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General Sonic Discussion (112 posts)
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Don't lose your temper so quickly.
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21 years old
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September 1, 1993
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  1. In Topic: Energy in Sonic Levels

    05 February 2015 - 03:45 PM

    I'd say they are lifeless for more reasons than just the lack of animations. But yeah, the backgrounds don't help - I love Toy Kingdom and Music Plant, for example, but the stages' visual identities are more often than not just skins applied to a mechanism.

  2. In Topic: Energy in Sonic Levels

    04 February 2015 - 03:34 AM

    Indeed, these details are very important when it comes to mantaining the illusion of speed and not letting the player drop the increasingly frantic behaviour if he ever stops. Movement is always something to look at, if only reflexively. So if there's something going on your attention won't "calm down" if you have to, say, wait while a platform goes up. I wonder if they added this just for the hll of it or if they noticed it was important from a gameplay perspective?

    Metropolis is my favourite example. Come to think of it, Metropolis is kinda slow. You spend a lot of time getting through tunnels, going up with those screws (and subsequently falling off because they suck) and bouncing on those yellow triangle things. However, the accumulated sense of danger from previous zones plus its inspired enemy placement makes it so that even if you are not moving Sonic or are just going up on a screw, you have to pay attention to everywhere else because otherwise you'll get hit. And the animations on the screen keep your level of attention high enough even if there are no enemies on the area. This makes the experience a lot more fluid and lets its level design shine the way it should. It's not just pretty - it's functional too.

  3. In Topic: Does Sonic 1 honestly hold up?

    19 February 2014 - 05:44 PM

    View PostCovarr, on 06 February 2014 - 04:09 PM, said:

    Do Super Mario World's levels win in terms of complexity? Nope. Scale? Not even remotely. But depth? Absolutely.

    Let's take a look at the maps you linked: Scrap Brain 2 is incredibly complex, but not very deep at all. There are branching paths, but all any given path has to offer is a different set of obstacles. It's certainly more interesting, what with the large variety in obstacles and a good balance between horizontal and vertical movement, but in the end, any given path is still quite linear. Vanilla Dome 2, on the other hand, may just be the greatest stage of any 2D platformer of all time. The game already had a long-running trend of hidden exits, and this level really pumped that up to 11 by hiding it behind a puzzle, with any of four different ways to fuck it up. What's more, this puzzle is implemented in such a way as to rely on and enhance the platforming elements of the game, rather than just grinding it to a halt the way the labyrinth zone switch puzzles did. If you fail, it's only a few seconds wasted and you can still get to the end.

    But even ignoring alternate exits, the exploration in Sonic 1 was never significantly more than choosing between branching paths. Super Mario World has secrets everywhere. Hidden lives, hidden bonus areas, and dozens of different ways to get to them. Some are found by flying, some are found by pipes, some are found by identifying things that are more than just setpieces, and some are unlocked by switch palaces... Let me put it this way. In Sonic 1, there may be different paths to the finish, but all paths are pretty much equivalent. Sure, they may have different obstacles or twist different ways, but it still boils down to "get past things to get to the end". Super Mario World has obvious paths, hidden paths, and even secrets in non-paths (see: all the sky stuff in Donut Plains 1) and the content in each one is vastly different. Some are obstacles, some are shortcuts, some are secret exits, some are bonuses, and sometimes they're a combination of those.

    I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there may be a lot less to a given stage in SMW, but every single bit of it is just so much more meaningful; not a single buzzy beetle in the whole game is anything but deliberately and meticulously thought out. It's simple, but beautifully and elegantly so. This is something I feel that Sonic 3 & Knuckles achieved, and to a lesser extent Sonic 2, but the first one never managed that. I'll grant that it was complicated, but most of the time I don't think that complexity added depth. Replay value, maybe, but not depth.


