The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

i've been playing a copy of sonic rush contributed by the fabulous B coma on and off for the past few days, trying to decide what i think of it. i'm pretty sure i don't think very highly of it.

while i play the game, i spend a lot of time running down long, looping but effectively straight paths and ramming into enemies, causing rings to explode all over the ds's screens while i come to a dead stop. that's a pretty effective summary of gameplay.

the game seems like one long rail, with enemies or platforms planted here and there as if to remind the player (or maybe the developers?) that this is a game after all. i don't think this is illustrated anywhere more clearly then the "ENEMY" rooms, where the doors close and you're required to kill a few short waves of enemies, probably because the developers couldn't find any more meaningful ways to work combat into the game. these rooms require little-to-no skill to pass.

the stages (which are stock sonic stages - green foresty place, water-filled ruins, desert ruins, carnival at night) seem more like something you go through rather than something you do. and that's why th platforms and enemies feel so frustrating - they feel like little more than interruptions of your on-rails journey. they feel less like game elements than like obstacles.

it reinforces my opinion that yuji naka has never played sonic cd. (in fact, i'm not certain he even knows it exists.). that game - which was developed parallel to sonic 2 - features stages that actually engage the player - things you have to go around, under, over. they're places you explore, not wallpaper you run past. perhaps not coincidentally, sonic's speed is generally slower in that game than in sonic rush.

the "carnival night" zone was the exception, particularly act 2. a lot of the - dare i call them setpieces - didn't feel tacked on, like a scene where you hit a switch to activate a rising light platform, and then have to quickly jump off it, hit another switch, and then back on, continuing to ride it up to a series of platforms you just made appear. it felt like i was doing things. then i reached the "huge crisis" zone, and it was right back to enemy rooms.

the bosses are without a doubt the weakest area of sonic rush. they're typically the cheapest model of boss - the "i attack, you counter-attack" variety. the first zone's boss is a long-necked robotic creature that slams its head in the ground, trying to hit you, and then you jump on its head while it's stunned. and then the next zone's boss is the exact same thing. and the boss fights drag on and on, as they give you progressively smaller and smaller of a counter-attack window as their hitpoints diminish. if you die near the end of a battle - entirely possible when the boss uses an attack that has about a fifty perchent chance of knocking you right off the platform into a bottomless pit - it means another ten-minute slog through a predictable boss fight.

(and bottomless pit deaths have never felt cheaper than in sonic games.)

the exception, again, is the carnival night zone boss, which is fairly original and can be attacked several ways. the battle actually goes faster if you know what you're doing. and then the huge crisis zone comes around and it's the exact same boss as the first zone's, only palette-swapped. i wonder if there was actually a second team working on this zone while naka's team was off designing enemy rooms.

again, he could really stand to take a look at sonic cd, with its pinball boss, bubble boss, race against mecha-sonic - these are original, inventive, and typically integrate elements of the zone they cap in clever and often revelatory ways - the collision chaos zone's boss builds a pinball machine out of elements that had appeared alone in the prior two acts.

for a game that encourages the player to play as efficiently as possible, there's a lot of stuff in the game that's superfluous. the bland conversations between stages (where quite a few one-word sentences are spoken), the "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS ZONE?" warning that appears before each zone, post-boss scenes where eggman "nega" says "i'll never forget this" while his voice-over intones "YOU'LL REGRET THIS", tails shouting "OH NO, SONIC!" and "ALMOST THERE!" during boss fights. blaze the cat, and her lapel-festooned character design.

i don't know. is there some hidden charm to this game that i'm missing? am i playing it wrong?
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[friedchicken]

[Persona-sama]

THE SONIC YOU KNOW IS DEAD.

At least Mr. Naka has the decency to not corpse-rape NiGHTS. :/
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[Pijaibros]

Well, I really enjoyed Sonic Rush. It took the series back to its Genesis roots. I've not enjoyed a Sonic this much since way back when I parts 1, 2, and CD were available at retail.

I enjoy its happy, Jet Set style music. I love tearing through the levels. The running just feels so satisfying since there really is nothing annoying to get in my way (I'm looking at you, Sonic 3). The posing when I launch off a spring or ramp is fun and gives me something to do while I fly through the air. I feel that there are so many things that were nailed in this title that made me grin the entire time. Running starts, score multipliers, a new instant-dash power, and less annoying voices for the characters. It makes playing for score quite fun!

Huge Crisis Zone is probably my favorite zone in this title. It has absolutely rocking music and is a cool looking level to boot! Those enemy rooms make the most sense here (to me).

This game was able to revive my faith in Sonic and makes me look forward to what will be possible in future installments. It shows lots of potential!

[Shapermc]

I basically feel the same as Pijaibros. Sonic always felt like it was a game to run the hell through as fast as you can. Rush gives you the most options to do so with. Sonic CD felt to me like a game about trying to find as much stuff as possible in the most same-y looking levels of any Sonic game.

