Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Cobalt Blue]

spinball was quite mediocre at best. unfair at some points, but overall quite... bland.

[Garamonde]

I liked Spinball...

It wasn't just plain old pinball. It was a little gem in the series.

[Koopaul]

Honestly I thought Mario Pinball Land was better, and that game wasn't too great either.

[Iceman404]

I sorta liked Spinball mind you.
(Or at least the sprites and Sonic's animations)

[DavidCaruso]

Sonic Spinball was only good for its music, and even that was hampered by a limited sound driver (they didn't use the same one as the main Sonic games). Aesthetically it's not nearly as appealing as the main Sonic series, and the actual game itself was pretty mediocre IMO. At first glance a pinball game would appear to be perfect for Sonic because he's a ball, but in practice it's annoying and the levels were kind of bland; ironically Spinball is probably less physics-based than the regular Sonic games. Most pinball games have never really interested me though, and at least it's more elaborate than Sonic 2's Casino Night Zone which consisted entirely of nonthreatening bumpers and practically no enemies.

Other Sonic game that is only good for its music: Sonic 3D Blast (both Genesis and Saturn). Saturn version in particular has some of my favorite series tracks ever.

[Cobalt Blue]

actually the greatest treat in casino zone was basically ran into spikes or being crushed by blocks.

[DavidCaruso]

actually the greatest treat in casino zone was basically ran into spikes or being crushed by blocks.

Yeah I replayed Sonic 2 a few days ago and got stuck between two horizontally moving blocks in CNZ. Then it turned out that the blocks didn't actually meet together. =P

Spikes are barely a threat in the zone. I don't remember encountering them at all on that most recent playthrough, and looking at level maps I counted 4 sets of spikes in the entire zone. All of them were in Act 1. The main gripe I have with the zone is that everything feels like it's made to delay you for no reason at all, and even then it's not that hard to get through.

But really, IMO the entirety of Sonic 2 seems to be littered with bad level design moments, like the small pits with springs on each end that keep appearing after Hill Top Zone, or the cannons in Oil Ocean Zone that basically just took control from you for 10 seconds, or the peek-a-boo enemies in Metropolis Zone (who also don't activate at all on the screw things if I just run and don't jump at them), or the infamous Pit of Death in Mystic Cave Zone (especially if you're Super Sonic), or Complete Filler Zone (Sky Chase). There are some cool setpieces (e.g. the earthquake in Hill Top Zone) but they're all a bit too underdeveloped (though most of the ideas are followed up in Sonic 3, and more awesomely at that). Many of the level gimmick objects aren't controllable (e.g. pipes in CPZ, cannons in OOZ), and sometimes their use is even counterintuitive (e.g. having to face the opposite direction on the speed booster things in Wing Fortress Zone to get across pits), which can be annoying. And boss battles have become much less threatening and interesting now that I'm older (with the exception of the Wing Fortress Zone boss and the final one, which are still great).

The other main problem the game has with level design is that there's no need to actually maintain inertia. Half the challenge in the original came from maneuvering Sonic around the obstacles to pick up enough speed, but here you can basically just rev up a spin dash and get through any obstacle. Sonic CD had a similar move with the Super Peel Out, but the difference there was that you had to actually maintain your inertia in order to get fast enough to time travel (which would even justify things like those spring pits), and you also weren't invulnerable to enemies. Sonic 2's levels also don't seem to be designed particularly well around the Spin Dash compared to 3's; my theory on this is that the designers designed the levels thinking the recoil feature they originally put in would balance it out, but then they removed it and it was too late to rebalance all of the levels since the game needed to be out by Christmas, no delays accepted.

Challenge is also reduced by Sonic 2's levels containing many more rings than the original, while the levels didn't get much longer. Data for comparison. As you can tell Sonic 3 had the same problem but it was partially offset by the levels being much bigger and the enemies posing more of a threat than in 2 (plus I think those records were achieved using the S3 special stages to get rings). The hardest zone in Sonic 2 was Wing Fortress Zone (which, not coincidentally, I also felt was the most well designed zone in the game), mainly because the ring problem was offset by the main focus of the level being on platforming. Speed wasn't diminished much there either as a consequence; the level was still a lot faster than something from SMW.

Really, the game is trying to be a bridge between the momentum-focused obstacle courses of the original game to the focus on setpieces and dynamic level design in Sonic 3, but the problem is that neither are really executed very well. The obstacle courses aren't very well designed, as I elaborated on above, and the setpieces aren't nearly extravagant enough or frequent enough to make up for that, especially when many of Sonic 2's ideas were redone in Sonic 3 (example: the earthquake setpiece in Hill Top Zone reappears again in Marble Garden) and better. All you're really left with are some awesome graphics and music. I personally blame the game's rushed development cycle for the quality; it's not that it's a horrible game (it's definitely better than the game I'm supposed to be calling "Sonic 4"), but it's easily the worst of the classic series IMO. (For reference, my personal quality hierarchy is: 3K > CD > 1 > 2.)

So yeah I think my opinion of Casino Night Zone just digressed to a mini-review of Sonic 2 in general, but whatever. Someday if I can find the time I want to do a more detailed level-by-level analysis of Sonic 2, with lots of screenshots and all included, since everyone seems to love the game and think it's the high point of the series but myself so the burden is on me to justify my opinions.

