Imagine how a platformer from that time used to be experienced: every single attempt at a playthrough consisted in replaying the entire game from start to finish or, if the player was still unable to beat the game, to the hardest point that could be reached before losing all lives and continues. Each attempt at completing the game pushed the finish line further away until the game was done.
A very serious problem with this classic platforming structure is the piling up at every replay of those "beaten and frankly pointless" in-between levels. Replaying those early levels feels like a chore, and soon it turn joyful platforming into a dull repetition exercise. Now, in 2017 level 1-1 of Mario is considered a masterpiece in player learning, but my child self who replayed it a billion times in the '80-'90 while dealing with 8-1 to 8-4 knew it as something different: a fucking chore where I would farm coins/lives to allow me to stay longer in the levels I actually cared about. Mario dropped the ball on this problem by making players just skip most levels thanks to cheats, but imagine if a game had something that could give value to those old mastered levels, something that gave an added value to remembering paths and flawless repetition.
In Sonic, the player's memory of levels and the ability to execute the same set of jumps again and again turns that platforming dead weight into visual spectacle, with the added benefit of allowing the player to fast track the beaten path as he focuses on the real challenge. And the best part is that the player does not notice it happening: that's the genius idea behind momentum based platforming. The player doesn't need to break a level with an exploit or a hard coded cheat, nor to learn a new set of tools or crazy skills that allows him to go faster and do things he could not before: he will naturally redo his actions with less mistakes, and less mistakes will make his momentum not drop, which will make his playthrough naturally faster. Not only that, but this extra speed will naturally lead to some new passages that were too hard or just ignored the first time around. The way I played Green Hill Act 2 the day i got the game was radically different from week 1, and completely different from month 1.
However while speed is great and gives a reason to revisit and enjoy old content... Isn't it all a visual trick and a slight convenience? But we want real gameplay! Not gimmicks! I mean, the player is STILL replaying the same levels and redoing the same thing again and again until it becomes routine, right? If only the game had something that forced the player to go out of their comfort zone, forced them to question if their choice of path made in the very first playthough was the best choice... something like a premium currency, a currency tied to speed in some way...
Rings as health items are to Mario's mushrooms what Halo's regenerating health was to Half Life, it turns a rigid clockwork system into a lax sandbox that doesn't feel like castrating the player for mistakes, in fact, getting hit is its own procedural minigame that leads to some really amazing moments (My last ring!). How rings are tied to speed? The first playthrough the player will inevitably rely on monitors to get the easiest fix of rings required to get a life or enter a bonus stage, however players who are enjoying the replay of the first levels as speedrunners will naturally tend to shift their focus from still targets to "ring clouds" along their chosen path. Finding ring clouds and the best rings/speed ratio paths is the main motivator into experimenting in old beaten levels: after all, you still need to pile up lives for the more challenging parts and get to those bonus stages.
Summing it up, that's how Sonic works:
Day 1 - It's a normal platformer, and if you don't believe it, they put spikes everywhere to remind you.
Day 3 - It's a normal platformer where you start to get fast in the earlier part without noticing.
Day 7 - You noticed how fast it can be, now you tend to re-optimize the early level paths and wonder what you've been missing. You've also likely beaten the pure platformer playthough, most platformers of that time would be DONE right now.
...
Day 30 - You are super sonic.
That was hilarious. And a multipage thread like this on gaf it is aswellI don't know how some of you manage to even put on pants in the morning.
Never underestimate the lengths people will go to to tell you that one of gamings most beloved franchises has secretly always been awful and no one realised.17 pages for a thread on how to play Sonic... how?
It's a platformer. You go from left to right. Collect 100 rings and gain a life.
Because people turned it into yet another system/game wars so page count increases.17 pages for a thread on how to play Sonic... how?
It's a platformer. You go from left to right. Collect 100 rings and gain a life.
Because while great games, the Genesis ones mainly, people began to see beyond the illusion of marketing and superficial aspects. This took some shine out of Sonic in retrospective.Never underestimate the lengths people will go to to tell you that one of gamings most beloved franchises has secretly always been awful and no one realised.
Sounds like you've figured out what many of us have known for years... That Sonic games are terrible.
Yep, much worse gameplay and design than Mario games. But...gotta go fast!
