OMG Nintendo.com

Since the last good game featuring Sonic the Hedgehog was Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I figure Sonic by default belongs to us now. That means it's time to talk about a more painful subject: why the core, console-release Sonic the Hedgehog games aren't good anymore.

The situation is so dire that Susan Arendt of Game|Life has issued a call Sonic's head on a platter. Her Sonic the Hedgehog Must Die simply states that Sonic's games are an embarrassment at this point, and Sega needs to stop making them entirely. It's an understandable viewpoint, but I don't agree.

Sonic is a popular enough character that it would only take one really good game to turn the series around and get people as excited again. Note that I don't mean a decent, playable game; I mean something really good, a must-play 4.5/5 masterpiece.

Sonic Team can still make that game, if they're willing to throw a lot of the current Sonic game formula out the window and start over scratch. Here's a list of the seven most important design principles I think our revolutionary, franchise-saving Sonic game would need to follow.

Before I get started, I want to clarify my POV on this. I sat down and thought long and hard about the Sonic games not just as fun things I played, but as titles that really changed the rules of action-platforming back in the day. As far as that goes, I think it's inarguable that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the apex of the Sonic series. It does everything just as well as the original Sonic when it comes to level design and tight controls, and offers some valuable extra features like the Spin Dash and a second player character.

Arendt's article argues for Sonic Adventure as the "beginning of the end" for Sonic gameplay, but I'd argue that the franchise went off the rails far earlier than that. Sonic 3 was already starting to skew toward the needlessly complicated gameplay and forgettable level design that mars the modern titles, and even at the time I could tell it wasn't as good as Sonic 2. Even Sonic & Knuckles has, in retrospect, a certain aura of doom about it. I'm not saying Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are bad, mind you, just that they set precedent for what the modern games do really, really poorly.

Anyway, this just means that my list of Seven Ways to Save Sonic the Hedgehog is going to largely assume that what the Sonic franchise needs to be good again is to go back to basics and study the design principles that drove the gameplay in Sonic 2. Obviously, if you don't agree with my assessment of Sonic 2, you probably won't agree with my list of things that need to be fixed in modern Sonic, but that's not my problem.

7. Ditch the Camera

The game that introduced consoles to the 3D camera as we now know it is the seminal Super Mario 64. Since then the basics of how that camera system work have been applied to nearly every major console genre, from the shooter to the RPG, thanks to the expedient of replacing the awkward N64 camera buttons with a right analog stick.

There's a reason why Mario 64 was the first game to develop this sort of camera system, I think. It was the most obvious way to allow for deliberate exploration in 3D, and the Mario games were always about the idea of carefully exploring the world for power-ups and secrets.

The fundamental difference between Mario and Sonic in terms of game design during their 2D eras was the emphasis of the action. Mario wanted you to try to ferret out secrets, but all Sonic asked you to do was move forward while moving as quickly as possible. The camera system that worked wonders for taking Mario's basic gameplay style into 3D wasn't well-suited to fast movement, and in fact most modern games are somewhat slow-paced to help players keep track of where they are in 3D space.

Since the camera system that was ported into the Sonic games as of Adventure wasn't friendly to fast movement, it forced an entire change in the basic philosophy of the game. In Adventure, you aren't asked to focus on relentless forward progress anymore. Instead, you're... well, you're exploring at a more deliberate pace, using various character abilities. From a certain point of view, you're not playing a Sonic game at all, you're playing Super Mario Bros. 2 in 3D with furry skins.

If Sonic the Hedgehog is to go back to its roots, then traditional 3D camera controls have to go. They're complete anathema to everything unique about Sonic's original gameplay style. I'm not saying that a revitalizing Sonic game would need to ditch 3D entirely, but whatever direction it went in, it desperately needs to be something with a fixed camera. This could mean 2.5D perspective, on-rails running, automatic camera like Galaxy, whatever. The important thing here is that players shouldn't be asked to worry about controlling Sonic and the camera at the same time.

6. Ditch the Cast

Susan Arendt seems to think of Sonic Heroes at the title that truly marked when the Sonic franchise had totally lost its way, and I'm inclined to agree. It would be one thing to jam a game full of that many characters if they were all individually good characters, but out of the sprawling dozens in the Sonic cast, there are at most seven solid concepts.

If you look at the original Sonic the Hedgehog, it only bothered to have two "characters" aside from the scads of villains you face: Sonic and Eggman. Sonic 2 added Tails, which allowed for co-op play and the woeful split-screen mode, but otherwise Tails's movement wasn't very different from Sonic's. He let two people share a game without really changing it.

Sonic's cast problem is a direct result of the sensation Knuckles caused in Sonic 3, and Amy Rose neatly duplicated in Sonic CD. Once it was obvious that adding a new exclusive to each game caused a spike of fan interest, it was inevitable that new characters would become part of the formula for new Sonic titles. While some of the characters weren't bad, this phenomenon meant that a title like Sonic Heroes, where Sonic is barely present, was inevitable.

