My Review of Sonic Frontiers
xeiaso.net
xeiaso.net
However, this was also interesting:
> They estimate Sonic Forces to take about 4 hours. My first playthrough was three hours long. At a $40 game, that was an absolutely awful value for the money.
I've always wondered how that fares against other forms of entertainment, time-wise. I'm sure that many forms of entertainment cost more than approx. 13 USD an hour and people wouldn't bat an eye at them.
And yet, making a video game can be a huge ordeal that involves programmers, game and level designers, visual and audio artists of all sorts, marketing, management and everything else you'd find in many orgs out there. It's a software project that has pretty great complexity and for whatever reason, oftentimes tight deadlines and overworking.
It feels to me that games can only be as affordable as they are in the first place due to economies of scale and being able to sell as many digital copies as needed to as many people as are interested. If you have an employee whose labor costs around 100k USD per year, a single copy of a game that's 13 USD buys you less than an hour of their work.
On an unrelated note, I wonder whatever happened to Sonic Colors: Ultimate. Some people were really happy to see it be developed with the Godot engine, but apparently there were lots of issues with bugs and whatnot upon release.
Sonic was built on the assumption that you would learn layouts and speed run the game before speed running was well established. Not work your way through the levels and beat them with much of an “on the fly” planning and execution like in something like Mario.
Something like Mario Maker is sort of the hard delineation between the two. It’s hard to enjoy a good sonic level on the first pass.
Sonic Adventures 1 and 2 were, imo, mostly successful because they were just really cool and aesthetic. The orcas from the first level of one and the truck from the first level of two are iconic. Perhaps the first games I can remember to offer that prepackaged hand crafted AAA feel that has leaked into other genres these days.
My earliest gaming that I could really put time into (ignoring stuff like playing SMB3 for a bit at a neighbors' house, or PC games like "Gizmos and Gadgets") was the Mario Land games on Game Boy, and the 90's Sonic PC ports (Sonic CD and Sonic 3&K), and those are still the kind of level design that think is the best. A 2D level should have variety, every part should be memorable and unique, and it should want me to play it again.
I hate the normal 2D Mario level design style (SMB1, SMB2J, SMB3, SMW1, and NewSMB series) because so many 2D Mario levels feel like they take one obstacle, then use some procedural generation to repeat it any pad out the stage. Too many scroll purely in one direction, and lack interesting secrets or alternate paths.
Mario Land 1/2 and the Genesis Sonic game levels have landmarks and parts with obstacles or layouts that were totally unique or only repeated once, so you knew for sure where in the level you were. One of the first levels in SMW is just a bunch of spinning platforms in a row. If you were shown a short gameplay clip of that level, could you tell if that's the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th spinning platform? Probably not, but there's only one place in Green Hill with a checkpoint between two s-pipes, so you'd know exactly were in the game that is if you saw it.
With SMB1, the repetition and one-way level design is understandable, due to technical limitations. But it stayed with Mario, and even in the New SMB games, many levels emulate the same, boring linear style.
Besides the Game Boy Mario games, Western SMB2/Doki Doki Panic and Yoshi's Island have good, interesting levels. The GBA and DS Sonic games' levels are poor because really fail at having good landmarks and the levels feel same-y.
In Mario Land 2 you could find secret exits that would lead to entirely new levels. Sonic levels have paths though the level that are more difficult to stay on, so you want to try again to see what you missed when the first time though. Sonic 1 may have levels like Marble Zone that don't really fit the idea of going fast, but they're still interesting and enjoyable if you look past that, far better than the average SMB3 or SMW level. Other 2D Mario games did have some exploration in bits, but it wasn't has good as Land 2 or Sonic.
Also, the ground controls for console 2D Mario kind of suck (the air controls are fine, though). SMB1's controls were good compared to other games of the time, but they've aged poorly and don't really fit the game. If you want to move at a decent speed, you have to hold B all the time for some reason, Mario's acceleration is too low, and I guess he greases his shoes considering how he decelerates. The Game Boy Mario games have much better, responsive controls than the "normal" 2D Mario games (but you still have to hold B, though). Sonic has the spindash, so he can accelerate fine, and his deceleration feels right.
I've wondered if my opinion of the Genesis 2D Sonic's was because I had played the games so much because I didn't have other options and I learned to accept any flaws. I wasn't a fan of spindash-less Sonic 1 at first, but when I tried hacking the game and ended up replaying parts of it a lot, I started to appropriate it more, so maybe repetition was a part of it? But later then Sonic Mania came out, and it was exactly what I thought I wanted, I enjoyed it as much I thought I would.
Sonic can probably be played multiple times over if you're going for a high score, but if it isn't engaging enough for you to buy into that the value or cost per hour is pretty low. Some games encourage replayability with multiplayer competitions, some with randomization or procedural generation, some with branching storylines or multiple endings, etc. High scores are a classic way to encourage it, but they work best at a local arcade or when you have friends / family to compete with at home. If it's just you playing through a Sonic game at home it can feel a bit lackluster for many to play it over.
A 4 hour completion time for a platformer if you're good at it would be totally fine, the problem is that Sonic Forces set the bar so low that everyone can do that first try without any practice.
Sonic games usually have alternate paths and tricky sections you need to practice to do quickly, so you might beat the game in 3 hours while finding all the collectibles, but only after practicing the run for much longer than that.
If you're looking for a 3D Sonic game that plays _like butter_, check out Spark the Electric Jester 3 on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1629530/Spark_the_Electri...
It's fantastic and I'm gonna end up writing about it at some point.