How SRB2 approaches 2 Button gameplay

I should note that other than the tutorial, GFZ1 at the very least hints to the usage of 2 shield abilities. Those being whirlwind placed right next to a trail of rings to a 1-up hinting at a double jump, and armaggedon placed right next to a whole bunch of robots that can't be interacted with any other way. Magnet even has an arrow pop up on enemies. The subtle clues for at least the whirlwind and magnet can hint to a reason to experiment.

Of course, Force and Elemental don't have the same level of hints, but if you find out about the other shields you could be tempted to try it on those too.
 
Also, 2.2 is the first version we've had that contains a tutorial. That's due to the fact that we've got 20 years of experience that has proven, without a shadow of a doubt, that it's necessary. Jump-spin activating shields is absurdly minor compared to the other things we need to explain about the game, but since we were setting up a tutorial, we had the opportunity to explain it, too. The fact of the matter is that 3D gameplay is simply significantly more complicated than 2D gameplay, and there were plenty of things that classic Sonic did a terrible job of explaining anyways. The true villain of classic Sonic is the damn Carnival Night barrel mechanic.

I almost compared the shield being the only function of Jump Spin as equivalent to the Carnival Night barrel! In principle it's the same issue. It only makes sense after you already know it, meaning it's a flaw in the game design that the game never uses that function before or since.

To avoid conflating things — it's good that the game currently has a tutorial. It does need it. It should be the goal of game design in general to not need a tutorial. That doesn't seem like a controversial statement, yeah?

SMB 1-1 being the iconic platonic ideal of intuitive design, the levels teaching the gameplay; no tutorial about how the screen works, or how the buttons change when you get a power-up. You play it to figure it out. 2 button gameplay, and a camera system that had never been used in a game before.

The opposite of that would be Modern Sega Sonic with obnoxious Omochao tutorials... although actually SA1 was pretty good at just dropping you into a boss fight and figuring out how to move and attack. There were tutorials but they were optional and unnecessary.

---------- Post added at 11:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:39 AM ----------

I apologize, I'll rephrase.
Controller players would not be able to utilize Jump+Spin abilities as effectively as most PC players, unless you play claw or have a different control scheme like using the controller's triggers to jump and spin...which is evil.

Zwip already addressed this but just to add -- bro lol! I play controller! I play Switch Pro controller on Mac 2.2.0; mapped like I would play any 3D platformer.

Jump is B
Spin is A

Left stick is move
Right stick is camera
Triggers are hard turns (look+turn L/R)

It's great, easy. I hear you that it's maybe less effective than KB+M for speed running maybe but in gameplay it's good to go with that set up. (2.2.0 doesn't have Simple, etc, control options)

Personally, the only "Jump+Spin" ability that I would want would be Metal Sonic charging an air dash like in the boss fight, and as opposed to coming to a screeching halt when hitting the wall he bounces off of whatever he hits.

It would be super fun.

Earlier we were saying pointless/unnecessary, right? But this would be the point. No point other than just... yeah. It'd be super fun.
 
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I almost compared the shield being the only function of Jump Spin as equivalent to the Carnival Night barrel! In principle it's the same issue. It only makes sense after you already know it, meaning it's a flaw in the game design that the game never uses that function before or since.
I'm not sure I understand comparing shield being on jump + spin to the Carnival Night barrel.

Shields being on jump + spin may not be the most intuitive thing in the world, but neither is using a mix of movement keys and camera to get around, or the thok facing in the direction of the camera. That's why SRB2 has a tutorial to go over these basic mechanics that you'll use throughout the game.

The Carnival Night barrel, on the other hand, is an absolutely stupid gimmick that is used in only one level and is necessary about twice in the entire game if I recall correctly. It goes completely against the nature of Sonic games to control a barrel you're standing on by pressing up and down, and it's also misleading that if you jump on barrels from high up, they will move up and down quite a bit.

Regardless of complaints about this one annoying gimmick from a mostly great classic Sonic game, the classics and SRB2 both excel in having minimalist controls. All the characters have simple abilities that are very versatile once you get the hang of them and I'm not enthusiastic about the idea of adding more side abilities to them.
 
