[General Discussion] Sonic the Hedgehog - Mediocre Madness!!!

i personally don't think they're doing that poorly of a job. it's quite hard to choose the sort of people you're not going to listen to when designing a game. there are TONS of voices that want their own image, and as the designers start hearing the echoes, they lose focus. I thought sonic adventure was pretty good. sonic adventure 2, while lacking adventure, was quite long in itself. i almost collected all of the emblems in adventure, while adventure 2 i'm somewhere over 3/4. this length in time that its taking me is something i appreciate. the same reason that i liked s&k+sonic3. when locked on, it took quite some time to finish the game and get all the emeralds/master emeralds. this depth just seems to have been missing lately... i didn't have much of a problem with the sonic advance series either. the first one was pretty decent. the twist of a couple new features was ok by me. in SAdventure 2, they corrected the "hold right and jump" problem a little by adding more pits and those SP rings required to enter the bizzare bonus stage , which required some stage scavenging to find (this difficulty took some getting used to, but i thought was pretty decent). Sonic Advance 3 seemed to be a bit faster (speed) than the previous 2, but less linear. with the addition of even more places to fall to one's death, i couldn't hope to clear gaps that were too large to begin with. finding the chao/key in the stages to get to the bonus stage seemed less tedious than the SP rings, but less difficult. i played a little bit of shadow the hedgehog, and i have to say that it was made pretty well for the type of game it was trying to be. it didn't give the appearance of a full on adventure to last. if i had liked to run around shooting/beating up enemies in my path to get to a goal, it would have been more enjoyable... but i just had no motive to continue playing. the "go fast for 5 seconds, then stop completely to clear the enemy-congested path" thing just didn't work for me as well as the "hold right and jump to avoid enemies" gameplay. The older games relied a bit on "knowing when you were wasting time" killing every enemy in the stage just to get through smoothly. rather than engaging in a risk of losing all of my rings, i liked being able to avoid enemies rather than having to have to stop to make room. i dont mind this digression from "mainstream sonic", but having another release of a mainstream sonic title would be nice.

without having an understanding of where "crappy" games lie, where's the line for good games going to be drawn?

Double Post:
-please excuse the ommitance of paragraphs...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by soniclover

Well, when I think of what makes a crappy game, I think of some questions....

i was stressing the contrast between the crappy/not crappy games. all of the crappy games make me realize that my favorites are so much better, so it's not a complete waste to have games of a series that are worse than eachother. It might even be a marketing strategy to keep the fans buying intent on getting something good, "like back in the day" (;^_^).
Its also the different margin of audience they're selling the "obscure" sonic games to. im sure that out there somewhere are people that refused to play anything with sonic on it, but because sonic riders was a racing game, they gave it a shot. so these multi-flavored titles could possibly be a reach to the people that aren't familiar with sonic in hopes of reeling them in when there is a major release. these kids growing up weren't raised by megadrive/genesis like some of us, so they dont know much about all the 2d heritage behind sonic. speaking of which, sonic gems, and mega collection+ were quite nice. i'm quite glad that they felt like bringing back the classics at least. when was the last time mario had a collection????

How ya doing, buddy?