What do you think of MLP or the brony fanbase?
Anonymous
They’re large enough that making sweeping generalizations is probably a bad idea. Just like I am a Sonic fan who is (hopefully!) not one of the weirdos, I know some people who still watch and enjoy MLP and are not greasy slimeballs with Twilight Sparkle fleshlights.
There are bad eggs in every fandom - how many bad eggs there are is proportionate to how large the fanbase is. It’s simple math: if 10% of every fandom is made up of weirdos, and you have a million fans, then that’s 100,000 weirdos. Which sounds like a lot! And kind of is!
But it also can’t be helped. I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I think I’ve sort of reached the status of that crusty old sea captain who’s seen it all - there’s no shortage of perverts drawing Mega Man lolicon, or Princess Peach being erotically devoured by a Piranha Plant, or anything else. Heck, there’s a whole website who’s motto is simply, “If it exists, then there is porn of it.”
There are just… a lot of Bronies. And all you get by saying “All Bronies are pedophiles” is an argument with somebody you’ve just offended.
I have seen maybe three or four episodes of Friendship is Magic way back when it was just a bunch of my friends telling me how it was a legitimately enjoyable cartoon. The term “Brony” hadn’t even been coined yet. It was enjoyable enough, and having friends who have tried to break in to the “cartoon industry”, I can see why some people would be so enamored with it. Maybe not quite to the obsessive levels we’ve seen, but again, 10% of bad eggs and all that.
What do you think of Sonic Lost World's level design in comparison to other Sonic games? I personally dislike it because from what I've seen, the level design reminds me of a Crash Bandicoot game- fun to play but rather bland and generic, and while Sonic X- treme used clever designs with its use of gravity, Lost World feels like a normal game where anti gravity feels like a gimmick and totally unnecesary.
Anonymous
Nothing we saw from Chris Senn’s later PC builds of Sonic X-treme suggested anything about anti-gravity, it just looked like a regular ol’ 3D platformer with ugly, blocky level design and the same kind of pre-scripted loop sequences we got in Sonic Adventure.
I don’t think Crash Bandicoot had bland or generic level design at all. It had strong themeing - sort of like a Mario game, where you have certain world types and within those world types contain variations on base tropes like auto-scrolling, swimming, castle, etc. The PS1 Crash Bandicoot games were great - comparing Lost World to them makes Crash look bad.
We haven’t been given a ton to go on, though. But what we have seen looks EXTREMELY basic. Almost like, “Baby’s First Sonic” basic, going by Windy Hill and the first act of Desert Ruins. Lots and lots and lots of very straight forward, very flat level design. Whereas most Sonic games seem to direct you down a narrow, winding linear path, Lost World seems to give you a lot more width to move around in but not a lot to actually do there because it’s all flat, empty landscape. If we got more levels like what we saw of the 3DS version I’d be a bit happier.
I’m starting to feel like I am repeating myself.
A couple people now are skeptical about what I am saying about Sonic Lost World (see: here, here, here), standing their ground on the notion that we should wait until we can play the game for ourselves to see just how it controls. Honestly? That’s smart.
But here’s the deal:
I can understand most of the complains you have towards Lost World, even though I think it looks pretty good - However, couldn't the argument that "parts of this level are basically a straight line" be applied to pretty much every Sonic game post Unleashed? There's platforming later on in that Windy Valley level, so the parts where you're just going forward don't bother me as long as there's a balance.
Anonymous
It depends on how you define a straight line, really. When you really get down to it, aren’t all games just straight lines?
But I mean a literal straight line. Look at Green Hill Zone from Generations, or Savannah Citadel from Unleashed. Linear as they are, there’s plenty of twists and turns and corners you have to deal with within literally seconds of starting the stage. In the Wii U Lost World footage, you are dealing with a stage that is almost entirely a straight-ass line. It’s the difference between
and
Lost World seems to contain a LOT of the latter based on those three stages shown on IGN yesterday.
