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What's the point of Special Stages?


MetalSkulkBane

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If it were up to me, special stages would be redesigned to be like the temple levels in the newer Donkey Kong Country games or the Land of the Livid Dead in Rayman Origns. Really brutal levels designed to test your skills that focus on particular gimmicks. I wouldn't make them a gameplay departure. To earn the chaos emeralds, you'd have to work for it.

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Hello.

TIL there's so much hate for special stages. Special stages were a good idea from the very start; the alternatives aren't all that great.

20 hours ago, The KKM said:

Sonic 1 is an arcade game that wasn't made for arcades.

Most arcade games do not actually have any sort of bonus stages; they really only took off with console games, particularly platformers. Both always had them for the same reason: variety, plain and simple.

17 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

Even if they are change of paste, majority of them aren't fun. So if people replay Sonic games, but without Special Stages, then maybe it's a sign that they should be cut off.

It's unfair that you get to speak for all the people who do like special stages.

17 hours ago, JezMM said:

But yeah, it is a bizarre thing when you deconstruct them.  Here in order to see all of the main content of the game, you must play stages which feature gameplay completely unlike what the game has predominantly allowed you to practice in a structured manner, under conditions where failure does not allow you to immediately try again.

I guess, if anything, they weren't so much designed to emulate the bonus stages of arcade games out of habit, but rather they add artificial difficulty in a way that doesn't completely lock off the main game from being enjoyed - something important to add replay value to a game from those days that can be beaten in an hour once you're skilled so people would get their money's worth.

Basically... special stages were the filler gameplay of the old days.

I dunno how I'd fix them to keep to established tradition by including them without majorly changing up how they function.  If the developers come up with gameplay that uses the same movements and engine as the main game like Sonic 1 did, you could argue "if it's fun, why not use that design in the main game for a single stage or a recurring element".  Sonic Lost World did that a fair bit (granted, with mixed results).  Extra lives as a reward instead of emeralds or final stages feels a little off when extra lives are an outdated concept as is.

I am a fan of how the Game Gear games made each special stage about a design element from the main games and tested you more thoroughly on it, though they have the issue that you can't really pace their difficulty.

How negative. How about, instead: "Here are some optional challenges to break away from the main game; if you complete them all, you unlock some secrets".

How cruel. I don't know which self-respecting game designer would call this "artificial difficulty" and "filler", but I wouldn't trust them to make a good and varied game, that's for sure.

You don't need to be all that great at the actual game to knock out the special stages.

Lives are absolutely not an outdated concept, it's just that so many game designers have forgotten how to use them properly. Arcade game designers were usually pretty good about life system design.

The Game Gear games dodge the issue entirely by putting the Emeralds in the actual stages. It's not a good alternative because there's not much to finding them; they're just kinda... there.

Remember that Chaos Emeralds are to promote the special stages, not the other way around.

17 hours ago, StaticMania said:

It really wouldn't have been much of a problem if they were just some optional stuff. Making them mandatory for "true final boss" stuff wasn't a good idea, especially if accessing them ended up being a major pain in the rear-end area.

That's exactly what these "true final bosses" are: optional stuff. Very odd to draw a line here.

Related: the funny thing about the Sonic Adventures is that you don't even have to play more than one of the stories; certain annoying persons would even tell you to do exactly that. Any of them is a proper story with a proper end (more so in SA2), with the Last Stories just being extra parts of the game.

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Despatche, I can't speak for everyone, but I think enough people here said that they didn't enjoyed Special Stages, that I'm in right to say that there is large portion of fandom that wouldn't mind removing them.

And I think you'll agree that Special Stages are rarely mentioned when people talk how amazing original games were. (I know more than one classic games fan that hates Sonic 2 special stages, especially with Tails),

So if there is a lot of people against it, and few people praising them, are they worth fighting for? I agree there are ways to make them fun, but (I'm talking now about "pure" Special Stages, not what Colors did or what Napenthe and Wraight suggested) since even originals could screw them, is it right place to put effort into? It seems to me like high risk, low profit scenario, just for tradition sake.

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51 minutes ago, Despatche said:

How negative. How about, instead: "Here are some optional challenges to break away from the main game; if you complete them all, you unlock some secrets".

How cruel. I don't know which self-respecting game designer would call this "artificial difficulty" and "filler", but I wouldn't trust them to make a good and varied game, that's for sure.

You don't need to be all that great at the actual game to knock out the special stages.

Lives are absolutely not an outdated concept, it's just that so many game designers have forgotten how to use them properly. Arcade game designers were usually pretty good about life system design.

The Game Gear games dodge the issue entirely by putting the Emeralds in the actual stages. It's not a good alternative because there's not much to finding them; they're just kinda... there.

Remember that Chaos Emeralds are to promote the special stages, not the other way around.

That's exactly what these "true final bosses" are: optional stuff. Very odd to draw a line here.

Related: the funny thing about the Sonic Adventures is that you don't even have to play more than one of the stories; certain annoying persons would even tell you to do exactly that. Any of them is a proper story with a proper end (more so in SA2), with the Last Stories just being extra parts of the game.

I was giving my honest opinion, if it's negative then I'm not being "cruel", I'm being honest.  These games are very old now, we can analyse them in a constructive manner, no-one's feelings are being hurt.

I don't talk about artificial difficulty or filler as strictly negative things either.  That was how games were made at the time - action games were not very long so it was very normal practice to make them more difficult than they needed to be so they gave the user more entertainment for their money - through giving you a limited number of chances to complete tasks and making you start the game over after a certain number of failures.  This was a perfectly fine idea at the time, but now it is an outdated concept.  Lives existed in arcade games to reward players with more time playing for playing well, while also hanging a condition over the player where the game could eventually be over, forcing them to spend another coin to play.  These issues shouldn't exist in console games - you could argue you should have reasonable access to all parts of the product you paid a large price for (as oppose to a small price for one session with a machine that you do not own to use freely as you like).

Lives just go two ways - for lesser skilled players, after a certain amount of failures at a particular point in a level, the game punishes you by sending you back to the beginning of the level (or even further back in some games).  Now you have to replay content you have already proven you can beat to try and attempt the part you're stuck on again.  Maybe you can earn more lives - but usually they are given as rewards for taking optional/more dangerous routes, when the less skilled player is having enough trouble with the normal route.

For more skilled players - lives are meaningless.  They feel good to collect for taking those more difficult paths, but you never run out of them so they might as well not be there.

To argue the last stories and true final bosses are optional, bonus content is ridiculous.  In both Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, parts of the story are left unexplained until you play the true ending.  Every character in Sonic Adventure has a section where they meet Tikal that would make no sense if you considered them to be individual stories with a clear end.  There could be a player who loved the story and wanted to know what happened, and loved playing as Sonic and would really enjoy playing the Super Sonic battle... but because they find Big's fishing too confusing and hard, they give up and never get to find out what all the Tikal stuff was about or play that fun extra bit of Sonic content, even though they have proven they are good at the main part of the game by playing Sonic's story to the end.  In Sonic Adventure 2, the Dark story introduces "Project Shadow" without revealing what it was until the Last Story, and the Dark story itself ends on a cliffhanger.  This is content the developers clearly wanted every player to play.  Usually they are content the players WANT to play.

