How on earth can you stand all that? Such complexity would absolutely overwealm me, especially if - god forbid - half of those should be necessary to merely progress through levels.
I do like the idea of wall-bouncing as Sonic, though I don't really think it's necessary to change forms to do it, as Zeta suggested, and I absolutely hated the wall jump of Heroes. What about this - Sonic bounces off wall (that is, he bounces away from the wall while gaining altitude) only when the player holds down the jump button. And there could be other applications of this as well, say gaining additional height after destroying enemies.
Crazy Penguin wrote:The light speed dash is one of the strangest additions to the regular gameplay of the series. It's completely uninteractive.
Yeah, I never understood that either. The light speed dash seems to just encourage bad design.
I like it.
Let's say you're playing through a speed-focused Sonic game and there's two different routes that are equally long in terms of distance. There's a route where you light speed dash over a pit. In the other route, there's not a string of rings, so you just have to run through it. Ta-da! It's useful.
(That's not to say that it's always been implemented like this. I'm not really sure if it has or hasn't.)
It makes collecting strings of rings in 3d easier and can be used as a way of instantly getting to top speed, but in most of the games it's in you're not expected to use it for that purpose. I've enjoyed the times where it's used in midair as a kind of QTE because pulling it off feels good, but that could be replaced with creative use of existing moves and I don't really want to see the series continue with this obstacle course style of level design anyway.
I always thought the light speed dash was a tedious way of saying "Hey you fucked up and messed up this path of rings we placed here for you, and now you can't take it anymore." Though in Adventure 2 it feels like a pretty frivolous mechanic, considering lines of rings are just standard placement half the time.
I really think whether mechanics expand or evolve the natural concept of Sonic depends on how well the level design is made to compliment them. Because of this, I'd support the idea of a context-sensitive button if it was done intuitively. Though I wouldn't say its ideal for a Sonic game.
(Ignore that last post I made. I'm an imbecile for not realizing this topic was four pages long. >.>)
Anyway, I never understood the Light Dash myself. In it's debut you had to charge up a complete Spin Dash to use it, and then in the second game it was mapped to the same button as everything else. If they really needed an easier why to collect rings, why not just have the collision detection for the rings be slightly bigger or have the rings slightly gravitate towards Sonic when he gets near them? Before you accuse that of rendering the Electric/Magnet Shield useless, let me mention that the gravitation would not be that strong, and obtaining the shield would only strengthen it.
On the subject of simplified control schemes, here's one I've been mucking about with lately, using the 360 controller setup:
Left Analog Stick: Walk/Jog/Run
A Button: Jump
B Button: Interact with stuff.
X Button: Crouch
Y Button: Enter first-person view (like in Mario 64)
R Button: Super Peel Out
L Button: Center camera behind Sonic
Right Analog Stick: Control camera
Press X while running to roll. Tap A while crouching to charge a Spin Dash. Pressing A in mid-air does the W Spin Attack. Pressing X in mid-air does a Bound Attack. For Tails and Knuckles the control scheme is the same, except instead of the Super Peel Out they have the Tail Whip and Digging, respectively.
Not sure what pressing B while crouching would do. Guess it could be left out entirely. Same for the left and right triggers.
Neo wrote:Crouch definately has to be a trigger, because it would be way to awkward to charge a spin dash otherwise.
Look carefully at this 360 controller:
I deliberately assigned crouch to X because rolling is Sonic's most common action other than jumping, so it's right above the jump button. Just holding X to crouch and pressing A to rev up the Spin Dash would be easy as pie with this setup. Unleashed screwed up badly by having crouch assigned to B, which is on the OTHER side of the face button area.
Imagine having to constantly press the trigger every time you wanted to roll. This isn't an FPS, so it's not like you're always holding the button down to fire a gun.
Rob-Bert wrote:Imagine having to constantly press the trigger every time you wanted to roll.
I know, doing a motion equivalent to clenching your fist in order to curl up would be so awkward and unintuitive! Holding X with your thumb and making weird jerking motions to tap A at the same time makes a lot more sense.
If it aint broken, dont fix it. The Genesis Sonic games worked fine, yes, even 3D blast and spinball, why add new useless moves like in Rush and Rush adventure?.
Rob-Bert wrote:Imagine having to constantly press the trigger every time you wanted to roll.
I know, doing a motion equivalent to clenching your fist in order to curl up would be so awkward and unintuitive! Holding X with your thumb and making weird jerking motions to tap A at the same time makes a lot more sense.
About as much sense as making tapping A while holding Down.
Rob-Bert wrote:Imagine having to constantly press the trigger every time you wanted to roll.
I know, doing a motion equivalent to clenching your fist in order to curl up would be so awkward and unintuitive! Holding X with your thumb and making weird jerking motions to tap A at the same time makes a lot more sense.
About as much sense as making tapping A while holding Down.
Which doesn't require the same thumb to execute. Have you even tried this method of yours you're so vigorously defending?
A few of the earlier ones basically force you to, annoyingly. There are exceptions, of course (I know Goldeneye lets me use Z to fire, the C-buttons to move, etc), but if it was a port of Doom or a game similar to it, usually you'd be usin' them triggers to strafe instead.
...and honestly, holding a trigger to duck in a third-person game does feel a bit more natural than holding two face buttons next to each other, but the two face button method isn't as bad as some people are making it out to be, either.
Ideally, a 3D Sonic game would only require a total of two control buttons: jump and crouch/spin, so let's just imagine that in an ideal world where this would actually happen, Sonic Team would also allow us to map these two buttons to whatever we want and quit arguing over such triviality.
