MightyHedgehog
Member
I hate to turn this into a Sonic thread, but Sonic isn't really about running fast even if Sega heavily featured the speed at which you could move as faster than other platformers of the time...it was marketing and a point of differentiation. Sonic is really about controlling your speed to maximize your jumps as well as avoid and destroy enemies. If you're running into stuff often, it's probably because you're not controlling it more carefully, though there is a fair amount of memorization of what's ahead (or around, as it pertains to Sonic), as with any game.
Compared to the straightforward and more traditional Mario-like obstacle courses in Bonk, I can see how someone could find it confusing and haphazard rather than complex and non-linear. The paths in levels crisscross each other and navigating that spaghetti design is a defining part of later games as most platformers were all about left-to-right, right-to-left paths when there weren't on a rail otherwise. It's not for everyone, as it can seem like a bunch of random level design barfed up.
As for the delay in order to reach full speed, well, that's also a point of differentiation that can annoy, but I think Bonk had a similar element to its control over the character when timing the amount of forward movement for jumps and bounces to understand the level of inertia for that you have to grow accustomed to in order to play proficiently. Getting up a steep angle required doing something right before you could, so hitting the appropriate level prop some ways away and/or finding the right path and running & jumping & bouncing it well gave you the speed and/or height necessary to overcoming it was necessary. This sometimes necessitated traversing two or three screens in one of the cardinal directions if not also requiring some combination of angled movement to accomplish. You hit these sorts of walls far less in Bonk because the game isn't concerned with anything that isn't on-screen at once for progression, so you just have to move over to an appropriate level prop nearby to get past the tall ledge or mash (or rapid fire) the button to climb with your teeth...while, at its most complex, you would sometimes need to successfully bounce a string of enemies on the path to reach secrets or a higher path that led to them.
Bonk had spinning to lengthen lateral air movement along with flowers and enemy bouncing along much more simply laid-out paths to reach the level's end. Sonic had springs, boosters, and bumpers as well as enemy bouncing. And then there are the railed tunnels and pipes crisscrossing the level layout. Because of the highly vertical and horizontal level traversal in Sonic, you had to develop a greater understanding of the zone's parts, their positions, and work out finding best way to connect the dots to find the paths that would define how far you could get across many areas while turning you around in later areas to penalize the player for simply running right on what is essentially the path of least resistance. It takes a desire to revisit, explore, and get everything within the time limit to really enjoy the limits of Sonic and the tight ten-minute timer really requires replays because there's no way to understand later levels within the time allotted given how big and maze-y they can be. Bonk has very little reason to come back and learn more about what's possible on a level, like so many simpler games. That's fine, as that's what many people like, even preferring that over games that feel too open-ended in their level structure, like the classic 16-bit Sonics.
It's fine that you don't agree, man, but I just can't get down with Bonk being in the same room as Sonic for control and playability, especially as the series heads into Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Bonk was a nice way to make a focused, pre-Sonic action-platformer without too much trademark Mario stuff defining its central design as it did for so many platformers. Mario and Sonic may be seen as opposite but equal sides of a coin, but Sega's game has more in common with Turrican and other jump & run games than Mario when it comes to level layouts that define the progression.
Sorry for the unorganized and random stream of consciousness post, but Bonk is just not comparable for playability if you can play a Sonic decently well to complete it. Bonk is like an arcade game, like Contra and Sonic is like Turrican...or something like that.
And, I'm spent on this junk. Sonic rules, Bonk drools, and that's all there is to it.