By the way, when I talked about the Game Gear games, I was thinking of Sonic Chaos and Triple Trouble, which do have special stages but are (mostly) platforming challenges using the main game engine.  I think that's a style that has potential and is a lot more fair because they use skills the player has developed in the main game.  Also the emeralds in Sonic 1 and 2 are actually pretty well hidden (too well hidden I'd say actually) on some stages so they aren't "just there" either. There's nothing wrong with including bonus games with completely different gameplay for variety, but I don't think you should lock "normal" gameplay behind their completion.  I'm glad Sonic 2 doesn't have a secret final boss/final level because I have tried and tried and I just can't enjoy the special stages in that game.  I ADORE Sonic Advance 1 and 2 and I've always wanted to play the true final bosses for those games but I can't because the special stages are too hard for me - even though I'm great at the regular gameplay, some stupid minigames that I don't enjoy stop me from enjoying all the content that I AM good at.

 

Don't take criticism of something you like so personally, it's fine, you are allowed to like things, but just because you like them it doesn't make the other people wrong - this is mostly a matter of opinion.

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The thing about criticism is that it needs to be based in fact. I actually dislike quite a bit of classic Sonic design, for fundamental game design reasons. Meanwhile, this thread seems to be more about getting mad at games. A lot of this thread isn't really trying to be opinion at all; it's mostly people acting like special stages are some fundamental flaw with the series that needs to be removed. Big difference. If you simply dislike special stages, you could just say that instead of coming up with this large-reaching rationale that doesn't really work out.

Terms like "artificial difficulty" and "filler" are inherently negative. Indeed, you continue on with talk of "more difficult than they need to be" and being "outdated". Neither of these things are true.

You completely misunderstand the purpose of lives. Lives give a player a set of chances ("three strikes and you're out") to play a game. Give the player only one or two chances, and the game's too hard. Give the player too many chances, and there's no challenge. It worked in arcade games because they didn't hand lives out for years like console games typically do. Lives, when done right, only lose meaning to the best players who can beat a game without ever dying.

These games are like obstacle courses; mess up, and you may just lose the race. Beating something once doesn't "prove" that you can do it again. The best players make mistakes all the time.

The various sections of the Adventure games are pretty self-contained. In SA, you would never know about Super Sonic and the Last Story until you did beat everything (or you just spoiled yourself and looked it up); that's why the Super Sonic section is marked with ???. SA's ??? section also just kinda happens, independently of everything else in the game. SA2 Last Story does follow Dark Story, but Dark Story itself is technically a different timeline from Hero Story entirely.

Again, there's that claim of "fairness". There's nothing "unfair" about the concept of special stages.

The thing to keep in mind is that the developers could very well have not added The Doomsday Zone and Last Stories at all. They also could very well have never had special stages at all. They are added entirely as bonuses, which is also why they tend to play differently from the rest of the game. The Last Stories were added to make the idea of collecting Chaos Emeralds more interesting than simply having a Super form to cheapen the rest of the game with.

1 hour ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

Despatche, I can't speak for everyone, but I think enough people here said that they didn't enjoyed Special Stages, that I'm in right to say that there is large portion of fandom that wouldn't mind removing them.

And I think you'll agree that Special Stages are rarely mentioned when people talk how amazing original games were. (I know more than one classic games fan that hates Sonic 2 special stages, especially with Tails),

So if there is a lot of people against it, and few people praising them, are they worth fighting for? I agree there are ways to make them fun, but (I'm talking now about "pure" Special Stages, not what Colors did or what Napenthe and Wraight suggested) since even originals could screw them, is it right place to put effort into? It seems to me like high risk, low profit scenario, just for tradition sake.

It seems awfully presumptuous to make such a massive conclusion from a one-and-a-half-page thread on a very specific forum, especially when there are multiple posts in this thread challenging your idea.

I will not agree, because it's not true. This is actually the first time I've ever seen anyone outright dislike special stages, other than making of Sonic CD's or getting angry at Advance 2's being so difficult just to reach (and having to do it all four times).

I posit that the vast majority of criticism against Sonic 2's special stages would only come from foolishly playing the Sonic+Tails mode single player. Someone who's never really played the game wouldn't know, but Sonic fans (the subject of this thread) would know better and would not suffer from this.

With that out of the way, the whole point of tradition is that it's safe, that there is no risk to it. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Special stages do not "take slots" from the rest of the game, and a single special stage is definitely easier to design than making an entire level. Game design-wise, mind; physically creating each of the Mega Drive special stage designs was probably quite the endeavor, with all the graphical tricks and assets used. That's not really an issue anymore.

Lastly, I think Nepenthe's "special stages are fundamentally pretty easy to understand" needs to be repeated. Any talk of the special stages being different from the main game being an issue because they're "hard to understand" is out.

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People have more of an issue with how "the" special stages control than understanding them in general. Though some may have trouble understanding how they control and/or the design...or...they could just flat-out dislike the way it controls and/or the design even if it happens to be easy to understand. That's pretty understandable in itself.

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Thing is though I DO like the special stages, I'm just saying they're flawed, and why I think so.  Sonic 3 & Knuckles is an example of a special stage I like despite how different they are from the main gameplay, but as some people have said in the thread, the way I see Sonic 2's is how some people feel about 3&K's.

 

You can't say the Last Stories are extras when the main stories set them up to happen.  They would have clearly been designed as part of the game from the start - hell it's setup VERY early on in Sonic Adventure that Chaos grows in power each time he gets an emerald, and yet in the main stories he never goes past 6 - it's obvious from the start that at SOME point you will have to fight him with all 7 emeralds - hell they even show him off in the opening titles, why would the developers do that if they don't hope that all players will see every story?

 

Also the old "just play without Tails!" point for Sonic 2's special stages always falls apart for me considering the developers clearly WANT you to play with both characters as the standard experience - and the fact that the problem with Sonic 2's Special Stages is very rarely Tails but rather the garbage draw distance and how hard it is to read the primitive graphics with bombs that pop out of nowhere giving you half a second to react, pretty much REQUIRING you to just keep playing them over and over until you learn the patterns off by heart.

 

Also for consideration, the fact that all the classic games say "TRY AGAIN" if you didn't beat the Special Stages, suggesting you haven't really won the game properly.  They are entirely encouraged as a mandatory part of the game if you want to see all the main content - beating the game again, but this time also beating all the levels of an unrelated minigame that may or may not be your cup of tea.

Of course, as said, I enjoy Advance and Advance 2 plenty even only being able to make it to the fake final boss, even if a little part of me wishes I could go on and just play that extra level too without doing all the unfun special stage nonsense to unlock it.  It's good that Sonic games at least give you a sense of accomplishment for beating the game under basic conditions (even if they got a bit too used to doing it out of tradition - the way the Secret Rings throws credits at you then requires you to just beat 3 additional missions to reach the last boss (if you haven't done them already - in which case you still get a pointless set of credits before the last boss; and the way Black Knight literally just dumps credits halfway through the game and then doesn't even inform you that there's more story - those were both awfully handled).

This discussion keeps making me think back to how stupid it was that in Donkey Kong 64 you could master the entire main game, but the final boss was blocked off until you beat the Donkey Kong Arcade and Jet Pac minigames.  They barred me off from the conclusion of the game for literally years as a kid.  The way Sonic's special stages do the same in some games is certainly less severe but the same basic concept.

 

Except of course for Sonic 1, which I will still always defend as being excellent special stage-wise due to the fact that the special stages test your normal gameplay skills in an unusual envioronment, as oppose to just coming up with a brand new game.  People only get mad at that one because well, they're hard!

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15 hours ago, Wraith said:

If it were up to me, special stages would be redesigned to be like the temple levels in the newer Donkey Kong Country games or the Land of the Livid Dead in Rayman Origns. Really brutal levels designed to test your skills that focus on particular gimmicks. I wouldn't make them a gameplay departure. To earn the chaos emeralds, you'd have to work for it.

