Not really able to argue well on this point since it's been forever since I played it, but I remember the levels having actual content and challenges in them even with the shitty controls disregarded. I haven't seen the level ports, but it's probably not fair to compare since they're two different engines, even if the mechanics are similar.
This is all besides the point, which is that Rise of Lyric is a buggy, bland, unfinished game and is bad. No one can argue Secret Rings isn't flawed, but at least it, Heroes, and Shadow are complete products with finished cutscenes containing proper SFX or music cues, minimal or minor bugs, and a framerate that isn't terrible. Rise of Lyric's graphics are poorly representative of the system, the cutscene presentation is garbage, the music is lame and forgettable, and you can glitch through terrain without really trying... How can you consider this game better than any of those when its presentation is so bad on virtually all fronts? Is it because you get to fight three versions of the same enemy and move slowly through generic platforming sections while all four characters shoehorn one-liners and advice throughout the game? Because I think I'll just stomach the motion controls and ride on a magic carpet and jump on dinosaurs 'n' shit, because I think that's at least cooler than what Lyric has to offer.
The problem is not that I have to listen to the dialogue, but that the dialogue is executed so poorly that I wouldn't ever want to have it on. Like, this isn't a matter of preference, it's objectively badly designed. Characters yammer constantly about nothing, either that or they keep giving you tutorials on things you already know or should be obvious. If they had toned down the frequency of the voice clips to something reasonable, I wouldn't even bring it up. Hell, I might even keep the dialogue on if I was playing the game.
I'm not "giving you the finger" for recommending that one use the option to make the experience more tolerable. I'm telling you that the voice acting is a significant feature of the game, and being able to turn it off does not change the fact that they messed it up.
I have a lot of things to say about this particular blurb, so I'll contain it in spoilers for the sake of page length.
Okay, so... GameSpot tells me this is how death works:
"Collectible rings are your health, and if you lose all of them, you'll pass out, but that's meaningless because you respawn exactly where you were in whatever battle you were waging, with the enemies' health exactly where you left it. The only punishment for death is losing gear, a currency used to upgrade your characters, but you'll have so much gear that it's less than a slap on the wrist."
Respawning exactly where you died with no change in enemy health is analogous to dying in a coin-op shmup or beat-em-up, where you just have to insert coins to continue where you left off. Except in this game you don't have to do that, meaning death is literally irrelevant.
Lives are required in coin-op games, many platformers, and so on to create tension in gameplay, and make you really care about not dying so you don't lose all your progress. Gaming over in Sonic, Mario, or Rocket Knight Adventures is actually not a problem in this regard, because most levels in these old games are actually designed to be played multiple times through, with hidden secrets or advanced techniques allowing skilled players to clear the game more quickly and earn more lives. In this sense, lives are generally good game design, because they increase design space in ways where they can get the player to care about different elements of the game.
Not all games are designed to support a lives system, of course, and that's okay. I just wanted to fix your naivety regarding lives as a general game mechanic, but the real reason I brought up lives in the first place was not because the game needs lives specifically, but because the game needs any punishment for screwing up badly in order for dying to have real weight. If the review is anything to go by, loss of gear is not a real drawback, and having to respawn at an earlier checkpoint is not a consistent drawback, especially with Rise of Lyric's lame-ass platforming being as tame as it is.
Kirby's Epic Yarn is a very easy game to brease through, but it actually does have challenge, ironically more than Return to Dreamland does IMO. The challenge of Epic Yarn is in finding enough gems to S-rank each level, and getting hit or falling into a pit significantly reduces your gem count. Just because a game's skill floor is rock bottom does not mean the player isn't rewarded for skill. Sonic Boom gives you fucking... rings for performing certain tasks when you're almost guaranteed to have 100 rings in many circumstances. This reinforces the game's low skill ceiling and inability to challenge the player.
"Collectible rings are your health, and if you lose all of them, you'll pass out, but that's meaningless because you respawn exactly where you were in whatever battle you were waging, with the enemies' health exactly where you left it. The only punishment for death is losing gear, a currency used to upgrade your characters, but you'll have so much gear that it's less than a slap on the wrist."
