Quite honestly it's got to a point now where I think Sega need to put this guy down or at least allow the hacking community behind some fantastic Sonic game hacks to produce some 2D sonic games as they seem to have a firm grasp on what constitutes as great level design. Many of you probably know Sega has more or less lost the source code to many of their older Master System and Genises titles, including the Blue Blur's.
A guy called the
The Taxman and another well known member that come from within the Sonic fan hacking community pretty much made a near identical engine to the classic sonic games.
Sega were cool to allow Taxman and co to use the engine the duo had made to remake and add additional content to older Sonic games and port them to new devices, so these aren't mere emulations. Their engine currently powers Sonic CD for Android, IOS, and PC furthermore both Sonic 1 and 2 for Android also run on their enging, for some strange reason Sonic 1 and 2 haven't been released for PC, which sucks as these games include widescreen support and additional features such as a lost level.
Taxman wanted to add a couple more zones to Sonic CD and wanted to come up with a true final boss for the game since these features had been cut from the original but Sega weren't happy with that, which is a great shame.
It would be cool if the hacking community could use that engine to release a new original 2D Sonic title in the same manner of Megaman 8, it may not be a step forward but it would at least mean we could have some decent 2D sonic games again.
Concept of the final fever level Whitehead had planned for the newer version of Sonic CD
As for the 3D Sonic games I'm not really sure what you can do there, Sonic Generations was good but I'm not sure if I was merely being blinded by the huge amount of nostalgia it packed with it.
Sonic never did transition well with 3D, and I've seen literally hours worth of people analysing as to why this is, and I think they pretty much nailed one of the key factors being that sonic never truly was focused on speed alone which is what many of the 3D titles try to do. The Megadrive games had those zones were you could speed through them as fast as you wanted, but you also had the choice to pick another route which focus more on platforming. What stood out about Sonic's platforming compared to other games at the time like Mario was all of it's angles and general physics of Sonic himself. It's really satisfying to roll into a ball, descend a slope, gain huge amounts of momentum launching high into the air and remembering where a position of a Badnik was so that you could then land on it and proceed to launch even higher into the air and discover that secret platform; No game at the time had those sorts of physics and that to me is what made Sonic more featured oriented than Mario.
I believe Sega somewhat realised this and tried to emulate those old features into Sonic Lost World but from what I've heard that game turned out terrible. Slowing down sonic during certain segments may be the answer. The 3D games need to be less like a Rollercoaster ride and more like a playground for us to goof around with some decent physics.
So to conclude, Since Sega have some diehard Sonic fans (somehow.... maybe it's all just furries now... :I) I guess we can say it's never too late to turn it around, I mean things were looking up with Sonic Colours and Generations which were released in succession, then Sega fudged it all up again. ;I
In the meantime I'll carry on playing brilliant half made Sonic rom hacks that get abandoned after a year or so.
