Playing Sonic CD Felt Spiteful

I'd rather not think like that because Sonic 1 is, well, fantastic, but it makes sense to believe Sonic CD retains a bit more of the arcade influence than Sonic 2, which is a bit more focused on a Grand Narrative more suited to a home console game that you can play every day if you own it. It's all still shades of the same color, though!

 

I don't have a problem with Sonic 1 being slow and rather linear. With the exceptions of Marble 3 and Labyrinth 1, I always thought the game had a good pace. It's a nice little game I can play through in an hour or so and have a good time.
Sonic CD didn't just feel slow, but it just felt obnoxious. I never really thought of "spiteful" as a way to describe it, but I do find it interesting.

 

I didn't mean Sonic 1 as bad, I should have worded it more like 'it cuts out the weaker aspects' I guess.

I like Sonic 1 but I feel like there's a reason as to why, and myself included, take basically every classic game after 1 over it. *Again* great game, I replay it often, just every game after 1 overall improved with each entry.

 

I've grown to really enjoy Sonic CD over the last 25 years despite its issues. The whole game is janky. But "spiteful..." Wacky Workbench and Metallic Madness are definitely spiteful.

 

I will never, ever get these claims that Sonic CD feels slow, or like random level pieces. The very first time I played Sonic CD, on christmas morning 1993, I blazed through it having already beaten Sonic 1 and Sonic 2. Like just absolutely flew, it's *always* been one of the fastest games in the series for me, PRECISELY because it has so many corners and ramps and slopes and small dips and bumpers and such all over the levels. They're not random pieces, they're things to launch you off of and keep your momentum going. I feel like I can play any given act in Sonic CD and basically never stop moving, ever. And thanks to some of the very obvious sections they put into the levels that are meant to get you running fast in a straight line for a while, you can BLAZE in sections.

Like people talk about wacky workbench being this arduous, long, slow level... are you kidding me? The entire bottom of the level is a red spring, you can use that to go *insanely* fast in the level. The entire point of the level is to avoid the tall spires in the stage, the platforms are built to guide you to do just this. You can bounce off of the floor under the spires with no worry and use the momentum to sling you extremely quickly through the level. The point is to stay low to the ground, not go the high route. The lower you are in WW, the faster you go. It's a reversal of typical sonic stages.

From the moment I played Sonic CD, it instantly became my favorite in the series. I got Sonic CD, Sonic Spinball, and Sonic Chaos all on the same day, and the poor quality of Sonic Spinball made the quality of Sonic CD just shine through all the more. I actually felt like Sonic 2 was a big step back from Sonic 1 terms of visuals -- a large portion of Emerald Hill Zone's background is a large, featureless green void for example, so seeing Sonic CD go the exact opposite route and just burst with visual uniqueness was exactly what I wanted. Sonic CD is exactly what I look for in a Sonic CD, it's hands down the most fun game in the series for me. And that's not nostalgia, nor mythologizing the game because "I couldn't play it" or whatever dumb "you don't know what you like, you're just confused" reasons people invent to explain why other people like a game that they don't like. It's taste, and that's something unique to everyone else.

I can never find the quote, and I can't remember who said it (it might have been on twitter) but I remember reading that those badniks are NOT supposed to be aged, broken down badniks. Apparently it's something about how as the future gets dingier and uglier, the materials used also get lower quality. They're actually supposed to be new, younger, crappier robots, not older broken down ones. I remember when I read that, it blew my mind and stuck with me. Someone ask Mazin on twitter if this is the case, he might know.

 

100% agreed. Aside from perhaps Sonic Chaos (if you approach that game with a specific point of view, at least) it's, despite its size, consistently the fastest. Even Sonic 3(K) tends to make you slow down a lot more for technical platforming sections and has significantly longer levels, and even with Super Sonic is likely to take a player an hour to finish. Sonic CD is beatable in under a half-hour, especially if you're not trying for the good ending, and in order to unlock everything you're expected to do that in the time attack mode!

 

I did basically exactly that on my first playthrough, haha. About an hour after we had setup the Sega CD, I was watching the credits roll. Now, I didn't get all the time stones or break the time capsules or any of that stuff, and so I mainly only saw the present and bad futures. Beating the special stage with the trippy swirling background took me several weeks to do, because I couldn't stop being thrown off by the moving sky. But that's also why I like Sonic CD so much, I felt like I could replay it endlessly and see new things. Beating it once didn't matter to me, I played Sonic 1 and 2 just about every day back then. I deeply, deeply appreciated how long Sonic CD could hold my attention and still show me new things.

 

I think the only design I'd characterize as spiteful is the enemy placement in Metropolis Zone.