I believe that only really die-hard Sonic fans, the people with full runs of the Archie comics and DVD sets of the Saturday Morning cartoon, actually care about the ancilliary Sonic cast at all. To most gamers, the really iconic Sonic characters are probably still Eggman, Sonic, Tails, and maybe Shadow (he did have his own game, after all). Right now the games seem desperately afraid to leave any character with any sort of fan-following out of a major game, while also piling in more new characters.

A truly revolutionary Sonic title would go back to basics and ditch basically the entire supporting cast. Just build the game around Eggman, Sonic, and maybe Tails. Maybe sequels could start trickling the better characters back in, but to get Sonic back on its feet, there needs to be a focus on the core characters and the core gameplay principles. Yes, the diehard fans will whine, but if Sega ever wants to sell Sonic to people who basically want to play good games again, this step strikes me as absolutely necessary. Frankly, the game might be even better if it ditched Tails.

What the Sonic franchise desperately needs is to completely rebuild its gameplay and approach based on the distinct abilities and personality of the character who is supposedly the star of the show. This means constructing an engine that's fundamentally about what Sonic does, not what Silver or Rouge or any of his other loser friends do. Sonic Team can try to make other characters work in 3D once they've fixed Sonic.

Eggman should stay around simply to because attempts to displace Eggman as the main Sonic the Hedgehog villain tend to end in ridiculous tragedy, with Sonic fighting either Eggman knockoffs of generic anime villains. We'll get into that more with the next entry, though.

5. Ditch the Humans

Speaking of Eggman, let's talk for a bit about how he works. The early games did a lot to reinforce the idea that Eggman was dangerous because his extraordinary intelligence allowed him to do the mad scientist thing. Visually, making the character a human in a surreal, pastoral world of cartoon animals emphasized both that he was a more advanced thinker and fundamentally a misfit. He still didn't seem very out of place; Eggman was, after all, a cartoon human.

There was no real need for more humans in the Sonic setting. In fact, it was undesirable-- adding in more people simply took away from Eggman's outsider status. Somehow, though, it ended up happening anyway, possibly part of the misguided setting-building attempts in recent games. The problem is that the humans of the new games look nothing like Eggman; they generally are designs that could've wandered out of any random modern anime or maybe Kingdom Hearts. They look bizarre alongside the Sonic characters, and profoundly unsettling if you get one of animals, one of the new-humans, and Eggman's unpleasant next-gen redesign all together. Stuff like Shadow's crush on Maria just gets into intensely creepy territory.

Regardless of what direction our theoretical, franchise-saving Sonic game went, it would desperately need to strip extraneous humans out of the worldsetting. Part of the appeal of the early Sonic games is that they were very simple and straightforward as compared to Mario, and this simplicity extended into the setting. Mobius was a world of animals and Sonic was their savior. Eggman was an outsider and misfit who disrupted the social order. If you're going to bother to retain Eggman at all in the Sonic games, he needs to keep his outsider status. That means humans can't ever be a part of the status quo.

4. Make it About Speed

I've touched on this in the other entries, but I think this is important enough that it needs to be reiterated. Part of what made the classic Sonic games stand out is that they were about going fast, and successfully communicated the feeling of going fast, when this was something relatively difficult to achieve. In a lot of ways, it still is, and most platformers eschew it completely. Simulating the sensation of speed is frequently left to racing titles.

In Sonic titles, the engine is invariably built to accommodate a host of slower characters--your Big the Cats and Silver the Hedgehogs-- and because of that, the game itself does not communicate speed. Sonic himself moves quickly, but often so quickly that he's just becomes difficult to control. The beauty of the original Sonic games is that, yes, Sonic moved very fast, and controlling him was never difficult at all.

This is why you need to pare down the supporting cast to a bare minimum: so the game design can focus on developing the simple concept of running really, really fast into compelling gameplay. A Sonic game that is not fundamentally about speed is one that has failed. Speed is such a fundamental design idea of the original Sonic games that it was basically all the personality Sonic as a character had. He was a little guy who liked to go fast, constantly. If you left him sitting around he'd get impatient with you, and a lot of his impulsive and hipper-than-thou character traits were easy to extrapolate from the base concept of someone who liked to move quickly at all times.

If this is your main character, and you're letting him really be the star instead of drowning him in sidekicks, then there is no excuse for not building your game engine to exploit his distinctive ability and need to go really fast. The level designs should cater to this, offering speed stunts to perform and avoiding show-stoppers like bottomless pits. In fact, Sonic desperately needs to bring back the tall, vertical levels infested with loops and ramps that were originally the calling card of Sonic level design. Make that work in 3D and you've got a license to print money.

3. Pick a System

We've established Sonic is about going fast, but something worth remembering is why Sonic Team sat down and made a game about going fast in the first place. Their real task was to give the Genesis a mascot that could offer Mario serious competition, and to some extent, champion the hardware. So the gameplay for Sonic ended up stemming from one of the few things the Genesis happened to do better than the SNES: scroll through screens really, really quickly. Yes, that's all "Blast Processing" ever was, fast scrolling.

