I recently got a DSi XL and man, it's a joy to play original DS games on this thing. That got me to playing the Rush games again, and I've gotta say... I feel like I was overly mean and dismissive of these games. When I first got Sonic Rush in 2005-2006 I thought it was incredible. I was really hooked on the game. I loved the soundtrack, I loved Blaze the Cat, I loved how the game looked (especially in the beautiful boss battles that reminded me so much of Klonoa, which I've always loved), and I really liked the "boost" stuff and the Special Stages. The Advance games never clicked with me, and it's part of why I wasn't anxious to play Rush myself up until I saw a trailer that made it look really exciting. But then when I first played Rush Adventure two years later, I wasn't feeling the game all that much. I don't know what it was. I think I maybe just had my feelings hurt because the franchise was at such a huge low, and I felt that Marine was annoying, and I think I also felt like Blaze was taking a step back on the game, whereas she had a big focus on the first Rush. By the time Colors was out I was a full-blown Dimps Hater. I was there agreeing with discussions online about their games' level design, their over-reliance of death pits, and I was mad at Sonic 4 and mad at people eating up Sega of America's marketing surrounding the game, and I was mad that me not being super excited for Sonic "going back to his origins" was being painted as me being grumpy that "Sonic's eyes were green", when I just thought the game had always looked bad. I didn't feel vindication when I was proven right about Sonic 4. (art by virtanderson) But now I'm replaying Sonic Rush and Rush Adventure and being 1. reminded of why I loved Rush so much, and 2. found a lot of newfound love for Rush Adventure, why the hell was I so dismissive about the game? I must've been really hurt by Sonic 2006's reception and it must've colored my perception and feelings on this game. It's great! I love the seafaring adventure theme, I love Marine, all the levels and bosses have fun new themes and ideas, and it's an improvement over the original Sonic Rush in nearly every way. The levels have more unique gimmicks and enemies, the iteration of the trick system feels great, and the level design has almost none of that cruel Dimps-ness that their Sonic games would have near the end. It feels like the developers being comfortable with the game being easier and less punishing now that it's filled with so much side-content and completionist stuff to it - the ramp up of difficulty and "unfair level design" of Dimps' Sonic games have always felt like trying to create friction and longevity to a platformer game that's very difficult to add difficulty to or to make the game last longer (Sonic levels are huge and much more complex to design compared to other platformers, etc). The bosses in Rush Adventure are so unique and I love that most of them have variable damage depending on how you hit them, and that there's a lot of "ping-pong balancing" on top of their heads to get multiple hits in. It feels perfect for such a pinball-inspired series to do something like that, and I mean, I always loved doing that in Sonic 1, 2 and 3. I love the variety of sea vehicles, even though it starts getting a little tiresome when you're trying to uncover the whole map. I love having a home base island to chill around in and talk to people. It feels so... itself! Is it a top 5 Sonic game in my book? No. Is it a top 10? Maybe! I feel really guilty for being so dismissive of Rush Adventure back then. It didn't sell too well IIRC, probably because it came right after Sonic 2006 and it bore the brunt of the outcome that it had on the franchise's reputation. Maybe people were confused by the title and didn't know it was supposed to be a new game. Whatever it was, I believe Rush Adventure not selling well was probably what made Dimps only work on "handheld little brother versions" of Sonic Team's bigger games rather than more original affairs, and it makes me so sad, because Rush Adventure has so much stuff that's unique to it, it makes me wonder what games they could have made if they had been given even more budget and free reign after Rush Adventure. Dimps' games' quality began suffering after this too, with their 3DS outings being, uh, much less than stellar, probably because they were given tighter budgets and therefore, Dimps (the company) probably put together smaller teams, on a lesser priority and with less star talent on the games they were making for Sega. But I wanna hear from you, since I haven't seen these games be mentioned ever since I started posting here again. What do you think of the DS Sonic games? I should replay Sonic Colors DS sometime soon too, and I'll post here what I think of it once I do. Many people even regard the DS Colors to be even better than the big console counterpart (an assertion I was always iffy on), but I do remember thinking it had some fun stuff going for it and sort of understanding where people came from when they would say that.
