12 weeks of Sonic Games

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Daily Challenge: Finish Neo Green Hill, any act with more then 30 rings

btw the special stages are the reason why i dont do challenges on them. they suck balls!

[Speeps]

Playing as Tails for this one:

Tails is probably the easiest character to play as considering his flying can get to different paths easily. His flying's a bit slower than in the classic games and feels heavier for the most part but it's still pretty good to have.

[TheOcelot]

Played with Knuckles for this one.

 

I did have 220 ring in act2 of NGH but I lost them against Eggman. Beating he bosses without losing rings seems almost impossible in Advance.

 

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Shit i forgot to put the daily challenge for yesterday!!! Now today you can chose from 2 haha thank my stupidity for this.

Daily challenge for 1/14: Post times for Secret Base Zone

Daily challenge for today: get the lowest possible score for New Green Hill Zone

[Indigo Rush]

I'm slowly becoming aware of how much I hate Egg Rocket Zone. Like, objectively awful and trollish level design.

Still haven't completed the game since we've started. This is pain. 

[Speeps]

Did them with Knuckles:

It's easier to avoid the enemies than in Sonic 1, so it's pretty much just making sure you can get to the goal with 0 rings and 6 minutes on the clock. Eggman still gives that 1000 point bonus though.

Here's the other one:

[TheOcelot]

Daily Challenge: Lowest score in NGH. I did the stages as fast as I could:

 

Daily Challenge: Fastest times in Secret Base:

 

Oh and of course...........................I got all chaos emeralds and beat the final boss; Super Egg Robot in The Moon Zone!

The Super Egg Robot boss - much like the Egg Snake and EGG X -  is very hard/super bullshitty. You have a very small window in which to beat him due to Super Sonic's depleting ring supply. Being super aggressive gets you no where. You need a lot of luck.

I'm glad I 100%d Advance. It's a good/fun game in parts. Definitely flawed due to often bullshit enemy placement and super hard later bosses. You will lose rings a lot in this game.

The special stages take some getting used to. The control isn't too bad, it's more about the "perception", thinking you're right in front of the rings and then missing them entirely. Oh and it took me a while to learn when to do the "trick" move when you go through the big yellow circles which grants - often essential - extra rings. Only being able to access each special stage once in a playthrough isn't fair due to how hard they are. Should be like in Sonic 2 where you could attempt a special stage a few times in each act.

Advance has some really good music. The level design is mostly well done. Plenty alternative/secret routes. Lots of extra lives to find and I like the green and blue lightning shields. The increase in difficulty as you progress through each stage feels consistent/quite well balanced. Yeah Egg Rocket zone is frustrating at first, but it's actually a good stage. Now that I've learnt it's layout I find it much easier. Advance isn't a particularly long game which is nice.

It's cool playing as Amy Rose as well as Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. They each have plenty of unique moves to make their gameplay interesting. I consider Tails & Knuckles as easy mode and Sonic and Amy as normal mode. I also like the characters animations; such as when you finish an act or when you leave the characters standing still and they get impatient...

Has a lot of references to the classics; such as the re-use of old bosses/zone names. Oh and as for Mecha Knuckles. Erm.......sure, why not  Knuckles vs Mecha Knuckles is epic.......sort of

Good stuff.

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Daily challenge for 1/16: Destroy 15 badnicks in any stage

Daily challenge for today: post times for Egg Rocket Zone 

[Speeps]

Played as Sonic and Amy again.

Here's the 15 enemies one:

Here's the points counter showing 15 enemies have been destroyed. They're pretty much one of the few ways to actually get points and there's no way to tell other than screenshotting me destroy all 15 of them, so the points here should be enough to tell.

And the Egg Rocket time:

Egg Rocket has a weird timer in the normal mode, so I had to go into Time Attack to do this one.

Believe it or not 6 minutes is actually pretty fast for Amy in this stage, haha.

[TheOcelot]

23 hours ago, JmTsHaW said:

And the Egg Rocket time:

I've just done a time attack of Egg Rocket zone and got exactly the same time as you!!! What are the odds of getting the exact same time?!

