How come Dimps dropped the ball so hard on 4 when they already had experience in making good classic-style Sonic games...

How come Dimps dropped the ball so hard on 4 when they already had experience in making good classic-style Sonic games like Pocket Adventure and Advance 1?

They stopped giving a shit after Advance 2 and gave even less of a shit after Rush Adventure. (Rush 3/Colors was alright though)

>advanced time attack requires 25 seconds on emerald hill 1 for platinum
Not sure how to get that done. Odd how they didn't put grades in the time attacks for the Advance games until 3.

As stated a gorrilion times already, 4 was never meant to be a "serious" project. They only slapped 4 onto it at the last minute.

But user, it's Neo South Island - I can never get past gold though
Man I was playing Pocket Adventure today, crazy to see actual discussion about it - probably the best platformer, if not the best title, for the NGPC imho

That doesn't excuse it from being garbage.

>Advance 1 was a remake of a Sonic 2 demake all along

Advance 1 is shit just like the other two

Sonic Team sabotage

>NGPC

oh shit

I miss that fucking system

How come nobody ever replicated that sweet-ass control stick?

No, but it still explains why.

Realistically, I'd say that key members of the studio left the company and what were left is who made 4. To be fair, they got better in Episode 2 but it still had a ton of issues (Tails' flying mechanics for example). That and it was a mobile gimmick game first, before it was titled "4".

>gigantic angel is metropolis with scrap brain graphics and chrome gadget music
>titanic monarch is a mash up of scrap brain and metropolis with chrome gadget graphics
Had Pocket Adventure actually mixed gimmicks from various other levels in its Sonic 2 remakes, it could've been the Mania before the Mania.

They stopped giving a shit with Advance 2. So much complete fucking bullshit in terms of spikes, platform, and enemy placement. The core was fine, the level design was the most garbage shit imaginable.

Dimps is a large company with multiple divisions and projects going at once. The "key members" didn't leave, they were just busy doing more important things than a shitty low-budget rushed-deadline mobile Sonic game.

I don't think I'll ever bother to get all Chaos Emeralds in Advance 2 due to the idiot conditions this game has. I'd use Tails for the job, but the emeralds aren't shared between characters (unlike in 1 and 3).

>Sonic Rehash: the Handheld Game
>good
Its only redeeming quality were the physics, but that's all. Advance 1 is passable.

...

am i missing much not playing pocket adventure?

The game is entirely rehash, literally. So no.

It's a demake of half of Sonic 2 with some new level design to go with the old. Most of the bosses are new and the physics are decent.

>am i missing much not playing pocket adventure?
not too much, but it's pretty decent and an all-together enjoyable game
camera's a bit annoying, but it's probably the best they could have done on the tiny-ass screen
would be nice if someone fixed the music so that the songs were attached to more fitting stages (no seriously, why is Angel Island's BGM on both act 2 of the GHZ-alike and act 1 of the CPZ-alike)

none of the stage layouts are particularly to the stage they took the art from

I just want to make sure everyone knows that this is the worst game of all time

>particularly to the stage
should be
particularly similar to the stage

They still tried with Advance 3. They just made the mistake of thinking your average modern Sonic fan could handle spikes or avoid getting crushed.

inb4 "WELL MY FIRST SONIC WAS 1 AND LET ME.YOU, SPIKES DON'T BELONG IN A SONIC GAME

better than the advance games

This. That's not a port, it's a fucking fangame that made it to the 3DS somehow.

The worst is 06. This doesn't even come close.

What's shocking is that the only good levels are the ones Dimps didn't design.

Classic Green Hill Zone, Casino Night Zone, and Mushroom Hill Zone are IDENTICAL to their Genesis counterparts, once they have to design levels on their own like Radical Highway (which was actually Shadow's stage but whatever), shit hits the fan.

06 can at least be fun. Generations 3DS is that perfect balance between "bad" and "so bad it's good" where it just ends up being fucking terrible and boring and there's no redeeming quality to it. It's the exact opposite of fun. It's anti-fun.

it was passable when there were no other 3DS games

Because the advance games are fucking dog shit and you are blinded by nostalgia, Sonic Advance 1 is the only barely decent

06 tried to change things a little at least despite how buggy or bad it is. On the other hand, Generations 3DS did nothing new because it's Rush with classic Sonic slapped on it. It makes no sense since both Sonics play on a 2D plain and the only "3D" part of the game is a rail in Modern Mushroom Hill. The art is shit too, and for some inexplicable reason, classic has the homing attack by fucking default. This game did so many things wrong that they wouldn't even fit in a 2000 letters post. So, for now, 06 is a fucking masterpiece next to 3DS Gens.