MAN... watching that Lost World footage feels like it's really clunky. I haven't played the newest Sonic games, but it looks way more awkward than anything I've seen in Sonic as of late... ... Do you think that's weird, or are you kind of getting that feeling, too?
It looks fine sometimes, I think. Sonic Team is on the right track to expanding Sonic’s moveset with the parkour stuff. Unfortunately I’m not entirely sure they have the right execution.
I also have to wonder if the 3DS version is intended to be a direct port or not. The levels in IGN’S Wii U demo looks so… bland, I guess? Like you have this aesthetic of the level taking place on this tube…
But if you unwrapped the geometry from the visual aesthetic you are basically looking at a stage that is a straight line.
Even Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 had more changes in elevation than Windy Hill Act 1 did.
I think that contributes a lot to the clunky feeling, because like I said, you watch the 3DS version of Windy Hill and it looks way better, because it looks like an actual level. It’s not some weird “hey we made a level on a tube so that gives us an excuse not to do anything interesting” thing, there’s actual platforms and elevation changes and complexity.
Surely you could say that maybe later levels in the Wii U version get more complex, but the other two levels in the demo don’t really hammer that home very well. With the exception of one or two sections, it’s a lot more of the most basic, simplistic level design possible.
I still don’t really like this.
What’s really starting to rub me the wrong way here is the controls - particularly when Sonic tries to change direction at high speed. It’s this really weightless 45 degree hairpin turn that looks really difficult to control. It’s like Sonic’s shoes are coated in glue and he weighs zero pounds. If you try and do that in most other games, like for example Mario, you usually skid around a little bit (which is how you setup for a special type of side-flip jump).
There’s other weird bits of momentum transference that I’m not entirely up on, either. There’s this thing that Sonic Heroes and Sonic Rush do that’s really annoying and awkward - you can be falling straight down and the moment you hit the ground Sonic shoots off forward.
I don’t know about you, but I NEVER got used to this in those games, and was more often than not responsible for a lot of unintentional deaths, as I would occasionally land near an edge and Sonic would basically fling himself off in to oblivion.
And you can see it happen in this Lost World footage on occasion. While it could certainly be blamed on Sonic’s new run button tendencies, it’s still something that probably shouldn’t be happening, and I’m not sure who at Sonic Team keeps pushing for it to work this way. Sonic is known for breaking the laws of physics in a good way, but this breaks the laws of physics in a way that makes the game awkward to control.
Other parts in the video show some awkward controls, too. There are a couple of bits where the Sega rep seems to have trouble making Sonic go where he wants him to go and eventually gives up trying to show off what he was attempting to do. That’s not a sign of a game that controls well!
Perhaps the weirdest part to me is that the 3DS footage they posted along side the Wii U demo I’ve linked above actually looks like a game I’d want to play. Level design is a lot more complex and natural, and there’s less of some of the weird problems I don’t like about what we’ve seen of the Wii U version. Unfortunately, Sonic’s shoe glue is still in effect, given how quickly he changes direction.
Of course, the 3DS version goes to complete crap about the time you see the second video, for Desert Ruins. The game looks INCREDIBLY stiff and awkward to play in 2D. Luring the rolling ball enemies to push buttons for you looks absolutely frustrating and janky in a bad way. For a game that’s really emphasizing platforming elements, this section makes it look like a really, really bad platformer.
So yeah, I’m still a grump about this game. On some level it’s looking more like a typical Sonic thing - insofar as some of the ideas they’re trying look absolutely abysmal and others look great. The Sonic franchise has been about extreme highs and extreme lows for a long time now, and Lost World probably isn’t going to be throwing out the extreme lows any time soon.
Hey dude. So I hear you don't like flash games much. Perhaps you could try out a particular flash game? It's called fancy pants adventures series. It's surprisingly similar to your classic sonic gameplay without being a blatant rip off.
