Will, Simon and Flopsy visited Dundee and Leeds (21st Oct-27th Oct 2024)

[Simon]

"I hold record in Jazz Jackrabbit 1, but I've never played Sonic."
"Jazz Jackrabbit? On what platform is that?"

Indeed, I had watched speedruns of Sonic 3 on the Genesis, and I had watched experienced Sonic 1/2/3 players play Sonic Mania around 2018. I have played Sonic Robo Blast 2 myself, but that's 3-D platforming (not 2-D) and has different controls.

Practically, my prior knowledge was:

• How top-level play looks like,
  
• that jumping is attacking and makes you invincible against killable enemies,
  
• that you can charge forward speed when the character is standing, even though I had to be told the specific controls for that,
  
• that newer games (Sonic Mania) make it safer to charge ahead blindly,
  
• that you must hold up and down in Wheel Glitch Zone to control the barrel. This is an odd detail that I had picked up as random internet knowledge, but it has finally come in handy now.
  

Given this kind of exposure, it was still correct to say that I had never played, but I hope that it's now more understandable how I learned the ropes reasonably quickly in Dundee.

In Dundee, we had Sonic Mania and a port of Sonic 3 on the Switch (or Playstation 4?).

I complained that they removed the music by Michael Jackson from Carnival Night and Ice Cap. I'm sure you can eventually get used to the replacement tracks, too, but ... geoo has been at my place several times, and he likes playing Genesis game music on his laptop. Several times per day, we get to hear Genesis Lemmings 2 Circus and Genesis Sonic 3 Carnival Night. Heresy to remove that!

The point of all Sonic games seems to be: Make it to the end alive, or, if that's too easy, collect all emeralds and get to the end fast. Fine very much with me. The confusion came from the many different routes that you can take, and from the elaborate level design. The devs really went over the top with seemingly-useless detail everywhere on the map, and the levels are huge. Cute!

Rock Garden wants you to go slowly, stand in place, an spin against random blue balls that stick out of the ground. Why? The point of Sonic is to go fast, not stand in place!

I liked the UFO-chasing bonus stages; they're hard. They need information, in the sense that you can't win until you understand what rings and blue bubbles do, but there is an interesting rhythm to it.

Blue sphere bonus stages felt pointless. The only challenge is the ever-increasing speed, that's a boring way to adjust difficulty. They're also inconsistent: 3x3 squares turn into rings after you collect the outline, but 2x2 squares don't, and you'll lose instantly if you expect the 3x3 behavior here. The world is also a torus, not a sphere, even though the rendering wants you to believe that it's a sphere.

-- Simon