I kind of hate MK64 (aside from Battle Mode - MKDS was the first one that really won me over on that series), Sonic R has way more personality. I agree though, it's kind of lousy as a package. I would say it needed about five more courses.
I don't know if the Saturn original is any different, but I know in the """HD""" PC port, the camera is way too zoomed in and too jittery, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing half the time even with the "tutorial", and playing it gives me motion sickness in a way I don't feel even when playing a VR game. First impressions are important to me. I respect that some games get more fun as you replay them, but that first time needs to naturally be fun on its own, otherwise you won't want to bother. I'm not the kind of person who thinks "This game isn't fun, so I'm gonna play it until it becomes fun". It's been years since I first tried NiGHTS and I don't really have any desire to go back to it. I didn't like the gameplay even when SRB2 added it for its special stages, even with the better camera. Also, sir, this thread is for unpopular opinions. Kinda rude to call out someone's "ridiculous take" here. And no, it not being a Sonic opinion isn't an excuse.
Yeah, double the tracks and make Reverse mode available outside of Time Attack and it's palpable (still not sure why Reverse race isn't available in VS mode at least). That's also enough tracks to have two or three cups, adding another bit of longevity. Then you have abandoned stuff like Mirror and Relay modes and the Flame Shield (which I'd argue could have been tooled to be an offense weapon to hit opponents with, which the game lacks otherwise). All the potential is there, it just needed more actual playfield to put it on. Really if Taxman/Stealth move to 3D remakes, I'm all for a remake of R which just adds some more levels and beta stuff.
If it’s rude to say someone’s take is ridiculous, that’s news to me. I didn’t say anything about you personally (except assume that you weren’t great at NiGHTS - which I was right about!). Anyway, I had a wildly different experience playing NiGHTS my first time and I enjoyed it enough to replay it again and again. There’s nothing wrong with not liking it, but saying a game is janky (which usually is used to say the game functions poorly rather than to describe a subjective experience) for no reason is ridiculous.
Only buying if Amy’s car gets its buzzsaw back. Who am I kidding, I’d fork over for the worst port imaginable.
I like that the games in general rarely use him as the main antagonist and more use him as a secondary threat, or like in SA2 where he is actually a playable character.
This is something I feel as well. Evil has standards. Eggman ceases to become funny or likable the moment you start having him torture and dismember the cast just for the hell of it. Some people say "Well, he's torturing animals by stuffing them in his robots" and apart from being trapped, I never got the sense that the little animals were being starved or drained of their life force or anything like that. Calling that torture is kind of like saying Mario is a monster because he's murdered thousands of goombas and koopas. It's looking way too deep into the way this universe works. On top of that, I'm not really a fan of how Sonic Team attempted to make him darker and edgier in SA1 & SA2. Again, the scene where he launches a nuke at Station Square is the evidence people give for how Eggman has """always""" been a dog kicker, but I've never seen that as a good thing. Imagine if he had succeeded. He would cease to be funny or likable for the rest of the series. The way I see him in the Classic games, and the way I think he was envisioned to start with, is he's not the kind of person who would murder an innocent bystander just because they were in his way. They'd have to be an actual active threat, like Sonic or GUN. I hate to admit it, but Sonic X (the Japanese version) comes the closest to how I view Eggman as a character, with the Movie version following close behind. He actually seems like a real human being in that show. Like, that scene in Sonic X where he's disgusted at Dark Narcissus not just capturing Chris and Cosmo, but torturing and suffocating them. The reason he's disgusted isn't because he's a pacifist who doesn't like violence, it's because they (Chris, mainly) are just normal children and they're not a threat. I think Eggman would like to think of himself as acting in "self-defense" whenever he attacks Sonic or Tails, and he wouldn't nuke a human city. The reason he chooses places like Westside or Angel Island to build his utopia is because he sees those as being uninhabited by anyone except for weird furry creatures that no one's going to miss once he starts making life "better" for his fellow man. He wants to create a world that worships his genius, but he ought to be smart enough, and sane enough, to know you can't do that by outright murdering the people who you expect to worship it. I just can't look at all the times we've seen Classic Eggman, like the cutscenes in Mania or Origins, and believe that's the same man who commits the atrocities Ian Flynn has him do. It reminds me of how Konami and Kojima wanted me to accept that despite Big Boss's team in MGS3 being utter goofballs who aren't even that competent at their jobs, they eventually found that universe's version of the Illuminati.
