So, on my journey to play through every (worthwhile) Sonic game, I’m currently up to Triple Trouble and I think I’m now assured in the following take: The 8-bit platformers blow chunks and are overrated thanks to what I can only assume to be nostalgia goggles and lingering console wars loyalties. Sonic 1 gets something of a pass but becomes dickishly cheap by Scrap Brain, Sonic 2 is dickishly cheap all the way through and Sonic Chaos is the very definition of giving nothing. Triple Trouble is admittedly doing its level best to be fun with its new gimmicks and attempts to mitigate the technical shortcomings of the hardware, but these are still pale imitations of the Mega Drive games that stubbornly insisted for four years on continuing to be just that. The speed isn’t there, there’s nothing interesting to be analysed in the level design, screen crunch makes the games at odds with themselves, Triple Trouble’s special stages are a sin, and so on. I genuinely can’t think of a single redeeming thing about these games in the core game design sense. It’s going to be a bit until I get to it, but right now I’m expecting to enjoy Tails’ Adventure and even Sonic Labyrinth a lot more than these titles, as I imagine they’ll both play much better to the Game Gear’s strengths.
That’s actually pretty well thought out, while I still disagree with your overall opinion of Sonic 1 and even 2 to an extent I can totally understand why they aren’t living up to the hype. Don’t get your hopes up about labyrinth though that game also blows chunks. You’re probably better off playing 8 bit mean bean machine.
You're doing yourself a disservice if you're playing the Game Gear version when there's a Master System version available.
I played through the Master System versions and they didn't get any better for me. The bigger screen space didn't solve the underlying issues. They're pretty mediocre games for me and the Master System/GG have far better looking and playing platformers than any of the Sonic games outside of Tails Adventure.
The best thing I can say of main MS/GG games is that they inspired a really good fan-remake of Triple Trouble (and that unfinished one of Chaos). I'd like to see a Genesis Sonic 1 rom hack have a solid reinvention of Bridge and Jungle Zone someday, but honestly I haven't been impressed with most attempts I've seen over the years. They're just not very interesting games. Except for Tails Adventure. That one can stay.
Sorry to break it to you pal, but I did prioritise Master System versions where I could - it really only makes these games a little more tolerable.
"Nostalgia goggles" allegations are always utterly ridiculous. You'd think "haha! You only like this game because it left a mark so big on your life it colors your perception of it so that it makes you happy to think about it or experience it again" should be a ridiculous thing to say about a game derogatorily, because what else are games even for? If anything, it's the highest praise a game can possibly get. That said, the 8-bit games are actually very interesting, and are fairly undervalued by the community and most of all by SEGA itself. They're dead on arrival: they couldn't possibly be made with the same purpose as the 16-bit games of showing off the Mega Drive and spearheading the whole company's portfolio, but had to somehow trick enough people into believing the same kind of magic and speed were there. So they were very meticulous about things few other games in the series, if any, paid any mind -- while also applying some of the craziest gimmicks in the classic era. There's a lot I could say, but I guess I'll leave it at that.
I think "This is a good game" is higher. Nostalgia is nice, but being able to separate the effect a game had on your mushy prepubescent brain from its objective quality is important.
There is no such thing. Games are cultural products and any perceived quality is intersubjective and contextual.
the problem with "nostalgia" to me and framing things as "nostalgic" is, imo, it often comes from a place of "I like this because it reminds me of how when I was a child and didn't know much and was introduced to something exciting and cool that expanded my world in an important way". This is a fine sentiment, but the problem with it is that people resign themselves into thinking that this "magical moment" can only happen during childhood and that they can't try to seek it in new things, they can only go back and "remind themselves" of how that felt as a child. I hate calling things "nostalgic" for that reason. In the context of retro games especially, I hate it because it's the first adjective anyone ever goes to, and I play retro games not because I want to remember a game from my childhood, but because I am constantly on the hunt for new, exciting experiences. An enormous chunk of my favorite retro games are games I've never grown up with. Games I've played in the last decade, last 5 years, last year. So that's why I don't go for "nostalgic" either as a compliment or not - feels derisive and dismissive either way. I think 8-bit Sonic 1 has quite a lot of merit, I think Ancient did a really fine job at rethinking/adapting Sonic to an 8-bit machine, especially since all they had was just the one game to reference what Sonic "is", and how it differs from other platformers, what is its identity, what's important about its play. It does get mean and unfun near the end but until then it's a great time. The Aspect games though, are varying degrees of "not quite there". They get better and better as they go on, with Triple Trouble being their best, and Sonic 2 being really incredibly mean, especially for the Good Ending. Memorization hell: the video game. One funny occurrence is that I distinctly remember rolling down a V-shaped slope in Green Hills and getting stuck in the "bottom of the V", unable to uncurl or move Sonic, thinking "great."