I think Rush has the best presentation of any of Dimps's games by far, mostly by virtue of Naganuma but also just tight design and theming that really nails the atmosphere and aesthetic. But I also think Rush 1 is the worst of their DS lineup, not because it's hard but because it loves doing the Advance 2 thing where it throws you at the void at blistering speed and shouts "think fast!". It's not as bad as that game by any means, but it feels like each level has had a huge chunk scooped out of it with just open air left behind. Also, the bosses have the Sonic Superstars problem of being too long and slow because you can only hit them once per attack cycle, and some of those attacks go on a while. Rush Adventure is a step up in every OTHER aspect, I think it easily bests the first in level design and bosses, but it struggles due to making you do a lot of minigames and watch a lot of unimpressive dialogue scenes for what is ultimately an extremely simple story. Colors DS is quite good, but it's also the one I'm least familiar with. I think it keeps most of the improvements Rush Adventure brought (and finally properly utilizing the homing attack and stomp helps a lot) and has no worse level design than either game before it. The bosses might even be a bit better than the Wii version. But it suffers from the fact that it has to be Sonic Colors. Not in that it's bad at being Colors (frankly it might be the better of the 2, it certainly has the better storytelling), but because it loses some originality, doesn't have Blaze, and was the unfortunate start to 2010s Sonic's lack of smaller original titles, which both made the series feel smaller during that era and forced the release dates to sync up leading to drought periods, and meant that anyone who wasn't on board with Sonic Team's vision at the time was left with no recompense, on top of the fact that Sonic 4, Generations 3D and Lost World 3D are all weaker games than the GBA or DS trilogies. I'm fully in the camp of "2010s Sonic Team were more competent than Dark Age Sonic Team", but I can hardly blame dark age fans for liking their era better, because I honestly think the downward trajectory of DIMPs's output and the lack of meaningful smaller side games with any meat to them (along with Sonic Boom, which probably didn't help) starved the 2010s of the things that saved the mid-late 2000s, even though Sonic Team's own work didn't crash and burn so hard.
I like Sonic Rush Adventure and always did, but there is basically nothing I find even remotely tolerable about Sonic Rush. I even tried to play it again more or less recently, and I was baffled: how can anyone like it? "What's the difference," you ask? Well-- while Sonic Rush eliminates all rest time by turning any available air time into an opportunity to build up your boost meter, and makes the whole challenge about how efficiently you can keep your action chain intact, Sonic Rush Adventure feels a lot more whimsical to me. You're engaging with these silly gimmicks nonstop, and they can really make Sonic and Blaze feel different. Because of that, using the boost feels less like a foregone conclusion and more like one among a series of different actions you have to perform, each of them with their unique flair. This makes every stage feel so much more alive than I found them to be in Sonic Rush! Sky Babylon is especially remarkable. It's the one boost level I can say actually liked. ...And then the only thing I remember from Colors DS is how bizarre is the difficulty spike in Asteroid Coaster.
Sonic Rush was flawed but fun. The overly-common empty pits and the enemy rush rooms were obnoxious, but the boost gameplay was fun and gave a reason to use the tricks that were implemented back in Sonic Advance 2. Also it has a Hideki Naganuma soundtrack, and I've been a huge fan of his ever since Jet Grind Radio. I never picked up Rush Adventure, but I hear it's not bad.
I'd need more time to articulate my thoughts on Rush 1 and Colors, never properly played Rush Adventure, but my current contribution to the topic is only this: the combination of a touch-screen with the half-pipe formula made the Special Stages insanely fun and one of my personal favorites in the whole series.