It should be the goal of game design in general to not need a tutorial.

Egoraptor is a fool and you shouldn't listen to him.

Edit: I'll actually contribute instead of just posting a joke reply, but seriously. Sometimes games need tutorials, sometimes they don't. Sometimes games have concepts that are too complicated for the player to grasp natively, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are a mix. SRB2 is not complicated and there are several areas in the first level of the game which hint at the ability to use the spin button with a shield to do something, like the 'm' shaped rings near the whirlwind shield indicating you can double jump, and the pile of enemies you can't directly kill behind a grate near the armageddon shield.

Also the tutorial is like three minutes long. At what point do we as game designers, if the player is both going to skip the tutorial because Funy Youtuber Man Say Tutorials Bad, and is going to ignore context in the level indicating there's something they can do, realize the player is at fault and stop holding their hand?
 
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To avoid conflating things — it's good that the game currently has a tutorial. It does need it. It should be the goal of game design in general to not need a tutorial. That doesn't seem like a controversial statement, yeah?

SMB 1-1 being the iconic platonic ideal of intuitive design, the levels teaching the gameplay; no tutorial about how the screen works, or how the buttons change when you get a power-up. You play it to figure it out. 2 button gameplay, and a camera system that had never been used in a game before.
It does - it makes it sound like having moves that require any combination of buttons that aren't immediately intuitive is a game design shortcoming, which in turn means that any slightly more complex game that has to explain its controls is flawed in some way. This is made even worse that there's no basis to that claim: SMB1 is a 2D sidescroller - SRB2 is a 3D platformer with a novel approach to physics for a 3D Sonic game and an orthodox control method on top of that.

Yes, you could say that ideally, every game could go without a tutorial and everyone could immediately grasp how a game works through sheer experimentation, but having a tutorial explain how not immediately intuitive parts of the gameplay work to avoid player frustration is definitely not a sin. Frustration is one of the main reasons newbies defect from SRB2, and it's only natural the team wants to avoid that over breaking some made-on-the-spot rule about tutorials.
 
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@ Moose: I gather from this thread and various other posts you've made in this forum that you're a big fan of the mechanics of the Adventure games. You're criticizing SRB2 for needing a tutorial to explain some basics, but I don't see how being offered a tutorial at the start and having the rest of the game's mechanics explained either visually or in the character select screen blurbs is anywhere near as bad as the fact that the Adventure games have to frequently provide textual hints for how to progress through the stages and how to use certain game mechanics (many of which are useful at one point but then never again). Maybe you think that since many new SRB2 players have already played SA1 and SA2, they will easily get used to those games' control styles in the Doom engine? If that's the case, then it's important to remember that a big part of SRB2's premise is to replicate the classic Sonic games in 3D.

Please note that SA1 and SA2 are the only official 3D Sonic games I've played, so I could be neglecting to mention other games whose mechanics you like.
 
@ Moose: I gather from this thread and various other posts you've made in this forum that you're a big fan of the mechanics of the Adventure games. You're criticizing SRB2 for needing a tutorial to explain some basics, but I don't see how being offered a tutorial at the start and having the rest of the game's mechanics explained either visually or in the character select screen blurbs is anywhere near as bad as the fact that the Adventure games have to frequently provide textual hints for how to progress through the stages and how to use certain game mechanics (many of which are useful at one point but then never again). Maybe you think that since many new SRB2 players have already played SA1 and SA2, they will easily get used to those games' control styles in the Doom engine? If that's the case, then it's important to remember that a big part of SRB2's premise is to replicate the classic Sonic games in 3D.

Please note that SA1 and SA2 are the only official 3D Sonic games I've played, so I could be neglecting to mention other games whose mechanics you like.

