Playing Sonic CD Felt Spiteful

The game wants to show you what a stage looks like normally so you can see what it can/will become. That's why having a "Present" is necessary.

I have wondered over time if there was a cleaner way they could've done it, though. Maybe after destroying the generator, the "Future" panel takes you to the Good Future instead of the Present? And you can't leave the stages from the Past? Would definitely make it more clear what the objective is, but might hurt how open the game is to interpretation.

 

Not wholly related but lot of the issues I see people take with CD's level design remind me more of Advance 3, honestly.

 

How so? My understanding was that Advance 3 was always constrained to linear sequences of annoying platforming with way too many instant-kill hazards (crushing mostly, but also pits) and springs or boosters that send you into danger, while CD is almost always about being overly-spacious and not all that difficult as a linear sequence, but requiring the player to perform complex acrobatics to time travel that the game actively fights you on, along with the exploration to find the machines often being obtuse. They don't seem similar at all to me, other than that I don't seem to have as much of an issue with either of them as other people do.

 

I think I like CD for the same reason I like Frontiers. Moving around as sonic in these games is just plain fun, so I enjoy combing the levels to search for stuff, so even though the level design is pretty bad in both games, the movement and the fun of exploration makes it up for me.

I always beat CD by going for the generators now, I did the time stones without generators on my first playthrough and had a miserable time because these levels just aren't that fun to play like they're an A-B game. (It probably doesn't help that my first playthrough was on Origins and all subsequent ones have been the 1993 sega CD release, though, so that difference could be coloring my perception.)

 

Moreso with their respective object huntings than stage layout, I suppose, though I would argue that Advance 3 can get pretty maze like on occasion. A lot of the ways I've seen people throw criticism at finding the Robot Generators is how I felt trying to find all the damn Chao in Advance 3 (though I suppose ring hunting in Advance 2 is also pretty miserable). I guess it's not the best comparison from an analytical standpoint but it's how things come across to me, y'know.

 

The Futures aren't useless, they exist as part of the game's mystery and as context to help you clue in about the time travel mechanic. You go to the Future once, see that stuff is messed up, that acts as a clue that you might be able to do something to change it. Then the Good Future exists as pay-off and confirmation that what you did did do something. It's borne of an idea of these levels as interactive worlds rather than just obstacle courses that need to have specific functions and mechanics and rewards, which the game *wants you* to think of them in that way so you can get the idea by yourself of trying to obtain a Good Future. Could it have been more than that? Sure, I would've liked if they did something more with them - I like how in the re-releases, Wacky Workbench Good Future no longer has the electricity traps functional, they could've done something like that in every level to make the Good Future an easy way to finish a level with 50 rings without any worry of traps and obstacles. I also think there isn't enough of a sense in the level design of these environments being the same but "evolving"/"de-evolving" as you progress through time, which would've also been nice.

 

To re-emphasize a point I made earlier, I think people forget that CD lets you play in several different ways, not necessarily just the "Sonic way." Some people might've been jumping aboard with a background in playing slower exploration platforming games, and maybe they really would've liked the idea of spending time hunting for generators, irrespective of the timer. (Also, I remember always being able to backtrack to a generator, except for the incorrectly-set spring in Metallic Madness Past.) That's a nice alternative if you're terrible at the special stages. It's totally possible to speed through the levels and do a special stage run and completely ignore the generators and time travel though (but still maybe just time travel for the curiosity). Yes, the level layouts tend to try and trick you with traps and unusual detours, but clearly since this is the first official time attack, the intent was to force you to do a little bit of practice through a mix of skill and pre-exploration.

From my perspective, the hate comes from a disconnect in expectations, but I personally loved the exploration layer and taking the game as its own unique thing. There's this multi-layered "choose your own gameplay style" aspect to it that I really appreciated.

 

With all due respect, all you did was outline exactly why the futures are entirely worthless from a gameplay perspective. Why should I even bother getting to the future in CD? Once you understand the how the time zones work (go to the past to destroy the generator to make a good future), that's it. It's not a complex or dynamic system. You'll understand it from as early as the first act, sooner if you read the manual. The futures have no real function.

Feels nice to get the good futures for the bosses though.

 

I'll insist: start at "bad" present, go back to past, come back to good present. Would've been more solid. It's what Sonic Time Twisted does

 

I think a fully linear remake of CD would basically just have four acts per zone. You start in the Present, the first goalpost goes into the Bad Future (which for whatever reason would be the only way you can get to the Past), then find the generator as the Act 3 goal, and then finish off in Good Future with the boss.

 

I find it weird to claim there should be some sort of objective function to the futures beyond what they have. Why, exactly? It's not like you can't finish a stage in the bad future. It's a place the game will take you to, sometimes, and it will be something of a nuisance. Oh no. Friction!