Hmm, I can get behind this. I can definitely see this as a way to give variety for different chaos emerald equivalents for new Sonic games. Like, say the Time Stones were the focus this time around. That's when you can have the special stages go Rayman Origins style mechanic wise, and be a twisted, psychedelic amalgamation of the hardest parts of the zone you found the "secret dimension rip" in. 

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The special stages and bonus stages vary in terms of their design quality (in my personal opinion), but I really like the concept behind them, as they give you additional goals to complete outside of the main focus of simply making it through the levels. Not only do they obviously give you the goal of getting all the Chaos Emeralds, but most of them also allow you to get Continues, and sometimes even other bonuses (in the case of S3K's bonus stages). They're basically additional challenges that give you something extra if you complete them; though, yeah, it is slightly annoying that they act as if you haven't "truly" finished the game if you don't complete do them, and I could easily do without that part. On top of all that, they also give you extra incentives to play the game in a certain way - for example, S3K's encourage you to explore, and Sonic 1, 2, and CD's encourage you to collect rings, and this also adds additional interest and more goals to the gameplay. So basically, to me the special stages add a little depth to the game by encouraging you to do more than you would otherwise, even if the stages themselves can be frustrating sometimes (personally, I hate Sonic 2's special stages - not only is the gameplay annoying and unfun, but they take away your rings and don't even give out Continues).

To be honest, I think Sonic 3's bonus stages are some of my favorite special stages, even if they don't technically count as special stages :P They're based on the mechanics of the main gameplay, they're completely optional, and they give out tons of great, practical rewards.

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3 hours ago, Monkey Destruction Switch said:

To be honest, I think Sonic 3's bonus stages are some of my favorite special stages, even if they don't technically count as special stages :P They're based on the mechanics of the main gameplay, they're completely optional, and they give out tons of great, practical rewards.

I totally forgot about these!  Great examples of special stage-esque gameplay using the standard game style other than Sonic 1's.

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Despatche, I'd appreciate if you would not take the opinions of other people personally.  Nobody is being "cruel" simply because they don't care for a singular aspect of a game about cartoon hedgehogs.

Anyway, as someone who actually likes special stages, I feel most of your points are completely off base.

6 hours ago, Despatche said:

The thing about criticism is that it needs to be based in fact. I actually dislike quite a bit of classic Sonic design, for fundamental game design reasons. Meanwhile, this thread seems to be more about getting mad at games. A lot of this thread isn't really trying to be opinion at all; it's mostly people acting like special stages are some fundamental flaw with the series that needs to be removed. Big difference. If you simply dislike special stages, you could just say that instead of coming up with this large-reaching rationale that doesn't really work out.

Which is weird because nothing you have said in defense has been based in fundamental game design, but based solely on personal perception.  The opinions of members here who have expressed disdain over special stages are indeed based "in fact."  That is, they are based on things that actually do happen and based on the objective qualities of the thing they're criticizing, but how they feel about it is entirely subjective, much like pretty much everything you've posted.

6 hours ago, Despatche said:

Terms like "artificial difficulty" and "filler" are inherently negative. Indeed, you continue on with talk of "more difficult than they need to be" and being "outdated". Neither of these things are true.

The terms are inherently negative because you assign them negativity, irregardless of how the the term is used colloquially or in the context of this conversation.  Granted, I think "artificial difficulty" is a much harder aspect to defend, but I expect games, especially those that are as linear and goal-driven as Sonic, to have some kind of filler.  Super Mario World has this in the form  of bonus stages that operate based on pre-established principles and allow the player to break from the stress of being constantly thrust into danger.  Sonic has this in the form of special stages that offer additional challenge and offer a break from the monotony of playing the same thing for several hours straight.  Neither of those are inherently bad approaches, but both can be described as filler, respectively.  Meanwhile, games like Half-Life 2, while not bad, have driving sections that last for ages and more than a few of these sections have absolutely nothing of interest happening in the meantime.  This is also filler, but it's not exactly desirable filler.

It's not too dissimilar from a TV show.  Dragon Ball Z has the "driving school" episode, which is humorous, cute, and fun, but Bleach has characters sort of just sitting and talking for 900 episodes on end.  Which one is the better option?  You wouldn't be any more factual in choosing one over the other.

Basically, there is "good" and "bad" filler, and barring some particularly egregious examples, how you respond to differing kinds is mostly subjective.

6 hours ago, Despatche said:

You completely misunderstand the purpose of lives. Lives give a player a set of chances ("three strikes and you're out") to play a game. Give the player only one or two chances, and the game's too hard. Give the player too many chances, and there's no challenge. It worked in arcade games because they didn't hand lives out for years like console games typically do. Lives, when done right, only lose meaning to the best players who can beat a game without ever dying.

The purpose of lives in arcade games was to prevent people from monopolizing the game and, of course, to entice people to insert more quarters into the machine.  Give a person unlimited lives in an arcade, and they're going to be there all day, which means less people putting quarters in the machine and less people wanting to come back because some nerd has been hogging the same game for three days straight.  With lives, your chances are equivalent to however much money (or store-specific currency if applicable) you have on hand.  This is a great system for arcades.

But in consoles, that's not how it works.  There is no inherent challenge added or removed with the addition of lives unless the game is poorly designed.  There are plenty of games without life systems that still offer a fair and reasonable amount of difficulty.  The Batman: Arkham games are one such example.  You have unlimited continues, but there are still parts I die on all the time.  Multiple times, in fact.  That's because of the game's level design, strategic enemy placement, and challenging mechanics.  Giving me only three chances wouldn't make it any more difficult.  It would just send me backwards, forcing me to plow through sections I've already seen and making the game repetitive and stale.  

This doesn't even translate solely to lives, either.  Gamefreak's initial decision to put a one-time use limit on TM's in the Pokémon games was to entice players to carefully consider how they allocate their resources, which was a fine system for the original games which physically did not have the memory to hold onto a vast number of items, but it was never a good thing about the game.  When that limit was finally removed in the fifth generation, it allowed trainers more customization and more freedom to experiment with moves, which is arguably a better system to have for a game that is ultimately about raising creatures to your desired specifications.  Granted, modern Pokémon games do suffer from being far too easy, but that's actually due to move- and type-balance issues than anything.

If a game is badly designed, lives will keep players from bulldozing through a level recklessly, which might offer some form of challenge, I guess, but that's only if you look at lives as compensation for poor level design.  Removing the lives from Sonic probably wouldn't change that.  I've seen arguments that lives encourage the player to master the whole level instead of just one portion, but I think that is ultimately subjective, depending on how you acquire mastery.  If I get a game over on Sonic 2, for example, being forced to go all the way back to the beginning won't make me better at Metropolis Zone.  At a certain point, it's become a given that I probably won't die on Emerald Hill or the next one, because they're designed to be easy.  And that's the thing.  You're not adding difficulty by restricting the number of playthroughs.  You're just repeating.  Of course, I am aware of the principle of "repeition = practice," but it's a moot point because, again, that's not where the difficulty lies.

7 hours ago, Despatche said:

These games are like obstacle courses; mess up, and you may just lose the race. Beating something once doesn't "prove" that you can do it again. The best players make mistakes all the time.

I'm not really sure where this fits into the argument.  Unless you're a competitive player, I don't think anyone cares that they're proving their abilities as much as they just like the thrill of getting through it, and I certainly don't think lives add anything in this regard, either.

7 hours ago, Despatche said:

The various sections of the Adventure games are pretty self-contained. In SA, you would never know about Super Sonic and the Last Story until you did beat everything (or you just spoiled yourself and looked it up); that's why the Super Sonic section is marked with ???. SA's ??? section also just kinda happens, independently of everything else in the game. SA2 Last Story does follow Dark Story, but Dark Story itself is technically a different timeline from Hero Story entirely.

