I agree. Out running the screen in Sonic 1 feels so fast.
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and running so fast in Sonic Adventure that a geometry quirk flings you into the sky or out of bounds is even better
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What is everyoneâs strong opinion on what Sonic should be?
as someone once said on the old ic/sb forums: the animated intro and outro of Sonic CD, but playable
that was the gist of it, anyway- or at least i think it was
no idea how this would work, admittedly (classic 2D Sonic but with more notes from Shinobi III? 3D open-world parkour sandbox? interactive movie Ă la Dragonâs Lair?), but thatâs why iâm not a game developer
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That game is Sonic Frontiers and it rocks.
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but what if sonic frontiers had guilty gear-level cel shading
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yes, i agree
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as i said at some point on sb1: aztec-themed harvest moon/sim city hybrid thing where you play as tikal
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also i think itâs legitimately wild that there isnât a dedicated Sonic rhythm game, his name is Sonic for christsakes
just do a riff on Sayonara Wild Hearts, but like in the Bonus Stages or maybe some kind of weird Vib Ribbon platformer thing or whatever, DJ Hero but Orbot & Cubot just dicking around in Ableton with Tailstube wrapping mashing tracks from the previous games. it could be anything, itâs all there!
unless they do a full on Sonic Mania 2 or make Sonic Utopia an actual game (not like Frontiers which feels more like an OK Sonic game dipped in Nier Sauce), iâm not that interested
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I have a younger friend in the neighborhood who throws a âSonic 2006â party every year, and at one of the first ones I went to, he had Sonic 2 set up on a projector. I started playing it and talking about the game and discovered that, actually, they didnât really know the 2D games at all. I was a little surprised, and this isnât a criticism on them, but it was the first time iâd encountered IRL the disparity between what Sonic is to different people
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Sonic should still be a terrorist working with his Archie comics friends, and one out of every three games should be absurdly bug ridden messes to give us all something to laugh about.
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This is more of a dream:
Ive always wanted a mission based semi-open world game flavored like the Archie Comics / Sat-Am / Sonic anime with a hang-out-y home base and a robotropolis you can learn and sneak around in.
As you save animal pals from roboticization they move back into and expand the village / become available for missions. Maybe they open a Chao shop or a coffee house.
Losing missions might mean losing people to eggman.
Prime fodder for a character creator. Like you make an OC and your Sonic OC can go on away mission to other peopleâs gameâs, pawn system style. âIve been here before! A submarine base is down this chute!â
If you had a like a princess / prince mode you could just send teams out to fight, manage the village and never go running around.
Id have mission areas indicated somehow to prevent the sort of aimlessness of open world design for people who dont want it. If you go too far off course your team is going to be like wtf sonic, where are you going? And then you just get a prompt to return to where you left the area or you can just ignore them. No fields. Absolutely no expanses. Its a forest, a city, a factory, a beach, a sanctuary, a ruin, a volcano, a highway in the sky, a theme park but never an expanse.
Everything about the game should be busy and all about forward momentum and looking cool.
Imagining super speed / slow motion / rewind / shoe heat
There would be rewind and slow motion modes. During slow mo you can do things like pull 90 degree turns at full speed, jump off of falling debris, make faces at eggman for style points etc. A long enough slow motion session ending would trigger a full-speed instant replay you can watch with another button press. Lethal events could also trigger slow motion giving you time to pull off cool saves or rewind to a better position. Pulling back on the stick to slow down would also set a your lean angle. Full lean at a high speed is like sliding into home plate.
I also think a shoe heat meter would be really fun. Sonic has more grip once his shoe reaches medium temp but you can over heat them or set them on fire with excessive super speed maneuvering and hard braking.
You could also create a shoe-shop system with customizable kicks.
mission stuff
Id have Hero difficulty where the game gets easier the more people you lose and Evil difficulty which does the opposite.
You take out an eggman outpost and eventually the forest retakes it.
Robotropolis zones would have infrastructure you can disrupt and things you can steal to stop various schemes. So everyoneâs approach could be different. Everyone you save knows something about something so saving the right combo of animals pals would give you the outlines of new missions or things to search for.
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While I think the ideal true nature of Sonic is to hop on contemporary pop music / aesthetic trends and go hard on them (e.g. house music and new jack swing in the 2D games, ska and emo and hiphop in Adventure 1 and 2), what Iâd actually enjoy most would be if they just kept going with that early 90âs rave/R&B/eurodance aesthetic and kept mining it deeper and deeper until we had sonic games inspired by like specific historical Italian discotheques.
Or like a KankyĹ Ongaku Sonic game where the soundtrack is restored tapes of actual St. GIGA broadcasts and every level looks like a different kind of novelty spa/terrarium/zen garden.
Ok yeah, make it so the levels are like the dance floor at the club, and the chao garden is like the clubâs chillout room.
Youâll notice I didnât say a thing about the gameplay. Thatâs because Sonic gameplay doesnât matter. In Sonic, only the aesthetic matters.
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Sonic should always be painfully earnest even when itâs being funny. Like i donât really like the snarky ironic tone of the games written by the Happy Tree Friends guys (Colors, Lost World, Forces) (btw @shnozlak your idea sounds like Forces but wayyy more sick, like what that game should have been)
at its best the Sonic universe is a sincere power-of-friendship shĹnen with funny animals. and yeah, mad style and cool vibes and fuckin bangin music
This is why i love that Ian Flynn and the IDW creative team have been more hands-on with the games in recent years, alongside Sega pulling in fan devs, artists and composers like Christian Whitehead, Tyson Hesse and Tee Lopes. They Get It. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog visual novel is unironically the best-written Sonic game, itâs fucking spot-on
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the only snarky ironic Sonic i like is the Boom TV series because itâs actually pretty funny. and basically an AU even though Sticks the badger keeps showing up?? (which is good, i like Sticks.) and i love that the most forgettable Sonic games spawned a tie-in Canadatoon series that was far more memorable and well-liked
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it goes the other way, too. old sonic manga from the 90s was clearly aimed at a much younger audience than any other sonic stuff. but having recently read the jet black hedgehog, it seems like someoneâs let the jp marketing department know who their actual audience is
itâs fucking horrific that whoeverâs running sonic merch in the uk is putting in the absolute minimum effort: crappy puzzle âmagazinesâ that just use standard character renders arranged in different ways and are packaged with flimsy, cheap plastic toys. itâs such a shame that thereâs no uk title at least reprinting idw comics (the kind of thing that got marvel massive popularity among uk kids from the 60s to the 00s, with dc mostly unheard of outside of tv and movies), since very few kids are going to know enough to go into a specialist comic shop and pick it up themselves.
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one of these days i gotta read that old Sonic manga where heâs a superhero alter ego https://sonic.fandom.com/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(manga)
itâs cool that theyre more tonally consistent and âon-brandâ now but i wont pretend there isnt charm in the weird old adaptations like that and Archie Sonic and Sonic the Comic where it was anything goes, just make some shit up. i mean we wouldnât have Flynn & the IDW crew without Archie Sonic, dork ages and all (and i would be a very different, arguably less fun person if i hadnt grown up with its sloppy furry melodrama)
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