What direction does "Sonic" need to go in?

The characters saw the Egg Carrier exploding, believing Eggman and Elise died but Sonic came back in time. He's the cause of the explosion but he saved Elise (obviously) and Eggman, who escaped.

But when Sonic, Tails and Knuckles were in the future, they found an article saying Elise and Eggman died in the Egg Carrier because Sonic wasn't there at that time.

 

Man, I hate those special stages. I had to destroy all the badnik generators to get the good ending. However, I don't like Sonic CD very much.

No, you're not.

I still think that Sega should just find some kind of deal with us and release hacks like Megamix on the Wii VC or something, maybe giving us some prototypes in return :P. Unfortunately, they're not smart enough to see that.

Ok, go back to your 15-seconds GHZ levels.
Some levels in S3&K were actually very long, yet MGZ is still one of my favorite zones ever. Even today, if I randomly decide to play S3&K, I usually go to MGZ even if I played it to death. Big levels = more paths, and S3&K is doing it right, many levels in Sonic 2 only had small alternate paths.

Agreed. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Dr. Robotnik (no Eggman). Anything after S3&K is gay.

Sonic Triple Trouble is one of my two favorite Sonic games, tied with S3&K.

Whoa, that was a lot of quotes.

 

The amount of Characters wouldn't bother me if they didn't take over and that they didn't appear in every new game, its became sort of a cliché.

Unfair deaths need to get removed.

Serious Eggman.

Loops that you actually can control, (you seem to hit a loop, hit a speed booster and then let your control go as you know that the game is then controlling Sonic).

A link to his past (honestly Mario has classic enemies, Sprites from previous games and design aspects from older games) Superstar Tennis does feature some classic things such as the old item boxes and motor bug so I hope this is not the end of these appearances.

 

Well for a start they should stop with the angsty storylines that have plagued the series since SA2; a simple "Eggman wants to take over the world" is better than any Shadow The Hedgehog.

Maybe a game with a solid 2D engine and a stage creator? That way, if you want to bitch about stage length/layout/design/paths/whatever, you have only yourself to blame. Plus they could pull a SSBB and let you download stages from other people.

 

I call BS! Sonic CD had levels all of which can be completed in less than 30 seconds without any crazy glitch exploits (Except for Tidal Tempest's and Metallic Madness' Zone 2 and most of the boss stages), yet they had the most complex layouts and the most crossing paths and routes in the whole series.

Seconded. His own creations turning against him might have been fresh and new in SA1, but from there on it became boring. I mean Chaos, Gemerl, E-123 Omega, E-102 Gamma, and even Metal Sonic all turned against him! Him teaming up with the heroes in SA2 was also pretty cool for a change (and he already did his badass part by threatening Amy with a gun and attempting to blow up Sonic in space). But in Heroes and Shadow he overall seemed more of a nice grandfather in character rather than an insane, power-hungry scientist.
At least they fixed him in Sonic 06, making him Sonic's only antagonist in his storyline and more ruthless and evil in his actions. But killing him in one timeline was a bit too much (I didn't mind Elise dying though).

 

"BLAH BLAH, NEW CHARACTERS ARE GAY BLAH BLAH! STICK WITH THE OLD CAST!"

Just a fun and apparently not so obvious fact, even the old Sonic games introduced new characters with each sequel. The large difference between the day of old and the days of new is that the new character designs suck a megaton amount of ass. Knuckles was awesome because he was fucking Knuckles. Your nemesis throughout the entire events of S3&K until the end. He would mock you, trap you, destroy you, he was somebody you hated and wanted to destroy until you got to the end and realized "He this guy....he ain't so bad." Tails wasn't that much of a bother either. He was your buddy, your sidekick. He helped you out when you needed him and flew you into space. He was handy to have around and that made him awesome.

Fast Forward to Sonic Adventure. Tails is now an annoying prick, Knuckles is a fucking douchebag moron, Amy is psychoticly annoying, and Big the Cat (Despite how awesome he is) is a retard. E-102 was the only cool one because he died. And Sonic just became an annoying asshole (Which was remedied in Adventure 2, but too bad the rest of the game sucked.)

The new characters aren't the plauge of the games, but they sure as hell don't help when the directors manage to not only make the newcomers lame but the old cast fucking annoying.

 

I love you Chimpo.


The sonic series was alot better in the older days. I wish ST would just believe that too, or if they do know it, just fucking take a dive, and appeal to the minority of people who aren't the fuck-tarded kids that say "ZOMG SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG AWESOME", Hell, they might score big if they do.

 

Here's the answer, which is actually simpler than most think: Don't give the next big Sonic game to Sonic Team.

It's been proven what with every game past SA2 has been trash by them, just give it to some American/European developer instead. I mean, hell, if Konami can get away giving Silent Hill 5 to an American company who's had a few bumps in the road, certainly Sega can just give it to an American team who might have some sense on how the franchise is supposed to go.

It couldn't be any worse than ST churning out a game as bad as Sonic 2K6 again.

 

Sonic IS made by an American Team. Sonic Team USA.

