The GHZ Forum

I think the hardest part, in retrospect, of translating Sonic to 3-D is that his main game mechanic - spinning, is totally fucking broken in 3-D.

If you think about it, the spin dash was totally useless in all of the previous Sonic games, and only made Sonic veer away uncontrollably. It's no wonder they removed it in Sonic Wii. It was totally useless.

But again, I think this is part of the problem with Sonic's transition. He was built around rolling and moving fast to attack. But the controls for him rolling just don't work in 3D, at least not as of yet. The only way the 3-D spin could work is if they maybe made it handle like Major Ruin from Kameo and allowed Sonic to do half-pipes and spin in place attacks to defeat enemies. It may be more trouble than it would be worth, though.

It might work if Sonic Team knew how to do momentum in 3D.

I think the closest they came to it was on SA1. Spindash's purpose was mainly to give Sonic a burst of speed, so you could easily spindash and then press B again so he would stand up and run again, with easy controls. I spent hours on Emerald Coast just running and rolling and running and rolling again.

But then that useless sommersault blew it on SA2.

SA1's spindash was quite possibly the greatest game mechanic in the history of the entire series. I loved how you could reach absurd heights by spindashing on slopes and jumping, I must've spent hours just bounding around in the Mystic Ruins like that. It would've been awesome if it had been an intentional gameplay element.

Y' know, if you get every ring and don't lose them in any given stage in SA2, you automatically get an A rank. At least, this is my impression after having done that with Metal Harbor, the only level I did manage to get every single ring in.

My theory is further supported in that whenever you come across a fork in any of the Sonic/Shadow levels, only one path had rings. Not like there were many forks, but still. This is most apparent in Final Rush.

I almost found every ring in the bonus Green Hill Zone but I've never been able to find two or three of the rings. The score tallies at the end of the stage tell you a total of how many rings are in the stage.

I also loved how you could just reach stupid speeds fast. If you were comfortable barrelling through a level at the normal brisk tempo, you could spin dash into a run without slowing down. That was my favorite part of it.

It's not spinning or any moves that are the problem, and momentum can be an issue, but that has a cause: It's that after SA2, they somehow completely lost any ability to get control stick sensitivity correct. Why should it be so difficult to program more degrees of sensitivity into that stick so you have more control over how fast you go? The 2D games had a nice acceleration rate that gradually increased to max or tapered off depending on whether or not you were holding the button. They need to find a way emulate this in the 3D games, and SA1, as Opa and Ritz said, was closest and good about this.

By that token they've steadily broken skidding to a halt too. In the Shadow game it was better to simply let go of the stick so that you come to a near dead stop instead of skidding and ending up sliding helplessly for several feet. Next managed to magnify that effect, but that game had mad control issues across the board so yeah.

FlashTHD wrote:It's not spinning or any moves that are the problem, and momentum can be an issue, but that has a cause: It's that after SA2, they somehow completely lost any ability to get control stick sensitivity correct. Why should it be so difficult to program more degrees of sensitivity into that stick so you have more control over how fast you go? The 2D games had a nice acceleration rate that gradually increased to max or tapered off depending on whether or not you were holding the button. They need to find a way emulate this in the 3D games, and SA1, as Opa and Ritz said, was closest and good about this.

By that token they've steadily broken skidding to a halt too. In the Shadow game it was better to simply let go of the stick so that you come to a near dead stop instead of skidding and ending up sliding helplessly for several feet. Next managed to magnify that effect, but that game had mad control issues across the board so yeah.

Yeah... everything you talked about would fall under "momentum".

Poison Eggroll wrote:I almost found every ring in the bonus Green Hill Zone but I've never been able to find two or three of the rings.

There's only one that's not in the open. You need to get the lightning shield and run all the way back to the very beginning and stand at the edge of the level. A ring will attract to you from either inside the ground or behind it.

Ritz wrote:I loved how you could reach absurd heights by spindashing on slopes and jumping, I must've spent hours just bounding around in the Mystic Ruins like that.

Ever try with a quantum fighter pad? I don't know how it works, but Amy can jump like twice as high. I could never make it work for Sonic though. Had something to do with the trigger buttons. But supposedly he could jump straight to the end of Twinkle Part if you lightdash before falling onto the roller coaster, then jump from there.

I've never even heard of one, but how could a controller make a difference with something like that? Sounds pretty nifty and/or bizarre.

The rolling thing is certainly relevant, but the main problem with the current brand of gameplay, to me, will always be the constant sprint further and further away from the pick-up-and-play ease of controls and gameplay that you had with the first titles. My five-year old nephew - who a couple of months ago finally called my bluff on why I wouldn't let him play with my ever-so-precious video games - can testify that the first Sonic titles are less frustrating to play than their same-generation Mario counterparts. That's kinda impressive. But while your 3D Mario games manage to stick to that nice easy flow of gameplay, the present Sonic games...don't. At all. In any way, shape or form.

The amount of time it takes for you to adapt to the controls and gameplay physics so you'll be able to get Sonic to do what you want onscreen seems to increase with each new title. Even without those godawfully implemented high-speed sections in Sonic the Hedgehog, my point would be sound.

Put it in one sentence: If you die in Sonic 1, you'll know it was your fault, but if you die in Sonic 2006, it almost certainly wasn't your fault.

Unless it is.

