Opinions on Sonic Team's level design in each game

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Scarbo the Black Sheep

Scarbo the Black Sheep

Furry Composer
I will quickly give my input for some games:

Sonic 1: Challenging, but too slow.
Sonic 2: Very good. I hate how you can't slide across the handle rails in Wing Fortress Zone, though. Barely making short jumps is really annoying. I would have really liked Death Egg Zone to be an actual zone.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Sonic Team's best. The levels are nice and large. Of course, Carnival Night Zone Act 2 isn't exactly...straightforward.
Sonic 3D Blast: Too slow, and too non-linear. But it was still fun.
Sonic Chaos: I've only played ports of the Game Gear version, and I must say that it suffers from one of the same problems as SRB2's 2D mode: small viewsize. The levels are way too short. With the Master System's larger resolution, I would imagine that it would be the more enjoyable version. Nice twist on Special Stages, though. I hate the glitch where if Tails gets 100 rings then gets hit, he dies.
Sonic Adventure DX: Has the occasional non-linearity, and the graphics are cool. The gameplay is OK.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle: OK, seriously, don't design 3D levels the way you would design 2D levels. In 3D, we can avoid obstacles at full speed. And the whole death pit on the side was quite abused. Come on, the second level is over a death pit? At least the Emerald Hunt levels are MUCH better designed, being all huge and stuff. Tails's gameplay wasn't too bad, though. Crazy Gadget could have been completely awesome, but the whole "choose the middle switch in the room with three switches equals instant death" and to a much, MUCH larger extent, the last room, really pull this stage down from awesome to epic fail. The last room is almost as bad as a particular Sonic 3 gimmick.
Sonic Heroes: Quite fun. The whole play-as-three-characters is quite cool, and it makes gimmicks like frequent mini-bosses not that annoying. It IS overused, though.
Sonic Advance: The best of the Advance series. Egg Rocket Zone is too long, and has frequent cheap hits/deaths, though. I would have REALLY liked X-Zone to actually be a zone.
Sonic Advance 2: WAY too much emphasis on running. Hot Crater Zone Act 2 is REALLY abusive on running. The method of getting to the special stage was so annoying, and the seventh special stage is really hard.
Sonic Advance 3: Quite fun, but the tag action thing makes certain things too easy. The zone maps give actual challenges; that's really neat.
 
Mkay, don't answer my question then....

Sonic 1 was okay, but its "run right into the wall then jump on top of it" gameplay ruined the overall experience. Sonic 2 I just didn't care too much for. Its levels were random and they had no flow in between each other. As for the levels themselves, they were just too plain.I enjoied(sp) Sonic 3 because its levels flowed realsticly and had more deapth then Sonic 2, and they were'nt increadebly short either.

I don't think that Sonic 3D was bad, the levels were nice and large, and you could explore it as you wanted to. It was sort of fast-paced, the only thing I didn't like was the camra angle and the super cheap challenges.

SonicCD wasn't all that in my opinion, I always felt lost, and had little to no idea where I was going. Most of the levels were platforming, and you had to have quick reflexes to move fast.
 
I think that the best games are:
-Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (next gen)
-Sonic Heroes
-Sonic Adventure 2
-Sonic Adventure
 
I <3 Silver's stages on Sonic 360. I hear he doesn't have the awesome game-physics inducing powers in other games, though.
 
STHE123O said:
I doesn´t have the STH 2006 yet. This is my dream! T_T but I have a lot of Sonic games
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I plan on buying STH 2006 as soon as it hits the bargain bin. I'll pay $5-$6 for a couple hours of laughs.
 
On a more serious note, I felt that the classic games apart from Sonic CD were quite decent in their design, though each was balanced toward different attributes. Sonic 1 had more platforming, Sonic 2 had more speed, Sonic 3 and Knuckles were probably the best marriage of the two.Sonic CD honestly felt and played like Sonic Advanced game. In other words, the level design wasn't particularly interesting, and the controls felt funny. Not horrible, but not great.

The Sonic Adventure series was pretty good when you played as Sonic. Knuckles was borderline with the emerald hunts. I appreciated the exploration required, but there honestly wasn't all that much to explore. What dragged both games down was the inclusion of oodles and oodles of stupid gametypes and characters. If Chao, Big, Amy, Omega, Tails Mech, and such were completely removed and replaced with proper platforming levels for Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, the Adventure series would have been great, rather than mediocre at best.

Heroes wasn't great, but it was a step in the right direction. Sonic Team at that point honestly appeared to want to shape up the long lasting problems in gameplay.