Have you played either of these games?

I'm sorry, but the very intro of the game shows what to expect from the story.  A first-time player may not know about Super Sonic specifically, but the giant city-destroying water lizard definitely piqued my curiosity when I was a kid to the point where it was fairly obvious that something was missing.  Even ignoring that, there are so many plot points introduced in each individual story that calling it "self-contained" is flat-out dishonest if not oblivious.  Knuckles even comments on this, saying he still has no idea what the hell is going on.  The only thing "self-contained" about each character's story in SA1 is their individual arcs.  Sonic stops Eggman, Tails gains his independence, Knuckles collects all the pieces of the Master Emerald (while also getting a brief glimpse at the ugly history of his ancestors, which had inquired at the start of his arc), Amy rescues a Flicky and reunites it with its family, Big finds Froggy, and Gamma just flat-out dies.  The individual story arcs are self-contained.  What's not self-contained is the overarching story arc regarding Chaos, Tikal, the Chao, etc.  Something that is not-so-subtly pushed in your face in the most abrupt manner.  It's a mystery you're supposed to question.

Heck, this is actually one of the strongest things about SA1's storytelling.  The eerie atmosphere, the sense of mystery, the sense that you want to find out more.  The game hasn't aged considerably well, but damn if it didn't succeed in telling a complex, intricate story that was tied across multiple playthroughs with different characters tremendously well.  It's simply ludicrous to say that you would never know about the last story prior to beating the game when you have reminders of it sprinkled very liberally throughout the game.  I'd go so far as to say if any of the characters' stories were standalone games, they would be very poor standalone games.  It's the fact that they are put together that makes the plot meaningful.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a bit of a different animal.  You can't really get a full appreciation for the world and the characters without playing both paths.  In the Hero side, you have no idea who Shadow is aside from being a bad hedgehog.  You don't learn anything about Rouge other than her being an antagonist to Knuckles.  The dark story is filled with so many plot intricacies that, again, to say that it's self-contained is either dishonest or oblivious.  The dark story is the only one where you learn about Maria.  It's the only one where you discover Rouge is actually a secret agent.  It's the only one where you learn about Project Shadow and that Shadow had been lying dormant for over fifty years prior.  None of that information can be scavenged from the hero story.

Furthermore on that, the Dark story itself is not a different timeline from the Hero story.  The game simply follows the different perspectives of the clashing parties.  The events don't play out any differently in each story.  You just get the same events from a different point of view, which all comes together in the Last story.

That's, again, not what I would call a "self-contained" story.

7 hours ago, Despatche said:

The thing to keep in mind is that the developers could very well have not added The Doomsday Zone and Last Stories at all. They also could very well have never had special stages at all. They are added entirely as bonuses, which is also why they tend to play differently from the rest of the game. The Last Stories were added to make the idea of collecting Chaos Emeralds more interesting than simply having a Super form to cheapen the rest of the game with.

They would have been very bad storytellers if they didn't include the Last Stories, all things considered.

7 hours ago, Despatche said:

I posit that the vast majority of criticism against Sonic 2's special stages would only come from foolishly playing the Sonic+Tails mode single player. Someone who's never really played the game wouldn't know, but Sonic fans (the subject of this thread) would know better and would not suffer from this.

Yeah, see, the thing about that is that when you make something that functionally doesn't work (not helped that Sonic and Tails is the default setting, making it even more glaring) because you chose to play the game in a way that it was actually intended to be played is called bad game design.

But that's another point, because even without Tails, the special stages in Sonic 2 are no less based on trial and error and memorization, something many players (at least in this thread and others) don't really appreciate in a game.

 

I like the special stages, but I have plenty of problems with the way a lot of them are designed, so I don't particularly blame anyone who just wants to see them gone altogether, nor do I feel like their presence makes a fundamental difference in the actual quality of the game.

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If I may, this reminds of of two particular fangames and how the Chaos Emeralds are obtained within them; namely The S Factor: Sonia and Silver and Sonic After the Sequel. 

Both kinda utilize the aspects Wraith and Nepenthe explained (at least I hope they do) in that the stages are to train your skillset while providing certain challenges within them. I think if future Special Stages can take what these two did it could bode for a more varied experience. 

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On 30/06/2016 at 9:46 PM, JezMM said:

I don't talk about artificial difficulty or filler as strictly negative things either.  That was how games were made at the time - action games were not very long so it was very normal practice to make them more difficult than they needed to be so they gave the user more entertainment for their money - through giving you a limited number of chances to complete tasks and making you start the game over after a certain number of failures.  This was a perfectly fine idea at the time, but now it is an outdated concept.  Lives existed in arcade games to reward players with more time playing for playing well, while also hanging a condition over the player where the game could eventually be over, forcing them to spend another coin to play.  These issues shouldn't exist in console games - you could argue you should have reasonable access to all parts of the product you paid a large price for (as oppose to a small price for one session with a machine that you do not own to use freely as you like).

Lives just go two ways - for lesser skilled players, after a certain amount of failures at a particular point in a level, the game punishes you by sending you back to the beginning of the level (or even further back in some games).  Now you have to replay content you have already proven you can beat to try and attempt the part you're stuck on again.  Maybe you can earn more lives - but usually they are given as rewards for taking optional/more dangerous routes, when the less skilled player is having enough trouble with the normal route.

I realize this is kind of off topic, so for once I'll try to be quick and concise on this and respectfully disagree. Lives are only a problem when trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - it's something you build with a marathon setting in mind, and the level design and learning curve have to be built to accomodate exactly that. And if it gets to a point that you're unable to master a later level on account of replaying the earlier ones many times, to me that's a question of making the later levels a culmination of everything you've learnt and practiced so far so those skills actually carry over regardless of the time you've spent at the later stages - Metropolis Zone, on top of being designed with absolute contempt for the player, is pretty much a perfect example of what happens when you design to the contrary of that, and for how long Eggmanland is I'm sure that counts to some extent too.

I just don't think it's fair to label the concept of lives as innately archaic when the problem, if anything, is that developers simply stopped actually developing their games around them and apparently only really bothered to keep them around for collectible's sake. There's a certain structure of game design that still benefits them, but it gets a lot harder to do once you make level select accessible by default, and Sonic's far from the only one to make that mistake with them if you ask me.

 

 

Back on topic now, I've been thinking about the "special stage as standard gameplay" shtick, and I think I'm a little conflicted as to what I actually want out of them? On one hand I still feel the Bonus Stages in S3&K are basically perfect for it and I wouldn't mind if special stages were... I dunno, silly fun for lack of a better description? Hell, for all I care, make them all big pinball machines with different paths to the top. But at the same time, I'm sure someone brought up earlier in the thread something about directly benefiting from the skills you learnt ingame and vice versa, and I feel like some very specialized challenges would work too? Not full levels so much as a dillemma you need a specific feat to get through. Like launching a huge distance from rolling down a slope to a ramp, or crossing a lot of airspace exclusively by bouncing off enemies, stuff like that. A lot of that kind of thing they usually reserve for optional extra stages in the likes of Unleashed and Generations, and I'm sure there's room to tweak it.

Maybe there's a middle ground somewhere in there? I haven't fully watched the clips TCB posted yet, I should probably get around to that.

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1 hour ago, Blacklightning said:

I realize this is kind of off topic, so for once I'll try to be quick and concise on this and respectfully disagree. Lives are only a problem when trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - it's something you build with a marathon setting in mind, and the level design and learning curve have to be built to accomodate exactly that. And if it gets to a point that you're unable to master a later level on account of replaying the earlier ones many times, to me that's a question of making the later levels a culmination of everything you've learnt and practiced so far so those skills actually carry over regardless of the time you've spent at the later stages - Metropolis Zone, on top of being designed with absolute contempt for the player, is pretty much a perfect example of what happens when you design to the contrary of that, and for how long Eggmanland is I'm sure that counts to some extent too.