From what I've seen on this forum I'm pretty sure this is unpopular, but I definitely prefer the stomp move from the boost games to the adventure games' bounce bracelet. Using the bounce to gain height is mostly situational and the stomp is just so much more useful in every way, and combined with the boost it helps maintain a sense of flow in even the most egregious of platforming sections by going airboost, stomp, airboost, stomp, and so on and so forth from platform to platform. The bounce is just kinda pointless in most of my experience. I don't understand why some people seem to prefer the bounce so much, it's essentially useless outside of the designated "your jump cant reach, use the bounce" areas. The most useful it gets for me is being able to chew through 06's massive health bars quicker.
Almost any character that was considered loose weight usually got killed by Eggman, via robotocization, nukes or the Egg Grapes. Many overlanders including Nate Morgan, the Golden Hive Colony, the Arachne Clan and several echidnas. He was also responsible for said brain damaging of Charmy via attempted murder. Basically Eggman has committed mass genocide routinely and thoroughly enjoyed it. Even besides that he is the future version of Julian Robotnik (the SatAm version the comics originally used) so every vile act he has committed is also tied to him. To Flynn's credit, he doesn't exactly push this Eggman where it doesn't HAVE to be, he's pretty versatile with every take on the doctor, even the likeable ones in X and Boom, just where Eggman was always a monster, he carries that on ten fold. I think IDW is the only case of him continuing Eggman as a dog kicker where he didn't neccessarily have to, and even there it's likely because that comic is meant to be a spiritual revival of Archie. I'm mixed about that direction since it often means Eggman gets overshadowed by a one note villain who IS a piece of shit antagonist instead. It works SOMETIMES to have a bigger nastier villain that makes Eggman look scupulous get the limelight, but I remember it being a predictable formula every main game that Eggman would get usurped by a more 'scawy' bad guy. I think making a character super eeeeeeevul isn't always the be all end all way of making them an effective villain. Heck I could argue some villains with petty levels of sadism actually look incompetent. Eggman was a top threat in S3K but it wasn't because his machinations were in-your-face sadistic and monstrous, he's still goofy classic Eggman from 1 and 2, it's because they were EFFECTIVE, the guy had back up plan after back plan and nearly every bot he had felt fearsome. He leveled half the stages Sonic was on just to try stop him interfering, which sells Eggman is ruthless but more in terms of an opponent than how 'dark' he is. I feel like CD and 3K sell Eggman more as a childishly selfish character who has a very dangerous amount of talent and utility to vent it, fits the whole nature vs industry plotline I guess, a lot of industrial kingpins aren't in your face malicious Captain Planet villains, they just don't give a shit about their toll on the environment so long as their companies make more profit.
For real, I have not found anyone in my circle of friends who doesn't adore Sonic R despite its lack of content, polish and balancing. In fact, its short length and lack of bloat probably plays a factor in how easy it feels for me to pop in the Saturn version every now and then and breeze through it in an afternoon. I just love its whole vibe, it's like racing ASMR.
Really multiplayer racing in the Sonic games (at least platformer wise) is super underrated. I get the same vibes from R that I do with Sonic 2 and 3's VS mode, it's such a perfect match for Sonic and yet it's kept so infuriatingly brief.
