How to make Sonic games better

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SecretTacoNinja

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Jul 8, 2008
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axia777 post=9.73447.811517 said:
Aoi Denkou post=9.73447.811241 said:
I agree with Bob, 2D WAS good, but there's no need to go back.
It's over, it's done, quit bitching.
They just have to fix the 3D, and do some decent game testing before they release anymore.
I have good hope for Sonic Unleashed.
Good luck on that one. I used to have faith that Sega could get 3d Sonic right. But after so many games sucking massive sweaty donkey dong I am now convinced that they will fail forever. If we want a great 3d Sonic game I suggest we give Sonic to Miyamoto. He is one of the only devs I trust to take old school 2d games like Mario and make into 3d master pieces. It would be Wii exclusive, but it would most likely be great.
*Sigh* I think Miyamoto has lost his edge. But Nintendo should buy Sonic already and see if they can kick him into shape.
 

smallharmlesskitten

Not David Bowie
Apr 3, 2008
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A lot me you are campaigning for a complete return to 2d. How about 2.5d? provides the 3d graphics but keeps the good old fashioned 2d gameplay. example? tombi!2 look it up
 

perfectimo

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Sep 17, 2008
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smallharmlesskitten post=9.73447.813488 said:
A lot me you are campaigning for a complete return to 2d. How about 2.5d? provides the 3d graphics but keeps the good old fashioned 2d gameplay. example? tombi!2 look it up
Tombi was cool, mission were fun and stuff. Don't give Sonic mission but a multipath "2.5D" game would make the series fell more like the original with somewhat linear paths and collecting animals or anything else stupid they have added.
 

Generic Hero

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Oct 13, 2008
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Well, Sonic could reach 88mph and struck by lighting to travel back in time to warn SEGA that they were going to ruin his franchise. On a more serious note I would say go ala Mega Man 9 and just create a New Retro Arcade game. I honestly think they cannot do a good orginal Sonic with 3d graphics or even sudo 3d graphics. Also /yay for 1st post
 

Jumplion

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Mar 10, 2008
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I am going to ignore what everyone said already and put in my two cents like in the last Sonic thread.

Keep it fast, keep it furious, keep it at blistering speeds, and let us break the sound barrier atleast 5 times in a single level.

That is all.
 

Rahnzan

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Oct 13, 2008
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Things I think could improve sonic.

1)Death of the franchise (ok ok I'm kidding)

1a) Get someone to edit the plot and story before you push it out the door. If it reads worse than a majority of the rubbish on deviant art and fanfiction.et combined it needs to be scrapped

2) Sonic is about speed, tails is about flight, knuckles was a guardian, not an asshole who liked to punch things. Stop over simplifying their personalities, regardless of how shallow they were to begin with, it's pretty bad when you've taken their thimble-deep aspects and run them into the ground even further. "Hey I'm a hot shot, let me drive that point into your skull a few more times with jokes that belong in the 80's!" "You tell 'em sonic!" "Thanks Tails! And I mean you Tails specifically, the person to whom I am referencing with my thank you for your snappy add-on to my clever remark." Holy gods someone drive a stake repeatedly through the dialogue.

3) HOW ABOUT A PHYSICS ENGINE! THAT'D BE GREAT! How come none of you have seen this? I didn't read half of page 3 and only the top post on 4 but I'm kind of frustrated no one thought of this! The first games had more physics! Scripted jumps and loopdy-loops does not a Sonic game make! They should be bloody ashamed of Sonic The Hedgehog (2008?) What were they thinking?!

4) What is all this realism junk? The comics, cartoons and earliest videogames had this awesome atmosphere and an incredibly unique if not overly geometric design to it that made you feel like you were playing a sonic game.

5) What ever happened to that fox princess or the bunny with the mechanical limbs?

6) Dr Robotnik was making a bleak dystopia by turning the sonics fuzzy friends into robots. Whatever happened to this? Now he's just going after these weird cosmic religious ways to undo the world.

7) Get rid of Humans. They're freaky in a game about a talking blue hedgehog who runs a hundred thousand miles an hour. It's like watching Roger Rabbit, it doesn't sit well when you see a cartoon flirting with an anatomically correct being.