Respawning exactly where you died with no change in enemy health is analogous to dying in a coin-op shmup or beat-em-up, where you just have to insert coins to continue where you left off. Except in this game you don't have to do that, meaning death is literally irrelevant.
Lives are required in coin-op games, many platformers, and so on to create tension in gameplay, and make you really care about not dying so you don't lose all your progress. Gaming over in Sonic, Mario, or Rocket Knight Adventures is actually not a problem in this regard, because most levels in these old games are actually designed to be played multiple times through, with hidden secrets or advanced techniques allowing skilled players to clear the game more quickly and earn more lives. In this sense, lives are generally good game design, because they increase design space in ways where they can get the player to care about different elements of the game.
Not all games are designed to support a lives system, of course, and that's okay. I just wanted to fix your naivety regarding lives as a general game mechanic, but the real reason I brought up lives in the first place was not because the game needs lives specifically, but because the game needs any punishment for screwing up badly in order for dying to have real weight. If the review is anything to go by, loss of gear is not a real drawback, and having to respawn at an earlier checkpoint is not a consistent drawback, especially with Rise of Lyric's lame-ass platforming being as tame as it is.
Kirby's Epic Yarn is a very easy game to brease through, but it actually does have challenge, ironically more than Return to Dreamland does IMO. The challenge of Epic Yarn is in finding enough gems to S-rank each level, and getting hit or falling into a pit significantly reduces your gem count. Just because a game's skill floor is rock bottom does not mean the player isn't rewarded for skill. Sonic Boom gives you fucking... rings for performing certain tasks when you're almost guaranteed to have 100 rings in many circumstances. This reinforces the game's low skill ceiling and inability to challenge the player.
This entire quote is irrelevant unless you are able to debunk the idea that my arguments are based off of fact and reason.
This is an attempt to twist my original argument, like Matt said. (I was contemplating using that same website! lol)
Once again, you are hyper-generalizing. People other than committed Sonic fans have bought Sonic Generations and considered it a good game. Critics of course are among these; Danny Sexbang from Game Grumps has recently gone on record saying he genuinely enjoyed Sonic Colors, and I don't recall him being a "Sonic fan". I don't really consider myself a Sonic fan (I'm here for the fangame, not the series it's derived from), and I thought Generations was pretty good; I've also been tempted many times to get Lost World for the Wii U even in spite of some of the reviews, although I'm still waiting for the price to drop a bit. I'm sure I could come up with more examples from other internet forums I go to, but I think you get my point.
No, feeling like a Sonic game means that Sonic is doing what you would expect him to be doing. It's not fast, it doesn't feel like how you would expect him to play, very few Sonic elements are actually intact outside of rings and the occasional speed segment, and... blue bounce pads...?
I saved this quote for last, because I think it is the most important.
Exactly what strengths does the game have? I'm looking at your original rant about how Sonic Boom is average, and seemingly the best thing you had to say about it was "This game is unpolished, but it works." And this is inaccurate, because sometimes the game isn't particularly functional, as can be seen by gameplay footage where Sonic inadvertently falls through the floor. You have failed to address my points that Rise of Lyric has poor framerate, offers no challenge, and is rife with gamebreaking bugs, and you didn't even address my other criticisms with any concrete defense other than unsupported, subjective counter-arguments, or in the case of voice acting, criticism-deflection via "just turn it off if you don't like it".
Is my argument complicated or forced? Or are you forcing me to complicate my argument by requiring me to argue against 1) opinions you haven't backed up, and 2) your misinterpretations of my own arguments? You say in another quote that a person's opinion with no fact or reason behind his arguments is worth less than someone's opinion with hands-on experience of the game, but why is it that I am expected to be rational and factual in this debate, while you are content with being subjective with your viewpoints on the game, and manipulative with strawmen and other logical fallacies to make your argument appear more valid? We have already established that owning the game doesn't automatically elevate your viewpoint to a higher status than mine, so you're going to have to come up with a better defense than what you've currently provided.
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