 

Also defeated 15 enemies. Good challenge. It's not easy to find 15.

 

Also beat the game on my phone.

 

 

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Sorry~I havent did the rest of the DC sense  didnt think many people would be playing Advance. So next game:

DC for today: post times for emerald hill

[Speeps]

Alright here we go:

Breakdown:

Spoiler

(The last hit in Death Egg Zone played the 1-Up sound because of the points bonus lmao)

Sonic 2 is a game I hear no end of praise about. While I personally prefer S3K a whole lot more than this game, there's no denying it's still a great game. All the levels are fun to play, with most of them balancing out speed and platforming as you go. Oil Ocean and Metropolis suffer from the same surprise enemy placement that a lot of the levels in advance had, but the difference here is those aren't exactly the second level of the game: They're supposed to be hard and even though they have their flaws they still manage to show that really well.

Sonic 2 is the only game I haven't collected all the emeralds in without cheating in some way or another. I don't like how the later special stages are so dependent on you having a high enough ring score from the previous segments and of course everyone knows how annoying Tails can be in them (I only got to attempt 2 special stages in my run here, but I lost one of them because Tails kept hitting bombs and resulted in me being one ring short). Besides that, I've never really felt the need to go out of my way to collect all the emeralds in this game because there's no real bad ending to it, you just see Super Sonic with the tornado instead of Tails. It's not like Sonic 1 where you're treated to Eggman's circus acts or anything.

But yeah, this game still holds up to be really fun to play even if I don't get why people love it over everything else sometimes.

Also here's my Emerald Hill times:

[TheOcelot]

Just done a quick playthrough of Sonic 2 on my phone.

 

My times for Emerald Hill Acts 1&2:

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Im very sorry for not updating this thread. I sicerally apologise. Ive been going to rather a range of emotions and I have negelected this thread in terms of daily challenges. So I will post them all in one shot

1/21: Get the highest possible score in Emerald Hill

1/22: Get the lowest possible score in Emerald Hill

1/23: Post times for Casino Night Zone

[Speeps]

Nah it's fine, don't worry about it.

But anyway here we go:

High Score:

I'm not the best at knowing how to get a really high score in Sonic 2 so I just went by having a high time bonus. I'm pretty sure killing all the enemies, having an insane ring count and getting all 7 emeralds would outdo the time bonus by far but I can barely get all the emeralds in this game as it is, so that's not an option here.

Low Score:

Like Sonic 1, pretty much the only thing to worry about is avoiding all the enemies and finishing with 0 rings with a time so terrible that it voids the bonus. The only thing that gives you points that you can't really avoid is the boss.

And here's my Casino Night times:

Casino Night 1 is one of my best zones in the entire game, although it did take quite a few tries to get that time. I'm not that good with speedrunning Act 2 though since I don't know the route as well as I do with Act 1.

[TheOcelot]

23 hours ago, JmTsHaW said:

I'm not the best at knowing how to get a really high score in Sonic 2 so I just went by having a high time bonus. I'm pretty sure killing all the enemies, having an insane ring count and getting all 7 emeralds would outdo the time bonus by far but I can barely get all the as I do with Act 1.

Yeah, pretty much. You get a 50,000 bonus if you collect all the rings in the act. The massive-time bonus for finishing an act at exactly 9:59 first appeared in Sonic 3 (although Taxman added this to the mobile version of Sonic 2).

I've done a high-score attempt of Emerald Hill and got all 7 chaos emeralds:

Spoiler

 

Score after Act1:

I got the 50,000 perfect bonus because I collect all 293 rings in the stage:

 

High score after Act2:

I tried to get all 285 rings in the stage after I collected all 7 chaos emeralds, but I accidently transformed into Super Sonic (you need to double jump to transform in the mobile version) which mucked up any chance of the perfect bonus.

A pretty healthy score!

