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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the article is right that Sonic is a terrible platformer, because it's not a platformer. It's a speedrun game. It's all about memorizing the map and being able to make twitchy inputs to get the biggest rewards. It's a fundamentally different kind of game than Super Mario Brothers, even though they look superficially similar.

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I definitely agree with your point, though I'd recast it slightly away from "twitchy"/"speedrun"/map memorization and towards the thrill of things being fast and disorienting. [1] Sonic involved lots of bright lights, fast animation, and noises. It was fun because everything ran out of control sometimes, or at least seemed to, and I think this, aside from considerations of wanting to optimize for efficiency of solution, was a large part of its joy. (I say "seemed to" because I remember elements of levels that blasted you through loops and walls at dizzying speed, but in practice served as just a rail that took you from point A to B.)

I didn't realize before I read this article that the design of Sonic (even excluding Sonic Spinball) was driven by pinball, though it makes tons of sense in retrospect. Pinball's got the same thrills; you're constantly in an unstable state, not really learning a puzzle so much as trying to manage a high-degree of chaos before you inevitably get thrown off the horse. It's a different brand of fun than the article's "correct" game design, less/more appealing to different people and less/more appealing when you're in the wrong/right mood.

[1] "Ilinx" in the taxonomy of Roger Callois's "Man, Play, and Games," though a personal caveat that I didn't really enjoy that book.

Oh yeah, that line about it being influenced by Pinball gave me one of those "of course it was" moments where something has been obvious forever but you never noticed it.

Bumpers, spinners, bouncers, Sonic himself when he gets going... It's semi-linear pinball.

> Sonic Spinball

Which, ironically, is possibly the slowest and most plodding Sonic game. It should have just been endless variations on Casino Night Zone.

I can still hear the Casino Night Zone and Mystic Cave Zone music in my head. My sister and I would try to play through all of Sonic 2 on our genesis in her room waiting for Christmas day. It made us so happy to beat it. Sometimes we'd take a break because the genesis would heat up and start to make sonic run in slow motion. Thanks Sega.

I'd agree with you on the most recent 3D outings, however, the 2D Sonic games from the MegaDrive/Genesis era had a lot of solid skilled platforming with speedy parts interspersed throughout the level as a reward, not as the core gameplay mechanic.

But Sonic fails as a speedrun game too. There's always some slow moving platform you need to time jumps around that breaks a thrilling run through a level. Not to mention that finding the chaos emeralds is almost impossible if you just plough through each level.

Chaos emeralds are just achievements they don't impact game play.

Yes they do, collecting them enables you to turn into Super Sonic (in Sonic 2+)

Article is in reference to the original game where they just change the ending.

Isn't one of the thrills of speedrunning figuring out how to time some action 5 screens ago so the platform is in exactly the right place when you get to it?

And that's one of the things they actually improved in the Sonic Adventure series: they placed Homing Attack targets in just the right places throughout the level so if you've gotten good at the game, you'll be able to hit them in succession without ever touching the ground/falling out.

It's a hybrid really. It's a speed runner with platform elements (or vice versa, really).

But yes, fundamentally quite different in goal and style.

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