I still laugh to remember how much trouble I had with Special Stage 7, until I realised you could tap a point on the touch screen and Sonic would move there pretty much instantly. I'd done the first 6 stages with the stylus constantly touching the screen, sliding it around to make Sonic move, but the final one requires such quick timing it was impossible to do with that method. I was kicking myself when I realised you could just tap the screen instead, not least because I realised I'd probably made a few of the previous stages more difficult than they actually should have been...! XD The BGM for it was an absolute banger too; can still hear it clear as day in my head nearly 20 years later! "Today's a day, today's a new day~"
Sonic Rush has one of my favorite stories and soundtracks in the series but I don't like the actual game that much. Rush Adventure is one of my favorite Sonic games period though. It feels like one of the only boost games where giving each level it's own flavor was a huge priority for the team, and the adventure game elements, hubs and minigames feel like a nice sweetener this time without going overboard. I also like Marine about as much as I like Blaze and Emerl in terms of new characters. Dimps were 3 for 3!
Did DIMPS actually work on Sonic Battle? I seem to remember it was all ST but it's easy to get mixed up since the sprites are all the same style as Advance
Rush and Rush Adventure fuck incredibly hard and people sleep on them. The best handheld Sonic games by a landslide IMO. Rush Adventure was my first mainline Sonic game and it's very near and dear to me. Colors DS is good but not great. It feels like a pretty big step down from Rush Adventure in terms of spectacle and mechanics and I don't think it's as fun or creative as the Wii version. I've heard rumors it was quickly hacked together from what had been done on the DS version of Generations which could explain why it feels kinda cheap in comparison to the Rush games.
This series and Sonic Advance 3 are where Sonic’s jump and momentum game feel died. I probably enjoyed the games, but it really was a turn for the worse in terms of game feel.
Voted "all incredible". Come at me, haters I never found Marine annoying, but that's mainly because I understand what Dimps were going for with her characterization. Imagine being stuck on this tiny island. Nothing but koalas and boredom. You were born here and you are most likely gonna remain here for the rest of your life. Sure, life isn't stressful, but literally nothing happens. Your whole world is this tiny place. It's a friggin prison in all but name. Until one day a blue hedgehog and a two-tailed fox from who knows where wash up on the shore and suddenly your whole worlds is turned upside down. Of course she would annoyingly insist on going with them on an adventure. Who wouldn't? So yeah, I don't blame her for how she acted. After all, don't we all play games just because we want to experience some kind of adventure too?
Need to find some copies of Rush and Rush Adventure because I haven't played them in years, but what I do remember of them is that Rush had a really great vibe but the level design was incredibly frustrating, while Rush Adventure was more fun but I wasn't vibing with the "Adventure" portion of the game. Maybe a replay will change that.
Sonic Rush I enjoyed enough to 100%, something very rare with videogames in general for me. Sonic Rush Adventure is poor at best. Sonic Colours DS I enjoyed a lot, and a return to form for Dimps after SRA. Sonic 4 was not on DS (but is trash anyway).
They were fun and introduced the boost to the franchise. I also appreciated SRA adding adventure elements, although forcing players to replay levels for materials was a questionable design choice. I disliked how later levels in both suffered from the Advance 3 problem of not being able to see hazards before running into them, and the music style didn't do it for me. I found it annoying and un-Sonic-like. *hides* How so? Advance 3 still featured momentum.
Advance 3 is actually the moment they made it so letting go of the jump button and directional buttons dropped Sonic like a rock, basically what Rush did, but subtler. It started feeling very off.
Interesting, so you dislike the boost mechanic in general? Not just the Dimps games but also all the 3D outings? That seems pretty high praise for SRA that you liked it despite that! This reminds me, something I'd also like to add is that I think Rush and Rush Adventure have the best Boost system in all the games - Rings for Boost (Unleashed, Generations) make it so all you have to worry about is whether you're running low, the boost is just given to you freely, destroying enemies for Boost (Colors, Forces), make it so there's often times of weird dry spells in the levels, but Rush and Rush Adventure's Tension Gauge makes it so you have to manage both not running low -and- getting to max quickly, and then once you do, you get to ride that wave of infinite boost and try to keep it going for as long as you can, it's very engaging without being "too much", and "dry spells of boost" occur mostly when you're not playing well, not because it feels like the level is withholding it from you.