 

Next up low score attempt:

 

Casino Night time-attack:

I kind of fucked-up a good time in Act 1 because I accidently landed in a slot-machine and got the 150 ring jackpot...

 

Act 2's attempt was better:

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Daily Challenge for Monday: destroy 15 bad nicks in any level

Daily challenge for Tuesday: Post times for Oil Zone 

[Speeps]

Here's enemies in Emerald Hill:

This was a lot easier to do in Sonic 2's first level than it was in Sonic Advance 1's. I had a run in Metropolis 1 to see how many I could find there but I could only get to about 5 due to a lot of the paths there preventing backtracking.

Oil Ocean times:

I really don't know much about this level so the times are a lot slower than Emerald Hill and Casino Night. I screwed up bad in Act 2 and ended up having to die to restart the stage. But anyway, aside from constantly having enemies shoot you in the face, it actually has really good flow for a late-game level and it's pretty easy to go fast in it.

[TheOcelot]

My times for Oil Ocean Acts 1&2

 

Also did 15 enemies in both acts of Oil Ocean:

Act1:

Act2:

Was quite tricky to achieve because there were only about 16 enemies in the routes I took. Also tried to get 15 in Chemical Plant & Metropolis Act 1 but there's a real lack of badniks (the star badniks in Metropolis which explode when Sonic gets near them don't count).

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

It's time to change the game!

Post times for the first stage  have fun!

And oh to finish the game, you dont need the true story for this. All you need is to finish one characters story and thats it,.

[Speeps]

Alright, I played through it with Sonic. It's gonna be great looking back through these when this is over

(Breakdown:)

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Beating Blaze somehow causes Eggman Nega to break down )

 

Sonic Rush manages to keep up the pace of being a fast Sonic game pretty well. Falling into the lower paths does mean crossing some platforming sections, but it doesn't feel like you're ever brought to a complete stop by them like you can be in Generations for example. You don't have issues controlling at all in small platforming sections thanks to having a lot more control over jumping than in pretty much any other title. People can rant about the physics in Sonic 4 however they want, but they work well in this title, as unlike that game you're constantly moving at a fast speed here never really getting the chance to slow down and watch Sonic walking up walls.

The soundtrack to this game is beautiful. In the words of my friend it's one of the few Sonic games out there that fully captures the attitude of the classic games and it gives every game that brilliant feeling of a speedy adventure. Aside from mishearing those voice sounds sometimes (Whenever I play Dead Line I keep hearing something about Elves) I love listening to it in my spare time whenever I feel like something Sonic-y.

The Special Stages were really good considering I normally can't stand Half Pipe stages. They're easy enough to get used to and provide you with just enough challenge that they're not too easy nor too hard (Although 5 and 7 did give me some trouble). In order to enter a Special Stage you need at least one bar of boost and be able to find the special stage entrance in each stage much like Sonic Advance 1. If you fail, you can try again provided you have enough boost left and even then there are a lot of special stage entrances to come across in every stage (Which makes it a lot less frustrating to find them than it is in Sonic Advance). Unlike the Special Stages in Sonic 2, I didn't feel I needed to go over the ring goal just to get enough rings to finish the stage in the next segment, which is a lot better than I feel for the ones in Sonic 2. Overall, using the touch screen is probably the best way they could make a half pipe special stage.

One of the major problems I've always had with this game though is how often you find bottomless pits though. I died twice in the second level alone from them and don't even get me started on how bad Altitude Limit can get (made even worse on an emulator thanks to the top screen accommodating for the gap between it and the bottom screen on a normal DS, meaning you have a blind spot lying around you at all times. Rush has really nice level design, but in terms of how many bottomless pits there are that you can fall into it's probably one of the worst, even moreso than Sonic Advance 2.

Overall, if you can look past falling down pits all the time Sonic Rush is a pretty solid game that's definitely worth playing.

Here's my times for Leaf Storm Zone:

 

Blaze has a different first stage, but you only get to unlock her after beating Sonic's first boss. (I didn't have Blaze started anyway though.)