A bit tangential but I've never understood old school sonic games. So much of it seems to be blindly running or being funneled through a chaotic level. There's this sense that you have speed and it feels good, but because you don't know what's coming next, it's very easy to lose that speed, which feels really bad. I feel like the intention of these games was to memorize the levels so that you could actually play them quickly. Whereas in a mario game you can generally improv your way through a level on skill alone. I generally only wanted to play through a game once, and sonic always felt very jarring, like the level design forced me to stop because I didn't know there was going to be 3 random reversals and a loop. The good feeling parts were almost autoscrollers. The challenging parts tended to involve sonic moving very slowly with his awkward jump physics.

Curious if someone can fill me in on what I was missing. I tried Sonic Mania recently and felt the same general frustration.