 

Sonic Team USA were the ones who developed Shadow the Hedgehog.

 

Didn't they rename to "Sega Studios USA"? I also hear they did Rush Adventure as well, but I don't believe that—it was too well presented to be developed by the same group.

 

Sonic Team USA are the ones who have done everything from SA2 to Shadow. Secret Rings and Sonic Next got shoved back to the current Sonic Team Japan team while most everything else, handheld and such, are surpervised

And yes, STUSA is now Sega Studios

 

And don't forget that Brawl is not being handled by Americans either.

 

I think the whole series has diluted and buried its self too far under stagnant ideas and gameplay concepts and I'd like to see a torch taken to it all and Sonic be given a complete revival, with a development team with motivations for a revival to handle it.

I think the Sonic Series is hurting so bad because they're trying so hard to fit a square peg into a round hole with the motivation of making money squeeze out of that fit.

When Mario made the transition to 3D, they nearly threw everything out the window and started in lots of new gameplay concepts - yet with Sonic, they tried to take the exact same game and fit it into 3D despite how ill fitting it was and their motivation seemed to be entirely just to try and match up with Nintendo on going 3D. I think from that point Sonic needed a revision in order to go along with that change video games were going through. That's the gameplay aspect of it.

On top of that, they tried to squeeze dialog laden cinematic sequences and layered plotlines out of a series that I think had a strong point in simple and enjoyable presentations & story events. The motivation there seems to be to wheel in more people by playing up to the RPG and Final Fantasy crowd, despite how bad that fit the series, evidenced by the fact they threw the series at Sonic Team USA to "Appeal to American Gamers" (I.e. try to strike in on the rising popularity of Anime styled things). That's the presentation/characterization aspect of it.

In addition to that, I remember when I played Mario Galaxy I thought "Instead of the shadow clones, it would've been neat to see Wario or Waluigi!" but then I remembered this is exactly what happened to Sonic and it's tons of unneeded side characters. To me, they dilute the primary characters of the series and end up cutting off any potential for creative new ideas. Instead of trying to come up with new ideas to implement in the game, they just go through their list of side characters and throw them around like candy. I also think the side characters remove potential events or personality traits from the primary characters, stuff they could've expressed and been involved with but instead the developers just use a token side character to enact that trait or event while leaving the primary characters to rot.

I think those side characters are fine in their spin-offs and mini-games, but their bearing on the primary series is one of the more damaging things, I think. Notice that Waluigi isn't used beyond Mario Party/Mario Kart/etc. Notice that Mario hasn't gone the way of Sonic.

 

But when your character's appeal is that he can run up walls, around loops, then this is what we want to see in 3D, but they haven't pulled it off yet, it still feels like you are stuck to a path when you go on a loop we can't just throw that out. They have added new concept ideas to help the 3D, like the homing attack and I would miss this if it went. They just don't take care with these things. I think Sonic should keep linear type levels but give more break offs and alternative routes.

Also I don't think it would have mattered if Wario was in place of that Mario thing, but what is the difference is that in a Mario game you can meet new characters and that's that, in a Sonic game when you meet new characters you know you will end up playing as them or spending most of the game with them.

 

I can immediately see two main problems with Sonic in 3D. One is the bottomless pits, and the other is the linearity.

Bottomless pits: In the 2D games, bottomless pits were okay in certain circumstances where you could consider them "a hole in the level" rather than "between two islands in the level". There was a very subtle difference between those because of how 2D works. In 3D however, the difference between them is extremely obvious, and /ALL/ 3D Sonic games have the second, much more undesirable, type. Now, if I look at pretty much the only non-Sonic 3D platformer I've ever played, which is Rayman 3 (and a damn good game at that) - it has no bottomless pits at all, and in fact limits you to certain areas with invisible walls/ceilings, which range from quite small to quite large, and often has underground "tunnels" connecting these areas. Sonic on the other hand kills you for going outside where you're supposed to be (I.e. you fall into a bottomless pit from walking off the platform) instead of trapping you there with invisible walls/ceilings. If I were Sonic, I'd have enough common sense to not walk off a platform into a pit, so the game shouldn't let him do that.

Linearity: If you look at S3&K, or to a lesser extent pretty much any 2D Sonic game, each level has a variety of different routes you can take. Obviously moving to 3D means the level designers would have a lot more freedom over where to place their routes, and therefore they should have added lots more routes, but instead, they made it even more linear. Why? I have no clue. Probably because a non-linear route would have messed up their camera which usually points where you're supposed to be heading, but that camera system was shitty anyway - as we know, the one they used for Shadow was far superior because it /DIDN'T/ automatically point to where you were supposed to be heading, apart from a few specific places such as grinding on long rails where you wouldn't want to turn around anyway.

 

Dude, seriously, the damn thing didn't even have an intuitive menu to select the game mode from the beginning... Not to mention how painful was it to search for any specific mission, since they were all mixed up and there was no way of organizing them.


It wasn't an example to follow on good presentation, with these user-unfriendly elements that could have been fixed in a couple of days.

 

Right, that's about the only thing I did hate about SRA... that you can't sort the missions >_>