You know, Dess, have you play Knuckles Chaotix? I think you may really enjoy it for what it attempts to do with the Sonic design. It's not bad.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[friedchicken]

[player 2]

I haven't played much of Sonic past #2, but the way you describe Rush sounds awesome. I always liekd Sonic because it was always about going as fast as possible. Recognizing obstacles and dealing with them in a flash, memorizing paths, etc. etc.

What I really liked about 2 was that it had a racing mode. To me, that just clinched it for me. You play Sonic if you want to go faster than Mario.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[dhex]

hey, i have that sonic collection for gamecube, or at least i think i still do. all i ever played was the pinball game. what else should i try?
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[squidlarkin]

I kinda figured Sonic was dead after I finished Sonic Adventure. Between badly timed, animated and voiced cutscenes, tedious and irritating field sections, and Big the Fucking Cat (I don't know anything about Blaze, but she has to be an improvement), pretty much the only enjoyment to be had was in the sections where you just ran. And that's not compelling game design.

[Dracko]

I find that the Genesis games, including the CD one, were some of the finest platformers made. The Master System/Game Gear versions felt like a different interpretation and approach to platforming. I certainly preferred the series to Mario. Sonic Advance 2 was good, didn't like its prequel, never played its sequel. Haven't played Rush yet, and I would like to.

Sonic Adventure wasn't that bad, but it was barely decent. It was buggy, the series doesn't need a plot and could have done without it. Didn't like the second one at all, and I have heavy doubts for the next gen game. On one hand, they have the potential to truly develop fast-paced action in a large, free environment, on the other, it could just be more of the same with better graphics.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Shapermc]

[simplicio]

Is Sonic CD on that Gems collection or the Mega Collection?

Rush is alright; it's about how I remember Sonic, which can be fun in bursts but not nearly so enticing as the internet would have me believe. But hey, I feel the same way about the NES Marios, so maybe I'm just weird like that.

[Shapermc]

Gems collection. The only thing worthwhile on the whole collection too. I mean, Sonic R and Sonic Fighters are neat to see then wonder what the hell they were thinking, but nothing else.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[B coma]

[B coma]

Like Starfox Assault (which I also put up for trade... hey!) I found Sonic Rush to be a decently fun pastiche of some of the older titles in the series with some interesting additions, but ultimately a game containing some frustrations that made me feel like I'd rather spend my time revisiting older titles in the series rather than actually replaying the updates.

Alright, Sonic Rush. Before I begin, I should mention for Dess that although it doesn't mention it anywhere until the credits, Dimps (creators of Sonic Advance) helped create this game, and I sort of wonder how much involvement the Sonic Team had with this in light of the simultaneous development of their Radical Masterpiece Shadow the Hedgehog. Although, that detail doesn't really matter too much in the scheme of things. I should also warn everyone that my passionate dedication to the earlier years of the series has resulted in the extremely long post you see before you. Extremely.

I'll start with the critical stuff and move slowly into what I thought worked:

I feel like Dess is pretty much on the money with the Boss fights. They just went on way too long for their own good in most cases and were most definitely the least satisfying portions of the game. The nice thing about the majority of Genesis boss encounters was that the length of the boss fights usually corresponded directly to the amount of skill and experience you had fighting them. Defeating Mecha Sonic at the end of Sonic 2 took me a few minutes per attempt when I was still green with the game, but in a recent playthrough I was surprised to discover I could get rid of him in less than 30 seconds. To be fair, I feel Rush's sections also require an good deal of skill of the player, but I felt that a lot of my deaths in those boss fights arose from the tedium and impatience incurred from being forced to dodge the same ten second missle animation for the umpteenth time in a row. Their repetiveness often unengaged me to the point of not caring.

Most of the Sonic Rush fight also lacked the important details that made the older boss battles in the series compelling or unique - like the catapults in Starlight Zone, the shifting platforms in Lava Reef, or the Bubble Clones in Metropolis Zone. Even when you were forced to go through the forced length sequence at the end of Labyrinth Zone, it was an awesome set piece where you were speeding through danger with rising water on one end and Robotnik on the other. I can appreciate the level of refinement and precision required to finish the final boss of Rush (not the "special" final boss, I'll get to that later) but that entire sequence drove me so crazy with its increasingly short hit windows that after reapeatedly dyingfor an entire day (playing on and off) I ended up setting the game to "easy" just to be done with it (although I did end up doing it the right way on normal difficulty with Blaze).

As for the stages, I felt the quality sort of varied between "in your face fun!" and "I'm really relieved that's over now". I'm pretty tolerant of cheap deaths to a degree, and I think if the developers had removed just on or two blind bottomless pits here and there the game would have been a better experience for it.

