So, I'm currently playing Sonic and Knuckles (cuz my randomizer told me to :P) but, as always when I play any Sonic game, I have this nagging sensation that I'm playing the game "wrong".

Sonic is a character about massive speed and such, but actually going fast in the games seem like THE WORST thing to do! I keep bumping into shit, whether it's an enemy or a spring, or spikes or all of it at once. But going slow makes me eyeball the "TIME" in the upper left corner and leaves me thinking "4 minutes for one level? More like Sonic the Snail!".

I keep opting for going slow, cause I don't wanna die.

So what about it guys and gals? Am I playing Sonic "wrong" by going slow? And, if I am, how the hell are people surviving this game when going fast?

You are supposed to go slow the first few runs to learn the level design and the timings but after that you can go really fast.

Memorization and reflexes.

The whole "Sonic games are all about speed" is a misconception that even Sega themselves seem to have bought into after the series moved to 3D. The early games were never about running as fast as possible all the time. Skillful play of Sonic games is all about knowing when it's safe to go fast but also recognizing when you need to slow down and take things carefully. The Genesis games were designed in such a way as to make speed segments much less common than platforming segments.

Going slow is fine, and the best way to find secrets. The speed was more of a marketing thing. They're meticulously designed platformers that can be played super fast, but even after beating the 16-bit games dozens of times I tend to take it slow.

Especially once you hit the giant levels in Sonic 3 and S&K.

Thanks! =D I guess I never thought of it like this. Reading all of your responses, this makes tons of sense now.

Exile's right. You can fly through them if you've played the levels 10-15 times, but you definitely need to take it slow and meticulous your first few times through a level to learn where everything is.

Man, I really love S3&K. Hope you enjoy it!

I am actually, now that I'm actually taking my time and enjoying the level design. Finally getting the fun of the old Sonic games!

What everyone else has said. Sonic 3 and S&K are probably the worst two games for just speeding through due to the way the levels are laid out. Even the first game only really encourages speed in Green Hill Zone. Marble and Spring Yard require a lot more skillful play, it isn't until you get to Star Light near the end of the game that you can go ultra fast again. 2 probably has the best levels to just burn through. Chemical Plant was pretty much built to be beaten without stopping.

Also if you think 4 minutes is slow I think I clocked 21 minutes in one level in the 3DS version of Lost World. That game nearly always wants you to stop moving... That game sucks.

Yeah, one of the pretty apparent flaws of S3&K is that they didn't tweak the time bonus setting to accommodate the increased size of the levels when compared to the previous games. There are levels where it's simply impossible to get any sort of meaningful time bonus because the level is just too big. It's difficult to avoid a time over in Carnival Night, let alone get a time bonus.

You're playing one that isn't Sonic 1 or 2, so yes, you are playing incorrectly.

@sinusoidal: I'll get around to those. I have them as well, but I simply rolled the dice today and got this one :)

Don't listen to the naysayers, S3&K is the best in the series.

A game so nice, you had to call it out, twice!

@khessed: No idea how that happened.

It doesn't help that Sonic & Knuckles is probably the most aggravating 2D Sonic experience you can have.

(EDIT -- This is a pretty old blog, and some of the jokes I make in it are rather off-color. Apologies in advance.)

Nice write-up!

I haven't really touched the other classic Sonic games (apart from 1 when I was a kid and the only thing I remember is the stellar Marble Zone track) yet. I don't see the issues, yet. Maybe it'll all flip on its ass as soon as I start playing Sonic 2 :P

As far as I'm concerned, the Sonic series ended with Sonic 2… that being said, I think the main thing to remember is that the whole 'speed' thing was mostly advertising hype.

You really can blast through most levels, but you need to know the levels inside out if you want to have any sort of fun doing it. Otherwise, it just ends up being frustrating.

What are you using to randomly select your games to play? I'm kind of interested in doing something similar.

listen to this guy. he's been right in all posts in this thread.

and after multiple play throughs when you are actually speeding through the game quickly pretty consistently its a great feeling.

I'm reminded of an old friend in the 90s actually made it into beating every level into record time. But he was memorizing every single obstacles and the best short cuts and reacting to them at split second timing.

I first made a full list of my games in google sheets (I've seen somewhere that there's an easy way to export a steam game list to a CSV file, but mine was all manual.).

Then I found a formula that spits out a random game every time I open up the spreadsheet, which is as follows:

=ArrayFormula(QUERY(SORT(A2:B1328;RANDBETWEEN(SIGN(ROW(A2:A1328));1E+293);1);"select * limit 1";0))

The values it spits out is the type of console and the name of the game.

Here's my list in action

This reminds me, it's about time for my yearly run through of all the Genesis games (just swapping 3D Blast for Sonic CD).

Something like that seems really cool for the upcoming Extra Life charity drive!

yesssss you guys fucking get it.

Oh man, I'd love to do that if I knew how.

What exactly? Streaming it or joining the Giant Bomb Extra Life group? Streaming can be done with a program called OBS (provided you wanna run the games on PC, otherwise you'll need some hardware) and there's a forum thread on the GBEL group around here somewheres.