Sonic The Hedgehog (Master System)

Sonic (Master System)

Level design is simple at first, but all levels hide a fair amount of secrets (lives, chaos emeralds, ring monitors, barriers, invulnerabilty monitors...). Looking around (specially downwards) can be used fairly often to find secrets. Sonic is very heavy on the ground, but he has great air mobility, being able to accelerate almost to full speed in the air from a still jump. The thing that makes platforming work is that it´s very easy to kill momentum in the air and specially that if you aren´t pressing any key when you land Sonic will "stick" to the platform he lands on. Overshooting jumps, positioning in the air and falling directly downwards is the way to go, though momentum can be killed even in straight forward jumps. This makes platforming feel awesome and with very little practice makes you feel like you can nail almost any kind of jump. I´m getting the impression Kitsune slides too much after landing from a jump (Mario in SMW doesn´t and as I´ve seen, Sonic either) so I should tweak momentum cancelling when landing. In fact, this approach of killing momentum is constantly enforced by the level design: the player must carefully stop and look around to search for secrets and if he rushes forward he´ll surely crash into an enemy or a spring that will launch him towards spikes or some other hazard. This made that those times where the player could rush forward feel a bit out of place at first, mainly because you could blaze to a hazard or just miss many secrets in a long jump after a descending slope. However at the same time it feels very liberating at times (is specially cool in the long ramps in Scrap Brain, where enemies are even placed to be killed by rolling off slopes) and can be great for speed running.

Low jumps are a bit trickier to perform well, but they still work acceptably.

There are almost no "extreme" jumps required in the whole game (last stage still pending), the player can usually overshoot all jumps and use airtime to correct landing.

The Jungle Boss was great (airborne boss throwing cannonballs on a half-pipe). I also liked a lot the Labyrinth boss, appearing both at the bottom to shoot to the side the player´s on (must wait until the last moment and jump upwards to avoid) and at the top (alternating sides, which forces the player to follow/foresee that). He shoots a slow missile downwards which, when at the height of the player will launch forward with a bit of tracking on the Y-axis. A simple attack, but that worked very well: it´s easy to implement and understand for the player, but has a behaviour that can be menacing in some setups. Pity is it could be cheated by standing at the far side of the screen, so the boss will shoot the missiles facing outwards and they will disappear offscreen without posing a real challenge, but this is also a consequence of following the boss from side to side of the arena, so it could be intended and is a nice reward for the player being proactive.

Special mention to the Bridge background (specially the clouds and somewhat the mountains) but most of all, to the AMAZING Jungle background. Very simple, but it really gave out a kind of "hand-drawn" vibe, similar to Yoshi´s Island but on a lesser level due to tech constraints. I must try making something similar for the Flower Beds in Sakura Field or for settings with more vegetation.

I didn´t enjoy much the Labyrinth stage, mainly because moving underwater was veeery slow and non-responsive, some and sometimes water bubbles wouldn´t spawn.

I understand how I could sink so many hours in this game back in the day, it´s really good :)

Sometimes I would know an enemy, secret or hazard was there before they could appear. I don´t know if it´s because I still somehow remembered it (doubt it, it´s been +20 years!) or because the level design and object placement made sense.