However, the game's structure, which centers around completing the game twice to reach the "true" ending, reveals quite a bit about the game's design focus - it's a perfectionist's game. This comes out very strongly near the beginning of the second playthrough. It's a game that requires a fairly even mixture of stage rehearsal and adaption of a gameplay style which is quite at odds with most of the older Sonic titles, with the possible exception of S3&K. What seems at first a random assortment rails divided by bottomless pits actually begins to reveal a logic over time: play the game enough, and you'll soon become instinctively aware of when you should be boosting in case of enemies, and when you should be maxing out your speed for a possible jump over a huge chasm or into some weird device - it's almost like a frenetic paranoia in how it works. Although I wish some of the stages required a bit less learning of the actual stage, I would say that there is actually a unifying logic to their design in the end.

The "performing" aspect of the game is also reinforced by the trick system - in order to pull off the most tricks possible, you have to practice until you figure out how to go as fast as possible the whole time, so you can get more time in the air to perform more tricks. I think that this is probably the best addition to the game - without it, replaying the levels would have felt unrewarding entirely, but instead you can feel satisfaction in figuring out how to maintain your momentum.

(before I go on, I have to note that I once had an exchange with fort90 on insert credit about how Sonic Adventure games felt like forced sex. I want to say that Rush is symptomatic of this, even if it is a much better Sonic experience on the whole.)

Now, in regards to the normal combat in the game (enemy rooms aside - they're tedious and break up the flow of the game): the enemies are actually quite meaningful in this game - they provide an impetus for the player to figure out that he should be boosting as much as possible. In that sense their presence makes far more sense in Rush than they did as obstacles to avoid in a split second in early Sonic games. Beyond that, they're uninterestingly designed and not really anything to dwell on - most of them are only meant to be on screen for a milisecond. And, not to spoil too much, but on a final enemy related note: the Special Zone boss was made of pure awesome and kind of made up for that annoying final boss. It was a technical and emotional masterpiece, I tells ya.

Finally the look and feel of the game: the visuals are neat but sometimes the stage locations feel like an afterthought when the stage is played out - although this probably has to do with the game's extreme emphasis on speed, which requires a lot of sparse design. I did enjoy the Jet-Set-Esque music, and if this is what we get in place of Nakamura's Genesis masterpieces and Sonic CD's dual soundtrack weirdness, I can deal with that far better than whatever crap they unloaded on us for just about every Sonic title since those.

To conclude: the game to me seems to be as much of a distillation of Sonic Adventure into a working 2D format as it is a "back to roots" Genesis experience.

[Alc]

I haven't had a chance to play Sonic Rush yet, but the SMS/Megadrive Sonic games were a pretty large part of my childhood so if it's better than Adventure, I'll probably fall in love again. I wanted so badly to like the Dreamcast games, but they just weren't worthy.

Someone mentioned Chaotix - very interesting game engine, which I loved (despite it being a major departure from normal Sonic gameplay), there are ~7 interesting characters with individual abilities to choose from, however the overall experience is marred by 2 things: the bland and repetitive level design, and the unset level order. The latter seems like an interesting idea at first, you can dip in and out of any of the ~6 different areas, complete the first zone but not the second, stuff like that. In the end I became dissatisfied because it meant that the difficulty ramp was uneven and sporadic: there was no sense of progression. You warp meaninglessly between levels until the game is over.

[B coma]

I loved Chaotix for what it was - a mostly successful offshoot of Sonic's traditional gameplay, even if it was a bit rough and wonky.

The more you play through the game though, the more apparent it becomes that it was either rushed out the door or just plain left it unfinished - a lot of the levels feel more like templates to me than full fledged anything.

Sega has completely ignored it's existence in every Sonic collection, but if you ask me, it was a hundred times more fun than 3D Blast.

[Pijaibros]

I've always wanted to get a 32x so I can have a proper Sega Tower, but I can never find a working one or even one with all the cables. The 32x had some interesting things on it (particularly Kolibri!) and Chaotix is up there with things I always wanted to tinker with. It always looked like such a goofy experiment when I saw screenshots in the magazines.

[dessgeega]

kolibri is great.
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[dessgeega]

[simplicio]

While we're on hedgehog duty, can someone tell me just why the GBA Sonics are so reviled? I could never quite nail that down (and I haven't bothered to play them). And hey, how do they compare to the Gamegear Sonics?

[SuperWes]

[Alc]

The Advance games don't have as good a game engine as the Megadrive games. The level design in Sonic Advance 1 and 2 is ok, nothing special, but then the Megadrive games weren't massively better. Love them as I do, it's the engine that made Sonic on the Megadrive.

I have a special place in my heart for the first two SMS versions of Sonic, to this day I love playing Sonic 1 especially - Iit's probably the closest in response and feel out of the SMS Sonic games to the Megadrive games. They didn't work well on the Gamegear for a few reasons, most notably the blurry screen and pathetic battery life.

[DonMarco]