spyro, crash and co.

[Cloudman]

spemanig said:

That's just not true. The homing attack is literally concrete evidence that the controls in those games are bad. It's a platformer. Imagine if Mario had a homing attack for mushrooms in Galaxy. You're supposed to skillfully skid/bounce off enemies naturally. The homing attack completely destroys that, betrays the already bad physics of most of the games (again, except in Lost World), and additionally removes all skill from successfully platforming off an enemy to maintain momentum.

The homing attack completely ignores your momentum and current speed, changing it completely to one standard "homing" speed. It completely destroys any momentum you had, or at least unrealistically alters it.

2D Sonic did well because their level design, enemy placement, physics, and controls were perfect. The homing attack was added because those elements in the 3D games weren't, not because 3D itself makes things more difficult. It had nothing to do with it being in 2D and only having two directions. Simply making the enemies larger by comparison to Sonic and placing them in spots that better aid to platforming and gaining momentum would have completely fixed that without ruining momentum or betraying physics. And fixing his terrible controls while in the air. Again, look at all the platformers that do it successfully. It's all because of the way they're designed.

Look at it this way; In 2D Sonic, you're a pro skate boarder. You're supposed to be in a skating park, and there are obstacles everywhere. 3D Sonic changed the skateboard to one that isn't as good with magnetic wheels, changed the skating park to one long downhill ramp with a few easy jumps, and whenever you think you won't make one, you get to click a button that yanks you to the nearest metal obstacle.

I'm 100% sure they could bring back how the spin dash or ball curl worked in the 2D games, but remember how completely reliant those were on semi-realistic physics. Once you spin dashed or curled into a ball, you were literally a ball and the only momentum you could gain was from the level design. The game respected ball physices and designed every single level and placed every enemy intelligently to accomidate that.

I think the homing attack worked better in the SA games at the time as opposed to it being in Mario Galaxy because while they're both platformers, the goals of the 2 games are different. In 3D Mario games, usually the goal is to find and collect stars of some sort, while in Sonic games, the goal is to reach the end as fast as possible. Skillfully trying to bounce off of enemies  while maintaing a fast speed I don't think it would work as well as opposed to using the home attack, unless they designed it in a way where you can do that and maintain fast speeds. Though the examples you give I think are good ones that could be a way to do this.

You're right also in that the homing attack does take away skill from platforming by basically making it easier and it kills whatever speed you were going at the time. It would be good if they can fix this to still have skillful jumps and platforming while stilling being able to go as fast as possible, but I guess for now, they'll have to settle with the homing attack. Also, on being stuck in a ball in the 2D Sonic games, I think you could get out of the ball and back to running position in SA1.