Sonic X Shadow Generations announced, releases Autumn 2024

And there it is. That's my exact problem. The leaning controls are wonky and ruin the system on Steam.

 

I don't know. My first playthrough of SA2 was only like 2.5 years ago, and I found it infuriatingly janky.

 

Can it be considered false advertising if they use the PC/PS5 version? I think everyone knows that it's not gonna look anywhere near that good on Switch.
Take this down, halve the frame rate, halve the resolution, halve the resolution of the textures, and halve the poly count, then reupload it.

 

I knew I wasn't crazy! To this day I haven't found any mods that fixed this, surprisingly. A shame because I do like the rail controls in SA2, but on PC it's a real crapshoot. I end up just flicking the control stick a few times into the right direction and hope it works.

 

Classic Nintendo, always waiting for it to marinate first

 

You can be level headed about the Rails situation. It's true that Boost games boil rails down into little more than shallow automated boost sections. It's true that SA2 has more sophisticated rail gameplay that rewards skill with momentum. But it's also true that SA2 and games like Heroes are often very finicky and unforgiving when using rails above bottomless pits. In a way the Boost games are not and so are far less frustrating on a fundamental level. What some people consider exciting I consider frustrating. Often I'd do as @Overlord says and line up Sonic at the perfect angle, jump, homing attack, and press no buttons in fear I'd make him go flying.

There were some simple solutions in the 2000s. Not sure why they never let you homing attack connect to rails. Ideally they should have tuned the rail mechanics rather than simply dumb them down with automatic. But like much of Sonic, the series' controls largely degraded after SA2.

I feel like Frontiers did try to make rails more involved. But the game's terrible controls and momentum physics really butchered it. But they had the right idea. Homing attack connect to rails in the open world organically and use slopes to launch yourself at will.

 

I haven't watched the whole video, but did the ports also break (or at least nerf) the Homing Attack? I recall trying to play the Steam version of SA2 like the Dreamcast version and finding myself unexpectedly missing my targets on various occasions. It's like the HA was worse at detecting enemies below.

Rails have been homing attackable since 06. In fact that was the way of switching lanes in that game, as it didn't have rail switching.

 

I think so, since they're showing a product the consumer won't actually get

 

I think the botched controls and momentum actually made rails in Frontiers even more fun. You could launch yourself out of them at stupid speed and fly to places you normally wouldn't be able to without doing some dog shit automated sections. I love Chaos Island for this reason. A lot if it is automated, but only if you let it.

Rails just need to be fun to play with, not watch.

No se, but I'm paranoid over the homing attack in any game before Sonic Unleashed. You were always gambling with your life with the HA. Real survivor horror shit.

 

That's how advertising works. Duh.

 

Well, you see, they've put an easily missable disclaimer that lasts for a second so they're free to lie to you as much as then want

 

Nintendo really calling our boost gameplay "cinematic", smh bros.

 

I do always forget that SA2 PC has the digital stick input that nobody's bothered to try and fix despite most everything else being fixed. That definitely makes things worse for the rail grinding.

 

A hacky solution I tried once was setting the game to keyboard controls and then using steam input to bind the arrow keys to the joystick selecting the emulate analog option. That soooorta worked but it also made regular movement a bit jank.

 

It would be interesting to see them play with leaning and rail momentum again now that switching between rails isn't a janky nightmare. Hell, Unleashed did let you lean (and, even more pointlessly, change Sonic's orientation), it was just purely cosmetic. I wonder if that was ever meant to do anything.

 

The video confirms that, yes, the ports did break the homing attack timings too.

 

It is, but it has a Chao Garden that makes the jank worth playing through.

 

All the boost games up to and including Forces let you hold down the B button to crouch on rails. It's purely cosmetic, but it's always in there. (I don't play Frontiers much and can't remember if it's still in there.)

 

Unleashed has leaning and Sonic's got animations for losing balance on rails, but it's purely cosmetic and doesn't factor into the gameplay at all. I have to wonder if the rail system in Unleashed was originally more like SA2's before getting streamlined. I don't think the SA2 mechanics would mesh super well with the boost gameplay because it'd make grinding a lot more complicated than it needs to be, but I would be interested to see an experiment in merging the two.

 

You gotta be fucking kidding me.
No wonder there's such a split in opinion on whether SA2 has better controls than SA1, half of us never played SA2 with controls that actually work as they're supposed to!