I just don't think it's fair to label the concept of lives as innately archaic when the problem, if anything, is that developers simply stopped actually developing their games around them and apparently only really bothered to keep them around for collectible's sake. There's a certain structure of game design that still benefits them, but it gets a lot harder to do once you make level select accessible by default, and Sonic's far from the only one to make that mistake with them if you ask me.

I definitely get where you're coming from, but can't see Sonic going back to it's "game over and you're back to the start" roots any time soon since it's a franchise primarily aimed at kids, and the times they're-a-changin'.

It's a tough act to balance, like I want every game to have a Egg Shuttle style marathon mode ever since Colours introduced the idea, so lives would be a perfect fit for that right?  But again... as a skilled player, I've never gotten a Game Over on such a mode.  So maybe save them for a "hard mode" that can only be played in marathon format a la Shadow the Hedgehog?  But then you might end up letting down the people who are skilled enough to enjoy a harder challenge... without being skilled enough to enjoy it under marathon conditions, who would love the harder stages if they could play them with standard infinite lives (or 0 lives only equals starting over the stage etc).  I hated the final DLC pack for New Super Mario Bros. 2 because I just don't have the skills or patience to beat the three romhack-level difficult stages with two hit points and no lives - but I would have loved the ability to take them on under normal rules - being able to save after each stage with checkpoints being checkpoints, and the ability to hold an item for mid-level recovery.  I felt I had wasted money on DLC for the PC parkour platformer CloudBuilt because they were extremely hard stages and you have to take harder routes to earn the right to set checkpoints - I just couldn't beat them under these conditions, but I wish I could play them with a normal checkpoint setup.  They're hard enough as they are, and the hardcore speedrunners (whom the extra challenge was particularly designed for) don't use checkpoints anyway because they don't die when speedrunning.

So yeah, that's my eternal problem with lives - how you balance them to not be meaningless for the skilled and an infuriating additional bit of difficulty for those who just want to take on the challenge with a safety net.  I guess at the end of the day that's where you have to throw your hands up and say "well we can't cater to everyone".

 

 

On-topic, the bonus acts in Unleashed and Generations are exactly what I think of when I imagine Special Stages as challenges built off regular game mechanics, which test you to the very limit of that mechanic.  As DLC/bonus acts these don't really need a steady difficulty curve like traditional Special Stages, each challenge is the hardest the game offers for each mechanic.  The question is, if those are being used as Special Stages that can occur all over the game, do you make all of them as hard as they can be with the thought that players can tackle them the next time round, or do you put a difficulty curve in them and squander the opportunity to create the hardest setup possible for whatever mechanics you're using for the earlier of the seven stages?  The one advantage of the minigame special stage concept is you at least get to create a typical difficulty curve for it.

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I'm of the (seemingly unusual) opinion that special stages tend to take way too long, the Sonic 3 special stages mean that the TAS for Sonic 3K 100% is about twice as long as the any%, granted this is more than extreme circumstances, but wow you're out of the normal action for a while.  I really like the Sonic 1 special stages for being so quick.  They also have the interesting easter egg/secret where not touching the controller usually brings you right to the emerald.  

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It's hardly unusual for 100% completion to take substantially longer than the most optimal route through the game, so I'm not sure what the relevance of that is supposed to be. That's like complaining that pistol start runs in Doom levels take substantially longer than Super Shotgunning everything.

That being said, the Sonic 2 special stages are basically auto-scrollers by any other name, so it would've been nice to be able to influence the pacing of them once you knew what you were doing.

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Perhaps by putting platforms to jump on and allowing you to roll downhill or something

 

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On 6/30/2016 at 10:59 AM, StaticMania said:

People have more of an issue with how "the" special stages control than understanding them in general. Though some may have trouble understanding how they control and/or the design...or...they could just flat-out dislike the way it controls and/or the design even if it happens to be easy to understand. That's pretty understandable in itself.

When people fail to understand a thing at first, they tend to immediately blame the thing for not explaining itself clearer, and allow that first impression to color any further attempt to interact with the thing.

On 6/30/2016 at 11:21 AM, JezMM said:

Thing is though I DO like the special stages, I'm just saying they're flawed, and why I think so.  Sonic 3 & Knuckles is an example of a special stage I like despite how different they are from the main gameplay, but as some people have said in the thread, the way I see Sonic 2's is how some people feel about 3&K's.

 

You can't say the Last Stories are extras when the main stories set them up to happen.  They would have clearly been designed as part of the game from the start - hell it's setup VERY early on in Sonic Adventure that Chaos grows in power each time he gets an emerald, and yet in the main stories he never goes past 6 - it's obvious from the start that at SOME point you will have to fight him with all 7 emeralds - hell they even show him off in the opening titles, why would the developers do that if they don't hope that all players will see every story?

 

Also the old "just play without Tails!" point for Sonic 2's special stages always falls apart for me considering the developers clearly WANT you to play with both characters as the standard experience - and the fact that the problem with Sonic 2's Special Stages is very rarely Tails but rather the garbage draw distance and how hard it is to read the primitive graphics with bombs that pop out of nowhere giving you half a second to react, pretty much REQUIRING you to just keep playing them over and over until you learn the patterns off by heart.

 

Also for consideration, the fact that all the classic games say "TRY AGAIN" if you didn't beat the Special Stages, suggesting you haven't really won the game properly.  They are entirely encouraged as a mandatory part of the game if you want to see all the main content - beating the game again, but this time also beating all the levels of an unrelated minigame that may or may not be your cup of tea.

Of course, as said, I enjoy Advance and Advance 2 plenty even only being able to make it to the fake final boss, even if a little part of me wishes I could go on and just play that extra level too without doing all the unfun special stage nonsense to unlock it.  It's good that Sonic games at least give you a sense of accomplishment for beating the game under basic conditions (even if they got a bit too used to doing it out of tradition - the way the Secret Rings throws credits at you then requires you to just beat 3 additional missions to reach the last boss (if you haven't done them already - in which case you still get a pointless set of credits before the last boss; and the way Black Knight literally just dumps credits halfway through the game and then doesn't even inform you that there's more story - those were both awfully handled).

This discussion keeps making me think back to how stupid it was that in Donkey Kong 64 you could master the entire main game, but the final boss was blocked off until you beat the Donkey Kong Arcade and Jet Pac minigames.  They barred me off from the conclusion of the game for literally years as a kid.  The way Sonic's special stages do the same in some games is certainly less severe but the same basic concept.

 

Except of course for Sonic 1, which I will still always defend as being excellent special stage-wise due to the fact that the special stages test your normal gameplay skills in an unusual envioronment, as oppose to just coming up with a brand new game.  People only get mad at that one because well, they're hard!

When you claim that something's "flawed" or make any sort of judgement call, you go beyond simple opinion. You have to start bringing facts to the table to back up your opinion, and those facts need to be checked and scrutinized.

I'm absolutely not saying that you could simply hack the Last Story out and the game would be "complete" as is, I'm saying that Last Stories are not "logical" or "supposed" to be in the game any more than the six game types Sonic Adventure provides. The Last Story and how it plays it out is specifically based on two things: how Sonic Adventure was put together, and the concept of a "secret bonus stage" taken from Sonic & Knuckles. Sonic & Knuckles had multiple endings based on what you did precisely because The Doomsday Zone was a bonus with variable effects. Sonic Adventure also has multiple endings: each character's story. The Last Story is icing on the cake and could easily have been integrated into the normal game, but Sonic Adventure was put together in a way where they could have this complicated plot capped with a cool bonus if you're good enough at the game to take out six different game types.