I think this is a subjective issue (I guess? Not really in my opinion, but whatever) but I must say… …It is weird to call the aesthetics of a game like story, graphics, and music “ideas and ambition” or whatever else, but no. That’s not gameplay. I mean it may all be part of things you experience as you play a game. But gameplay refers the mechanics of the game and the challenges you use the mechanics to deal with, not this other stuff. Maybe I could add gameplay includes how the mechanics feel to use which may be influenced in part by character animations and sound design, at least in stuff of the action genre, but I feel even this is stretching it. And I do make a distinction there, as the former stuff, while it can make me like a game more, is ultimately far less significant than the gameplay. At least in a videogame. Also, yeah. I do like the stomp more than the bounce , but that’s mainly because of how it’s been used than the mechanic itself. The bounce could potentially be used for the same thing, it just isn’t. And that would be timing your stomp so it cancels your momentum right as you travel over a platform so as to not under or overshoot it. Adds a feel of “rhythm,” to the game, and just feels good in itself. Yeah I could see the bounce being used in the same way. It just isn’t needed in the adventure games because of how much air control you have and how little inertia there is (by which I mean it is very easy to stop.) You don’t really need to time a move like a bounce right as you come over a platform because if you over/under shoot it, you can just use the air control to navigate back.
In SA2/SA2B and SADX, Chaos Chao (and other superbreeds) are butt-ugly and not worth the trouble. I just want to raise an adorable critter with a chocolate chip-shaped head. Additionally, breeding Chao to get children with better base stats ruins the fun of just raising a cute little baby with different combinations of color and animal traits. If I wanted an RPG with way too much stuff going on in the mechanics and no plot, I would play a post-2nd gen Pokemon game instead. None of that crap you have to do to max out the stats is worth a better result in a Chao race or Chao Karate minigame which involves minimal user input. ... And while I'm whining about SA2: Green Hill Zone is not worth the effort of getting an A rank in 5 different "missions" per level in SA2. I used an Action Replay back in 2003, and I have no regrets. That 3D version of Green Hill was fun, but it's not worth slogging through certain missions 5-10 times to get a good result. ... And as an aside, other than the poorly-mixed option menu theme, I loved everything about Sonic Spinball. Especially the music. Lastly to echo several other people, I loved Sandopolis Zone and Labyrinth Zone. I thought the ghosts in Sandopolis Act 2 added much-needed tension to the game, and I appreciated the challenging platforming. The endless waterslide to start Labyrinth Act 3 and the "boss battle" at the end where you win by simply surviving the rising water were also clever in my opinion. Contrary to the horde of unoriginal youtube commentators who think classic Sonic is just about "going fast", I thought the more deliberate and slower-paced style of platforming was a good change of pace, especially considering the high-speed nature of the levels preceding and following both levels. EDIT: P.S. Classic Sonic games in general were not about speed, and speed was not "the reward". The fun was that the physics of those games allowed you to interact with your environment in a much wider variety of ways than a Mario game or any other platformer. The floors were not just flat surfaces, and neither were the walls. Compared to games preceding it, the Sonic physics were like that giant room in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory where everything is edible. This is why Sonic games have so much replayability, there are more than just 2-3 basic ways of approaching any given level.
Woah woah woah WOAH slow down there, those are my children you're talking about... Personally, I just like it because the bouncing motion and the visual feedback it provides feels really fun, it's less about the utility for me and more about how it feels. You also never have to stop moving like you do when you stomp, even for a fraction of a second. I also love that SA2 provides some depth by giving you ways to bounce higher or at a higher horizontal speed, so I feel good when I do something right.
See... This is precisely why I hate the stomp so much. Its binary. You go from 100 when you're boosting through the air to a dead 0 when you stomp and back to 100 when you boost off on the ground again. If you traced the path that Sonic takes, it would have right angles. Much like the way that speed boosters and springs are used nowadays, the stomp results in the most unnatural flow possible for Sonic games. And it's only worse when combined with the boost. The bounce in SA2 was great fun and worked with Sonic's current movement rather than overriding it. Lost World and 06 also included the bounce attack, but in those games it didn't react to surface angles and momentum. It was more like a stomp that automatically jumped afterwards, which is rubbish. If sonic is going to have some way of cancelling his momentum in the air, the SA1 actually got it almost right with the jump cancel.
