stages without any issues.

Gens 3DS as a whole strikes me as a product I couldn't give an answer as to why it exists. It offers almost nothing standout in gameplay, presentation, or story. (Actually, it does have some good music--I really like the Classic Radical Highway and Big Arms tracks in particular--but I wager you could just save the music for the soundtrack release/add them to the console game as additional bonus tracks.) I can't even reason for it being a simple "pay the bills" game because Dimps was busy with Sonic 4 and Colors DS between 2010 and 2012, and Gens 3DS feels less inspired in design compared to those games.

Of the three distant relative handled versions of the console games Dimps made [Colors/Generations/LW] and of the four 3DS Sonic games produced overall [Gens/LW/SC/F&I], I'd argue it's the most useless game of the lot in both categories. (LW 3DS, as absolute trash as that game is, does have it being the only 3D handheld Sonic game in its favor and being less of a gameplay roulette game than LW Wii U.) I don't think we would had lost anything if Gens. 3DS was canceled during production and only the console game came out.