DimensionWarped

People need to curb their enthusiasm for harshly correcting people's opinions in here. Level design is not a science and what is good level design to some may not enthuse others and you need to be respectful of that. Feel free to share your thoughts and even your disagreements, but language like "Ok this is almost COMPLETELY WRONG and makes NO SENSE. AT ALL." doesn't fit and doesn't help to advance the discussion.

2D: Lava Reef (Sonic and Knuckles) and/or Launch Base (Sonic 3) - Both have an epic climactic feel to them and both have general flows that differ greatly from the norm. Honorable Mention: Wing Fortress Zone (Sonic 2) - it's cobbled together in a weird way that allows for some awesome sequence breaking. 3D: Final Rush (SA2) - When you master this stage, you feel freakin' awesome. Honorable Mention: Space Gadget (Shadow the Hedgehog) - evokes a lot of the same feelings as Final Rush, and looks a little more polished while doing it. Too bad it's held back by a game with much shoddier controls.

Don't you think you are a little early in your project to be doing calls for voice actors in multiple languages and singers?

Switch to someone who doesn't suck. Or go Ike Climbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXABhlj3nI#t=97

Plus it has a crazy tendency to jump over most projectiles. Playing the Demo I was constantly catching Megaman's metal blades while doing it and also going right over Mario's fireballs and Pikachu's jolts. And the meteor smash on his dair is quite sweet too, especially when considering the new floor-bounce mechanic. IMO, Fox never should have had a frame 1 reflector. That move was broken as hell as evidenced by all those videos with shit like reflector jump cancel wave dash reflector jump cancel wave dash reflector jump cancel wave dash KO Speaking of reflector, Ness's psi magnet no longer absorbs Doc's pills. Come on guys, that move wasn't already useless enough on every stage that didn't involve the world firing lasers at you?

There will almost certainly come a time when an updated Worlds (either Delta or a fork of Delta) will be released that requires CF2.5 just because there are a lot of potential performance gains to be made by switching to CF2.5's way of handling for each loops as opposed to the method that was originally used in MMF2 (something involving spread values and nested for loops...) I'd highly recommend jumping on while it's cheap.

A 'good connection' is a fairly nebulous concept. When matched with randoms from another country the odds of having a consistent latency below 100ms are quite low and it seems like the game chokes a lot more on a less than perfect connection than something like Blazblue. EDIT: Turns out I lied, Ness is still my man (though Mario is a real beast). Finally had one good match with minimal lag this morning. Sadly the other player only stuck around for one game. It was a Jigglypuff who really didn't know what they were doing... kept spamming rest, kept eating my fully charged baseball bat.

Picked it up last night. So far I've unlocked Ness and... became incredibly disappointed how in spite of how awesome Mario feels to play, they somehow made Ness feel even worse. Why Ness, why can't they bestow you with that crunchy feel I crave? I think I might be a Mario main in this one. Played a few online matches and won just over half... the lag is quite harsh, just like it was in Brawl. Shame.

It's quite fine Ila. I've got more than enough demo uses to keep going through to release (or whenever I end up getting the game) and the extra week I had to wait wasn't a big deal. I was just put off that Nintendo would dis their platinum members over something as trifling as not signing up for spam.

Wow, what a great way to leave yourself completely defenseless at a time when a simple jab combo is enough to kill you.

I... I don't know

Been playing this since the demo released public (I was platinum, but apparently they didn't give out the platinum demo if you didn't sign on for 'promotional emails' (read: spam)) In any event, my impressions right now are that it's a much more satisfying game to play than Brawl, if not quite as technically minded as Melee (the dodge spammability just makes it a little iffy). I do have some small beefs with the DS version that appear to be more graphical in nature than anything else and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up being fixed in the Wii U version. Here's an example: Villager's bowling ball. Frankly, I kind of hate this move, but what really kills it is that the ball hits the ground and just kind of immediately disappears without fading away or anything like that. This also happens with Mega Man's lemons and Villager's slingshot pellets. It's too abrupt and it looks sloppy. I feel like they kind of missed an opportunity by having custom specials but not custom regular attacks. The loss of Lucas would have stung a whole lot less if Ness could switch to using Lucas's up smash. Also the fact that Ness's own up smash doesn't hit on charge in this one really irks me. I'm really hoping there are some mechanical differences in the Wii U version like that. Another example of something that might have been able to be done here would have been to swap out grapple grabs for regular grabs. That way Ness could have inherited Lucas's snake as well and for people who don't like grapples, they could have let Link/Samus/etc have some normal grabs too. Oh well, there's always the future. Another thing that would have been cool is if Mario were able to float Peach style as long as he had Fludd charge.

It's OK Serphim, we've already established that you like terrible things more than I do. I applaud your ability to see silver linings and magnify them in your head until that's all you can see.

