This is just a small observation I made recently and wanted to bring up; I'm gonna assume it's common knowledge but this is just a nice detail in the games I wanted to appreciate real quick. (it would probably help to make gifs but I don't have the resources on me right now) Sonic levels are always "alive." There's always some kind of motion within every stage, even if it's not the player. We all know this; the flowers in Green Hill move and bounce, the signs in Spring Yard glow, the panels in Casino Night rotate and change symbols, and so on. Even with stages like Mystic Cave where the level artwork is completely inanimate, there's lots of objects within the stage that bring it to life such as the crushing pillars and giant crates. Marble Zone almost had the animated UFOs, but it still has kinetic energy through the lava that sways back and forth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urAxupGOe5k Lets even look at Marble Garden Zone and some of its objects. The Green Hill Zone flowers look like stylized sunflowers, but this tree here? It looks like a normal fruit tree. Of course though, the fruit is animated and swings around in the game. There's no gameplay related function for this, it just adds to the kinetic energy of the stage, giving it more life. The swinging platforms are in a lot of levels, but they still bring visual motion to the levels. Both the background, foreground and level gimmicks contribute to the life within a Sonic stage. Casino Night Zone is a good example of a stage that has all three. In fact, this goes for just about any level in a video game, but Sonic games had a tendency to go the extra mile in terms of animated environments. Level themes aren't really sensitive to kinetic energy, as you can have mechanical stages full of industrial movement, or even caverns that glow. There's always some way that the levels become less static. It's all basically nice seasoning on an already great experience. Just imagine how different these stages would be if things weren't animated as they are. The beta version of Casino Night is probably a good comparison. It was obviously unfinished, but you get an idea of what a level is like without its life and energy. Things glow all over the stage, but the animated panels, gimmicks etc. had not been implemented yet, so you basically explore a lifeless unfinished shell of a level to-be. When we come to the final version of Casino Night, the city in the background sparkles, and the river reflection shines. The panels are now animated, and all the objects are in place. It's a living, breathing Las Vegas giant pinball machine. Like I said, this is probably common sense to a lot of people, but sometimes I notice it missing in fan games or other media, so I thought the topic could warrant some discussion.
This type of detail was frequently lacking in other games of the era. Backgrounds and objects were static or animated in a very lazy manner. It is also to Sonic Team's credit that these animated details in the level art were not distracting or overwhelming or too "busy" during gameplay, which is a fine balance indeed (and one you might agree was tipped to the "a little too much going on here" side of the scale with Sonic CD. I really give a lot of credit to the teams that put together the original trilogy. Their creativity and drive to bring something new to the table with each game of the series brought some really neat tricks to the Genesis. Of course each game was built on top of the last, and they kept saying "what if we do this" and programming some crazy new gimmick in and it really came together. In the end we got S3K which, as evidenced by the TASes and Mike89+Werster's (among others) runs that it has oodles of glitches, but they are no doubt the result of myriad little programming tricks to add interesting features to the game. Taxman and Stealth's tribulations while recreating AIZ for mobile are a good indication of the amount of work that went into the original game. Edit: I must admit, though, I thought the boppin' mushrooms in MHZ were overly cartoony-silly when I first saw them and I still find them somewhat out of place.
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.
This is what the modern 2D games are missing, imo. The Sonic Advance/Rush games have such flat and boring backgrounds by comparison.
I would agree somewhat. The higher up Advance went the more incomprehensible and dull the stage tiles kept getting. Rush Adventure and Colors DS are worse than Rush's static backgrounds. Sonic 4 feels entirely lifeless for different reasons though. Most notably the art style, animation, and movement being entirely off.
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.
*Scribbles notes for future projects* Green Hill Zone just wouldn't be the same without the ticking sunflowers, but it is interesting how easy it is to forget if it's not brought to your attention. When I think about it. Sonic 4 didn't really have a lot of this to it. It had a lot of flash and intricate backgrounds, at least, for certain stages, but there wasn't a whole lot of little animated details. At least, not to the extent that the classic games had. And what was there was pretty much just copied from the classics (Like everything else.) Heck, even Mario has been adopting this design technique, with the "Bah" dancing and the animated flowers in the New series.
The classics always had some aspect to their levels that made them stand out and feel dynamic, whether it be the spinning sunflowers of GHZ, the pistons in Metropolis Zone, or the lights in Casino Night Zone and Carnival Night Zone, there was always something going on in the background that mad them look interesting. Now, the levels of the modern area, for example, have very great visuals, but aside from Colors imo, the visuals don't mean much as you spend a majority of the time boosting through them and the background becomes a blur, with any enjoyment of scenery lost unless you actually stop.