Here's the trick:I don't know how some of you manage to even put on pants in the morning.
17 pages for a thread on how to play Sonic... how?
It's a platformer. You go from left to right. Collect 100 rings and gain a life.
First time playing Sonic it took me awhile to get the flow of the game down.
You just got to keep playing the stages over and over again until you remember the route then you have a lot of control of the game.
There's section in the stage where you got to go fast and there's sections where you have to slow down and explore. Once you figure out when to speed up and slow down and to be able to memories where everything is, the game becomes a blast..
However, I can totally seeing that as an issue because not everyone wants to play a stage over and over again especially if they beat it once already. I feel like it's an acquired taste.
What is going on in this thread.
This is how video games worked. Certainly no one is going to beat the game in one play through, sonny. By nature of the challenge of beating a game, you would end up playing it many times. At some point, you'd be familiar enough with all the stages, hazards, secrets, that you'd be able to successfully move through all the stages to the end of the game. It's possible you may never beat the game.
It was always fun to do both on different playthroughs for me. Added replay value to what are fairly short games. Plus you do need to build up speed to actually reach some areas so I wouldn't call that a conflict.It's not about beating the game though. It's about just speeding through and missing everything because the game is designed for you to go fast but explore at the same time so it's like a conflict within itself.
.I don't know how some of you manage to even put on pants in the morning.
Nobody's asking for hand-holding tutorials; what they're asking for is a sense of conceptual elegance. If you think it's obvious, you had better be prepared to make the case.
Exactly what I was thinking. What is this thread?I somehow figured this out at 6 years old...
what they're asking for is a sense of conceptual elegance. If you think it's obvious, you had better be prepared to make the case.
Literally every single question in the OP can be applied to Mario, Donkey Kong Country or basically any other standard 2D sidescroller.
And the answers are the same as in every single standard 2D sidescroller ever made: If you want to go fast, go fast. If you want to explore and go for collectibles and hidden goods, go for collectibles and hidden goods.
It's simple: you play it like literally every single other 2D platformer ever.
You go through the level how you see fit on the first run through. If you are a completionist then try to get all the items and kill all the enemies (otherwise just skip those out of the way) and if you like exploration then try to explore as much of the map as possible (otherwise just try to find the critical path). Once you are familiar with the level, usually after beating it a few times (or even once) then you generally start trying to rush through the maps as fast as possible.
After Super Mario Bros. 1, 2D platformers added the ability to sometimes go backwards(!) so make sure you head back now and again whenever you think you might have missed something.
And just like the NES Super Mario Bros. games, there is a timer so make sure you finish the map before that expires.
Just play it like every single other classic 2D platformer. A bunch of us figured this out before we were 10.
There are not many classic 2D platformers that you can't get the most enjoyment out of on the first play through of a level. Memorization and repetition is not a good basis for level design.
There are not many classic 2D platformers that you can't get the most enjoyment out of on the first play through of a level. Memorization and repetition is not a good basis for level design.
Y cant metroid crawl?
There are not many classic 2D platformers that you can't get the most enjoyment out of on the first play through of a level. Memorization and repetition is not a good basis for level design.
I seem to remember there being many one-time skippable items, events, and sections in Donkey Kong Country and a few in Mario 3.
Rogue-likes are basically an entire genre of memorization and repetition... and there's also old arcade games like Donkey Kong, which are pattern based and essentially perfected via just memorizing layouts and repeating them over and over.
There's nothing inherently bad game design about repetition and memorization.
great fucking postI'm from the camp that asserts Sonic was never great (I'll give you good, but not great), so take this as you will, but the shoot-from-the-hip defensiveness and condescension in this thread has gone a long, long way towards persuading me that maybe people aren't joking when they say the fan base is the worst thing about this series.
Since many of you clearly decided to read the thread title as uncharitably as possible and hit Reply without thinkinggotta go fast, right?I think it's worth emphasizing that a lot of scepticism or befuddlement towards Sonic comes from players who are otherwise very experienced at 2D platformers, particularly from the Nintendo school of design. In a way it's not all that helpful to lump all of them into a single genre (a mistake people still make in spades with "Metroidvania") and I think the diversity of side-scroller design, and the unique design personality afforded each distinct IP, was a lot clearer in the SNES/Genesis era when this format was the biggest game in town. The question here isn't how to get through the stages from left to right, but how to have fun doing it, and I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking that Sonic sends mixed messages about how to get the most out of reading the stages and exploring them. That's certainly how I felt on returning to the Genesis games on the Wii VC as a significantly more experienced and design-literate player than I was back when the Nintendo/Sega rivalry was at its peak.
