A Defense Of Sonic 3D Games
November 26th, 2008Everyone seems to hate 3D Sonic game, and honestly, I’m not really sure why. I loved Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast - although it seems like I’m the only one who did.
Honestly, the 2D games have been an extremely mixed bag for me. The problem with them is that they trade speed for control; as a result, you fly past meticulously created levels so quickly that you have no idea what’s going on, and are challenged mainly to hit buttons reflexively in time to avoid hitting spikes/animals/miscellaneous obstacles. This is the worst sort of Panzer Dragoon-ism, and it surprises me that so many people are so nostalgic for it. Should you dare to slow down enough to locate hidden secrets or examine the landscape, you’ve often inadvertently killed yourself, because speed is so essential to survival. I often felt cheated by the original games for this reason - they were playing me instead of the reverse.
The 3D games dealt with this by making the fastest parts of the game as stylish as possible: Sonic Adventure kept the on-rails theme but focused on making them highly cinematic (think the Whale sequence on the boardwalk at the beginning of the game). Sure, you might not have as much control as in a platformer, but at least you were getting a great experience out of it.
It seems likely that people don’t like the new games because they’re not like the old games, and I think Fallout 3 has shown that that’s simply not a fair criticism. Modifications on a theme are just as valid as slavish recreations.
Posted in Geoff, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360 |
November 26th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
I’m going to go on record as disliking all Sonic games, both 2D and 3D. The 3D ones I just thought were devoid of personality — unless “extremely annoying” counts as personality — but I actively disliked the 2D ones.
It’s always seemed to me that you have two options in a Sonic game:
1. Go really fast. This means you’re unlikely to survive, because you don’t have much time to see what’s coming. If you do survive, as you said, you didn’t really get to see much.
2. Go really slow. This means you’re almost certain to die, because a ton of the game relies on you being fast. You weren’t running? Oh well, have fun falling down a pit and dying.
I don’t understand why anyone likes Sonic games.
November 26th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Apparently I missed a large chunk of the post in which you said exactly what I did. Whoops.
November 27th, 2008 at 8:24 am
I always thought most of the 3D Sonic hate was because they were badly made/designed games…. e.g. poor camera implementation (SA 1&2), poor technical implementation (Sonic the Hedgehog on PS3/360) and also for crossing the human/animal sexual divide along with expanding the number of extraneous characters several fold.
Personally i liked the old Sonic games because it mostly wasn’t about speed - people seem to think that it was all about zooming around and yes, you could play them with the mentality of trying to get to the end of the level the quickest…. but Sonic 1-3 mostly had levels were you had to platform at slower speeds with some few bits inbetween that had you ricocheting off the environment to get to these different platforming parts and this design mentality became more apparent as the Sonic series progressed - it became more about the inbetween getting to speed parts than about the interesting platforming puzzle elements.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Duoae,
I can see too many characters, but I thought the camera complaints were always overblown. Cameras are a perpetual complaint amongst all 3D games, and Sonic wasn’t a particularly egregious offender.