Hi there!
Once again, I haven’t posted for a while, largely for
girlfriend-related reasons though I have to say that I needed to give myself
some time to play the games as well!
So we’re at the half-way point of the challenge, and so far
I’ve been doing OK. By that I mean I’ve managed to get through the last six
months without buying a game or any DLC of any kind, and any games I’ve
acquired during this time have been absolutely for free. And as we approach the
back half of the year, I’ll take this opportunity to reflect on the challenge,
and how it’s made me approach games:
It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that it is easy for me
to fall in to the trap of buying games habitually. The huge stack of Xbox
games, both original and 360, in my bedroom is testament to that. This year
I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to do this. And to be perfectly honest
it’s been a lot easier for me than I dared to hope at the start of the year!
This is largely because of the new generation of consoles
that are coming out. The line-up for the new generation is the Playstation 4,
the Xbox One and the Wii U, and I don’t own any of them. Therefore I can’t be
tempted to buy games for them! Not that there are many to get at this point,
and most of the ones you can buy were available on previous-gen as well. I’ve
spent some time thinking about which one I’m going to get when I am allowed to
do so, but that’s a whole different discussion for another time.
When I buy games, I tend to go for the ones on special
offer. GAME – the main retailer for games in the UK
Where the challenge has presented me with, well, a challenge
is when it comes to actually thinking about the games I own. I know I’ve been a
bit spotty with this over the last few months, but the original idea behind the
blog was to post updates about what I think of the games I’ve been playing and
whether or not I want to keep them, this that and the other. And I’ve seen some
of the other guys playing games on their posts and getting through a
significantly higher number of games than I am, and I’m wondering if I should
be doing more. Not playing more games; we all have different schedules so if I
don’t have time to play as many as I’d like, or as many as other people do,
then it’s not really a problem. But I sometimes ask myself whether I should be
doing more to say how I’m getting on.
What I’ve been doing, then, is while I play the game, I
think about what I want to say about it. Not just for the sake of the
challenge, though. I think it’s quite a good thing that, given how much of my
time I spend playing video games, it’s good to ask myself why I’m actually
enjoying it – and if other people want to know, then that’s fine by me. So I
mutter to myself passages that eventually end up in the blog, in the hope that
someone’s going to read it and find it interesting…
Case in point: This week’s game.
This game will always be very special to me. Back in 1994, I
got my first Sega Megadrive, (Genesis,) and I’d been after one for literally
years. I remember I was 8 years old, and my Mom bought me a Megadrive with
Sonic 2 on it. It wasn’t my first ever game; we’d had an Acorn Archimedes
computer before that and we’d had plenty of games for it. But the Megadrive was
mine, and so was Sonic 2. I played it almost non-stop until the end of the
school year when I was bought another couple of games – more on that later. I
come to own it now from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection that I’ve spoken
about before, and I thought 20 years later, now was the time to give it another
play-through.
Turns out I’d forgotten two very important things about the
game. The first is how much fun Sonic is! And the second was how hard those old
games are.
So Sonic 2 is a great game, it really is. Side-scrolling
platformers were hardly uncommon 20 years ago, but few games did it so well. It
encouraged speed by having Sonic move incredibly fast for a video game, but
punished carelessness by throwing spikes and pit traps in your way. The levels
were designed in vastly different styles, each with their own gimmicks, traps
and enemies – but with enough similarity to tie it all together. The fact that
there were different enemies on each level was actually not that common, if I
remember rightly; most of the games I remember playing at the time used the
same or similar enemies across multiple levels. The sound track is nothing
short of iconic. I know that word should not be used lightly, but just do a
quick search on YouTube for the number of people who’ve done videos of Bass
Guitar covers of the Chemical Plant Zone theme.[1] And
most importantly of all, whether you got through the game or not were entirely
up to you.
