As far as mechanics to attain momentum, I’ve long felt rolling was one of the weaker ones.

I think the idea is that you need to recognize the optimal time to roll as rolling uphill usually negates the momentum you get from rolling downhill.

In the original games rolling disabled most of your control over sonic, you were locked in to a set trajectory if you jumped and you were at the mercy of the slopes to make sure you gain more momentum than loose it. Which is a fair trade off for being relatively safe from enemies and going faster than the camera (if you do it right anyway).

Successfully joining together optimal rolls with jumps using springs and terrain to your advantage is really satisfying and you can achieve a really nice flow and I assume that's what people are so fond off. So I guess it's not specifically rolling that people want back it's the associated flow and adrenaline rush that comes with using the level to your advantage at blazing speed.

Using the roll for that purpose in 3D wouldn't be as satisfying, restricting movement in 3D would make it really tedious and annoying. Without that trade off, it would make you faster and immune to enemies at the push of a button with no nuance or depth (hmmmmm sounds a lot like the boost actually).

I've played some fan games where you hold a button to roll and can unroll at will and I think that approach could actually work as you'd have to build up a rhythm as you go up and down and perhaps you could still have the reduced control as you'd have the ability to unroll if you need too.

 

Rolling in the 2D Sonic games isn't satisfying because "pressing down is satisfying to pull off"; the satisfaction results from pressing down and rolling in the right place and at the right time for a fun burst of speed. What's being tested here is your knowledge and judgement, less than your reflexes.

Sonic is a Mario who can become a marble on a pinball table whenever the player wants him to; when they do this, chaos can ensue, just as in pinball. It's up to the player to decide when and where they unleash this chaos. The resulting chaos (blazing down a hill, or bouncing off of objects into other objects) isn't entirely out of the player's control (they can still jump while rolling, or steer themselves in the air while bouncing), so it's not as if this results in something entirely automated. Part of the joy comes from the fact that the blazing and bouncing are determined by the underlying physics of it all, and so sometimes it's fun to see where the physics will take you if you hit this bouncer from this angle (like in any game that involves hitting a ball), or jump off of this slope at this point to see what you collide with (and what will happen if you collide with this, or with that).

Rolling also isn't just a way of gaining momentum: it's also a melee attack (which requires some momentum in order to activate, weaving its execution into the player's movement), and a more defensive option for barreling forward into unknown territory. If you roll into an enemy and you're near a downward slope (as is the case in Marble Zone Act 1, I believe), then your melee hit will bleed seamlessly into your Downhill Jam™. Multiple functions rolled (lol) into one action.

If you initiate a roll just before you walk off of a platform, you'll be in 'ball mode', and can break monitors or enemies you might land on, and can ricochet back up if you're holding the jump button down. So, it's weaved into the "platforming"' aspect of the game just as much as it is weaved into the "speed" aspect.

 

At the top of a hill.

Another nice thing about it being really simple and quick to activate is that in the event that an enemy unexpectedly shows up on screen, you don't have to do some elaborate button combination in order to turn on the defense. Simply tap down, you curl into a ball, and you'll be fine.

 

This "initial run" argument seems counter to the kinds of things you were bringing up in the opening post as cool, fun things to do.

I did none of these things on my first time playing any of these games, not just because I didn't realize I could use my movement and abilities in these ways, but because I wouldn't have been going for speed in that way anyway when I had no idea what was coming up. On subsequent playthroughs, I experimented more with things like the SA2 and Freedom Planet examples, and after I saw other people doing loop jumps, I worked that into my muscle memory too. It's the same thing with rolling; the more I played classic Sonic titles, the more I just chose to roll in places and find out what happened. It's neat to mess around with.

I would say the other part about giving up control when rolling makes sense, but given you have the ability to jump out of your roll, land, and continue running, limited controls when rolling doesn't end up much of a restriction in expert play. Framing it the way you do in these posts makes it seem like you're looking at rolling as a disconnected state you choose to enter and stay in rather than a tool in your kit that you can chain into other actions.

Much like with your thread on the spin dash, I see discussions like this always going down the road of determining what's "good design" or "useful" or "balanced" when all I really care about is the fun I have with it. I press down, I see my little guy tumble down the hill, I smile. My day is made a little bit better.

 

This pretty much sums it all up. Rolling isn't a mechanic just to attain momentum; it's connected to so much else in the game. Understanding the game mechanics as tools for motion play is the thought process of someone who is very seasoned at the games and has consciously understood its secrets. But before that, you roll simply to save your ass from an enemy you can't safely jump onto (badniks with spikes on top, for instance) or just to protect yourself more while at high speed, because you know being curled up in a ball is probably safer than actually stopping, walking slowly and being vulnerable.

And since rolling is fully integrated to using the level geometry to your advantage, as well as other actions you can take, you can't see it as one-dimensional, nor can you consider Sonic as a game that's based around momentum-based gameplay. Even before that, it's a game in which you must go from A to B, and momentum more or less means more power relative to what the stage has to offer. Which is why rolling works.

 

Well, experimentation is part of it. It's not like rolling at the top of every decline is 100% sure to result in a satisfyingly fast moment, but there's a pretty good chance it might. And it's fun, to me, to experiment and see if it will be.

I don't think these are ultimately at odds. I'd argue that the essential function of a game is to be fun to play. If players are having fun playing it, that's ultimately the reason why I'd say it's "designed good".

Though there's a whole huge caveat of "different things being fun for different people", and "some things being more fun the more you learn them and the better you are at them", and so on, but I digress.