There is a fair point to be made about the games someone grew up with being difficult to analyze with any perspective that can be of use to anyone else, but it has way less to do with affective memory than it has to do with being a formative experience. The games you'd play as a kid taught you how to play and are forever burned in your mind, shaping the way you approach other games. Even if you hated some of them, they at least were the first contact you had with struggling to play a game for whatever reason. That becomes harder to happen as you get older, even if it's quite a treat when it does happen. But still, that's perfectly valid, and a reason why any kind of objective standard of quality for games is impossible to achieve (not to mention an undesirable thing to pursue). Sometimes that's the angle you actually need to have to see interesting aspects of a game's design principles, even, which I think is all the more reason never to say a game is liked because of nostalgia as a bad thing. It's a treasure, and having people who grew up with completely different Sonic games so they have different formative experiences is healthy, something to be highlighted.
That's not what I said. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having affection for something brought on by nostalgia, it's when it crosses into critical assessment of media that it becomes a problem. I have a lot of love for Sonic Chronicles because I played it when I was like 10 and didn't know better about what makes good games. I am NOT looking forward to seeing that game again with critically matured eyes in the future.
There's nothing wrong with nostalgia. It just doesn't give anything innate value. Unless you hate every part of your childhood, you're necessarily guaranteed to be nostalgic for some things that kinda suck. I'm nostalgic for McDonald's food, and I was born long after their meat stopped coming from animals.
You don't need to jump through hoops to justify why you like something. You don't need to write out a list of objective qualities that make you like something. Sometimes shit just hits different. So in that sense, there is nothing wrong with nostalgia. I have a lot of nostalgia for Shadow 05, as it was one of the first Sonic games I ever played. I still play it from time to time, and I don't need to explain why. However, nostalgia is not an argument, and has no place in legitimate debate and discussion. It needs to be brushed aside when talking about what makes Sonic legitimately valuable as a product and what it contributes to games as a medium.
There is such thing as nostalgia as valuable qualitative data in the critical assessment of media. That Sonic Chronicles left an impression on 10-year old you is valuable in itself, not the least because that's what it was made for in the first place. You were the target audience, and it worked. The supposedly educated you can't dismiss that if you actually develop a complete critical idea about a product. You could say it could have been any other game if you "knew better", but the fact is that it was Sonic Chronicles. Any discourse on what makes games good can't come in a vacuum -- the idealized version of critical analysis that seeks an aseptic principle of good game design will always fail anyway, as it has time and again in this community. So anyway, about the 8-bit games: they all tend to be very well directed, and their level design is indeed very economical, but that's a virtue (that I think Mario Wonder decided to capitalize in full): each stage will try its best to be about this one thing, and explore all systems in the context of this one thing. When it comes to Sonic 1-- everything about it does a lot with very little. I don't think we ever got a game that dares you to do stuff the way it does. The emeralds hide in plain sight, and usually the easiest way to get them looks dumb and reckless at first; you might even die! But that's okay, you have very clear parameters on what that means from the start. The 1-Up placements are cheeky like that, too: It's very small, but Bridge Zone Act 3 playing with the idea that Sonic always starts at the leftmost point in a level is something we don't usually see in Sonic. Indeed it's very Mario-esque, in that Mario is a game that rewards you for doing strange things or thinking a little out of the box. It's also a game that will have you die while chasing a green mushroom, canceling out the 1-Up. But what Sonic 1 does that sticks out, and that is because of the movement system, the life system and how score works in the game, is that you can be a complete idiot about it and still succeed because, in the end, what works, works. Like throwing yourself in the spike pit for Labyrinth's emerald or throwing yourself to death in Bridge Zone Act 2 only to bounce back with one more life. It's not really like a puzzle: it's more like the game is indeed daring you to do something it knows is counter intuitive. I think Sonic 1 is dirtier in that sense than any other comparable platformer, and it's an attitude not seen in the 16-bit games, let alone after that. It's worth looking into as "core game design sense".
