Current Events > Sonic Riders - Babylon Garden

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https://youtu.be/eazzGr_LoIE

This game was pretty neat

It was a mediocre facet at best. The drifting was wonky and the Air System was tacky; Sonic games are about going fast, so why do you get off your board and run on your slower feet if your air bar runs out? I understand not being able to boost, but having to get off your board is whack. And speaking of whack, jumping on rails to grind was frustrating af; way too hard to land your jumps precisely enough to get on the rail, so you'd usually fall right through.

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Scotty_Rogers posted...

It was a mediocre facet at best. The drifting was wonky and the Air System was tacky; Sonic games are about going fast, so why do you get off your board and run on your slower feet if your air bar runs out? I understand not being able to boost, but having to get off your board is whack. And speaking of whack, jumping on rails to grind was frustrating af; way too hard to land your jumps precisely enough to get on the rail, so you'd usually fall right through.

These are really good points but the points are more about the game doing a bad job at explaining how the game works, more than the mechanics themselves. I completely relate. I think the first time I beat the story mode I had no idea what I was doing and spent half of the levels off the board and never getting any of the shortcuts to work. But if you figure out the game mechanics (again, that the game doesn't explain well) it all flows a lot better. Air is less of a problem for example when you know the trick system and know how to get max scores on almost every big jump. The rails feel wonky but I think a lot of people are thrown off by the fact that you don't just jump on the rails, you jump and then tap A at a certain moment and it kind of magnets you on to them.

The most egregious, and I've seen a lot of friends who played the game a good bit and never picked it up, is the game never tells you how most of the big jumps work. On almost every big jump there's a shortcut you can get to but you can only get to the shortcut by holding up or down, and which direction you need to hold depends on the jump. Up kind of for the distance ones and down kind of for the height ones. But really you just need to know the level already to do it. I saw some friends who beat the game and still didn't really understand that.

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Bump

Honestly, even when you master how to play the game, it never feels quite fast enough for a Sonic game. Sonic and Sega Racing 1 and 2 remain the only good Sonic racing games.

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it was an interesting game but it never had any good sequels to improve upon the shaky-but-cool foundation

Scotty_Rogers posted...

Sonic and Sega Racing 1

this game had the blandest track design of all time

This game reminds me of Kirby's Air Grind or whatever it was. Cool game.

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I enjoyed the hell out of that game, most of the complaints were of casual who never got good, becuase if they did then the vast majority of said complaints became a non issue.

They changed the sequals mechanics likely becuase of it and that game in my opinion was trash. The gravity boost ruined the pacing, and invalidated large portions of the track, drifting was gone, standard boost were gone, timing for the ramp jumps were made braindead.

I dont even remember if I beat that game or not, it was stupid easy, and utterly forgettable.

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