'OC Zed said:
They don't make em like this anymore....
I wish I knew, and it really makes me sad because I'm a Sonic fanboy through and through. I really think the dismantling of the core Sonic Team has led to disastrous results - they have really struggled to keep up with the times.IMO, the Sonic series was uniquely suited to side-scrolling 2D/2.5D play. Unlike a game like, say, Mario, Sonic was always built on sheer speed and timing rather than exploratory gameplay. Sonic 1-3 and Knuckles for the Genesis were great (again, IMO), and Sonic CD was good as well. Then came the real 3D test for the series with the Dreamcast, and I think they just completely missed the boat. I don't know if it was poor planning or lack of ideas or what, but FWIW, the concept of Sonic Adventure 1 is a ####### nightmare. Yes, if you want to beat the game, you have to spend several levels fishing with Big the Cat and running around hitting things with hammers as Amy. Sonic Adventure 1 took what was good about the original game - the fast pace and speed - and completely stripped it from the game, slowing things down seemingly to a crawl. Add in the open overworld and having to actually FIND where the next stage starts....that game tested my patience.
I think they realized that they had gotten too far away from the core of the game, and tried somewhat to bring it back with Sonic Adventure 2's simple stage-to-stage gameplay. But instead of letting you run through the stages as your favorite characters, you only get ~6-8 Sonic/Shadow stages and you have to wade through ~5 Tails-in-a-robot-suit-shooting-a-gun stages and ~5 Knuckles-searching-for-pieces-of-the-emerald stages. The game is disjointed and frankly, the Tails/Robotnik levels are brutally not fun.
Every one of the games I've played since then (which isn't all of them, to be honest) has just been downright bad. It seems like they try to introduce a new tweak to each game that fails miserably, and the controls have seemingly gotten downright unplayable with the more recent installments.

I understand that you've gotta innovate if you want to stay on top, and I'm sure the success of games like Mario 64 prompted their changes. But the Mario series at its core is a world away from the Sonic series - even if they were both originally side-scrollers. I don't know what the right answer for Sonic would have been, but I'm pretty sure whatever they've done in the last 10 years isn't it.