Sonic 2's default is inherently a two player mode. Tails isn't even AI-controlled; the AI simply returns him to where he needs to be if it doesn't detect input on the second controller. If only one player is playing, they should be using the one player option.

...Yes, because that leads to the good ending. A secret hidden in the game. There's a reason why Sonic 1 did not have any special effect for collecting the Emeralds besides an extra graphic at the end, and it has nothing to do with time constraints. Then Super Sonic happened, that wonderful bonus that completely trivializes the games further. Then they decided to add a secret stage, as collecting the Emeralds became more than a typical secret by this point.

The first loops of Donkey Kong and Jet Pac are very easy; everything else in the game should be making you ragequit long before these simple challenges do. See point 1 at the top of this post.

Sonic 1 may use game assets, but nothing in those Special Stages are encountered in actual gameplay. No amount of studying the jump physics can prepare you.

On 6/30/2016 at 5:10 PM, Tara said:

Despatche, I'd appreciate if you would not take the opinions of other people personally.  Nobody is being "cruel" simply because they don't care for a singular aspect of a game about cartoon hedgehogs.

Anyway, as someone who actually likes special stages, I feel most of your points are completely off base.

Which is weird because nothing you have said in defense has been based in fundamental game design, but based solely on personal perception.  The opinions of members here who have expressed disdain over special stages are indeed based "in fact."  That is, they are based on things that actually do happen and based on the objective qualities of the thing they're criticizing, but how they feel about it is entirely subjective, much like pretty much everything you've posted.

The terms are inherently negative because you assign them negativity, irregardless of how the the term is used colloquially or in the context of this conversation.  Granted, I think "artificial difficulty" is a much harder aspect to defend, but I expect games, especially those that are as linear and goal-driven as Sonic, to have some kind of filler.  Super Mario World has this in the form  of bonus stages that operate based on pre-established principles and allow the player to break from the stress of being constantly thrust into danger.  Sonic has this in the form of special stages that offer additional challenge and offer a break from the monotony of playing the same thing for several hours straight.  Neither of those are inherently bad approaches, but both can be described as filler, respectively.  Meanwhile, games like Half-Life 2, while not bad, have driving sections that last for ages and more than a few of these sections have absolutely nothing of interest happening in the meantime.  This is also filler, but it's not exactly desirable filler.

It's not too dissimilar from a TV show.  Dragon Ball Z has the "driving school" episode, which is humorous, cute, and fun, but Bleach has characters sort of just sitting and talking for 900 episodes on end.  Which one is the better option?  You wouldn't be any more factual in choosing one over the other.

Basically, there is "good" and "bad" filler, and barring some particularly egregious examples, how you respond to differing kinds is mostly subjective.

The purpose of lives in arcade games was to prevent people from monopolizing the game and, of course, to entice people to insert more quarters into the machine.  Give a person unlimited lives in an arcade, and they're going to be there all day, which means less people putting quarters in the machine and less people wanting to come back because some nerd has been hogging the same game for three days straight.  With lives, your chances are equivalent to however much money (or store-specific currency if applicable) you have on hand.  This is a great system for arcades.

But in consoles, that's not how it works.  There is no inherent challenge added or removed with the addition of lives unless the game is poorly designed.  There are plenty of games without life systems that still offer a fair and reasonable amount of difficulty.  The Batman: Arkham games are one such example.  You have unlimited continues, but there are still parts I die on all the time.  Multiple times, in fact.  That's because of the game's level design, strategic enemy placement, and challenging mechanics.  Giving me only three chances wouldn't make it any more difficult.  It would just send me backwards, forcing me to plow through sections I've already seen and making the game repetitive and stale.  

This doesn't even translate solely to lives, either.  Gamefreak's initial decision to put a one-time use limit on TM's in the Pokémon games was to entice players to carefully consider how they allocate their resources, which was a fine system for the original games which physically did not have the memory to hold onto a vast number of items, but it was never a good thing about the game.  When that limit was finally removed in the fifth generation, it allowed trainers more customization and more freedom to experiment with moves, which is arguably a better system to have for a game that is ultimately about raising creatures to your desired specifications.  Granted, modern Pokémon games do suffer from being far too easy, but that's actually due to move- and type-balance issues than anything.

If a game is badly designed, lives will keep players from bulldozing through a level recklessly, which might offer some form of challenge, I guess, but that's only if you look at lives as compensation for poor level design.  Removing the lives from Sonic probably wouldn't change that.  I've seen arguments that lives encourage the player to master the whole level instead of just one portion, but I think that is ultimately subjective, depending on how you acquire mastery.  If I get a game over on Sonic 2, for example, being forced to go all the way back to the beginning won't make me better at Metropolis Zone.  At a certain point, it's become a given that I probably won't die on Emerald Hill or the next one, because they're designed to be easy.  And that's the thing.  You're not adding difficulty by restricting the number of playthroughs.  You're just repeating.  Of course, I am aware of the principle of "repeition = practice," but it's a moot point because, again, that's not where the difficulty lies.

I'm not really sure where this fits into the argument.  Unless you're a competitive player, I don't think anyone cares that they're proving their abilities as much as they just like the thrill of getting through it, and I certainly don't think lives add anything in this regard, either.

Have you played either of these games?

I'm sorry, but the very intro of the game shows what to expect from the story.  A first-time player may not know about Super Sonic specifically, but the giant city-destroying water lizard definitely piqued my curiosity when I was a kid to the point where it was fairly obvious that something was missing.  Even ignoring that, there are so many plot points introduced in each individual story that calling it "self-contained" is flat-out dishonest if not oblivious.  Knuckles even comments on this, saying he still has no idea what the hell is going on.  The only thing "self-contained" about each character's story in SA1 is their individual arcs.  Sonic stops Eggman, Tails gains his independence, Knuckles collects all the pieces of the Master Emerald (while also getting a brief glimpse at the ugly history of his ancestors, which had inquired at the start of his arc), Amy rescues a Flicky and reunites it with its family, Big finds Froggy, and Gamma just flat-out dies.  The individual story arcs are self-contained.  What's not self-contained is the overarching story arc regarding Chaos, Tikal, the Chao, etc.  Something that is not-so-subtly pushed in your face in the most abrupt manner.  It's a mystery you're supposed to question.

Heck, this is actually one of the strongest things about SA1's storytelling.  The eerie atmosphere, the sense of mystery, the sense that you want to find out more.  The game hasn't aged considerably well, but damn if it didn't succeed in telling a complex, intricate story that was tied across multiple playthroughs with different characters tremendously well.  It's simply ludicrous to say that you would never know about the last story prior to beating the game when you have reminders of it sprinkled very liberally throughout the game.  I'd go so far as to say if any of the characters' stories were standalone games, they would be very poor standalone games.  It's the fact that they are put together that makes the plot meaningful.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a bit of a different animal.  You can't really get a full appreciation for the world and the characters without playing both paths.  In the Hero side, you have no idea who Shadow is aside from being a bad hedgehog.  You don't learn anything about Rouge other than her being an antagonist to Knuckles.  The dark story is filled with so many plot intricacies that, again, to say that it's self-contained is either dishonest or oblivious.  The dark story is the only one where you learn about Maria.  It's the only one where you discover Rouge is actually a secret agent.  It's the only one where you learn about Project Shadow and that Shadow had been lying dormant for over fifty years prior.  None of that information can be scavenged from the hero story.