With this in mind, I appreciate the posts that actually try to break down the arcade design philosophy underlying Sonic and answer the question of what kind of mindset it takes to not only play the games but enjoy them. The thing about Sonic is that there is this massive discontinuity between the two separate experiences of speeding through the environment and plodding around if you run into spikes, a lack of gradation along a spectrum from one end to the other that makes these experiences feel like one game instead of two (with one of them, the slow one, leaving a strong and encumbering impression that you are doing it wrong). It's like the Baby Mario sequences in Yoshi's Island, except all the timeeither you're in the flow or you're stumbling. So it's illuminating, and important for the sake of conversation, to look into whether Sonic benefits from a different approach in terms of how to read the stage, because forming a mental map of the layout certainly doesn't work the same way it does in a Mario game, where you can do it all in one brisk pass.
DKC is a good point of comparison here, not least because the original game's reputation has faded in its own right, only for the series to come back in exceptional form. DKCTF is the game I hold up as the king of speedy momentum-driven platformers, and a lot of it comes down to two things: (a) the mechanical continuity between the slow, exploratory experience with your eyes peeled for every secret and the frantic speed-run route where every enemy and stage element is like a boost pad; and (b) the quality, shared with Mario, that if your mastery of the mechanics is good, you always, always have a chance to read the screen and react no matter how fast you are going, even in an apparent move-or-die stage like the notorious Bopopolis. In my experience with the original Sonic games, you don't really get that same window of reaction conjoining the fast and slow game and letting you swap smoothly from one to the other. The skills at mentally mapping out a stage layout that you might cultivate in a Nintendo platformer aren't really transferable.
So either you bounce off the design philosophyI sure did, and so have many others by the looks of itor you find another way into it, like an RPG packrat adjusting to a game designed around aggressively spending consumables or breaking weapons. And if there is another way into Sonic, a more pleasurable way, it's useful to know what that is. I'm surely not the only one here in the position of contemplating taking a chance on Sonic Mania despite never really clicking with the series before, and this is practically the only way to inform the decision.
I'd like to fall for a Sonic game for once, and this one looks like it has a real shot, but from my lukewarm experience with the originals, it's hard to tell. The people selling Mania the hardest are the incredibly Nintendo-literate players who had the same reservations about Sonic's core paradigm but tell me the level design has markedly improved in the execution. But I'm still on the fence for a reason, and those of you here who are quick to assume this position must be disingenuous are too busy revealing yourselves as either poor readers or poor players to offer much in the way of insight.
It's not that people who can't get into Sonic don't know how to play platformers; it's that there has long been reason to suspect that, much like a lot of films or books I can name, Sonic might fall into the category of things that are paradoxically harder to appreciate the deeper you get into a medium. The snots and boors in this thread scrambling to announce that Sonic's priorities are obvious aren't doing the series any favours. Nobody's asking for hand-holding tutorials; what they're asking for is a sense of conceptual elegance. If you think it's obvious, you had better be prepared to make the case.
Excuse you? Every single Megaman would like to have a word with you. Memorization and repetition are perfectly fine especially if they in cloud twists here and there to keep you on your toes, which mania does fantastically.
These levels are neither "awesome" or difficult to make in any way bar being willing to sit and `test` your route works once before uploading. With the trails in the editor you can lay out the exact path with whatever margin of error you care to leave in (adding hazards that you hit if you `fail` to match it), and after that it's just adjusting the timing on the elements like that shell to make sure holding forward at the right angle will always hit it after it rebounds. Go into the editor and actually TRY to make a `hardest ever` like this. It is NOT hard to do. Finishing them is just a matter of guessing what that person wanted you to do in their little prescripted sequence of moves and being willing to sit there and redo until you get the script right.
You don't play these levels. You copy a predetermined `win` path that has been set up to kill you if you don't match it with the degree of preciseness determined by the original creator - who already knows it