adjl posted...
In my experience, older Sonic games tend to be built around the idea of "if you know what you're doing, you can go super fast and it feels awesome." The flip side of that, though, is that if you don't know what you're doing, you're frequently going to break that flow state and be left with platforming and controls that are kind of clunky because they're designed to work for going fast and not for carefully figuring out an unfamiliar level.
As some people have pointed out over the years, the real trick with the first few Sonic games is that, for all that everything about the games (and their marketing) are telling you that you absolutely GOTTA GO FAST!, that's actually a terrible strategy.
You're much better off generally learning maps and moving through them more tactically, and at times slowing down and maneuvering. If you're just barreling through at full speed 100% of the time (like many kids definitely were), you're more likely to crash out.
Then skip ahead a few decades. Where all you really remember is that you kind of sucked at the game and it didn't feel fun, so you assume it was a poorly-designed game. You've forgotten most of the details, all you really kind of remember is how the game made you feel.
adjl posted...
In the same vein, I will say "Star Wars was never that great" to people complaining about how Rogue One doesn't offer much by way of character building, simply because Episode 4 didn't do much more than Rogue One did.
Ehh, I'd disagree with this, if only because the original trilogy HAD characters. Rogue One kind of doesn't. It has
archetypes
. Which is part of why even people who
enjoyed
it can rarely
name
any of the characters. They'll be like "the monk guy" or "the funny robot" when referring to it. They're not
people
, as much as they're just roles in the story. Even Andor (whose name I only remember because they gave him a TV show) and "girl protagonist".
And I say that as someone who really
liked
Rogue One... and I've said in the past that it and Force Awakens are literally the only things Disney has done with the franchise that even remotely "feel" like Star Wars to me. But in TFA's case, that was literally the entire point of the movie - it was scientifically designed to echo the original trilogy as much as possible. Whereas Rogue One sort of simultaneously straddles the line of trying to be something new while simultaneously managing to rekindle some of the old feeling of what Star Wars was meant to be. Rogue One almost feels like someone telling a myth or legend about long-forgotten real events, more like folklore than watching the original history (which I like, but I also understand why others might not). It almost might have benefited more from having a wrap-around frame story of someone telling someone else the "true story" of how the Rebellion got the Death Star plans (which would also have the benefit of instantly nullifying any continuity errors).
Honestly, if I had full power over Star Wars as a franchise and could decide what was canon and what got thrown into the trash in order to try and make the "perfect" core to build off of (and didn't have to appeal to what other people wanted from it or fondly remembered from their own childhoods), I'd probably look at the originals, Rogue One, TFA, Timothy Zahn's EU books, and the two KotOR games as the only things that have ever really felt like Star Wars to me (and yes, that means I'd throw away the prequels as well).
In a parallel universe, it would be extremely easy to write far better prequel scrips and follow-up stories to TFA that would be
far
better than what we got. We used to brainstorm and rewrite those movies in the Geek topics all the time and come up with better stuff that post-1990 George Lucas or Disney.
It's not that hard
.