Yeah, this is fair. I've been playing Sonic 1 and 2 long enough that I don't remember my first time playing either of them. But it wasn't until I was maybe like 15 years old before I really started to roll more frequently and appreciate the mechanic. That said, while I've obviously had fun playing these games my entire life, I started to have even more fun than before after I began appreciating the mechanics, as you say, as 'tools for motion play'; that's honestly the main thing that keeps me coming back to these games at this point, outside of nostalgia. I think if I had to fault these games for one thing, it's that they don't really directly encourage new players to appreciate this aspect very much, which I think is why they often don't "click" with some people.

 

I’m in a similar spot. Been playing them since I was born and I didn’t start doing it “properly” until maybe 8 or 9 years ago. Something just clicked one day and changed how I interacted with the games. Proper utilization of the roll is probably the biggest indicator that a player “gets” how Sonic is supposed to work.

 

I think the game hints at the possibilities with sections that make you go "oh wow holy shit what just happened" -- for example, the S-tube in Green Hill. There are these thrilling moments that make you feel fast and powerful and make you wonder how the hell did you do that. Besides, you build skill through a process of getting hurt, losing rings and having to somehow survive. It may be a bit of trial and error, by it's by no means unfair: you get multiple lives, the life system itself is very forgiving, the levels often have enough verticality in their design that you can draw multiple paths across a stage etc.

Which is why I agree with @Aerosol that it's not that deep. It had never even occurred to me that you could spindash + jump before I played Sonic Triple Trouble (which shows Sonic doing it after Sunset Park Act 3), and by then I had already 100% every Genesis/MD game. It's not the games' fault. It's not quite my fault, either. I just... had never done it, but a lot of sections -- that I had already mastered some other way -- sure became even easier when I started doing it.

 

The S-tube is a very good point.

And I agree with you and Aerosol, that it's really not that deep. I honestly don't know why I never deliberately rolled growing up. I think like your example with the spindash + jump, I just never thought to do it, despite having beaten the games. Even despite having gone through that S-tube plenty of times. Possibly because I played 2 a lot more than 1, where I only ever was in ball mode on the ground was while spindashing.

 

For me personally, I think it was the idea that Sonic = running fast. I think part of the enjoyment was seeing him running and rolling as an animation was less exciting. I know that is the reason I really loved the peel-out as a kid and that whole figure-8 animation in CD.

 

I've read this all right now and it's weird to me that people beat games without ever trying spindash->jump when that's one of the first things I thought of, but it seems to be common knowledge the half-loop jump that I've never done consciously or sought for. I know I've used it unconsciously when doing time attack on Azure Lake, because I was trying to jump from the right angle and thought I did so on my fastest times, yet years later upon trying again I improved my precision only to see I didn't get such fast times and wondered what happened the first time until I read about this, and I've never bothered doing it because I find it counterintuitive, and I don't play Sonic to analyze or think how can I "break" the game.

Which leads to the main thing I wanted to say: you OP find it irrelevant for being effortless, I find it relevant for being effortless. I don't play Sonic to think, in fact what I love from it is feeling super-intuitive in what it has to be, and makes you only think about how to deal with new gimmicks and hazards, not about how to deal with how controls affect Sonic because that knowledge comes organically from how physics are in real life and what's each state (running/jumping, curled/uncurled, horizontal/vertical, etc.); even if Sonic physics aren't realistic in a lot of aspects, they aren't coming out of the blue (pun intended), they're based on real things and then simplified and enhanced to make them easy for the player to try without overthinking them.

I'm not saying your approach is wrong, though. A lot of people like games that require way more complicated things than learning to jump downwards from a loop, and there's where some people look like real crazies to me, yet they won't be if those games are so successful. I played Guild Wars 2 a lot through what was seen as the "boring" parts of it, yet I tried the "fun" or "convenient" parts of the game I was overwhelmed by how unimmersive was to learn tight patterns, use so many keys from the keyboards and the mouse, and so on. I don't play games to be so active and spend so much energy, I play games to rest my mind and evade from the difficulties of real life, so I prefer simple stuff that becomes huge and complex without noticing, still feeling simple when you master said stuff.

 

I don’t understand this topic. I keep reading the title in the forum and ignoring it, but it keeps bugging me, therefore I feel I need to just get it out of my system.

Gaining momentum by rolling down hills is literally THE core mechanic of Sonic, and is the only way to gain maximum speed through levels, unless specific objects also allow one to achieve this. You say that you don’t understand the fascination with it as “you literally just press down on any point on a decline”, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s such a simple, obvious and intuitive thing to do, and yet, depending on when and where you do so, it greatly impacts how you play. It’s something no other platformer did at the time, and hasn’t really since.

It also allows skilled and knowledgable players to play better, and is essential for competitive play, opening the doors to speed running and an entirely different way of playing. What more can you ask for from a game, than having mechanics that allow you to get better at it as you play?

Yes, spin-dashing in place is a thing, however this wasn’t in the original game, and can only be used when you want to stop your progress and have Sonic bend down and charge up. There are only a handful of occasions where classic level design requires you to actually do this however, as if you play well you usually don’t need the extra boost.

Regardless of this, what is the alternative? If you feel rolling is weak, what do you suggest? Boost pads?

You might as well argue that jumping in Mario isn’t an interesting mechanic, because all you do is press (A). Each obstacle should automatically spring you up, so you don’t have to jump

In short, I don’t get the point of the argument, and I feel that’s because it’s simply fundamentally flawed and misguided. I’m not trying to be rude, that’s just how it is.

 

And the OP did a similar thread about that before this one.

 

I see they also posted the thread ‘I kind of feel the spin dash takes away about as much as it adds’, so basically what they’re saying is, they would prefer to play Super Mario Bros