If the idea of Sonic played well is to have shit memorized down to perfection, fuck that every which way. The two extremes then seem to be A) struggling with awkward momentum, giant labyrinthine levels that are almost completely without landmarks making them just blurry garish messes of Things Happening until you randomly stumble into the goalpost and B) A drilled down set of maneuvers making the game more of a Simon Says exercise than a platformer. Is that really it?
Wonky-ass physics, the laziest motivational mcguffin ever in the goddamn chaos emeralds, and a sense of flashy charmlessness has made Sonic only really memorable to me as the game that showed the Genesis could do really sweet parallax scrolling.
If you want a good Sonic game, play the SMS Sonics or Sonic Rush. Everything else is moments of fun slathered in impenetrable badfeels and it can all take a running leap into the sea.
Mega Drive Sonic is trash fire game design and always has been. Not liking that garish, juddery, stop-and-go zero-rhythm mess just means you're a person who knows good things from bad. Congratulations, you don't suck!
Sega was an arcade game company that thought glitz and loudness was what made a game. Meanwhile, Super Mario World is a goddamn bonsai tree of expert economy and game design: Sonic was made for a hypothetical arcade nobody goes to, Mario was made for the living room.
Ironically the master system Sonics are genuinely good but nobody fucking ever talks about them because BLAST PROCESSING KNUCKLES FNAFFFff
A wild written review appears! These are becoming so rare I'm practically bewildered when one is published. Like why this game out of all the games? Giant Bomb reasons? Don't get me wrong I'm not complaining, just puzzled at how random it seems.
Jeff just isn't really a shooter guy, though at this point I wonder who truly is. I absolutely admire shmup design, to the point of having spent half a decade now doing engine/tools for them, but the point where it "clicked" with me was when I joined a shmups.org competition on a whim and wound up practising 20XX for a whole night to optimally 1CC it. It was an amazing time but it's also ultra weird, as far as playing games for fun goes.
Been thinking about Ikaruga a lot recently. I'm not entirely sure people heaping praise on it (or radiant silvergun for that matter) have actually really played it. It's 14mb of amazing engineering and design, but by stage 3 The Filter is in full effect and for its legendary awesomeness I truly wonder how many could look past that austere visual style and ultra-regimented scoring system and "just have fun" with it.
That's the thing, I feel like shmups are less and less about conventional fun, and this is by design, too. The original Dodonpachi strikes this amazing balance, but then you bumble into something like Mushihimesama and you just wonder why exactly they expect folks to go through that pain. It truly is a kind of masochism.
I'll pick this up at some point, it truly looks great, but I can totally understand why this repeat-until-you-get-good style grates on people otherwise used to having games be capsule machines of treats. I think with age you kind of want that capsule machine experience more than the fist in the face one, just because time isn't on your side anymore.
@quickbunnie: Sticks are noisy too, and given wide travel ranges filtering noise on gyro/acc combos is pretty dang accurate if what you are trying to get is a rotation vector as in the case of splatoon/arms.
IMO the future of hand held controls is sticks, buttons AND gyro/acc. Tilt in general to augment aim is a genuinely useful innovation that would improve any game with aiming. The questionable thing in arms is probably the punch, but even for that tracking an average motion in a given direction is 100% reliable as far as gesture tracking goes.
Obviously bad controls are bad controls from a design pov, but I take issue with the assumption that motion controls are just less accurate by default when they tend to be more distractingly accurate than folks are used to.
"imprecise motion controls" This always rubs me the wrong way. Sticks are one of the least precise control mechanisms in control-town, with a single floating point of precision spread across tiny travel. As a developer the amount of massage you have to put on stick controls to make them feel right is huge, they're that bad. The fact that you aren't used to using wrist twist (with more travel and thus MORE precision) instead of sticks is on you, not the control mechanism.
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