This is the golden take really. The narrative really needs to go in this direction, because it's so self-evident when you're not caught up in a discourse tainted by multiple layers of sound bites that no longer refer to the games, but to the surrounding marketing.
Blue Blood, I see where you're coming from, and I can agree with a lot of it, though some of it isn't as much of a problem to me as it is for you. What do you mean by almost right with SA1's jump cancel? That's the worst one, in my opinion. lol Because the stomp or bounce (3K's bubble shield version) sends Sonic down with such force it almost feels like redirecting momentum rather than cancelling it, which is probably what I actually meant, while SA1's air literally cancels momentum, and prevents you from gaining any more really before hitting the ground, which honestly just doesn't feel very good to me. It is comparable to how running out of stamina as a flight character in Heroes feels. Plus, I believe such a move is unnecessary period in the Adventure games for the reasons I previously gave. People like to throw around the word "momentum" alot and trash the boost games for their lack of it, but the reality is that Sonic doesn't have much of it in the Adventure games compared the Classics OR THE BOOST GAMES. There is almost no weight at all, no force built up as you gain speed that makes it harder to stop. Obligatory SRB2 Best Sonic game here. SO yeah. You have so much air control that the air cancel loses utilty unless you just want to quickly drop to the ground, in which case an air dash is probably better because you don't lose all speed. In any case, yeah. The bounce or something like Freedom Planets dive kick/GT's stomp into roll is a bit better than both. They preserve a bit more forward momentum, and the bounce interacts with the angles it hits like you said which is pretty cool. Plus, stuff like the super bounce and the bounce > air dash for instant speed mechanic exist which are legitimately awesome, even if not intended.
For me, it comes down to what fits the story best. If the story needs a darker villain than normal? Go for it. Smaller conflict, then its not really needed. My problem is when the series just kind fails to feel fresh and starts to stagnate after a while. Yes, this happened back when Eggman was constantly getting upstaged by newer and arguably less interesting villains too, but I'd argue that those served the narratives better due to the writing generally centering on the development on one of the main characters at the time. The story isn't about what the villain/Eggman is doing, but how the heroes react and deal with it. Now granted, Eggman obviously shouldn't be an afterthought in the series, but I feel like ever since the series has kind of tossed him back as the main and primary threat and severely streamlined it's stories, it's really highlighted just how boring the whole Sonic vs. Eggman thing has become to me. Mainly because there are no longer any characters who actually grow and experience character development any more, so its just kind of...bland. Its as bland as how Mario plots tend to be, but they're at least self-aware enough to make fun of it at times and the main games never really set the precedent for having in-depth characterization or storytelling to begin with. This is why I kind of like the IDW comics, because while the game characters are stuck in static purgatory, the comic exclusive characters can actually be much more varied without upsetting the status quo much. If you're gonna have a series with a static main character and villain, then you need a supporting cast to pick up the actual emotional beats otherwise its just gonna be boring.
I'm not sure what people mean when they say earlier Sonic games had character development and growth. The only character I can think of who EVER had that was Shadow, and it wasn't so much "development" as it was him coming to the realization of what the audience already knew. Yeah, I guess you could say Tails and Amy got some by the end of SA1, but they immediately went back to the status quo with SA2 and they don't seem any different. That's it, really. Otherwise, character development is restricted to new characters, and it lasts for one game only. I'd rather have no character development than have what SA1 did which was tease character development and then immediately take it away. As much as I love the idea of character development in Sonic, this simply isn't a series where that makes sense. It's not as if Sonic is ever going to "end". It's not as if the characters are ever going to grow older, settle down, or achieve world peace. Sonic is not a shonen anime, and it never has been. I know people want it to be, I do too, but in reality, that isn't even possible. Sonic is a corporate mascot and a flagship franchise. He's going to be around for a long, long time. The comics will eventually end someday and be rebooted, so they can get away with character development to a certain extent, and the same goes for the movies. But for the games? Forget about it. The only way you could make that work is if each new game had a brand new setting and a brand new cast, with only Sonic and maybe Tails being consistent between them.