“Well, no shit,” I hear you cry. “You’re in control of the
game; of course it’s up to you whether or not you beat it!” Yes… but it’s not
that simple. You have a lot of control over what happens in the game for a few
reasons:
- Sonic 2 was a competently-made game. That means that it had been play-tested so the dev team knew it all worked properly, and there were no game-breaking bugs or glitches that would screw you over. That’s not to say there weren’t any bugs or glitches in there at all, in fact some of them were quite beneficial, but none of them would harm your progress, and they weren’t even taken out for the game compilation I’m playing it on! Thankfully most of us remember a time before there was scope for games being patched for bugs, so the developers really had to work hard to make sure that everything worked. They didn’t always get it right, but they got a lot more right than many of their contemporaries manage these days!
- The game wasn’t designed to be played for you. There were no button prompts, no “Hit the Crawl from the rear or you’ll just bounce off him” or “Jump to avoid these spikes/that pit trap.” If you avoided the traps, it was because you saw them coming. If you destroyed a badnik without getting hurt, it was because you’d considered the best way to approach it. If you managed to beat the bosses, it was because you’d analysed their attack patterns and developed your counter-attack from that. Or more likely, you’d buggered it up fifty times before you got any of it right – which made the game a challenge, but not unfair. There was a lot of trial and error, and the sense of accomplishment from finally getting it right was where a lot of the longevity of these games comes from. I’m still playing it 20 years later!
It was quite strange, playing it through again. Those muscle
reactions that I thought long gone were coming back to me as I played my way
through the early levels of the game, only to get stuck later on because I kept
dying. Rarely from a Badnik (evil robot.) No, I’d always get trapped, or fall
down a pit, or drown or something or other. I remember finding the game a lot
easier when I was younger and I found myself wondering, are games getting
easier in the last few generations? Or am I getting rubbish at them in my old
age?
It turns out the answer doesn’t relate to either of those
things. In actual fact, when I played this game when I was 8 years old, I had
all the cheat codes to it and could select whichever level I want, and was also
able to change into Super Sonic any time I wanted as well. So I had plenty of
opportunity to practise those harder levels. I actually can’t remember, even in
my younger days, playing the game through from one end to the other more than a
couple of times, though I did complete the game several times by cheating. I
can’t remember any of the codes now, even if I wanted to cheat – though I do
remember you input the codes by playing certain tracks from the Sound Test in a
particular order. I don’t think they’d work now even if I wanted to do it,
because I did play back some of the tracks and my 360 seems to be a lot less
happy about doing this than my old Megadrive was. (It crashed after a couple of
tracks.)
That being said, Sonic 2 is also a lot harder than today’s
contemporary games because here you have a fail state. You start with three
lives. You can gain more, but if you ever lose them, you have to start all over
again. This just doesn’t happen in modern games, and rightly so, because modern
games are sometimes quite a lengthy procedure that would not survive having the
whole thing de-railed because you’d died too many times. But in the early
games, those lives were your lifeline. You had to hang on to them, and try not
to lose them.
Because lose them I do; usually either to aforementioned
traps, or boss battles. Some of the latter are ridiculously easy, some are
insanely hard, and the last boss battle is borderline impossible. I’ve fallen
down on the last couple of bosses several times, and even though it is frustrating,
I don’t particularly mind. Let’s be honest; this is what these games are about.
Smashing your way through levels, exploring them fully to find their secrets –
they will give you cool stuff but you have to earn it – praying that you’re
still in good enough shape to battle the end-of-level boss, and then when
you’re exhausted and your concentration is slipping, have one last duel to the
death between you and the final boss. Whatever happens at that point, it is a
fitting end…
I managed to beat the game last Sunday night, and allowed
myself a small smile of overcoming the challenge, as hitherto I always fell
down on the last couple of levels. But I would like to make a few comments on
the game itself, how it is different from the other Sonic games, and what I
think of the mechanics involved with it.
For a start, Sonic 2 is a very good sequel. Over the last
few generations, we’ve been seeing more and more sequels that haven’t been as
effective. On one hand, some sequels iterate rather than innovate, basically
releasing the same game 4 or 5 times. *cough* Dynasty Warriors *cough* On the
other hand, some games take it too far the other way, and release games where
the mechanics and design are so different that it is barely recognisable as
part of the franchise. (Less often, though I think some of the more recent
Sonic games are guilty of this!)