So -- not exactly! I've clarified this a few times but it's not that I like the Adventure mechanics... I actually do NOT like the Adventure games!*

It's relevant for SRB2 in two major ways

(1) Both are an attempt to convert Classic Sonic to 3D from the ground up, conceptually
(2) Both must adjust to 3D by changing the 1-button Sonic formula to 2

So then it's -- separate Adventure from execution and just conceptually. Execution-wise, SA, yeah, not a fan. I don't like the Action RPG progression of movesets, and the extra gear.
*
I don't like how they play. The camera in both SA games is borderline unplayable (say what you will on SRB2 camera but once one adjusts it's great and even while adjusting it's still far less clunky)

I enjoyed them in 1999 and 2001 or whatever on Dreamcast. But I liked them for the story and cinematicness and the sense that Sonic Team was taking control of the lore of the franchise and seemed like it had... momentum. Even then, I didn't particularly like the way they played at the time and IMO it's aged like cheese in the sun. Around my initial hype honeymoon for SRB2, both a bit before and then definitely after finding it, I thought I'd revisit Adventure 1/2 on Xbone. Imo, they don't hold up... AT ALLLLLLL. Well, in terms of execution that is, almost everything falls flat or is pretty busted.

There's no room to DO anything, you can't run around, you have no real freedom to move, the platforming is perfunctory at best and completely broken and unfinished at worst, even when there is room to run around, the camera is getting stuck everywhere, and all of the characters are too floaty and the physics feel off in general, the roll is too slow, the spin dash is awkward... etc

BUT...

Conceptually, they weren't wrong about EVERYTHING.

And it's interesting to compare and contrast SRB2 and SA, because to my eyes SRB2 solves most of the equation in translating Classic to 3D, but the ways in which SRB2 falls short are ironically solved by the handful of strong ideas in the SA games.

Also, it's less so about whether new players are familiar with SA style controls, and just that the controls make the most intuitive sense for a platformer, a platformer starring Sonic in 3D, and this one in particular.

As they are, SRB2's controls do work and make sense on gamepad, even on 2.2.0, even though it's a very different type of 3D platformer (ie, third person shooter). Jump and Spin are face buttons for me, sticks for camera and movement, and it's great. Imo the trigger/shooter controls I think are odd. I mean I get why it makes sense and more power to those players but the natural assumption for a Sonic game is that the controls would be what any Mario/Sonic/3D platformer would be if it were on console like Sega Saturn.

So really my view on the Adventure games and why advocating for some of those concepts to SRB2 is less for my fondness towards them (there isn't) and more because it seems like some of the missing pieces in the equation. Different analogy - it's like SRB2 is a puzzle that's almost complete, and the missing pieces are the few actually in the right spot on SA's board.

Also, on top of that, it's kind of funny that it's part of this larger border dispute in general for Sonic between "modern" and "classic" with varying shifting definitions on what that functionally means aside from just 2D / 3D / art style

---------- Post added at 08:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:52 PM ----------

Egoraptor is a fool and you shouldn't listen to him.

Edit: I'll actually contribute instead of just posting a joke reply, but seriously. Sometimes games need tutorials, sometimes they don't. Sometimes games have concepts that are too complicated for the player to grasp natively, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are a mix. SRB2 is not complicated and there are several areas in the first level of the game which hint at the ability to use the spin button with a shield to do something, like the 'm' shaped rings near the whirlwind shield indicating you can double jump, and the pile of enemies you can't directly kill behind a grate near the armageddon shield.

Bolded is the best answer for how the design suggests finding the right button combination without text/tutorial; those placements suggests a shield activation ability somehow. It's still a bit of a leap to assume it would be Jump+Spin and not Jump+Jump as it is in Classic Sonic, for the benefit of overpowering the shields for reasons, but yeah, once JJ doesn't work then JS would be the next logical assumption.

I don't know enough about Egoraptor to know his thoughts. It just seems like a natural conclusion when you're thinking about what defines good design I guess. Yeah, tutorials can be necessary; it's good that 2.2 has a tutorial and should keep it etc, but the best examples of gameplay design make learning the inputs logical and intuitive with as little overt text instruction as possible.

Especially when you're thinking of games in terms of "Classic" -- tutorials don't fit.

