>Be me, zoomer born in 2000>Go to flea market in 2009>Find a Sega Mega Drive + a bunch of games for cheap>By this point I was used to the nonexistent difficulty of 6th and 7th gen games (Lego Star Wars comes to mind)>Buy the Mega Drive>Didn't like most of these games because they were too hard: I remember Shadow Dancer, Rocket Knight, and Terminator 2 being frustrating>But I fell in love with the Sonic games because they were piss easy>ffw to 2026>Classic Sonic is apparently considered brutally unfair nowWTF changed?
bait used to be believeable
>>12902359>believeableAnd your country used to be without internet.
>>12902357completing sonic isn't difficult.getting ALL of the emeralds to complete the game 100%: very difficult.
>>12902371death egg was super unfair
>>12902357People think anything 2D = crazy hard nowadays, just look at all the Silksong whining and that game is easier than most of Megadrive's library.
People today are used to generous checkpoints and infinite retries. Having to replay a level for even one microsecond makes a game "impossibly hard" by today's standards.
>>12902420>People today are used to generous checkpoints and infinite retriesSo Sonic? There's checkpoints everywhere and the game showers you with 1-ups and continues
>>12902379>death egg was super unfairIt was the final level. It's supposed to be unfair. And the only thing you have to do to beat it is to be patient, something that the preceding 3 levels / 2 boss fights already taught you.
>>12902357>Classic Sonic is apparently considered brutally unfair nowI have never heard anyone say this about Sonic, but I have heard it (a lot) about Mega Man which is really funny because those games aren't hard at all.
>>12902371depends on the game>1 pretty difficult but not because it's hard but because of RNG. the special stages are fucking dogshit and you basically have to memorize them and hope you get good RNG for each one. also made harder by the fact that you need 50 rings at the end of each level so you can't fly through them.>2not as bad as one. more opportunities to get the emeralds and the stages aren't as hard and much more forgiving. will definintely be nerve-wracking at death egg though. hope you have a lot of lives.>3easiest but also the hardest. special stages are pure skill/memorization. can also rapidly retry them since you have the save function. doomsday is the hardest sonic genesis level though by far.
>>12902357I've given up and decided to use save states to get through it. Any time you fall you have to hope there are no enemies or a death barrier/lava below you. So, even though you typically get a second try before dying, I find it is particularly easy in this game to get baited into taking damage twice in a row or instakilled. Probably the biggest recurring issue is that Sonic is a dumbass apparently who doesn't roll if bouncing off a spring. In other words, any time you need to get onto a new platform you need to make sure you don't land above any enemy which is how I have been killing everything the whole game. And the game of course abuses the fuck out of this fact by always making enemies stand at the edge of the platform and troll you into jumping onto them. It happens, you lose all your rings because you are stuck in an animation, and get launched backwards to the start (or death barrier) where you have to do the extremely precise gap you attempted all over again. Also I think I have unironically gone 3 ZONES, not acts, but ZONES without seeing a single extra life which also seems pretty fucked up and unfair if you don't know where to look. Other things I don't like is that some (not all) of the drill boys in the water level don't actually show their drill and are invisible until you walk slowly to bait them out.Finally, the traps. God there are so many spikes, before I played it I thought sonic was about speed but genuinely 99% of my playthrough thus far has been tiptoeing at a snail's pace avoiding spikes in floors and walls for half an hour straight, but with different backgrounds. The spike spam sucks. It's also not really nice not knowing a gimmick bullshit area is coming up next and getting your run killed because you haven't memorized that section's quirks yet. Overall just a really punishing game. The ring system is neat but I feel like it incentivizes drip-feeding yourself the rings so you have one (1) to use later. I'll try a legit run rn
>>12902693>special stages are pure skill/memorization3's could easily benefit from having a map, that way you're not lost trying to look for the last couple blue spheres.
>>12902721>Sonic is a dumbass apparently who doesn't roll if bouncing off a spring.This is why post-Megamix hacks added the air curl ability to Sonic's moveset. Sonic Classic Heroes is not a hack for purists, but it improves so much upon those first couple games.
>>12902724yeah i spent a little too long running around some of the super emerald stages but they're not that bad. again, it's helped out by the fact that you can level select and rapidly retry them.
