Superstars actually does have a quick descent feature by holding down while flying. It's no flight cancel, but it makes Tails significantly more fun to play in my opinion
I enjoy more mobility than less. I prefer the air speed cap and the roll lock off too even if that's not the design intended in S1 And I don't think flight cancel should let you start flying again after a successful bounce, I'd just have preferred the option to have a safer landing or an opportunity to get a big bounce.
It's not an unpopular opinion to say Big is the worst part of SA1. But what MIGHT be unpopular is that I think Big is genuinely the worst gameplay experience in the entire franchise. The Werehog might be frustrating, but at least it's not boring. Secret Rings might have horrible controls, but at least you can adapt to them. Sonic 06 might be a trainwreck, but its worst aspects are not by design. Labyrinth might be as unfun as a Sonic game gets, but it's a Game Gear spinoff, so who cares? Nothing else in the rest of the series compares to the pure, undiluted misery that is playing Big's story in Sonic Adventure. It has been over half an hour and I am still trying to navigate Ice Cap looking for that stupid fucking frog, fighting against the clunkiest controls, camera, and physics known to man, bored out of my mind, and I can physically feel my soul slowly being sucked out of my body. I can't even imagine taking the time to get all of his emblems.
Froggy is at the ice hole on the right side of the frozen lake where you spawn. The one you can see in this image
I don't like Big, but nah. He's mostly easy filler, and not that long either. I can think of plenty of stuff I'd want to do less than play Big's story to completion. A-ranking Team Dark's B-missions glitchless, Lost Impact, Silver's ball puzzle, Cool Edge act 3, most of Lost World 3D, pre-patch Master King's trial...Fang's mech.
This might not be that unpopular in this community but YouTubers told me the game was trash when I was younger so: Chaotix’s rubber band mechanics are insanely fun and if anything the game’s weakest aspect is that the level design doesn’t force interacting with it more.
Half-disagree. The rubber band mechanic, while certainly underutilized, still struggles because the game is trying to be a fast, fluid Sonic game, and being jerked in various directions when you're trying to do normal platforming and such isn't fun. If it simply weren't always-on, and activated by the player's input, it probably would've been both better-received and made the levels feel more active, since you have to actually think about what you're doing. Alternatively, make a game that isn't actually about going fast and instead physics puzzles using the weight of two characters.
At least paying as the Big Cats was optional after you finished Sonic's main adv, I found the Rouge levels in Sonic Adv 2 to be far more annoying and you had no choice but to play them to finish the game, which got to me no end. I agree with you over Werehog and Secret Rings mind, I really liked Secret rings myself
But the rubber band can very easily add a lot of speed. The game doesn’t teach you how to use it to its full extent but by the end of my playthrough I’d pretty naturally discovered several ways to use it to go from 0-100 faster than you can in a lot of Sonic games. Whether those were all intentional movement options is debatable I suppose-but they’re there alright. I do think there should have been more puzzle elements though. The tutorial features them more heavily than the rest of the game.
I'm not saying it can't add speed, I'm saying it serves as an obstacle too much for that potential to come across and enrich a playthrough. It's not even the negativity bias, I think it just straight up causes more problems than it solves.
each of Big's levels can be finished in like, a minute tops, by a literal child. meanwhile, playing all of Sonic Heroes................
The only thing you need to be explicitly told about going into Big's levels is that when Froggy bites onto the line you need to immediately hold down on the stick. If you don't know that - as I didn't when I played SA1 for the second time and had forgotten this after a several-years gap - it is bloody hard to actually fish him up. Once I'd re-read the controls for the character again - yes, it became easy again and I blazed through. If you need an example of someone who didn't do this - Arin Hanson on Game Grumps infamously had problems with Big's levels, and it was entirely because, being Arin, he didn't bother to read the instructions or check them when he was having difficulties with Froggy, hence why the levels took them so long.
I literally could not care less about the Game Grumps, their views on Sonic, the favor they recieve at times from Sonic’s social media, or even about them being part of the reason some of the people who don’t care for the series don’t.
Is this a particularly unpopular opinion? Everyone I've ever seen caring about the Game Grumps in the last like...five years has cared much more about wanting them to fuck one another than anything they actually do. Oh, you were replying to that other fella. Disregard-
In all fairness, it is pretty fucking ridiculous that there are neither any hint orbs nor any floating monitors that tell you such vital information. I apparently need a hint orb to tell me how Knuckles's very obvious and intuitive emerald radar works, but not to tell me how Big's very unintuitive fishing mechanics do. Even in 1998, manuals were out. It's unfair to criticize anyone for not reading them. Sure, even if Big's Ice Cap has fucking atrocious design and camera work (not to mention bumpers that don't send you far enough leading to a janky-ass time trying to get out of the water), at least his story is not hard to blaze through. But if you actually try to engage with the fishing, actually try to catch fish other than Froggy, and actually go for his emblems, then lord have fucking mercy. It may not be strictly required to see the game's ending, but I stand by it being the worst gameplay experience ever put in a Sonic game. At least with Heroes, it's still platforming.
I feel like even without knowing the control stick thing there was still always a shot at Froggy biting anyways and so it really was just a matter of being at the right place (litterally where they put you, outside of Hot Shelter) but the annoying parts start to come when you're going for all emblems, Big's fishing collision for example always seemed to result in resetting the entire minigame if you did something really arbitrary the game didn't like which made it harder than it needed to be to catch the bigger fish in the harder to access areas like pretty much anywhere in Ice Cap, plus I'm pretty sure you can unlock the lure upgrades out of order meaning you're fucked if you started with the one in the egg carrier prison. All that said, I still don't consider him that bad from a game design perspective.
Um.... OK? Needlessly aggressive reply, I was just pointing out a well-known example of someone who's struggled with Big's levels. I never said a personal opinion on them either way. This, on the other hand, fair enough. That said: you don't need to read the manual, I said instructions - the single screen of text you're given when you first select a character on how their controls work.
I think the absolute biggest victim of SA1 coming out at the tail end of the "read the enclosed manual before playing the game" era of old-school gaming is Sky Chase. The game never, ever tells you in-game how to shoot 99% of the levels' enemies.
It’s fine. Because if you want, you can just not shoot the enemies and walk away while most the level plays out anyway.