Because it was such a ridiculous thing, no one had ever really built a game about that before... and that meant that Sonic was the rare platformer that could offer unique gameplay when it came out. A major problem with the modern Sonic titles, arguably all of the titles past Sonic 3, is that once people took fast scrolling for granted Sonic Team had a hard time coming up with more innovations in that vein. It was much easier to just sketch up some new characters real fast, drop them in, and hope nobody noticed how stagnant the games were getting otherwise.

Not incidentally, the Sonic franchise turned utterly sour after the Sonic Adventure wave, when Sega wasn't making hardware anymore and the games were being developed as multiplatform titles. This meant that building anything unique into the game's functional innards was more or less impossible. That games had to be generic to make sure they could run on all the major consoles.

Sonic doesn't work as a generic platforming series, and only small children care about generic platformers anymore. Sonic Team needs to sit down and pick one system to focus on during development. While focusing on that system, Sonic Team needs to discover a modern equivalent of Blast Processing-- something the system can do that no one else is bothering to use particularly well. Both the Wii and DS are fertile ground for this sort of discovery, since they've got the most distinctive hardware set-ups on the market, but it would be possible to pull this off with the 360 or PS3. The important thing is generating gameplay that feels like a unique and organic outgrowth of the hardware.

2. Sonic Does Not Talk

This may be more of a pet peeve than an absolute problem that needs to be fixed, but there are a lot of cutscenes in the new Sonic titles, with a lot of dialogue. The cutscenes are generally dumb and slow, and the dialogue inane. The characters are never especially well-animated. Sonic in particular tends to come off as a complete goof in these cutscenes, frequently reduced to spouting generic hero phrases until the "drama" mercifully ends.

Part of what made the original Sonic titles feel revolutionary was how much body language Sonic had in his animations. How he moved, his rest animations, and even his "teetering on edge of cliff" animation all spoke volumes about what kind of character he was. The strength of the sprite animation made him appealing, and made gamers love him.

While Sonic talking during Adventure was a revelation at the time, the novelty has long since worn off. Sega needs to remember what kind of character Sonic really is, and how he most effectively communicated himself to the players, by his actions. The revolutionary Sonic game might make itself worlds better by making Sonic and the other characters shut their mouths, and focus on communicating via simple body language and the odd, utterly necessary noise.

If Smash Bros. Brawl can dazzle by taking on such a no-frills approach, then it can certainly serve Sonic well, too. More importantly, removing dialogue would force the graphics poeple to focus on filling Sonic's animations with character-defining, entertaining mannerisms again. I would much rather know who Sonic is by watching him move, than by having a weirdly stilted voice telling me about it.

1. Keep It Simple

There's a term called "feature creep" that PC game writers toss around a lot, and it's one that really deserves bringing up in a discussion of the modern Sonic the Hedgehog games. Feature creep describes the tendency of software developers to emphasize adding new features to software over other design goals that are arguably far more important, such as stability, simplicity, and usability. The result is software that is in theory very powerful and performs lots of functions, and that no one wants to use.

Feature creep in games describes... well, the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The original Genesis title was a very simple game. Sonic 2 was slightly less simple, but still very straightforward. By the time you hit Sonic 3, you have individual character abilities, multiple shield types, and other complexities. Sonic the Hedgehog next-gen was a morass of complicated and disconnected features. Learning how to control the characters was difficult, and what you did on game levels felt strange and disjoint. It was a very far cry from the utterly simple and intuitive gameplay and tight controls of its 16-bit forebear, which literally anyone could pick up and figure out how to play in roughly a minute.

Our franchise-saving Sonic title needs to remember how simple the games were early in the franchise, and then have its designers go to war on feature creep. The design of a great new Sonic game would need to emphasize the basic goal of usability and simplicity that the franchise has long since abandoned. Don't let us play as additional characters if you can't fine-tune their gameplay styles; don't give players the option of doing anything that is counter-intuitive or simply not fun.

Returning Sonic gameplay to the one-button affair it began as would be ideal. Just make a good game about running fast and going forward. All instances of crate-punching and gathering anything that's not rings or Chaos Emeralds should be immediately eliminated. Likewise, ditch the sad attempts to give Sonic "cool" robots to fight, and let the designs feel simpler and more cartoony again. Eliminate the weird attempt at a combat engine, and let Sonic kill things by ramming into them again.

Getting those the fundamentals right would give Sega a solid engine to work with, which the Sonic series has lacked for years. From there they could design coherent levels that progressed up a sensible difficulty curve. Usability is the fundamental requirement of good software, and in gaming this translates into tight controls and focused goals for the player. If Sonic games quit trying to incorporate so many different gameplay mechanics at once, they might just gain the focus a game needs to do something well.

• << prev
• next >>