This is a bigger gripe in general, btw; modern Mario and other Nintendo games have horrible unskippable text heavy tutorials built into the first few levels. They're intended for the younger player I guess? But more often a younger player is going to just want to get to it anyway and figure it out. Ironically Mario and most Nintendo games are generally very intuitive mappings anyway, and are better off with optional tutorials. Mario 64 gives you the courtyard to learn how to jump and what the buttons do; the walls of Lakitu text are lame. Anyway... yeah tangent of the same issue.
 
It's still a bit of a leap to assume it would be Jump+Spin and not Jump+Jump as it is in Classic Sonic

Do you mind if I ask you why you think this? Fundamentally I think this is where I'm struggling to see your side of the argument, here.

Because there's only two buttons, that means there's only four possible combinations you could try, and it doesn't exactly take very long to try them.

Let's use the whirlwind shield with the trail of rings as an example. A new player is playing as Sonic, gets the shield, and sees this trail of rings. They have four combinations of buttons to try, so they try them, in this order:

Jump+Jump: That makes Sonic thok, so that's clearly not the answer.
Spin+Spin: That made Sonic blast off in a little spindash, so that's not the answer either.
Spin+Jump: That made Sonic do a spindash again, and then he jumps during it, also not the answer.
Jump+Spin: That made Sonic double jump, with a little woosh sound effect, and that's something that Sonic wasn't able to do without the shield. Problem solved.

Now, I put the correct answer at the end, admittedly. But even so, this is all something that would take less than a minute for the player to figure out. I think any player with a reasonable set of observational and deductive reasoning skills would eventually arrive at the conclusion that "Shield+Jump+Spin=Thing Happen". Yes, the exact combination of buttons is different from how shield abilities work in Classic Sonic, but again, I also think any player with a reasonable set of observational and deductive reasoning skills would know that, hey, this is not a Classic Sonic game, and some concessions had to be made to get things to work in 3D and so the player could have as much total control over their skills as possible.

This post is a little wordy but as someone who holds the opinion that the tutorial is not necessary*, that jump+spin is actually better than jump+jump for shield abilities, and that homing attack is terrible (in all Sonic games, not just SRB2) and Thok is better, I really do want to understand where you're coming from, because I genuinely do not see an issue with SRB2 as it currently is.


*To some extent, I agree with you that tutorials in video games can be frustrating. Doom Eternal is a recent game that beats you over the head with tutorials at every turn, completely stopping the action to explain things multiple times that most players probably would've figured out themselves--an issue that its predecessor notably did not have. I just however cannot agree with the idea that a game must never explain anything, largely for the reasons Ikkarou Tatsuru brought up--it's ultimately a very limiting design philosophy. But that having been said I feel like SRB2 doesn't actually need a tutorial, but it certainly is helpful, and I don't want it removed. It really does just take minutes to complete, and I struggle to see the point in catering to players who would both skip the tutorial and then proceed to ignore obvious hints in level design as to how the shield skills function, and then blame the game rather than themselves.
 
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@ Moose (too lazy to quote):

I see where you're coming from with those arguments a lot more clearly, now that I know your opinion on the Adventure games. I agree with you that those games have some great ideas despite being mostly poorly aged messes. But I also think SRB2's controls as they stand handle the principle of "less is more" beautifully. Every playable character has a simple but incredibly versatile ability set that becomes even more versatile when a shield is put on, all handled with only two non-movement buttons (jump and spin). While there are certainly characters whose abilities I think could use some change, I don't think giving each character a new jump-spin ability overwritten by a shield is the right way to go about it.

I think that if SRB2 playable characters were to gain new abilities, there are plenty of options outside of having button X do function Y. There are already some character abilities usable based on context rather than buttons pressed, like Knuckles' ability to walk through breakable walls and Metal Sonic's boost mode. Or you could augment existing abilities like giving a new use for Amy's hammer, or a new thing that happens when Fang bounces.
 