Anonymous
Oh, well, yeah, of course I’ve heard of Fancy Pants Adventures. There’s a video on my Youtube channel from over five years ago of me playing Fancy Pants World 2. EA then hired that guy to make Mirror’s Edge 2D, which was also similarly pretty great. There are ideas in ME2D that I think 2D Sonic games could borrow from. The problem is those games are all really old now - might even be classified as the last flash games I really “played”.
Shame that Fancy Pants Adventures XBLA didn’t turn out well. It was kind of trapped in this limbo where some parts felt over produced and others didn’t feel produced enough so it ended up being this weird high budget flash game, and I mean that in a bad way. It was still playable, sure, but it didn’t feel like something I wanted to spend money on.
Wish there was a standalone executable version of Mirror’s Edge 2D. I guess they made a iOS Mirror’s Edge game that looked an awful lot like the flash game does but I’ve never seen it in motion, so I dunno.
(He said as he punched “Mirror’s Edge iOS” in to Youtube and saw it was a more stiff, less interesting game than the Mirror’s Edge 2D flash game was)
How do you feel about Crush 40? At least, in terms of the music they did for Sonic?
Anonymous
Open Your Heart and Live & Learn are great songs. I’ve always unabashedly enjoyed buttrock.
Unfortunately, I get the feeling they’ve kept Jun Senoue on past his shelf life and both the music he produced for Sonic games and the music Crush 40 in general produced for Sonic games sort of went flat by Sonic Heroes. None of the Crush 40 stuff from Heroes onwards is all that memorable, save for the fact I consider their version of Seven Rings In Hand to be a huge guilty pleasure of mine. Oh, and I guess their version of Free is pretty good, too.
But they definitely should be retired. They’re getting to the point where they have more misses than hits, in my book. Then again, what they’ve been getting to replace Crush 40 has been pretty hit-or-miss, too. So I don’t know. Seems to be kind of a crap shoot these days either way.
What do you think of characters talking during stages? I personally enjoyed it in Black Knight since Sonic had someone else to work off of.
Anonymous
Sonic games have gotten in to this really nasty habit of being REALLY noisy games. For as awesome as so much of the music is, it’s CONSTANTLY being drowned out by talking and annoying, extra-loud sound effects. Listen to this. There’s a background song under there somewhere, but you’d never know with all of the chimes and hissing steam and YEAH YEAH OKAY YEAH COOL OKAY YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH ALRIGHT
They create all this really nice music and then don’t let you enjoy it. Case in point.
Dialog in a Sonic game is not so important that it needs to invade levels. I thought the talking sword in Black Knight was absolutely awful, too, because it was such a stereotypical relationship of “Oh man they hate each other but eventually they learn to become friends”. Ugh. The same goes for all the mid-stage dialog in Heroes, Shadow, and Sonic 06. Completely unnecessary.
Keep the noise pollution to a minimum, please.
Do you think we'll ever have another sonic rpg? Despite some cute ideas, it feels as if Sonic Chronicles was a bit of a let down.
Given enough time, yeah, probably. Maybe not in the next couple years or maybe not even this generation, but I wouldn’t put it past them to try doing another RPG at some point in the future, or a game with RPG elements. Iizuka loves those.
Sonic Chronicles gets a lot more guff than it deserves, I think. It’s a little bit wonky in a lot of places but it’s honestly not ABYSMAL, like it’s not unplayable or anything. It just feels like a first-gen iPhone game. It’s got these really weird, really low quality sound effects. Awful, tinny MIDI music. The art direction is all over the map, where some bits of the game look gorgeous (2D art) but other parts are a horrifying nightmare (anything using polygons). And then there’s this weird, sort of ugly touch interface that doesn’t really need to be there.
But with a little bit more spit-polish, Chronicles could’ve been an actually great game. Instead it’s just kind of mediocre and weird, and there are so many better RPGs to play on the DS (Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, etc.)
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