I’ve given this post a sensationalist title with the dual purposes of interesting those of you who are flicking randomly through the archives and in the hope that it will increase traffic to my webpage. I do not hate Sonic the Hedgehog in the sense of a deep and irreversible loathing, but I do dislike his games. And not just the gimmicky crap-arse 3D games and their infamous camera issues – I don’t like the “classic” 2D games either.
Before I continue, I have to say this in the interests of fairness; I am a bit of a Nintendo fanboy. This isn’t ye olde Sega vs. Nintendo rivalry, though, since that doesn’t really exist anymore – this is just my opinions on Sonic games, which unlike most Nintendo fanboys I intend to express eloquently.
What I do like: It would be unfair if we didn’t discuss what I do like about Sonic games before getting down to the nitty-gritty. First things first; I love Sonic games when all they’re asking me to do is hold down left on the D-pad (or forward on the control stick) and look at the pretty lights. Sonic games do this very well indeed, primarily because of the second thing which I like; graphics. The graphics in the 2D games are excellently drawn and work fluidly, and the backgrounds go well with the stage. The 3D games (when your camera isn’t stuck in the wall) are also very pretty, because they look good without looking “realistic” (a games-industry codename for “brown and grey”). Sonic Team do great cartoony-stylized graphics. The level design in Sonic games is also very good, especially the “shortcut” mechanic in all the 2D and most 3D Sonic games – it’s a nice way of giving skilled players a tangible reward for their awesomeness. There is also one (and only one) Sonic game which I think is an unappreciated masterpiece – yes, masterpiece. I’m not going to tell you what it is just yet, though, because when I do you will stop reading and pick up your guns. So now let’s get into the business of what I don’t like.
Story: The original Sonic games had a very silly story, and that’s fine. All the games from that era had ridiculous stories (a certain plumber who eats mushrooms to grow bigger and stomps on evil turtles springs to mind). However, the success of these stories lay in the fact that they didn’t try to explain themselves or take themselves seriously. Gameplay came before story.
Of course, our modern gaming world is quite heavily concerned with its storytelling. I like a game to have a good story, but I don’t really care how said story is actually told, because I’ll just read the plot summary on Wikipedia three months before it comes out in Australia. My personal favourite method of storytelling is the tried-and-true RPG method of combining dialogue, cutscenes and events into one big multilayered tapestry of a story, although I do love a good scripted scene. But Sonic is lagging at least five years behind this trend.
To clarify; there are two things that the story of a game can be – either a) silly or b) sensible. If a game is silly, then it has to “know” that it’s silly. Banjo-Kazooie had an immensely silly story, but that’s okay because it didn’t take itself too seriously – fun gameplay and joke-filled dialogue cleared that problem up. The Halo series and most other “hardcore” games take themselves very seriously, but in doing so there is a very strong sense of the life or death of the protagonist and all his friends/family/pets/acquaintances/species/enemies resting on your actions. Some games (such as my aforementioned favourite Sonic game ever) fall in between these two extremes, and they generally do so by having a sensible-ish plotline but not taking themselves too seriously. A few games are both silly and sensible (anything by Tim Schaefer, for example) but these are rare and hard to pull off.
Sonic Team have experimented with both “silly” and “sensible” in the post-3D era, and have pulled both off really badly. A lot of their games (like Sonic Heroes and Rush) have fairly silly plots, but for some reason Sonic Team feels compelled to explain, explain, explain EVERYTHING instead of just letting the gamers get on with it. Of course, some newer Sonic games (Shadow the Hedgehog, that uber-crappy 2006 360/PS3 Sonic the Hedgehog) try to have sensible storylines, but they cross the line from “sensible” into “angsty and complicated.” There are so many characters, all with complicated motivations, but it’s hard to get over the fact that you’re talking to a fox with helicopter tails. A blue hedgehog who runs at the speed of sound is silly, Sonic Team. Just admit it and get on with hiring some comedians to write your dialogue.
Rings: Boy oh boy oh boy, do I despise ye olde ring system which Sonic Team feels compelled to put in every single Sonic game. A lot of old games have limited health systems, where it only takes a few hits to send you to Arcadion – Mario games and Crash Bandicoot spring to mind. A few modern games also have super-punishing health bars – play any FPS on Super-Hard Mode or equivalent and you’ll see what I mean. However, most of these games have updated their punishing health bars either by adding a) health packs b) a forgiving continue-point system or c) a Super-Hard Mode so that you’ll only be as fragile as a glass statue if you want to be. Not so with Sonic.
How many of those of you who’ve ever played a Sonic game have ever been charging along at a few thousand kilometres an hour with 99 rings before – BOOM – you go crashing into an enemy which you didn’t see until AFTER you’d hit it (see below for more on this) and you’re riiiight back to zero rings? That would be all of you, right? The rings system is obscenely punishing, because there’s no tangible difference between one ring or ten thousand, apart from those extremely hard-to-get extra lives. It makes boss battles much harder than they would otherwise be, too, especially since bosses’ health bars always reset after your death.
There are some Sonic games which do something good with their rings, my all-time favourite Sonic game and Shadow the Hedgehog among them. In these games, when you get hit, you don’t lose all of your hard-earned rings when you take a hit – you only lose, say, ten or twenty of them. This gives you a much better reason to collect rings than an ephemeral extra life, because you can stay alive for longer off more rings. Sonic Team; I want to see this system (or better yet, a health bar, but you can’t change everything at once) in ALL future Sonic games. Change with the times, guys!
