Sonic Adventure 2

[FlamingMetroidzd]

My first sonic game. I actually played it a little bit again last week. No idea how I managed to get all emblems and A ranks. xD

Who else had good times with this game?

[Knighto]

Cool, I just started replaying it last night, too. I just don't understand why they can't make games this simple and this fun these days. Why don't sega go back to 2d and produce something amazing like I've heard been done with Megaman lately?

[Konrad]

Probably because the last time a good 2D game was produced (Braid) everybody started screaming "Mario clone" and "get out of the 90s!".

[Jason]

Yeah, the double-standards in gaming reviews is quite spectacular at times.

On the subject of Braid, I thought it was a game with tremendous potential, except for one thing... it's probably the least intuitive game I've ever played. I've never ever played a game more desperately in need of a few 'tutorial' levels.

[Konrad]

Seeing as they introduced new ones all the time, I thought figuring out the mechanics and what can be done with them was part of the fun. Hell, the point of some of those levels was just to wrap your head around what does what and how it reacts to everything else.

And actually come to think of it... Isn't there a single level at the beginning of each chapter that has you solve a tremendously easy puzzle with the new mechanic?

[Jason]

Did they? I tried the 'story' mode, and quickly got frustrated with the frequent 'impossible' jumps and so on. Some kind of tutorial early on to give you the basic concepts of what is possible and so on would have been much more user-friendly, and would have perhaps warranted a bit more of my attention. As such, it remains on my 'played once, unlikely to play again' list.

[Konrad]

Interesting. Braid is definitely on my "best games ever" list, right next to Fallout. Ill have a look and see because I haven't played the game in a while, I don't exactly recall those impossible jumps you mentioned.

Anyway, the reason the game wasn't user friendly was because that's part of the challenge. Including several "speedrun" levels, I have a total of 6.1 hours in-game time. But the entire "experience" took me much longer. I remember waking up one day and going "Ah-HA!"
Then solving a puzzle I was stuck on for a long time.

If they had started with a tutorial, explained every mechanic and the circumstance in which they are useful than you could just blast through the game in no time. Like I said, the challenge was in experimenting and figuring out everything for yourself.

For example, many of the game levels were the same as something you've seen before - but with a twist. There are about six variations of the sqyare donkey-kong esque level, each one harder than the last.

[Jason]

Yeah, perhaps not even a tutorial, but something at least explaining what the different ways of bending time are, and the uses of speeding up/slowing down time. I spent 2-3 hours on the game and still don't have the faintest clue what some of the controls do, which isn't a great showing by the makers.