Furthermore on that, the Dark story itself is not a different timeline from the Hero story.  The game simply follows the different perspectives of the clashing parties.  The events don't play out any differently in each story.  You just get the same events from a different point of view, which all comes together in the Last story.

That's, again, not what I would call a "self-contained" story.

They would have been very bad storytellers if they didn't include the Last Stories, all things considered.

Yeah, see, the thing about that is that when you make something that functionally doesn't work (not helped that Sonic and Tails is the default setting, making it even more glaring) because you chose to play the game in a way that it was actually intended to be played is called bad game design.

But that's another point, because even without Tails, the special stages in Sonic 2 are no less based on trial and error and memorization, something many players (at least in this thread and others) don't really appreciate in a game.

 

I like the special stages, but I have plenty of problems with the way a lot of them are designed, so I don't particularly blame anyone who just wants to see them gone altogether, nor do I feel like their presence makes a fundamental difference in the actual quality of the game.

I'm not taking anyone's opinion personally, I'm taking issue with how this discussion is playing out. There are opinions being thrown around everywhere making strange judgements about developers and games, and trying to convince people of things that may or may not be true. So much discussion in so many places of the world is handled just like this. I'm here to put the opinion in its own box and bring actual facts to what is supposed to be a debate (and one that attempts to throw a fundamental part of the series under the bus).

Simply incorrect. Most of my post above was either plain fact (no opinion behind it) or assumptions based on my own research and long talks with others (still not opinion). At no point am I concerned with "I like/dislike this" except when I mentioned that I dislike a number of aspects of classic Sonic, entirely as a sidenote, because it was offtopic and I didn't want to get into it.

The terms are inherently negative because the world has always assigned them negatively. The entire point of the term "artificial difficulty" is that something about it is supposed to be "inorganic" and somehow cheats the player. The entire point of the term "filler" is that it's taking up "space" that could be used for other things, or taking up people's time. These are not my definitions as I don't even use these words; these are the time-worn definitions that have been used for countless years now by everyone else on the planet... except for certain people in this thread, apparently.

You misunderstand what's happening, and this is exactly what happened to lives, by the way. It takes a very specific kind of person to actually stick with a game and get good at it beyond the resources given. This did not used to be the case, because we used to live in an era where people were given a reasonable amount of resources to play a game with. Resources were trivialized so long ago that noone really remembers what it's like to design resources well. Challenge means nothing except to speedrunners and other so-called "hardcore" gamers; nowadays, you slog and grind through a game once, and maybe play it again in some distant future, largely based on your very specific first impression more than anything else.

So, the idea of getting through on one chance is completely out because noone really cares. Resources now matter. Giving you three chances would make it more difficult because you would have to actually learn to play and to play well, rather than blasting through the game every time you boot it up until you get bored. The game is already "repetitive and stale", and your entire experience is running on the fumes of your fundamental "like" of the game (again, based largely on things like first impression, peer pressure, etc).

Only shorter single player games like Sonic and Mario suffer from this. Things like RPGs turn grinding into an artform, and multiplayer games completely sidestep this entirely because challenge is derived from pitting resources against each other. The idea of balancing a game is not so "abstract" there as it is with single player games.

TMs and especially HMs were never a good idea no matter how it could possibly be rationalized. By itself, it irritates the item issue you're talking about, and both makes balance much more complicated (usually resulting in balance being affected negatively).

Pokemon single player was always as easy as it is now, it's just that in gen 1 you had things like Psychic and Normal. The basic single player "campaign" of defeating the champion is a very small part of both what Pokemon is and what it's meant to be.

Resources given has very little to do with specific level design. No amount of lives will save poor level design; it is usually argued that an abundance of lives is meant to "fix" poor design. Wow, yet another reason why this "resource inflation" is a terrible idea. The purpose of resources is to allow an alternative to forcing players to play perfectly all the time; with resource design, you get levels of skill, wiggle room, baby steps on the road to being skilled. Note that "resources" also refers to things like, say, items in monitors.

This is the part where I sympathize with people having issue with the "obstacle course" concept. The problem is that games rarely emphasize the use of a level select as a training tool to help you practice parts you have issue with, or just so that you can experiment with other levels for a while, so that you won't be stuck hopelessly grinding away for that half minute you would get to Metropolis Zone before you die. In something like Sonic, level selects were always seen as cheats, and this simply goes hand in hand with resource inflation.

It's all one big package of degradation in game design, and it all stinks.

I already covered everything about Sonic Adventure above, and it largely stems from a very specific point; we don't have the same definition for words like "self-contained" and "bonus". I don't know what I could do to help this conflict.

I also covered the Sonic 2 situation above.

People have been bred to hate "trial and error" and "memorization". They have created new game-specific definitions for these terms, completely ignoring their core definitions for the purpose of video games. In doing so, they throw out any foundation in their ranting about "skill" and "cheapness"... when it really just boils down to them not really wanting to be good at the game, because they've been bred to believe that being good at games doesn't "matter".

At the end of it all, you say that you have problems with Special Stages, but are they simple dislikes, or do you legitimately challenge the developer's better judgement? As I said earlier, I take issue with the frequent confusion of these two things by what seems to be every other human being in existence. It goes well beyond Sonic, and it definitely goes well beyond video games. It's impossible to have a serious conversation about anything when you're constantly having to puzzle out whether someone's just mad at a thing, or whether someone is legitimately trying to explain and solve a problem. It matters even more because this is the Sonic community, where problems tend to be meaningfully solved in ways that very few other series can attest to, because the healthy fangame and hacking aspect can make solutions real.

On 7/1/2016 at 9:48 AM, Blacklightning said:

I realize this is kind of off topic, so for once I'll try to be quick and concise on this and respectfully disagree. Lives are only a problem when trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - it's something you build with a marathon setting in mind, and the level design and learning curve have to be built to accomodate exactly that. And if it gets to a point that you're unable to master a later level on account of replaying the earlier ones many times, to me that's a question of making the later levels a culmination of everything you've learnt and practiced so far so those skills actually carry over regardless of the time you've spent at the later stages - Metropolis Zone, on top of being designed with absolute contempt for the player, is pretty much a perfect example of what happens when you design to the contrary of that, and for how long Eggmanland is I'm sure that counts to some extent too.

I just don't think it's fair to label the concept of lives as innately archaic when the problem, if anything, is that developers simply stopped actually developing their games around them and apparently only really bothered to keep them around for collectible's sake. There's a certain structure of game design that still benefits them, but it gets a lot harder to do once you make level select accessible by default, and Sonic's far from the only one to make that mistake with them if you ask me.

This isn't as off-topic as it appears. It has a lot to do with why something like Special Stages manages to persist time and time again.

As I explain above, a level select can go very well with a proper resource system if you advertise to people what it's for, rather than make it out to be some secret or cheat.

On 7/1/2016 at 11:27 AM, JezMM said:

I definitely get where you're coming from, but can't see Sonic going back to it's "game over and you're back to the start" roots any time soon since it's a franchise primarily aimed at kids, and the times they're-a-changin'.