Sonic Rush was the first dimps Sonic game to have special stages that were both not utterly maddening to get to and also didn't play like shit, so by that virtue it's one of the best to me (outright the only one of theirs I've played that I was able to see the true ending of). I actually haven't played it in a good while, though it's on my list of games to re-tackle at some point.
Unless I'm grossly mistaken, we were both around in Brazilian discussion boards more than 15 years ago discussing the merits of boost gameplay in the months leading up to Sonic Unleashed-- and even then I had a lot of gripes with the whole idea. The thing about boost gameplay as a whole that I really don't like, although it's really just a very personal preference, is how no matter how cool whatever Sonic is pulling off, it just feels like I'm doing what the game expected me to -- and why would I do anything that's not what the game expects me to? I remember that being a focal point of discussion regarding boost pads, and nowadays I think these are just particular cases of a general philosophy I don't really vibe with. Very rarely in Sonic Rush the best thing you could be doing isn't either a) boosting or b) doing tricks to fill your boost gauge, so action can feel really seamless when you're doing it right, but it's like Sonic (or, well, Blaze) is sucking up the stage so he can keep doing what he was already doing. It's very tempo-based, but in a rhythm game kind of way that's not really dictated by music. Conceptually, the entire boost system favors action that is born from controlling Sonic's abilities, when and how to use each of them to maximize a continued streak of action that neutralizes the effects of your surroundings. The decreased focus on physics, movement that is created from the relationship between Sonic and the stage, can be explained by these concepts -- but for all the apparent thrill, it's actually a very controlled experience that asks you to never divert your attention because you actually can mostly direct Sonic to where you want him to go, and must do so. But the reasons why I dislike Sonic Rush, specifically, are a bit different. It's a very cool game, I'll give it that. Both Sonic and Blaze are very cool in it, and the game makes a point of being so at every turn. Sonic isn't just overcoming challenges! He's styling on them-- and everything, from the soundtrack to the trick system to the way Sonic can just dash past any enemy, seems to make an effort to make up this urban-ish, intense yet relaxed vibe, reminiscent of parkour and skating that's sort of detached from the locations you go to, the danger you're facing etc. So it's less of an adventure, I guess, and more of a setup for the performance of coolness, which is the experience of this continued streak of controlled actions. It's both an evolution and a rupture from what we had from SA2 on. I can see why one would like it. The thing is though, I just... don't like it. I don't like how stifling it feels, how uncreative I feel when ultimately I complete a stage and get a great rank. It feels very red tape gameplay to me, the opposite of what it says it is. Doesn't help that I simply don't like the soundtrack, and how it doesn't relate to the places you go to in any way. But this is really just me, because I was never a rhythm games person either, for very much the same reasons. Sonic Rush Adventure, though! It feels like an adventure again, and I think it recovers a little bit of the focus on what's not Sonic because it uses the DS screen so much better. When I play Sonic Rush, I feel like I'm alternating between the two screens, because the screen that doesn't have Sonic in it almost never has anything of interest. But when I play Sonic Rush Adventure, I feel like I have to look at both of them at the same time and create a comprehensive picture of my surroundings, making sense of a very enlarged vertical space. I mention Sky Babylon because it's the most clever stage in this regard. Check this out: Notice how more often you have to look at the screen where Sonic is not to figure out where you should go or understand what exactly happens if you fall, especially during the balloon sections (I love the detail that the purple crystals inside the balloon makes it float, and the larger ones make you levitate) and the ones with the fire walls that you have to avoid. When Sonic Rush does it, I find it very disorienting because there's a lot of empty space all the time. I especially like the section near the end of Sky Babylon Act 2 with the electrical currents and the springs, where you have to quickly gauge where you can go by alternating your attention between the screens where Sonic isn't. I think SRA takes much more advantage of the fact that it's a DS game, and this is especially apparent in the bosses that almost always (or always?) take place in a two-story setup, which I respect a lot.
I think your memory might be slipping. I just checked and that doesn't happen. If anything, it seems to keep more momentum than its predecessors.
It might be an animation thing. Letting go of the jump definitely felt a bit slipperier than in Sadv2.
