So I brought my PS3 round to my sister's house and got my 4 year old nephew to play Sonic for the first time. First I got him to play Sonic 2 SMS and while he managed to figure out jumping on enemies and getting on platforms, he struggled with hazards and didn't complete the act. He asked me to set up another game so I got him to play Sonic Advance and would you believe it he completed the first act without even dying. It really surprised me just how unforgiving Sonic 2 is for the SMS and how genius the first act of Sonic Advance is. Advance gently introduces you to the game mechanics while Sonic 2 puts up loads of brick walls for you to jump over. That's not to say Sonic 2 is bad because I think the level design in that game is great, but in terms of accessibility, Advance does it brilliantly without making the act boring. I would say it's up there with the likes for Green Hill Zone.
It always bothered me that Underground Zone came first. It's so short, but the boss is so terrible. I've played the rest of the game, but I barely remember it because of how many times I've had to replay the first zone just to get to the real game on the other side.
Sonic 2 8-bit would have been a bit easier if green hills zone was the first level like originally intended. (I recently switched the two levels around in my s2 hack. xD)
^ I always thought that the difficulty spike (no pun intended) in Act 3 of GHZ was a late addition due to the zones being switched around, but the autodemo proves otherwise...! Sonic Advance had some good level design in it I thought, wasn't too fond of that carnival stage but other than that, it's a fun game to play. I'd gladly play that one over the rest of the Advance series anyday.
Sonic 2 SMS is my favourite game ( not only my fav sonic game) ever. Sadv. is Ok in my book. I wish there was more Sonic with the same spirit as S2SMS, it's rather different to the other games.
There's some nice nostalgia with S2 SMS, but I think Advance wins out. A more intricate engine, all the traditional gimmicks, four playable characters (including Amy as a first time 2D playable) and multiplayer race mode. Far less overblown difficulty spike too.
At least you're playing it on the Master System, playing it on the Game Gear is when things start to get really hard!
I was never too keen on Sonic 2 8bit. I LOVE the first one, enough to buy a SMS Converter and the game just to play it properly in all it's glory, but I thought number 2 was much less satisfying. I mean, I love finding out about it's development, because the way the game's structured just begs for it to be dissassembled as it's clearly a rushed game that was changed more times than most other Sonic games, but overall the level design isn't smart, and the whole thing's design is based on the player having prior knowledge of every intricacy. I mean, most Sonic games make you have some level of prior knowledge to play the game effectively in the later stages, but WHAM! Sonic 2 8bit slaps you in the face in the very first Zone. And now we know why. Underground Zone wasn't meant to be the very first level. I think I'd have liked it much more had GHZ been first. Sonic Advance on the other hand? I think it's a fantastic game. In fact, I like all the Advance games. They're pretty much the continuation of level design and game play from Sonic and Knuckles, mixed with some of the features from the Dreamcast titles. I like the fact that Sonic Advance 2 is slightly more difficult than 1, and then no 3 is much harder than no 2. It's like how Sonic & Knuckles progressed with the difficulty from 3. They're also all wildly different in level design and give the player something fresh every time. Not everyone likes the more linear gameplay from 2, or the puzzle-solving from 3 with the team based mechanic, but I do. They all do a god job of introducing you to via the first zone too.
lolwut at the topic title. They're two very different games made by different studios that are difficult to compare. Although I agree that game design and physics have improved vastly since Sonic 2 SMS, and the differences become more obvious with all the remakes these days. The first Metroid, for instance, is thoroughly unplayable to me, because of how floaty and unbalanced everything is. You're stuck farming for all your health back when you continue the game from a previous session, (Easily the biggest offender.) there were no backgrounds, no sense of direction, (Map drawing time, literally!) the framerate was piss poor most of the time, and the list keeps on going. It is so difficult to wrestle with the bad controls, that I can't judge whether the map layouts were bad or not. I might be a serious masochist with games, but I have my limits, and Metroid goes beyond mine. Metroid : Zero Mission, (A remake of the same game.) was a completely different story. Sans the better artwork, music, additional content, and presentation, the controls were perfect, solid, fluid, and very, very carefully timed to smoothly animated sprite work. I beat it without a single guide's help, and if I still wanted a serious challenge, Hard Mode was perfect for that. Hard was so brutal that I never could finish the final escape after defeating Metal Ridley, and there were probably 30 deaths on each boss before that. Metroid Fusion also proved itself to be impossibly hard on Normal, but with the swimmingly nice controls, I couldn't complain about the game being derpy; every death was legitimately my fault.
I'm going to take a different position on Underground zone coming first. If the hardest, most annoying zone is the first one, it gives you plenty of tries (infinite) on practicing the tricky bits and the boss. In an era where video games were still played in repetition to progress, this seems like a good solution rather then letting players get through half the game and then never get enough playtime in the level to beat the bouncing balls. Or they could have made the boss easier :v:
Advance 1 was probably fully built with the last scrapped concepts from Sonic Team's classics, so that may be why Dimps made such a solid (if short) game. Their Sonic games went downhill + - with awkward friction from that point, in my oppinion. :P As for Sonic 2 8-Bit, yeah, it felt like a big step back from Ancient's original. Thank goodness Aspect got much better at it by Sonic Chaos.