[Rökkan]

Woosp! David Caruso is absolutely right! Sonic 2 was sort of rushed and therefore that is why many ideas (scrapped or not) were re-used in Sonic 3/Knuckles (Hidden Palace, a snow zone, a desert zone, Death Egg, Flying Battery, more "cinematic" approach with cutscenes and all, etc).

The problem with Wing Fortress' speed boosters is that you can actually continue to move while they are being activated, resulting in, if you're still running or walking forward when you activate it, your forward launching not starting from the very beginning of the thing, and therefore, only slightly throwing you forward, which makes you fall and die. Wing Fortress is one hell of a shitty level, because the whole game says that you can and you SHOULD run forward without worrying about dying, only worrying about keeping that pace, and Wing Fortress says "hold the fuck on, if you run so fast you'll fall down and die instantly". And you know what, the level IS designed so that you can jump from platform to platform fast, but no one would try to do this because running on that level means you're 500% more likely to die. On other levels, it'd just mean that you could be thrown down to a slower path or that you'd get hit if you're careless, not that you'd actually lose lives and that you'll have to restart the level all over again just to fucking forget about the speed booster bug and die again.

Oil Ocean is another level that just bothers me, the level isn't just about going rightwards, there are a lot of times that going rightwards = backtracking, and going leftwards = going forward, and it's not like Sonic 3 & Knuckles, in which it is really intuitive to know when you actually have to go leftwards (big fucking walls are quite a help!) So, a lot of the times, specially because you're thrown several platforms down because you got hit by that octopus badnik, you end up somewhere that you don't know which direction to take.

And regarding gimmicks in which you have no control over them, I thought that those were more like nudges to let you know that you're not in the fastest path, that having to wait Sonic go through tubes and cannons delays you, and that there is a faster path that lets you avoid those sections, like Sonic 1's Spring Yard's incredibly slow moving blocks, which takes a lot of your time to get through them, but if you're smart and skilled, you can get in a higher path before facing them and going over those sections entirely. I don't know if that actually holds true though, as I didn't study Sonic 2's levels that much. But yeah, I honestly agree with you, Sonic 2 is pretty much the classic game that is my least favorite out of all of them, because of the reasons you mentioned, and because the levels there just are mostly more straightforward and less enjoyable overall.

But I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say that the other classic games didn't have its bad moments. Well, Sonic 1, not really, it was really well-thought and executed, and its problem is mostly some blandness in some aspects of it in comparison to other Sonic games, but that's excusable since it was the first one, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles had some really stupid and boring bosses, and I also don't like how it doesn't quite reward much the player for trying to go fast and keeping its speed like the other classic games motivates you to and all. And Sonic CD, which is my favorite game, has a bunch of faults, like its programming, which isn't as good as the main Sonic games', how underexplored was the time travelling mechanic, which was supposed to be its main mechanic, but by far isn't one of the main things that makes Sonic CD so good, and actually some numerous level design parts that didn't have enough beta testing on it, or are just incomplete, etc.

That reminds me, I replayed Sonic Colors today, and while I love how they tried to give it more exploration, more genuine platforming, and trying to come back to a level design that favors both exploration and going really fast, etc, etc, I reached a point that I got mad while playing it and turned it off at once - Sonic Colors just suffers from a lot of unthoughtful design (just like most 3D Sonic games), in which the player sometimes needs to guess what the designer intended him to do, because it's not only not very clear, but also because doing anything else other than what specifically the designer intended (which isn't the only reasonable course of action you can take, most of the times) will punish you hard. Deathpits. Everywhere. It's almost like I'm playing Wing Fortress all over again.

Sonic Adventure on the other hand, instead of putting glitches and cheap deaths for players who actually wants to be a bit more explorative and curious, the designers actually put power-ups. Go ahead, play as Sonic and try just being explorative, trying to take completely different routes to the one you usually take, or trying to get to places that you'd be fearful to try to explore in other 3D Sonic games because you'd only get killed. You'll see Ring capsules, shields and 1ups instead.


It's late and I'm very sleepy. I apologize if this text is slightly or mostly incomprehensible. bleh.

[Cobalt Blue]

its bro i never read them anyway♥

[Helmo]

I've heard that pretty much every sonic game was rushed

[Omegajak]

I've heard that pretty much every sonic game was rushed

SEGA sets up terrible standards for itself. As well as terrible time frames. It's a Miracle Sonic Adventure 1-2 turned out as good as they did on hind sight.

[Rökkan]

I think his post was sort of a pun??? Rush, fast???

But yeah, Sonic Adventure, Sonic 2 and Sonic 2006 are the most notorious examples of how the game development in Sonic can be very rushed (as they have a LOT of features that were taken out or appear in the game as incomplete, specially Sonic 2006). SEGA should take a hint at Nintendo, that takes a long time to launch their games so that they can iron it out really well.

[Cobalt Blue]

but rokkan.... its nintendo... you know!

[Iceman404]

but rokkan.... its nintendo... you know!

Stop living in the past old man!!

[Helmo]

no really ive heard that like almost every sonic game was rushed