@softchassis —

Do you mind if I ask you why you think this? Fundamentally I think this is where I'm struggling to see your side of the argument, here.
...
the exact combination of buttons is different from how shield abilities work in Classic Sonic, but again, I also think any player with a reasonable set of observational and deductive reasoning skills would know that, hey, this is not a Classic Sonic game, and some concessions had to be made to get things to work in 3D and so the player could have as much total control over their skills as possible.

The below answers the above! It's not that the player is unable to figure out how the Shield Activation works without the tutorial. Just the deductive reasoning logic doesn't follow elegantly or intuitively -- the necessary button combo is unused otherwise, which is counter to the logic used in Classic.

Classic Shields cancel the Sonic jump ability. It gives Sonic more uniqueness in his abilities because the shields provide optional, contextual versatility (since Tails/Knuckles abilities don't change).

It's a trade off. You gain one new ability at the expense of another.

Shield powers having their own unique button combination in SRB2 removes the trade-off in favor of empowering the shields to a higher degree than Classic Sonic. This decreases SRB2 Sonic's uniqueness, since every character can now use shields like Classic Sonic. It also creates the logical snarl of why would shield abilities use a button combination that is otherwise unused, when that's not how shield have ever worked in Sonic?


This post is a little wordy but as someone who holds the opinion that the tutorial is not necessary*, that jump+spin is actually better than jump+jump for shield abilities, and that homing attack is terrible (in all Sonic games, not just SRB2) and Thok is better, I really do want to understand where you're coming from, because I genuinely do not see an issue with SRB2 as it currently is

The Thok and Homing being comparatively "at odds" is illogical, imo, even though that's how the two are always framed, as against each other.

Thok is more of a replacement for "Boost." It's used to gain speed immediately. It's the same as Spin Dash, but aerial.

Homing is about empowering the player to make their jump attacks as accurate in 3D space as they would be in 2D space.

Also... Fun fact! Homing was originally intended as Sonic's jump move in SRB2. It became the Thok by accident / programming limitations and then stuck.

For emphasis:
hey, this is not a Classic Sonic game, and some concessions had to be made to get things to work in 3D and so the player could have as much total control over their skills as possible.

Right. So, is SRB2 "Classic Sonic" or is it making concessions to work in 3D?

It makes the concession for a separate button for Spin roll, just as SA had to, and goes the additional mile of giving "Jump Spin" a function for the shields.

So why doesn't "Jump Spin" have function without the shields? It's in order to keep with the "1 button" ability functions of the Classic 2D games.


@cookiefonster

I see where you're coming from with those arguments a lot more clearly, now that I know your opinion on the Adventure games. I agree with you that those games have some great ideas despite being mostly poorly aged messes. But I also think SRB2's controls as they stand handle the principle of "less is more" beautifully.

Incidentally, it was while playing SRB2 that I came to realize that Adventure did have some good ideas, conceptually, that were just implemented poorly.

For example, I remember having a lot of discussions back in the day when the SA games came out (in the old days of the GHZ message board) about why it felt really wrong for Sonic to be 2-button gameplay at all, and how awkward it felt to press a separate button to roll, and how that affected the Spin Dash and the overall feeling of momentum.

Now I realize that there's just no way around it. The 3rd dimension necessitates the 2nd button. Once that's a given, then it's just what is the most logical / minimalistic / elegant usage of 2 button gameplay that retains the same spirit?

Shield powers requiring the trade-off of ability is just how Classic works. S3K could've made the design choice to have shields activated by a unique button combination, allowing all 3 characters to use Fire Dash and Bubble Bounce, but didn't. SRB2 changes how the shields work for 3D with the 2nd button, but otherwise keeps jump abilities to 1 button.

So... idk. The SRB2 design choice is based around the shields being both unique and new, and also more important than ever before. It's interesting!

SBR2's having all new shields and emphasizing them to a larger degree that is out of sync with Classic or otherwise Sonic is a little bit like the game design equivalent of fan-fic that introduces Poochie the Hedgehog, Sonic's cooler older brother, and everything is about him now, and when he's not there, you really wish he was. It reframes everything to focus more on the new totally bitchin unique thing.
 