I want to double down on this and say that all of this is rewarded in one of the best scoring systems the series has ever had. - There's exactly one extra life in every act, that doesn't respawn after a death (to prevent score/lives farming - it almost works too); collecting all of them gives you a big score bonus at the end of the game. - There's exactly one chaos emerald in every zone; collecting all of them gives you a big score bonus at the end of the game. - Special stages exist only for score, lives, and continues, but completing all of them gives you a big score bonus at the end of the game. - Beat the entire game without losing a life and, yes, you get a big score bonus at the end of the game. A score attack run of Sonic 1 8-bit means actually engaging with all of its mechanics and features and being genuinely good at the game, and there is a ton of fantastic, intricate, and deliberate design that went into making it all come together.
The discussion about nostalgia is a point that helped me "make peace" with 3D Sonic after I had a sort of critical crisis with it. They're usually very derivative games, but ultimately their target audience is often too young to know what the games are deriving from, allowing them to deliver transformative experiences to players that don't know any better. I'm a person that plays games from the angle of mechanical depth and surprise first, so my patience with the series wore thin some time ago, but keeping a pulse on those nostalgic days is key to understanding it's longevity. I wrote a big diatribe on Sonic Unleashed being a poor action game some time ago, but that won't matter to someone who's first action game is or was Sonic Unleashed. If it's competent enough to get what's fun about that experience to a less experienced gamer, it might just do the job it needs to, for the player that needs it the most, even if that player isn't me anymore. There are some cynical ways to read this. You could say Sonic Team should probably be trying harder to create more unique, richer experiences for more experienced players in the way the originals did instead of relying on the relative naivete of younger players as a crutch. The older me agrees with that, but if I told that to my younger self he'd probably roll his eyes and keep doing stunt jumps and rail grinds on Sonic Adventure 2. There might be better extreme sports games or collectathons or shooters or pet sims out there, but SA2 is what he had and it was good enough for him. He could even flip that perspective around on me if he cared to. If there are other games that are so much better for me than Sonic, I can just go play those instead and leave him be. Bring that logic over to my personal nadir, Sonic Frontiers and it becomes easier to forgive. 2025's younger players deserve excitement just as much as I did.
You can use this argument for anything, though. If a kid's first animated film is The Emoji Movie, is that really the best way to introduce them to a genre? Is it really ok to let them refuse to branch out and try new things? Sure, maybe they like it regardless and maybe it sounds ridiculous to deny them that, but kids are fucking stupid. They don't know what they want and what they like tends to be brainrot. That's why they're still kids. Cause they're stupid. We should want what's best for the younger generation, and what's best for them is not always what they want or like in the moment. We should be actively encouraging them to try and learn why people criticize these games, and encourage them to look at other games, especially if they trust us enough to steer them towards something they'll, in all likelihood, like much better. Even if they don't ultimately agree, this will at least give them the chance to open their eyes to a whole new world of experiences while they're still young and impressionable. That's why my father, and likely your father as well, tried to get us to watch Star Wars instead of whatever the latest direct-to-DVD kids film was.
Here's an opinion that at least someone out there shares: I think the stagnation of Sonic's model has absolutely hindered his design. He doesn't look cool outside of certain pieces of media, nearly all of them done by people that aren't from SEGA. I personally can't stand seeing Modern Sonic anymore because he reminds me of a Walmart employee more than a cool guy
My dad actually used to show me shit like Batman Forever and Underworld, so it's never that cut in dry. I agree with sharing the art that resonates with you with the next generation but what actually resonates with you is gonna be relative.