Sonic Rush was nothing more than the Advanced series with less interesting enemies (oh, hey, Sonic Heroes called and it wants its horribly shit pawns, wizards, and hammer dudes back) and a soundtrack that sounds like a bunch of squeaky farts and squeals that a lot of people like for some crazy reason. I think it was way overrated when it first came around and now people pretty much see it for what it is. Sonic Rush Adventure is supposed to be better I guess, but I got irritated by that one early on due to how annoying the special stages were and didn't finish it, so I don't have much of an opinion on it.

I like Colors more than Generations on principal, but I'd have to say Generations is the better game overall. Plus the Rival fights were just great. On the other hand, Colors' last boss was actually fun while Generations' was an exercise in frustration. I do not care for Unleashed.

The best part of 2006 is how it retcons itself out of existence in the end.

Because disseminating knowledge to outsiders is hard and they are prone to misconstruing things.

That all strikes me as incredibly ranty and completely unjustified. It's not like Nintendo has a tons of 3DS software announced and in development right now compared to the Wii U. It just has a hell of a lot more third party support to make it seem less sparse.

Not to be mean or anything, but seeing the word 'multiva' in reference to a creature's species makes every part of my brain scream out in rejection. It just makes me think of a horrible combination of multivitamins and Activia yogurt.

Oh yeah, I mean... the Gameboy had only been out for like 9 years before the Gameboy Color was released, and it had a lot more going for it than just a slightly better processor, but yeah, exact same thing.

Yeah, I feel like I just bought my 3DS XL and this really kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They could have just waited another year and announced a legitimate new hardware line with 3ds backwards compatibility and I would have been fine with it, but this tiny incremental upgrade that is just enough to fracture the library is aggravating.

I have enough information to answer his question: There is no likelihood that anything you ever do in terms of character design art will end up in any kind of official work related to Sonic unless you just happen to work for one of the entities that actually produces the stuff (Archie Comics being the most obvious), and even then it isn't very likely you would be able to push an aggressive redesign. Basically your options are bribery or buying your way into the authority.

I see you are new to the Internet Stardust.

Taxman is already perfectly capable of recreating S3K without any of the original code. Really I doubt there would be much for him to learn from any of it. Personally, I'm ok with this development since as much as I would love a 16:9 variant of S3K with possibly some added features, I'd rather see an original game (Sonic or otherwise). That said, having heard what I have heard over the years I would be a bit disappointed if the reasons were more political than practical.

I have some of my own opinions on level design that may deviate from the actual classic approach at times (but then, the classic games also had lots of people involved with their level design, so some deviation is expected). 1. Alternate paths are a much hailed element that even SEGA started talking about, and it's true that just having multiple routes through a level does aid in replayability. One thing that doesn't get talked about as much though is that if you are going to have multiple routes through a level, you need to think about distinguishing them from the normal route. A simple example is the lower route in one of the GHZ stages in Sonic 1... Getting to it requires a slightly tricky low jump across some spikes, so it's already a secret route, but what makes it interesting is that the area itself doesn't look like the rest of the level. It's flatter and it has a natural behind the scenes feel. Having alternate routes is nice, but they are at their best when each route has its own unique feel. 2. Take all the crap you hear about standard pathing patterns and things like 'the high path' with a grain of salt. It's a thing, but it's not as important as people act. The reason the high path tends to work so well in a lot of stages is frequently more because its sparsely populated with obstacles than anything positive. It's sort of like how in Kirby games there tend to be some levels that you can just fly over. It's a little more interactive than that in the Sonic levels that push that angle, but the focus of your levels should always be on the levels. As for standards, just realize that they are over-thought. Most levels don't actually play out like the Green Hill Zone top, middle, and bottom concept. 3. The basic unit for how you think in terms of planning levels is the challenge. This is a somewhat hard to define concept, but one way to go about it is to think of a single lave room with the rising lava eruptions in Marble Zone or a room with conveyor belts and a switch in Labyrinth Zone. Basically the player enters a more self-contained area and has to traverse from point A to point B. If you think this way, you'll probably be less likely to produce repetitive levels. A lot of fangame developers make the mistake of not having discreet areas and instead just having one continuous ambiguous map, sometimes with a little bit of branching, but it all ends up feeling very blah if they don't plan out specific challenges in their levels. 4. Use landmarks. One of your biggest goals should be to make players remember parts of your level layout and one of the easiest ways to do this is to have certain visually striking sections populated with background doodads (using the Starcraft definition of the term in case you aren't familiar) in unique configurations. 5. Avoid straight areas that don't have any purpose. If you have more than 5 seconds of uninterrupted running, you are probably doing something wrong. That said, the occasional long ramp in preparation for a jump (like in Chemical Plant 2 or parts of Launch Base/Ice Cap Zone) isn't a bad thing. More than anything, I'd just say that best levels are the ones that help the player to remember them. The faster a player can build a mental picture of the level, the more likely they will be to reflect positively on it. For that same reason, I'd recommend against making levels that take more than a couple minutes to complete or are unnecessarily maze-like in nature.