It's a tough act to balance, like I want every game to have a Egg Shuttle style marathon mode ever since Colours introduced the idea, so lives would be a perfect fit for that right?  But again... as a skilled player, I've never gotten a Game Over on such a mode.  So maybe save them for a "hard mode" that can only be played in marathon format a la Shadow the Hedgehog?  But then you might end up letting down the people who are skilled enough to enjoy a harder challenge... without being skilled enough to enjoy it under marathon conditions, who would love the harder stages if they could play them with standard infinite lives (or 0 lives only equals starting over the stage etc).  I hated the final DLC pack for New Super Mario Bros. 2 because I just don't have the skills or patience to beat the three romhack-level difficult stages with two hit points and no lives - but I would have loved the ability to take them on under normal rules - being able to save after each stage with checkpoints being checkpoints, and the ability to hold an item for mid-level recovery.  I felt I had wasted money on DLC for the PC parkour platformer CloudBuilt because they were extremely hard stages and you have to take harder routes to earn the right to set checkpoints - I just couldn't beat them under these conditions, but I wish I could play them with a normal checkpoint setup.  They're hard enough as they are, and the hardcore speedrunners (whom the extra challenge was particularly designed for) don't use checkpoints anyway because they don't die when speedrunning.

So yeah, that's my eternal problem with lives - how you balance them to not be meaningless for the skilled and an infuriating additional bit of difficulty for those who just want to take on the challenge with a safety net.  I guess at the end of the day that's where you have to throw your hands up and say "well we can't cater to everyone".

Things "change" because ideas are forced. The "old" ways could be forced back just as easily as they were forced away. The merit of any given thing, good or bad, is rarely considered.

The problem is that people are not clearly being told the rules on what they're "supposed" to be doing. Newer games have taken resource inflation to such an insane degree that having to puzzle out how to play a game well should no longer be an issue, but somehow it still is. Somehow the meme of a game being "too easy" simply because of resource inflation still persists after all these years. The greatest irony is that we still talk about "beating" games so extensively, yet there's so little about these games being learned and so little "beating" actually being done.

The way this CloudBuilt does things is clearly wrong, and it is exactly how the system was destroyed. You're not supposed to get resources for playing well, or lose resources for playing worse; experts need resources less and less as they get better at the game (though I do NOT recommend losing resources for playing better). Every type of player needs to be given the same chances, given to them "outside" of normal gameplay.

13 hours ago, Phos said:

I'm of the (seemingly unusual) opinion that special stages tend to take way too long, the Sonic 3 special stages mean that the TAS for Sonic 3K 100% is about twice as long as the any%, granted this is more than extreme circumstances, but wow you're out of the normal action for a while.  I really like the Sonic 1 special stages for being so quick.  They also have the interesting easter egg/secret where not touching the controller usually brings you right to the emerald.  

It seems rather silly to compare the results of a TAS to any particular thought on stage length like that. You have to consider that the Special Stages aren't really "designed" for the absolute expert player who can tear through levels in ridiculous times (if they were, you'd REALLY hate Special Stages). After that, you have to consider that there are tons of zips and other weird tricks in all the games; just have a look at the beauty that is Marble Zone Act 3.

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I find it strange that some people dislike that Special  Stages play differently to the rest of the game.

Isn't that the point? That's what makes them exciting and fun! They wouldn't feel very "special" in the least if they just played like the rest of the game...

As long as they're actually fair and fun (like S3+K's) and not bullshit like Sonic 2's were.

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I ask that you reconsider how you approach Sonic 2's Special Stages. Not only is the basic mode of Sonic 2 a "two-player game", but it's very likely that the Special Stages were always meant to be played with that extra help.

This might also have something to do with why the Special Stages in games like Sonic 3D are so much more lenient.

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Tails is only "extra help" if a person is controlling him co-op style, otherwise you just have to just react faster to make up for his one second lagging behind...and the only way to do that is to have at least had some experience with Sonic 2's special bonus chaos emerald stages.

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49 minutes ago, Despatche said:

When you claim that something's "flawed" or make any sort of judgement call, you go beyond simple opinion. You have to start bringing facts to the table to back up your opinion, and those facts need to be checked and scrutinized.

I'm not taking anyone's opinion personally, I'm taking issue with how this discussion is playing out. There are opinions being thrown around everywhere making strange judgements about developers and games, and trying to convince people of things that may or may not be true. So much discussion in so many places of the world is handled just like this. I'm here to put the opinion in its own box and bring actual facts to what is supposed to be a debate (and one that attempts to throw a fundamental part of the series under the bus).

At the end of it all, you say that you have problems with Special Stages, but are they simple dislikes, or do you legitimately challenge the developer's better judgement? As I said earlier, I take issue with the frequent confusion of these two things by what seems to be every other human being in existence. It goes well beyond Sonic, and it definitely goes well beyond video games. It's impossible to have a serious conversation about anything when you're constantly having to puzzle out whether someone's just mad at a thing, or whether someone is legitimately trying to explain and solve a problem.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding about how most video game debate works that is causing an unnecessarily dramatic rift in the discussion.

Regardless of what Sonic Team decides to do, the experience of a video game with any individual comes down to a subjective emotional experience, and this is the base assumption that such conversations are operating under unless context dictates otherwise (how to mod something, what features a game is to have, chain-exclusive pre-orders, etc.) By trying to force participants to uphold an unnecessary standard of proof where one need not apply, you are hijacking the discussion's focus in a manner roughly similar to what you are complaining about in the last paragraph, where instead of trying to discern between the objective and the subjective, now we're concerned about whether or not someone's own experiences even matter at all.

What is even more concerning is that you are applying this lax standard of discussion to other ambiguous conversations about more pressing and larger issues, in effect equating discussion about fake Special Stages to real life politics, further taking the thread into territory it never needed to tread in the first place.

You are not the first person on this forum to try and railroad opinions by assigning certain ones higher standards of proof to be met for no reason other than your own personal disagreement with the base opinions themselves, and you unfortunately won't be the last. However, the act of doing this has utterly ruined many a discussion topic on here and as a staff member I'm putting my foot down on it. If you're unable to understand that "Special Stages are totally unfun" and "Special Stages are totally fun" are both opinionated statements with logically equal footing, then there is no reason for you to continue participating in a thread with an objection that was already inherently addressed by the nature of the discussion. You're basically being off-topic. At the very least, drop this "burden of proof" presumptuousness and converse with people only on the basis of their examples and experiences given, of which there are plenty here to talk about.

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The funny thing is Despatche you are basically arguing that Special Stages are objectively good ideas and objectively well designed as a concept, and seem incapable of tolerating that the (frankly very varied) hands-on opinions of Sonic players in this thread are disproving that idea, claiming we're playing or even simply "experiencing" the game "wrong" way.

For the record, I will confirm for you now, my critiques of special stages do not stem from being "mad at a thing".  Games where I have enjoyed Special Stages include: Sonic 1, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic Rush, Sonic Rush Adventure, Sonic Colours DS and even the infamous motion-controlled Sonic Lost World 3DS.  Games where I haven't enjoyed Special Stages include Sonic 2, Sonic Advance and Sonic Heroes.  I would also mention Sonic Chaos, Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Advance 3 but the issue with those was more the method of getting into the stages rather than the stages themselves.

I feel my personal taste actually informs my attempt to be fair and unbiased in my arguments regarding "the special stage as a minigame rather than offshoot of the main gameplay" because I have been on both the positive and negative side of things.  Sonic 2 I loathe and I would hate that the minigame would deny me access to a portion of the main game had there been a bonus stage for collecting all emeralds.  Meanwhile, in Sonic Colours DS, I find the Special Stage gameplay MORE fun than the main gameplay believe it or not.

 

Finally, to respond to a much more particular thing, I disagree with you that Sonic 1's special stages are a minigame comparable to the other special stages, and aren't an offshoot of regular gameplay.  Knowledge of the jumping physics DOES play into your navigation of the stages, and just because all the other obstacles in the special stage are unique, that doesn't make it a minigame any more than gimmicks and hazards unique to one zone are (such as Scrap Brain's flywheels, which like the special stages, build off of, but cannot be mastered ahead of time by, experience with the general gameplay movements).

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