Owen Axel wrote:The rolling thing is certainly relevant, but the main problem with the current brand of gameplay, to me, will always be the constant sprint further and further away from the pick-up-and-play ease of controls and gameplay that you had with the first titles. My five-year old nephew - who a couple of months ago finally called my bluff on why I wouldn't let him play with my ever-so-precious video games - can testify that the first Sonic titles are less frustrating to play than their same-generation Mario counterparts. That's kinda impressive. But while your 3D Mario games manage to stick to that nice easy flow of gameplay, the present Sonic games...don't. At all. In any way, shape or form.

The amount of time it takes for you to adapt to the controls and gameplay physics so you'll be able to get Sonic to do what you want onscreen seems to increase with each new title. Even without those godawfully implemented high-speed sections in Sonic the Hedgehog, my point would be sound.

Put it in one sentence: If you die in Sonic 1, you'll know it was your fault, but if you die in Sonic 2006, it almost certainly wasn't your fault.

This is interesting because I seem to be reccomending to people who didn't get Sonic Rush to give the game a play-through to the end, because honestly; your first time through Sonic Rush is a bitch.

It's once you start memorizing the levels and getting a feel for where you should dash and where you shouldn't that the game becomes as fun as everybody said it was. But getting to that point takes a lot of patience dealing with the level design as you constantly dive straight off in to pits. Once you learn where the pits and hazards are and learn how to avoid them, the game becomes 100x more fun.

Similarly, a complaint I'm hearing about Sonic & The Secret Rings is that it takes too long for you to pick up skills for Sonic to bring it up to the skill set a normal 3D Sonic game would have. It's along the same lines, "stick with it, once you get the hang of it, it gets much better".

What's bad is I think Sonicteam thinks they're keeping it simple by refusing to use more than two buttons (one for jump and one for "action"), and that's obviously not working.

One of the problems with Sonic Rush (other than lacking the same physics as the Genesis games) is that the level design seems to run you straight into hazards when going full speed. The Genesis titles (maybe not Sonic CD so much) has a good flow of speed, slowing you down, and then platforming. Rush skips the slowing down transition, making you die more easily.

I have a non-gaming friend who always brings up how good those old games still are. He won't touch the 3D or handheld games.

On the case of momentum, when I first discovered that you can slide to a stop in Twighlight Princess, I went back and forth for a few minutes thinking how great it would be in a Sonic game.

The 2D physics really made the old Sonic games. I think that's the reason why Sega begged Naka to come back after he quit.

Er, did Naka actually do anything worthwhile for the 3D games while he was employed? Really, I'm asking.

gr4yJ4Y wrote:One of the problems with Sonic Rush (other than lacking the same physics as the Genesis games) is that the level design seems to run you straight into hazards when going full speed. The Genesis titles (maybe not Sonic CD so much) has a good flow of speed, slowing you down, and then platforming. Rush skips the slowing down transition, making you die more easily.

Well, yes and no. There are a lot of times where dashing at the improper location will send you into a pit, but the amount of times it throws you blindly in to spikes or enemies is far less than Sonic Advance 2 or 3.

The main problem I had with it is I wanted to just pour on the speed all the time - and whenever the game would require me to slow down to do some awkward platforming, it gave me very few visual cues to do so - so I'd just go dashing off - usually off a cliff or in to a crusher, saying "Wait, shit. I think there was a platform up there; guess I was supposed to slow down."

Moments like that accounted for 75% of my deaths in the game. Once I had the levels memorized and knew those sections were coming up, I pretty much never died ever again.

Owen Axel wrote:Er, did Naka actually do anything worthwhile for the 3D games while he was employed? Really, I'm asking.

I ment in 1992 or whenever it was.

Naka did some of the programming for Chu Chu Rocket; I remember that much.

Speaking of <i>CCR</i>, talk about an ideal game for the Wii. Seriously: aim is the cursor, D-Pad places the arrows. Take it online again and you've got the intense experience all over again.

I think DS would be better, but I think they already made one. The stylus would be a lot easier to quickly and accurately place arrows than the Wiimote. Wiimote would still be better than a joystick though.

gr4yJ4Y wrote:One of the problems with Sonic Rush (other than lacking the same physics as the Genesis games) is that the level design seems to run you straight into hazards when going full speed. The Genesis titles (maybe not Sonic CD so much) has a good flow of speed, slowing you down, and then platforming. Rush skips the slowing down transition, making you die more easily.

I think the Rush ability was actually built to help stop that problem. Pretty much anything that can hurt you can be destroyed by dashing through it, so if you were skillful enough to keep power in your meter, you'd probably be able to get through those sort of problems. Blaze is right about dashing into pits though, that was a bitch.

Shadow Hog wrote:Speaking of <i>CCR</i>, talk about an ideal game for the Wii. Seriously: aim is the cursor, D-Pad places the arrows. Take it online again and you've got the intense experience all over again.

Light Speed wrote:I think DS would be better, but I think they already made one. The stylus would be a lot easier to quickly and accurately place arrows than the Wiimote. Wiimote would still be better than a joystick though.

You are both fools, clearly the platform of choice for CCR would be XBLA. They could just do a straight port which would be hard to screw up, even with all the practice Sonic Team's had.

I agree that Chu-Chu Rocket! on XBLA or the NDS would be sweet. Fuck the Wii; like that thing's ever going to get online play off the ground.

Double-S- wrote:It might work if Sonic Team knew how to do momentum in 3D.

They fixed that in Sonic Adventure, you know that especial atack called “Homing Attackâ€￾? I don’t freaking care what they did after that, that movie worked well, and maybe you had to get used to it, but that was the point, show others how you rule in the game, not a game that can be played as a master with only 5 minutes of your time!.

That has absolutely nothing to do with momentum whilst sticking to the ground.