As far as the new stuff goes, I gave up after the debacle of Shadow the Hedgehog and have no intention of buying anything new until it hits the bargain bin, for the reasons I stated above.
 
Jazz said:
Sonic CD honestly felt and played like Sonic Advanced game. In other words, the level design wasn't particularly interesting, and the controls felt funny. Not horrible, but not great.
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...What? Sonic CD had some of the most varied level design in the entire series! Each new zone was a completely new experience.
 
Jazz said:
Sonic CD honestly felt and played like Sonic Advanced game. In other words, the level design wasn't particularly interesting, and the controls felt funny. Not horrible, but not great.
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You obviously haven't played it much or often. As FoxBlitzz said, Sonic CD was one of the greatest classics in the series, not to mention one of the best around.

Sonic CD & Sonic Advance have both different experiences & gameplay to try to make these 2 titles unique. Sonic CD gets time travel as well as classic design to make it very unique, but Sonic Advance gets the level design to try and make it like the classics but it doesn't have much unique gameplay as Sonic CD does. Yes it's ok to have that, but added other things such as time travel would make it great gameplay as it transforms the level, and there's a lot more to explore with a lot more experiences to come. The whole of Sonic CD is a great experience to remember for years to come. This should of been *the Sonic 1* in my opinion.
 
Sonic Advance was brilliant, a perfect example of what should be used in a 2D sonic game along with Sonic 2.

Sonic Advance 3 was excessively too long. It takes anywhere from 30 secs. to 5 min. to change acts, and that's far too long.

Sonic Rush was even better than Advance. The only problem was the special stage and the last boss. In the special stages it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to go thorough with out being hit due to the hidden spikes and the run-diagonally-through-these-spikes-to-almost-hit-and-get-rings gimmick was excessively hard. The last boss was plain hard.

Sonic 1 I never beat it because of it's speed, too slow.

Sonic 2 was excellent. I love speed, and I NEED speed. The gimmicks did not detract from speed ever.

Sonic 3&K I got bored halfway through the Sonic 3 part. THe levsl were long and it was the sane thing constatly. Bleh.

Sonic CD
Wario said:
Excellent!
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The figure 8 and peel out move was plain awesome. Fast, and time travel added a ton of replay value. THe only problem was the obstacles were too close to each other.
 
Hyperknux said:
You obviously haven't played it much or often. As FoxBlitzz said, Sonic CD was one of the greatest classics in the series, not to mention one of the best around.
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Your opinion isn't any more or less credible than mine, don't act like it is. I have my opinion, you have yours. Not to mention that a game's greatness should be apparent on the first playthough.

FoxBlitzz said:
...What? Sonic CD had some of the most varied level design in the entire series! Each new zone was a completely new experience.
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The controls felt awkward because this game for whatever reason changed around the fundamental way Sonic spindashes. Not sure why they changed something that never needed to be fixed. Play Sonic 2 then play Sonic CD, you should notice the difference.

I beat the entire game without ever using this "Time Travel" mechanic intentionally. It did nothing perceivable to me other than change the graphics around somewhat. There may have been an enemy reduction, I don't know, but it made absolutely no difference to me. If the entire game focuses around this one feature, it should make more of a gameplay difference.

As far as the level design went, it was awkward to ever find enough room to run far enough at the correct speed to ever intentionally engage in time travel. The changed spindash mechanic made awkward jumps more awkward, and the billions of springs and small platforms made me feel like I was bouncing through the levels more than I was running. Boss fights were generally simple and uninteresting. As a point of reference, the first boss in Sonic 1 was at least four times harder than the first boss in Sonic CD. Even then, the first boss in Sonic 1 was pretty easy. =/

Naturally, taking this position on Sonic CD is vastly unpopular. I just don't see why this game is so widely acclaimed. Sonic 1-3 and Sonic and Knuckles are each easily superior.
 
My guess is because CD's spindash was created first and Refined for S2. If I rember right Sonic CD was meant to come out before Sonic 2 (hence the hidden Tails picture) which would explain the bad spindash.
 
I've never yet completed Sonic CD, mostly because I never quite got into the game. Regarding the time travel gimmick, the main idea is to go into the past and destroy the machine that produces robots... this gets rid of the bots in the present and future, creating a "Good Future". That's all I understand of it, though.

In my opinion, the bosses were actually quite interesting, and I would go as far as to assume that more work was put into them compared to the Genesis titles. Each boss was very different (though, some of them were unfortunately unchallenging) in playthrough so that every boss really stood out in the game. Granted, many of the bosses in Genesis titles had their own gimmicks, but none of them were done quite like some of those in Sonic CD.



In any case, Sonic CD was better than Sonic 1, so I'm not complaining.
 
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