>>12902693All special stages in Sonic are about memorization. S1 are probably the least about memorization of them all because they're full with shit like up/down and rotation circles and you will ALWAYS hit them, affecting your gameplay.I'd say the almost insulting thing about them is because S1 and S2's bad/good endings don't really incite you to care plus Super Sonic in 2 controls like SHIT. The 8-bit games and CD made me care more about achieving the good ending on an emotional level: S1 SMS good ending actually shows the South Island getting cleaned of pollution, S2 SMS locks an additional level behind 100%'ing it just like S3 would later on, also you get to save Tails from death. CD, nuff said, it also provides an alternative to its (also memorization and skill based) special stages, which is a good thing.
>>12902838>Super Sonic in 2 controls like SHIT.I've never heard anyone else share that sentiment before. He always felt like the right amount of OP, especially with how high he jumps. (Even if, code-wise, it's just a combination of invincibility and speed shoes.)
> Since when was Sonic difficult?
>>12902874>only a D-pad and 3 button on the controllerit shouldn't take more than 15 seconds to figure out that pressing up and down makes it move
>>12902838>they're full with shit like up/down and rotation circles and you will ALWAYS hit themthose are telegraphed to you so you can move/jump out of the way>S1 SMS good ending actually shows the South Island getting cleaned of pollution, S2 SMS locks an additional level behind 100%'ing it just like S3 would later on, also you get to save Tails from death. sounds interesting but unfortunately i will never be arsed again to play those shitty demakes. everything they do the genesis games do better. compared to e.g. the mario GB games that at least do different things than the console games making them actually worth playing.
>>12902874Sonic Jam removed the barrel entirely in one of its options, so it's a non-issue.
>>12902721>before I played it I thought sonic was about speedCommon mistake. Sonic is about physics based platforming. Speed is something you chase for score or time attack on a second playthrough.
>>12903020>Sonic is about physics based platforming.Exactly, I found out it's entirely possible to complete Sonic 2 without ever using the spindash.
>>12902357People hold right to win and then blame the game for having depth
>>12902357>Since when was Sonic difficult?
>>12902693>not as bad as one. more opportunities to get the emeralds and the stages aren't as hard and much more forgiving. will definintely be nerve-wracking at death egg though. hope you have a lot of lives.I always found 1 easier.2 gives you way more opportunities than 1, but those last couple special stages are the hardest in the series I think. Then again, I usually don't go for Super Sonic playing so I bet if I memorized them again it'd be easy.
>>12903149Haven't gotten to the one on the right but it was absolutely criminal that they expect you to make it through the flooding chamber without fucking up and hitting the side of that spike. It's funny because up until this point I actually felt like this was one of the easier zones just because there aren't so many bullshit enemies and you can more or less take your time not getting stabbed by the spikes
>>12902357Literally one of the easiest retro games to finish. I finished the original Sonic game in the first afternoon I got it back in 1991. People are just shit at video games now.
>>12903328>finished the first afternoon I got it back in 1991Sure you did
>>12903362He probably did, it's not a very long game and it's quite easy. It's also designed to be completed in a single playthrough.
>>12902721>God there are so many spikesJump over them, then.
>>12902483Bro said GENEROUS checkpoints. One to three per stage doesn't count.
>>12902357u get old and no goodo anymores.
>>12905038>One to three per stage doesn't count.The levels are like 2 minutes long at most???
>>12902357I just beat S3 AIR (Sonic 3 & Knuckles fan made remaster). Mind you, I haven't played the game in over 20 years. Still finished with 60+ lives and all 14 emeralds. Some parts I remembered, others felt unfamiliar, some mechanics felt janky (e.g. Sonic slows down too much when walking up even a tiny slope).That said, fuck the semi-final boss. It's a 3 phase fight with no rings. Phases 1 and 3 are piss easy, but phase 2 has a screen wide laser attack that is hard to dodge. Died like 5-6 times before I re-learned the timing.
>>12902838This. Most of the SMS ports are peak.
>>12902923Intelligent action is based on solution space reduction. The barrel violates the usual intuition of solution space reduction. The problem is that jumping on the barrel makes it move, and timing your jumps just right make it move almost enough to get through.