8) My biggest complaint. Sonic the hedgehog came out when I was a kid. Shouldn't the franchize grow with me? Let me explain. When your mom and dad were kids, they watched Mickey Mouse, it was all they had and they loved him. They grow up, they have a kid, and they say "hey you know what'd be a good idea? Lets take him to see Mickey Mouse at disney land!" Ok sure why not. You drag the 3 5 or even 10 year old to Disney land and as soon as Mickey gets near him he starts screaming his bloody head off. Why? Cuz he's an icon to you, and a 6 foot tall mutated ****ing rat to him! Sonic is too contrived and muddled with his own history for kids to get half the crap you try to feed them. You should have been catering to the market you originally wrangled. We're still on this planet you know, we didn't stop caring, its not like we disappeared suddenly. Why hasn't sonic been ripped out of his kiddy shoes yet? Last I checked you can get a lot more money out of people with jobs, not so much kids who have to whine for quarters just to get a plastic gummy worm out of a vending machine.


Same problem with DnD. I was never apart of it, but a lot of the fanbase is moving away to more complex games that can feed to their want for something new and different. WoTC just keep pumping out new books that are even more simplified and centralized around finding uninteresting variants of the same old monsters and killing them dead to take their stuff so you can find their cousins and kill them too. It's never made a lot of sense to me, we're all mortal beings, you'd think you'd focus on the people that you grew up with, you know? Take money from them. What good is keeping your franchise at a target audience? New people are introduced to your product, and long after your dead they'll be complaining about how product-x isn't what it used to be. Which is pretty much the problem, its the same re-hashed stuff over and over again fed through the simplifier and thrown at you when you're feeble minded. A year later they stop caring about your age group suddenly and they're trying to wrangle your little brother.

Why not target that ten year old with your franchise, he loves it he's hooked, keep him around. Target 11 year olds the year after, then 12 year olds, etc and so on until your product is targeting 30 year olds and you're handing your business off to your son cuz you're now retired. When you dont follow the lives of your audience and stay in one place for too long, the whole world sees your product as aged and boring. Because it is.


So yeah, stop making up characters that look like they were stolen off a 12 year old fangirl's deviant art gallery, both in apperance and in name (lol I'll call him Chaos Dark Lord Azure Knight!), STOP forcing their cheap easily-digestable-for-the-masses personalities on us, and stop creating situations in your games where I can stand upside down on the peek of a loopdy loop because you suckers are too lazy to Du Mathz to find out how fast I'd have to go off of angle-x to leap y-distance and land on a platform that ejects me nowhere spectacular. Maybe if they took what was actually good about their games they'd actually get somewhere.
 

GloatingSwine

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5) What ever happened to that fox princess or the bunny with the mechanical limbs?

6) Dr Robotnik was making a bleak dystopia by turning the sonics fuzzy friends into robots. Whatever happened to this? Now he's just going after these weird cosmic religious ways to undo the world.
Those are artifacts of the US comics and cartoons. Nothing to do with the games at all.
 

Aoi Denkou

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Sep 5, 2008
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Rahnzan post=9.73447.813607 said:
Things I think could improve sonic.

3) HOW ABOUT A PHYSICS ENGINE! THAT'D BE GREAT! How come none of you have seen this? I didn't read half of page 3 and only the top post on 4 but I'm kind of frustrated no one thought of this! The first games had more physics! Scripted jumps and loopdy-loops does not a Sonic game make! They should be bloody ashamed of Sonic The Hedgehog (2008?) What were they thinking?!
You mean Sonic the Hedgehog(06). Get yout facts straight.
But you have a good point.
 

GloatingSwine

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Nov 10, 2007
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Sonic 06 did use havok physics.

That didn't make it any good.

Because it still had shit controls, for example, light dash and bounce attack on the same button, meaning that hitting a fraction of a second too early for a line of rings means you plummet to your death more often than not (and if you weren't perfectly lined up you just collected one as there was no guide onto the ring line), and there are two face buttons unused, it was completely impossible to control sonic at high speed due to the twitchiness of his movement and the bizarre decision to make all controls absolute directions when in previous games when running Sonic veers gently. The mach speed sections were unplayable due to cheap obstacle design and the aforementioned twitchy controls, the levels were the same uninspired linear path over infinite drop designs which have been the norm for Sonic since Sonic Adventure 2 (IMO where the rot started), and this was compounded by occasional arbitrary luck based sections (one part of Sonic's last level consists of a boost jump onto a moving platform, it is impossible to steer Sonic in the air because any small adjustment sends him flying way beyond the platforms, and you have about a fifty fifty chance of the platform you need to hit being present when you reach it because it's moving.

