QUOTE (Scarred Sun @ Dec 19 2010, 12:54 AM)
Actually, this is a great original post and the rest of you should be striving to do that instead of writing one-line responses.
You might like this observation then (crossposted from SoA forums):
"What really gets to me about the level design by DIMPS/Sonic Team is the 'conquering the beast' methodology that they used in EVERY stage. It's smooth sailing right up until the end where all of a sudden the floor drops out from you (sometimes literally) in an attempt to make the stage seem like some cruel beast that must be defeated before ULTIMATE VICTORY can be attained, but what actually ends up happening is the player gets frustrated that they have to start the level all the way over from the beginning because there aren't 50 rings between the last checkpoint and the SUPER CHALLENGE OF DOOM. The idea of each level being a demon that must be conquered is a very japanese design style and tends to just make western players upset and question why they keep playing. Before someone accuses me of conjecture let me cite some actual ingame examples:
- In splash hill act 3 where there are bottomless pits below ziplines, and right after the zipline landings
- casino street act 2 where you have to platform over all of the cards right before the end over the pit of death
- casino street act 3 where you have to cannon-to-homing attack and then not have the bumpers push you into the pit of death
- mad gear zone act 1 where you have the pistons kill you if you aren't somehow moving at full tilt, but you can't get any speed there because the first piston is de-synced
- The final boss. Every time you get hit your rings fly further and further away, which is cheap as hell. Also, the boss gives no warning as to what it is going to do and if you're on a 4:3 screen like me, you can't even see him when he comes down. Again, pulling the rug out from under the player.
There was one occurence in mad gear zone act 2 that had this problem 'fixed' between the leak and final builds where there were bubbles in the middle of the last gear run over the bottomless pit(again, jeez it's like there's a theme going on here or something) that made it so even super sonic had to momentarily lose control. Without super sonic this would have been an absolute deathtrap and I'm glad it got fixed in the final. But just this one occurrence is not enough. I seriously think sonic needs to stop being handled by japanese developers, their entire culture's mindset just doesn't mesh with what makes a classic sonic game. Or at least tell them to call Yasuhara - he seems like the only person ever to have worked for sonic team who knows how to make a game for both cultures.
Speaking of the piston section at the end of MGZ act 1, I found myself using the game's poor collision to stand on a small, one pixel wide area where I shouldn't be able to do and just wait for the whole set of pistons to reset their cycle and then just homing attack like mad to get through the section. Now of course, the eastern mindset I mentioned earlier would have the developers fix this had they known it was possible because there seems to be this prevailing mindset of 'if the user can find a solution to the problem that we didn't anticipate, then something is horribly wrong and they need to be punished for it'. This is evident in shows like Ninja Warrior (Sasuke in japan) where if someone gets inventive and finds a new way to reach the goal in question, they immediately get disqualified and kicked out of the tournament. Also, every time someone actually manages to BEAT Ninja Warrior, the entire course gets redesigned to be even harder. We saw this mindset during the development of Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut, where the majority of the development cycle was spent fixing 'character x in level y' bugs that everyone just wound up using an action replay or more collision glitches to circumvent later, instead of adding content and making it an actual director's cut. I'm sure you can see why this mindset would infuriate people who try to think critically and be inventive with a challenge to reach the goal instead of being shoved into the narrowest set of parameters possible and repeat, repeat, repeat until victory is achieved.
Ruby are you taking notes? This is something DIMPS needs to hear."
I'm hoping that THIS is something they fix in the anniversary game, as it was even relevant in colors to a lesser degree. If nobody notices this problem, I don't think SEGA will be too successful in their efforts to re-vitalize the franchise.
This post has been edited by Dude: 19 December 2010 - 11:11 AM
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