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Classic Shields cancel the Sonic jump ability. It gives Sonic more uniqueness in his abilities because the shields provide optional, contextual versatility (since Tails/Knuckles abilities don't change).

It's a trade off. You gain one new ability at the expense of another.

Shield powers having their own unique button combination in SRB2 removes the trade-off in favor of empowering the shields to a higher degree than Classic Sonic.

I kind of wish you had said this before so that I could better understand where the fundamental disagreement here lay. I didn't really get why you even made this topic until now.

I strongly disagree. Classic Sonic got it wrong. Shields should be a powerup, not an ability trade off.
 
I've argued at length before that the Classics is not a true one-button gameplay experience. They may be inputs on the directional pad, but the up and down buttons ARE a different class of action to the sideways movement. They do not make Sonic move upwards or downwards. Down absolutely *is* a seperate button conceptually, and we should be treating it as such. It's the spin button, analagous with Adventure and SRB2's mechanics (with only the charging spindash being optimised to require less mashing), and there's no shame in recognising that. It has a thematic resonance with Sonic tucking and rolling, but it's not literal, and every addition to the concept serves to make it more obvious that it's in effect a seperate input.

If you want a clearer indication of this statement in effect, look no further than Tails' flight ability. If the down button making Tails go downwards was about directional movement, then it'd use its atonym, the up button, to make Tails fly upwards, It doesn't, though - it uses JUMP and DOWN, the two action buttons representing up and down behaviours, instead.

I rest my case. :P
 
The reason S3K could replace your ability as Sonic is because Sonic's ability was god-awful. The insta-shield was borderline useless to most players because of how terribly it was explained. I didn't understand how to actually use it until a decade later, and I played S3K to death as a child. Sonic might as well not have had an ability at all. Therefore, the shields giving you new abilities was a net positive all the time.

That's not true in SRB2. All of the characters have important double jump abilities that you would not want to replace. If we replaced your double jump ability, the correct answer for most situations would be to never grab a shield, ever.
 
The reason S3K could replace your ability as Sonic is because Sonic's ability was god-awful. The insta-shield was borderline useless to most players because of how terribly it was explained. I didn't understand how to actually use it until a decade later, and I played S3K to death as a child. Sonic might as well not have had an ability at all. Therefore, the shields giving you new abilities was a net positive all the time.

That's not true in SRB2. All of the characters have important double jump abilities that you would not want to replace. If we replaced your double jump ability, the correct answer for most situations would be to never grab a shield, ever.

To clarify, Moose is proposing that each character should have a default jump-spin ability (for example, a drop dash for Sonic) and that's what would be replaced by the shield ability. The double jump abilities would be untouched.
 
The reason S3K could replace your ability as Sonic is because Sonic's ability was god-awful. The insta-shield was borderline useless to most players because of how terribly it was explained. I didn't understand how to actually use it until a decade later, and I played S3K to death as a child. Sonic might as well not have had an ability at all. Therefore, the shields giving you new abilities was a net positive all the time.

That's not true in SRB2. All of the characters have important double jump abilities that you would not want to replace. If we replaced your double jump ability, the correct answer for most situations would be to never grab a shield, ever.

To this day I still can't use Insta-shield reliably. Drop Dash in Mania is the definitive 2D solution, imo, and has made replaying Sonic 1 and 2 with that ability 100x more fun. (Sonic 4 adds more buttons unnecessarily, including homing, and it is a very poor fit in 2D.)

Unknownlight clarified the other point. But shields-replacing-ability is a specific creative choice in Classic Sonic, so it's an interesting and unique deviation in SRB2.

I don't follow on why never grabbing a shield would be the correct answer? Shield powers usefulness speak for themselves, so the trade-off is almost always worth it.

You're going to want Bubble Bounce, or ah Elemental Shield stomp in Deep Sea.

You're going to want Whirl shield in Arid Canyon and Castle Eggman and anywhere you can find it, really.

You're going to want the Power shield in Castle Eggman.