 

i was a dumb child and don't think i beat sonic 2 or 3 until i was 12 or 13 - the first classic game that i beat was CD through the gems collection port, and for a time it was my favorite of the classics precisely because i felt it was easier and demanded less of me.

i will totally grant that wacky workbench sucks ass - one of the worst classic sonic levels for sure. i also had a pretty miserable time going for true 100% with the badnik monitors and holograms and whatnot. but on the whole, the criticism i'd make of CD isn't that it's spiteful, but that it's pretty light on substance precisely because the levels have to be designed to accommodate backtracking on a level that none of other classic games did. it's definitely not a masterpiece, but the vibes are so immaculate that i have trouble really resenting it for any of its shortcomings.

the reason you had a bad time seems to be that you went for 100% out the gate - i wouldn't really recommend doing that with any of the classics, frankly, but i especially wouldn't recommend it for CD. i encourage you to give it another low-pressure try just trying to run to the end - i think you'll find that it's probably the most easygoing game of the four by a pretty wide margin.

 

How would we feel if hitting the generator somehow time-warped you directly to the good future so you could easily experience it (for those who wouldn't take the special stage route to get the good ending)?

 

Same here. I found the game much faster to play than Sonic 1 and so much better designed than the other 16-bit Sonic games. My issue's was not enough use was made of the ASIC/PCM chip's some of the future/past activation routes were too brutal the game slowdown in parts and the FMV window was utter crap. It has always been my fav 16-bit Sonic title and I wish SEGA would go back to the game and also look to reuse the time travel aspect again

 

I consider myself a big fan of Sonic CD (I still play it regularly on my phone), but even I have to admit that without watching others play it and have fun with it, I would have had a hard time figuring out how this game operates. When it finally clicks, it offers endless replayability and attention to detail when it comes to level design. Even more so than other classic Sonic titles. That's where the enjoyment stems from.

But heck, for the longest time I didn't even know Sonic CD was a mainline title. It can be quite confusing in certain areas.

 

The achivements on the 2011 port incentivized me to beat the game destroying the robotizers instead of getting the time-stones.

It's very much a puzzle game around Sonic physics. I found it a very unique and interesting experience. I recommend it do it at least once from start to finish if you consider yourself a big fan of the Mega Drive era games.

 

I think people get their enjoyment of sonic momentum from different things sometimes. A lot of people want momentum to be something that grants you very fast horizontal speed, like hurling a bowling ball. For me, my enjoyment of Sonic Physics is more about being able to feel his weight and momentum instinctively. He behaves exactly how I expect, so that I can gauge my launches. Sonic CD honestly makes me feel like I can fly, like it's just like the opening of the game to me. All the little dips, they're not necessarily about zooming to the right as fast as possible, it's more like you can feel gravity as it lifts you off these set pieces. I compare my enjoyment of Sonic CD to the feeling of nailing a long, arching, slow 3-pointer in basketball from an incredible distance. Like the feeling of the ball rolling off your fingertips and being able to affect the destination with great precision. In Sonic CD, little taps of the joystick (I normally play Sonic with a fight stick) to hard break and reduce my speed, or laying off holding right for a sec to de-accelerate without stopping. When I play Sonic CD, a large portion of the time, Sonic is spinning with great momentum through the air, and I'm not pressing anything on my controller, because I have the momentum and angle exactly as I want it. Instead, my time playing is spent doing very precise, small adjustments.

Sonic CD is this in video game form:




No other Sonic game feels quite like it. When you play like this, and can recognize how each part of the scenery can be used to keep you in the air, spinning, it's so much fun. One of the neatest little suplurfluous bits of level design like this is the angled bumpers in Collision Chaos zone. They look pretty much pointless, they're angled over quarter-pipe curves with springs below them, so you normally just run under them and get pushed forward without touching them. But, when I play, nearly every time I encounter them, I'm falling downward in their direction from above, spinning very fast. I hit the angled side, which causes me to bounce back perpendicularly, except I hold right as hard as I can, which alters my air trajectory so I hug the wall to my right, then roll down it backwards into the spring, which shoots me forward at a very high speed.

Playing like that, acrobatically, is where the fun in Sonic CD is. It feels like parkour. It's just this feeling of constant motion, constant momentum, constant spinning. Because you are always in this state, every little dip or curve can send you as high or low as you want to go. Again, I feel like I can fly in Sonic CD. I love that the stages are very tall, the gameplay is built to accommodate it. Stardust Speedway is my favorite 2D sonic level in any game because it's this to the extreme. Just... constant fun.

This is a super old video so excuse the quality, but this is what I like about Sonic CD:

 

I've been thinking about how a 2D Metroidvania-Style Sonic game would work but you've given me an idea - applying the Time Travel mechanics and general philosophy of CD levels to a large, interconnected map where the progression is gated behind obstacles that you can influence through different time periods, and a few different progression gates locked by bosses.

 

honestly even normal 2d sonic games could probably benefit from a metroidvania style map. would mitigate visibility issues with incoming hazards, would help with searching for giant rings / roboticizers / other collectables, and would also provide a neat additional completion reward that would encourage playing every possible route through a stage

 

Sonic CD is definitely a game that merits repeat playthroughs to acquire a taste for, if you didn't vibe with it already. Honestly, I didn't actually really like it until I played the taxman version when it first released and committed to unlocking everything, which took a lot of replaying.

As somebody that puts Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Mania on a pedestal as what 2D Sonic should strive for, Sonic CD was a weird experience for sure at first.