Difficulty: This is a biggie, especially in the 2D games. I think that even the hardcorest Sonic fanboys would agree that Sonic games look kiddy. They’ve got lots of bright colours and are filled with anthropomorphic animals beating the crap out of evil robots – that’s about half of all kids’ TV shows in summary. However, the difficulty of Sonic games, which varies from “rather tough” to “screaming at the television” makes them inappropriate for a younger audience. I’m not asking Sonic Team to make Sonic games look less kiddy (or, Godot forbid, “realistic”), but rather using this as a critical device to frame the obscene difficulty of their games.
The number one difficulty problem in Sonic games is the rings system, as mentioned above. The instant-loss-of-all-rings-issue is especially bad when you combine it with Sonic’s trademark – his speed. Quite frequently in the 2D games, especially on small screens like the NDS screen, you’ll go crashing into an enemy or obstacle so fast that you didn’t see them until post-crash. You can’t honestly expect me to believe that a hedgehog who runs fast enough to break down giant stone walls would be knocked for six by a pathetic little robot, can you? The 3D games at least partially eliminate this difficulty thanks to the wonders of perspective, but the crappy camera angles still kind of ruin it. As far as I can work out, you can only successfully avoid all enemies and obstacles in a 2D Sonic game by either having the reflexes of a panther with ADHD (which not many of us lethargic gamers do) or by memorizing the level layouts exactly over a period of several hours. Kids don’t have that kind of patience, and nor do I.
Another problem is Sonic’s lack of traction. Okay, if he’s running at the speed of sound, I can kind of understand him skidding a bit when he wants to stop, but the 3D Sonic games have him slide around like a greased ice-skater even at low speeds. It’s bloody hard to line up jumps correctly when one mistap of the control stick can send you skidding into oblivion. On that subject, let’s talk about jump control. For some reason, whenever Sonic’s feet leave the ground, he is no longer in control of his own destiny but is instead bound to continue moving in whatever direction he happened to be travelling at the time. Yes, this is how real-world physics works, but Sonic isn’t realistic (graphics- or physics-wise); it’s cartoony and silly. In platformers we expect some control over our jumps, please. Whenever a Sonic game decides to go into “platformer mode,” you just know that thanks to your skiddiness and lack of jump control, many lives will be lost to the grim pit of death, and you’ll have to make your way back to the platforms from the continue point, which is always about six kilometres away, only to face mocking pitty oblivion once more.
Ultimately, I think that there is a way to fix Sonic games, and bring them up from “crap” to at least “average” or even slightly better. That way is this; TEST TEST TEST. A lot of Sonic games are riddled with bugs and difficulty spikes which make anyone who knows anything about the gaming industry say “Why didn’t the testers pick that one up?” Honestly, I’d swear that some Sonic games (crappy 2006 Sonic, anyone?) hadn’t been tested at all. Sonic Team: TEST YOUR GAMES. And don’t just get mad Sonic fanboys to test them – get ordinary gamers, even non-gamers. Pull folks off the street if you have to. Maybe then Sonic will turn into a game hero who is actually on par with our modern idols instead of a buggy slippery blue piece of crap.
Moral message aside, it’s now time for me to reveal my favourite Sonic game ever. Drum rolls and fanfares, please…
Sonic and the Secret Rings.
Read that again. I’ll wait.
Before you grab your torches and pitchforks, you may want to know why I like this game. You wanna know why? Because SatSR removes just about all of the problems which infest other Sonic games. Granted, it’s not without its problems – more than a few glitches slipped through the testers’ rather holey net, and the multiplayer – a cheap Mario Party rip-off – would have been much better as a multiplayer version of the single-player, with characters actually racing each other. Gameplay-wise, the reversing mechanic sucks and should have been assigned to a button, and Darkspine Sonic (this game’s equivalent of Super Sonic) is for some reason far, far worse than regular Sonic, making the real final boss battle horribly annoying and difficult. But in my opinion, SatSR fixes just about all of the problems listed above.
Basically, I think that Sonic Team were dead wrong when they decided to make their 3D Sonic games into platformers. It just doesn’t work that way. However, SatSR feels a lot more like a racing game, and this is exactly how it should be. It doesn’t over- or under-use the Wii Remote, a problem which plagues a lot of Wii games – it works just right. The RPG mechanics are great, because they’re quite simple to use but with many hidden depths to plough.
SatSR deals quite well with the problems of story. The story is fairly silly and treats itself as such in part, but also manages to get a moderately serious tone to it. The rings system only shaves off 20 rings per hit, and you can reduce it to 10 with a skill. While there’s still the odd difficulty spike, at least it’s possible to just go to another mission and try it out – something rather lacking from most Sonic games. The addition of a brake button and the ability to instantly drop down from a jump fixes up the platforming pretty well, and the Wii-remote-powered Homing Attack works a hell of a lot better than those pinpoint-timing systems found in most 3D games.
Unfortunately, SatSR crashed pretty heavily, and Sonic Team went back to their old ways with its sequel, Sonic and the Black Knight, a game which I have little to no interest in. Ah well. That’s what the internet is for; complaining about shit you don’t like.
Peace out,
God of Pie.
Observe, god damn it!