You always want Attraction Shield because of homing. (if homing were in vanilla I'd replace with the blast of the Nuke shield for the Attraction/Electric shield as an "EMP Blast")
 
The reason S3K could replace your ability as Sonic is because Sonic's ability was god-awful. The insta-shield was borderline useless to most players because of how terribly it was explained. I didn't understand how to actually use it until a decade later, and I played S3K to death as a child. Sonic might as well not have had an ability at all. Therefore, the shields giving you new abilities was a net positive all the time.

That's not true in SRB2. All of the characters have important double jump abilities that you would not want to replace. If we replaced your double jump ability, the correct answer for most situations would be to never grab a shield, ever.
To add on to this, I don't really like that Mania replaces Sonic's drop dash when he puts on a shield but I can put up with it because the shield abilities are generally also good for speed. It would be much worse for character abilities in SRB2 (especially if it's not just Sonic's) to be replaced by shields. This would even go for hypothetical jump/spin abilities; it took me a while to get used to the fact that Amy has to use jump/jump instead of jump/spin to hammer when wearing a shield.
 
I kind of wish you had said this before so that I could better understand where the fundamental disagreement here lay. I didn't really get why you even made this topic until now.

I strongly disagree. Classic Sonic got it wrong. Shields should be a powerup, not an ability trade off.

Discussion is helpful in that way. I wouldn't have originally thought to phrase it like that.

It's fair to disagree with 2D Classic's choice, but it's a big deviation. Shields becoming power-ups is definitely a bit more Mario like, like the Fire Flower using "run neutral" which is otherwise unused.

If you were to revise it to be correct to your preference, how would you solve in Mania? Do the shields have no extra ability (Bubble Bounce) or does it add a separate button combination?
 
That defeats the point of why shield abilities are on jump-spin to begin with. The whole point was to select the button combination that wasn't already used and would not be accidentally hit trying to accomplish something else.

The reason is because this was being set up for armageddon initially. Originally, you couldn't activate armageddon on purpose. The only way to set it off was to get hit. The initial way tested to set it off was double jump, and I think you can guess what the result was. Everyone, devs included, kept setting it off unintentionally. It was moved to jump-spin to avoid that. Giving characters jump-spin abilities would therefore just create the same issue on a new button combination.
 
To add on to this, I don't really like that Mania replaces Sonic's drop dash when he puts on a shield but I can put up with it because the shield abilities are generally also good for speed.

The shields have to be powerful enough to be worth it, for sure! And they almost always are.

I was glad that Mania included the power-less Sonic 2 shield for this reason, because often you want the shield's protection but still want the Drop Dash! Arguably this makes Sonic 2/1 for Sonic w/Drop Dash even more fun and DD-focused because the shields don't ever change ability.

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That defeats the point of why shield abilities are on jump-spin to begin with. The whole point was to select the button combination that wasn't already used and would not be accidentally hit trying to accomplish something else.

I get that. It's unique to SRB2 and doesn't fit with Classic or other Sonic games.

It's just an interesting deviation. And making it different invites the question of why is it different here than it was in 2D?

The reason is because this was being set up for armageddon initially. Originally, you couldn't activate armageddon on purpose. The only way to set it off was to get hit. The initial way tested to set it off was double jump, and I think you can guess what the result was. Everyone, devs included, kept setting it off unintentionally. It was moved to jump-spin to avoid that. Giving characters jump-spin abilities would therefore just create the same issue on a new button combination.

Interesting that it came as a result of the Nuke/Armageddon shield. Was it originally that only Sonic would have shield powers?

I would assume if shield powers were on Jump+Jump they probably followed Classic, and not cancel for non-Sonic characters (Tails fly / Knuckles glide).
 
If you were to revise it to be correct to your preference, how would you solve in Mania? Do the shields have no extra ability (Bubble Bounce) or does it add a separate button combination?

Ideally, I would've wanted shield abilities to be on a different button, similar to how Mania set turning Super to the top face button. I get why they didn't do it, but as it currently stands I almost never want to get a shield while playing as Sonic.
 

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