    How is anything you said even remotely relevant to the point? If secrets are what you would say is what adds depth to a level, then Sonic has always had plenty of them. But they are not in "where", they are in "how". It's not about secret areas in Green Hill, but about how you can use the areas you already know of in a completely different way and finish the act in less than 20 seconds. That's deep. The thing about Mario levels is that the secrets are and must be in the level. Sonic has, because of aspects of his gameplay, to offer cues in the level for the player to perform a secret. Exploration isn't, never was the point. So the switch puzzles in Labyrinth Zone are, in fact, immensely simple compared to anything SMW has to offer. However, how you do it is what counts and for what purpose. Branching paths aren't even the most important part of Sonic, you know? Why does everyone focus on this aspect of level design when Marble Zone, with all of its linearity, offers ways for the player to draw his own path within it in so many different ways? Everything in Sonic is meaningful too. Automatically so, because it's up to the player to use the elements laid out in front of him. Mario, of course, has always had genius level design that also lets you do amazing stuff just jumping here or there, but since this is actually inherent to Sonic, all levels naturally focus this one kind of depth.

    I wouldn't talk of Scrap Brain Act 2 if I were to expose how deep Sonic 1 can be. I'd take Spring Yard. There's room for absolutely everything in there. Not so many secrets, no, but the levels are horizontally expansive and yet you can finish it in less than 30 seconds if you perform secrets instead of finding them.

    Once again, it's not about "I didn't know there was such a thing in the game", but "I didn't know you could do that to reach the same place".

  4. In Topic: A feature I think every Sonic game should have.

    17 February 2014 - 07:52 AM

    View PostSpeedStarTMQ, on 16 February 2014 - 03:09 PM, said:

    Because nowadays getting a Game Over usually just means starting from the beginning of the level/zone/whathaveyou, rather than starting the entire game again, which is what Game Overs were originally all about back in the arcades and the majority of the early to mid 90's games.
    Having lives is part of this feature, because running out of lives is what gets you a Game Over, but as they are more or less redundant in today's world where games have save files and are often easier than games of the late 80's and early 90's,why bother having lives either? Why not just make lives infinite? If you die you die, and getting a Game Over just means you'll have to start the level again at worst, rather than the entire game. For Sonic and Mario at least, starting a level all over again is hardly much more of a chore than dying and restarting at a checkpoint.

    For some games that use the lives and Game Over system still, it makes no difference anyway. Sonic 4 and NEW Super Mario Bros are so difficult to lose all your lives on that you'll probably never see the Game Over screen in your entire lifetime. It just makes the whole system pointless.


    That's hardly technical. It's but a design choice that doesn't need to be taken for granted. And it's not even about making a game harder or easier. It's just how the game deals with frustration, which is bound to happen whether there are lives or not. Does it show you that you've failed? There are many approaches, which is why Game Overs might or not be important and that has nothing to do with technical aspects.

    So for instance, should you give infinite lives to the player, is there anything wrong with counting how many times he gets a Game Over and making that affect his playthrough somehow? I mean, there's nothing you can't count in games and return to the player in the form of a reward or a punishment. Heck, you could even count how many times the player loads the game. Lives are - again - a number just like any other and there is no reason why Sonic Team should ditch them for the sake of modernity or whatever you would call it.

    View PostThe KKM, on 17 February 2014 - 06:55 AM, said:

    Didn't find lifes fun in 1993


    I suppose you didn't find school fun at that point in time either, but how do you see it today? That's the thing, see. Fun is not a concrete block you have delivered at your home once you spindash the first time, but a continuous process of remembering, forgetting, learning and experiencing. Lives may not have been fun the first time you got a game over, but passing through the point in which you got a game over, but this time with more lives, may be double fun. And that's the entire point.

  5. In Topic: A feature I think every Sonic game should have.

    16 February 2014 - 01:31 PM

    View PostSpeedStarTMQ, on 29 September 2013 - 06:39 PM, said:

    Whilst from a technical standpoint lives and game overs in most games might seem pointless,


    How so?

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