Sonic 06 distilled everything bad about Sonic in 3D into a bleak nadir of ultimate badness.

Sonic Unleashed looks to combine all the bad bits of 06's mach speed sections with QTE based command and response gameplay for it's 3D running.

But hey, it was fast M I RITE?

Fuck off. No. Sonic needs to go back to what actually made the first games fun, good technical platforming, solid control of a character, and incentives to explore the levels. Levels which are not a linear speedway, which have multiple routes and hidden secrets. The people entrusted to make the next Sonic game need to be locked in a room with copies of the original three games, and not allowed out until they get it.
 

Mr. Moose

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Oct 3, 2008
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The original 3, PLUS Sonic Adventure.
Also, wipe their minds of all things involving Shadow, Rouge, Amy, and every other stupid character they've made.
 

Gormers1

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Apr 9, 2008
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Maybe stick do handheld releases if you cant do it right on consoles, the games for the ds have been mostly very good.
 

Aoi Denkou

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GloatingSwine post=9.73447.814297 said:
Sonic Unleashed looks to combine all the bad bits of 06's mach speed sections with QTE based command and response gameplay for it's 3D running.
Well no.
Sonic Unleashed IS basically the Sonic 06 Mach Zones, only IMPROVED.
The movement will be more fluid when moving at high speeds, and the level design goes right back to Sonic's roots, from what I've seen anyway.
I think that Sonic Unleashed will actually be good.
 

LadyZephyr

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Nov 1, 2007
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Lesson to learn from Sonic 2006: EXTREMELY FAST RUNNING SECTIONS - ABILITY TO SLOW DOWN AT ALL + HAIR-TRIGGER CONTROLS = GAMERS THROWING GAME OFF A CLIFF.

Seriously, and get those loading screens under control.

ETA: AN NO MORE HUMAN/HEDGEHOG SUBTEXT. That shit was cracked, and not in a "lol omg" way. Just a "oh my god, BRAIN BLEACH" way. D:
 

Exodia's Right Leg

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Oct 13, 2008
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1: Sonic levels are skateparks, not racing courses. They're fast, but also relatively free, lend themselves well to acrobatic mayhem, and have secrets for the ones who can find them.

2: Make Sonic cool again. Sonic can be cool. No, really. You don't need to try and push Shadow as "the cool one" of the Sonic crew. It's not working anyway.
 

Bob_F_It

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May 7, 2008
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I'm going to return to my first point in that it's the level design that is the thing that's screwing the series over (after the controls, of course).

Sonic Adventure's level design was pretty good; you could charge through the level, or you could arse about looking for hidden goodies and poke about for some shortcuts. Therefore it wasn't impossible to get Sonic working well in 3D. (Note: past tense)
In Heroes, you just went in the same direction all the time on a track more linear than a railway. Fuck, there was even a railway themed zone! Shadow the Hedgehog weaved its path about, but it usually remained the one path of no choices (although they did ask you to find some hidden keys, this time). I haven't played '06 myself, but from what I've seen, it was pretty much the same dull single track, only glitched.

To those who keep saying "stop making the games": shut up. You're the reason why Sega doesn't do consoles anymore.

Also, an advance warning about Unleashed:
It looks like they're adding in the tension boost from the Rush games. For those who don't know what that is, you could press and hold a button to become an instantly fast ball of death (death for your enemies this time). While this seemed pretty "cool", it seriously detracted from the gameplay as it reduced all stratagy down to "press X to kill shit and go faster".
 

malestrithe

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Aug 18, 2008
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Sonic is exactly the same as he in 2d: bad. The games were terrible back then and they are the same now.
 

MosDes

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Jul 16, 2008
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CyberAkuma post=9.73447.796512 said:
I totally agree, I truly believe in the 3D Sonic locked in a 2D perspective and letting the gameplay and level design back to their roots.

I think a psuedo-3D Sonic from the Nintendo DS games is the way to go.
Also, scrap all the characters. Start from scratch.
Sonic Rush for the Nintendo DS is probably the most fun I've had in a Sonic game since Sonic Adventure DX for the GameCube...

Sonic Rush was that 3d-ish on a 2d plane and really brought the feeling of "Sonic" back, despite its crazed desire to switch screens at a moment's notice...