To contrast, Sonic 2 is basically Sonic 1, but better. He
can still do everything he could do before, in the same way – but now he can do
more things. Here’s a few alterations to what had gone before that made Sonic 2
an improvement on Sonic 1:
First, the Dash Attack. Sonic’s been able to do this for so
long, sometimes it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t always the case. You could
now duck on the floor and charge a ground-based spin attack, whereas before you
had to do it from a run. This was very useful for opening some item boxes and
hitting some of the enemies where precision was required. It’s no surprise that
they kept this one!
Second, the Special Stage. This was a massive improvement
over the rotating special stage from Sonic One, where one wrong move would take
you straight back into the main game. For a start, it was much easier to get to
– get 50 rings and find a Star Post, then jump through the ring of Stars that
appears there. A challenge, certainly, but better than praying you still had
enough rings left at the end of the level. And then there was the Special Stage
itself. The sort-of-3D graphics looked amazing for the time, and the setting
made the age-old premise of ‘collect the good stuff (rings) and avoid the bad
stuff (mines)’ a lot more interesting. Plus, if you did muck it up, the game
would drop you back in the same level next time, rather than move it on. This
was good because some of the seven stages were actually really hard!
Third, Super Sonic. This was your reward for getting all
seven Chaos Emeralds out of the Special Stage. If at any time after this you
collected 50 rings and hit the jump button, Sonic turns yellow and becomes
Super Sonic. I remember Sonic The Comic (published in the early-to-late 90s, I
got most of them up to 1999,) portraying Super Sonic as an out-of-control
demon, super-strong, invulnerable and very, very angry. The Super Sonic you
control in the game is pretty much like that except he can’t fly. There were no
morality issues either; in pretty much every game before 1995, you were either
the good guy, or in a very small number of cases, you weren’t. Sonic, Super or
otherwise, has always been the good guy and rightly so. Super Sonic is faster
than Sonic, won’t take any damage that would normally result in losing your
rings and can jump higher. But he’s less accurate to control, which is not good
during some of the precision platforming you have to employ late in the game.
Also, getting him was something of a blessing and a curse – he drains your
rings for every second he’s in the game, and there’s no way to turn him off
short of letting him drain them all. And it was almost impossible not to do it
because the trigger was the jump button. Try getting through any Sonic game
without jumping and see what happens! This was all well and good, except that
the best way to collect extra lives was to collect 100 rings, and playing as
Super Sonic prevented this. So, the individual levels were easier, but the end
of the game was harder as it allowed less room for error.
Finally, Tails/2 player Co-op. Sadly, I think they missed a
trick here. True, Tails became one of the most famous characters of the
franchise, and the idea of a fox with two tails that can fly is a good one. But
as there was no way to make him fly in the game, it didn’t make the slightest
bit of difference whether you played him or Sonic. This undermined what could
potentially have been a great innovation into the game, allowing Tails to reach
harder-to-reach areas. The Co-op mode was, I suppose, a good way to allow a
younger player to play with a more experienced player, since Tails couldn’t die
or lose any rings. But the second player is shut out of the last couple of
levels since Tails doesn’t appear in them, for the story’s sake as much as
anything else. You could, of course, allow the AI to control tails, but this
rarely helped. His role seemed quite reactive; i.e. if a Badnik hurt Sonic,
Tails would attack it. If Sonic lost his rings, Tails would pick them up. He
was no use at all on the Special Stage, as he would follow Sonic and his
reactions were delayed by about half a second, which meant that he would more
often than not run into the mines you were trying to avoid! Most of this was
fixed for Sonic 3 though.
So, to conclude, a great game, and I was happy to have the
opportunity to play it through again. I think I will cover Streets of Rage 2 at
some point as well, but for now, I’m going to decide what to play next in
amongst the multitude of things I’ve got to do…
[1]
Then do another, much longer search for one who actually got it right…
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