Dimps, from what I understand, have very little creative influence over the so-called Dimps Sonic projects. They basically just provide code and asset monkeys, while Sega and Sonic Team employees lay down the actual groundwork. Pocket Adventure and Sonic Advance were good because Sonic still had competent people like Yuji Naka backing his corner at the time. Nu-Dimps makes shit Sonic games because Nu-Sonic Team isn't giving them a whole lot to work with.

It's one of the few 3DS games I traded in because I enjoyed it so little.
The other was Super Monkey Ball 3D, it was designed with motion controls in mind but that doesn't excuse static level design with safety rails all the way to the end.

Plus Sega has a habit of giving them shit budgets and shit deadlines. If you're in charge of Dimps and Sega is telling you to make a low-budget mobile or handheld game on a six-month deadline (literally Generations 3DS) then you're not going to waste your top guys, you're giving that job to the guys at the very bottom of your company totem pole.

And that kids was the story of how Sonic 4 aka Sonic the Portable was done.

inb4 "WELL MY FIRST SONIC WAS 1 AND LET ME.YOU, SPIKES DON'T BELONG IN A SONIC GAME
sonic 1 has an absolute assload
of spikes, anyone who says that is retarded

Advance 3 has somewhat weird controls (tolerable, but they feel weird as shit) and appalling flow that emphasizes bottomless pits a lot more than Advance 2 ever did (no really, Advance 2 is known for a small handful of pits that loads of people fell in, Advance 3 stages are actually full of pits).

So back in the Advance and Rush days they were given decent deadlines?

I remember Rush has a good amount of development time behind it.

I think the advance games could have been amazing if they had better level design. There were so many instances in all 3 games that the game would just fling you to your death with a bouncer - constantly. Trusting the game lead to your death. Sure original Sonic had some of these moments too - like the Mystic Cave deathpit - but I had issues with advance way more.

It's just cheap. Advance 3 was my personal favorite from the trilogy but it had problems with the team up mechanic - some combos are absolutely stupid. If you tag up Tails and Cream .. you know, the two characters known for flight, Cream glides and Tails loses his flight power extremely fast. The fuck?

The games desperately needed more polish.

Pretty much. Then Rush Adventure had underwhelming sales because Sega decided competing with Zelda was a good idea, and the rest is history. Only reason why DS Colors turned out well is because it was basically Rush 3 with Wisps. Once they had to moved to a new platform (3DS for Generations, mobile for Sonic 4) everything went to shit.

This image is obligatory. I think that they had so few feedback from their level design skills that they went creating their style little by little, without knowing that it was shit.

That wasn't Advance 1 or 3's level design.

Before buying, I realized that this shit was going to be full 2.5D.
I don't get it. Lost World 3DS is a 3D platformer, so why the fuck didn't they give Modern Sonic his own gameplay? It completely defeats the purpose of Generations.
Not to mention that Classic Sonic's first three stages are LITERALLY cut-pastes from Green Hill, Casino Night and Mushroom Hill. The Special Stage is a revamping of Heroes' Special Stages, the later zone's music mostly loses the "remix" bit of it, and the Adventure-Modern Eras only have two zones. Sometimes it's hard to play as Modern Sonic sometimes because shit is thrown at you as soon the point is reached.
If they were gonna differentiate the game from the Console version, they should have made all the stages from handheld games. Fucking Water Palace from Sonic Rush is in there, but not Bridge Zone, or Chaos Angel, or even a Rush Adventure stage. Fuck this game.

My only real issue with the games in general is the level design. For some reason I find it too stupidly hard to understand and memorize given how fucking small the GBA resolution is for those games. Individually, the only big problem in the games are: Advance 1's weird level design, 2's obsession with speed and the closest to "hold right to win" and 3 for having a fuck ton of crushing objects, going from 0 to 100 in 0.3 seconds and some teams being ridiculous like in your example. They really need some polish after all.
3>1>=2

>Sometimes it's hard to play as Modern Sonic sometimes
Sorry for the redundancy. I'd added in "Sometimes" after writing the sentence, not realizing I already had said word there.

this is fairly accurate, but doesn't hold any water for Advance 1, and none of them until Sonic 4 have homing attack chains
also, the pit is placed right before the end of the stage and the stage gimmick comes up earlier
it describes Sonic Rush the most closely

did dimps go TROO FAR?