@Rokkan is exactly right: by laying out the present versions of the stage first and allowing you to go either way from the get go, it's presenting an interactive world to you. That's the gameplay function. It's a game you play. Streamlining it by starting from what's at best a watered down bad future, like @astroblema suggests, is just pushing the player in a certain direction. Which I guess mainline game design sensibilities would like, but I find it boring not to examine what it means for Sonic CD to be the way it is rather than compare it to a pre-prepared recipe.

First and foremost, the game is simply there to be beat. And you do it any way you can or want -- getting a good future or all time stones is simply a secondary layer of challenge. By presenting itaelf as an invitation to curiosity rather than a puzzle with no margin of error, it becomes a lot less demanding, and a lot more responsive to the player's wants and whims. It's pretty much the reason it's so easy and chill to pick up and play like many have reported in this thread. And that... is wrong why, again?

 

Well said it is also a 1993 game and back then Sonic games were getting a lot of heat for being short and very easy to finish so SEGA Japan had not only to address the criticisms of Sonic 1 and 2 but also show off the storage space of the Mega-CD at the same time. I loved the time travel aspect of the Sonic CD and also how the game rewards you for replaying the game and finishing it faster and faster

I felt it was the best 16-Bit 2D Sonic game my only major issue was it didn't make enough use of the PCM and ASIC chips

 

"Thing has no purpose. By the way, here's the purpose of the thing."

 

The future signposts in the first two acts don't really serve much purpose once you know how to play the game, since you'll never have any reason to go to anywhere that isnt the past. They basically just serve for worldbuilding and confusing new players, and maybe catching you off guard on the chance you accidentally go to the future and have to worm your way back, but thats such a rare occurrence in my experience it's basically null.

 

Come on dude.

 

Audiovisual confirmation that you've successfully done something is from a gameplay perspective.

 

Please don't be so pedantic. It never ends well.

Going to the future in Act 1 and Act 2 serves absolutely no purpose. You could entirely remove the ability to travel to the future in Act 1 and 2 and virtually nothing would change because there's no reason for you to ever do so in the first place. The criteria for getting a good future in Act 3 is simple to track, and you don't need to travel to the future in the preceeding acts to accomplish that.

 

Now this, worded as-is, I partially agree with. Partially because, well, Sonic CD is a game with two paths to the 'good' ending and one of those is exploration-centric; I'm going to argue wholeheartedly that exploration is about wandering with intent to find and sometimes that means wandering in the wrong direction. The timezones are no exception here, and they serve a multiple purpose here; they're the temporal equivalent of reaching a dead-end and realising "huh, there's nothing here" on top of the obvious second purpose of showing the player the work they've done (or failed to do). There's also a tertiary purpose of being a whole third pool of rings for players aiming to access special stages; let's say you lost them all just a few screens shy of the goal stretch and, oh dear, there's none in the current timezone. Oh, you whoopsied in the past AS WELL so there's no rings there either? Future's got your back.

This openness, these multiple options available to the player, it's actually why I personally hold Sonic CD in high regard. You got options, the game has them, if you start lookin'

But also please, get fucked with the idle threats, bub.

 

That's not a threat. I'm not making a threat! I'm talking about the actual value of the conversation. I'm saying that if we start firing off pot shots, the conversation will just become miserable. Nobody wants to sit around trading insults and witty comebacks at the cost of an actual discussion. Your previous post smacked of purposefully missing the point with pedantry for a quick "gotcha".

If I'm wrong, and you earnestly misunderstood what I said about the futures serving no purpose, fine. Just know that I'm not going sit here and make threats. Not sure what I was even supposed to be threatening you with, but rest assured I'm not gonna do it regardless.

If you're really struggling that hard with time for special stage access, the future can arguabley help out there. Like you said though, that's a tertiary purpose and a real push even at that.

But otherwise, no. The thing is, it's not "exploring" and sometimes winding up in the wrong place or a dead end if you know in advance that you're going the wrong way. And that's what the futures in CD are. The futures in CD are never the solution. Even if you go into CD completely blind as a brand new player, how long is it going to take before you figure out that you have no need to ever travel to the future?

A dead end would be finding the robot teleporter in the present, where it's already deactivated.

 

Not even tertiary. Finding new routes if you're struggling at all becomes a tridimensional process if you have different versions of the same stage at your disposal. If you die while in a different time period than the last time, you suddenly have new options to avoid the same death. Bad Futures don't even necessarily play worse: since all gimmicks are fully functional, they can be, and often are, actually less uncooperative than the Present and especially the Past. Quartz Quadrant is faster and more straightforward in the Bad Future, even if it's more dangerous. It's not exploration for exploration sake, as it's always oriented by the player's needs. The fact that you could remove them doesn't mean it'd be beneficial to do so.