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Starting out in Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, the Steam version on PC!
If you have a save but pick "New Game," a window saying "Delete all of your game data saved so far?" pops up--and if you pick YES, it resets all your Options settings! So the volume went from 20% to 100% suddenly and deafened me as the first stage started. ; D ; P
But it works okay with my DS4 and hasn't crashed or choked up yet so it feels better on a technical level than Sonic Generations, which came out on PC a year earlier (although in the console version releases, Sonic 4 came out a year before Generations ; D).
Things I don't like:
- Sonic moves too slow in the first second of trying to get him to move. He comes to awkward stops on sleep inclines, and slows down when running along telephone-cord-shaped spiral paths. Jerky vine swings. Why didn't they copy the original physics? This feels chore-like. Baffling. : P
- Geckos phasing in on the wall right in front of me and firing instantly point-blank. Whee.
- Lock-on jumps. Just let me jump freely, man. Sonic used to jump good in 2D. : PP Now there's twice as many button presses necessary and you die if the lock-on decides to do something different.
- There are a lot of spots where you die if you don't move in the air in a particular way toward a target or landing spot that's still off-screen--so you lose a life, and continue losing lives until you memorize the spot where you have to do the particular air move toward the still-unseen goal; in fact the stage designers seem to take a certain glee in setting up jumps that leave you just short of current safety.
- Massive chasms at the ends of stages, requiring move memorization to survive. Easier than making a boss fight, I suppose. Barf barf.
On the other hand, I kinda like the sorta janky (light flares on grass, weirdly photo-realistic background cloudscapes) high-res 2D art. And the bonus stage I've had to do so far was actually chill, and easy to control; kind of a rip-off of Taito's Cameltry--way better than any Sega-made bonus stage I had to do in Sonic 1-3, which were more or less out to destroy you. |
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"Ball was fun-ish, rest not so much"
This game already the worst physics of any commercial Sonic game I've tried to play, and kind of horrific level design, and it upped the ante here something fierce.
End-of-stage death pits evolved to a double-death pit, and were joined by fun stuff like full-screen crushing walls chasing you, drowning, 10-minute time-out deaths (whyyy), and a boss with random full-screen crushing block patterns.
There were even block puzzles in dark rooms, and mine cart sequences, which normally I would have protested, but which felt downright dandy next to all the other stuff. And I liked drunkenly trying to maintain balance on big rolling balls (after those balls had been crushing me repeatedly up to that point...)--but then they made you do it like four times in a row which took a bit of the fun out of it.
So I quit. : P Episode II is supposed to be a bit better...
Was looking up the designer credits, and the lead designer for Episode I is just one of the regular designers for Episode II. And the Sonic Advance games this developer, Dimps, made for GBA a decade prior had entirely different design teams, so, whew, maybe those will be okay. |
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