RocknRola
Member
I don't feel that, for SA1 at least, level design was ever the main issue with it. A weird twitchy camera that would set itself in weird angles, twitchy controls (at least for new players trying it today) were and still are it's main flaws regarding gameplay. Arguably, it being only 1/6th of pure Sonic gameplay was also an issue, though Tails is almost a carbon copy + flight.
Regarding the physics, while they were trying to emulate the 2D games they also needed to be fixed. They somehow mistook their "quick fix" of adding speedpads before loops (and in many other places) to fix the physics as the way to go, instead of what it was, a fix to combat the somewhat wonky physics (in particular the way the characters slowed down way too fast on anything that wasn't a leveled floor)
As someone already said here, the physics did support a natural speed progression. You could do some of the loops naturally by jumping over the speedpads. You could also gain some decent speed naturally, especially if you had downward slopes in your way. However, as I mentioned, the character also slowed down way too fast, which meant that it's wasn't a smooth, constant process of sorts. Sometimes it worked, sometimes you'd crawl to halt while going up and then you'd fall down. So they fixed that by adding speedpads everywhere to make a more consistent (during loops, scripted events, etc) experience for everyone.
A return to this style would probably work really well with Lost Worlds parkour system, for example, and it's 3 tiered speed system. It would allow you to slowly explore without going from 0 to 100 in 1s and also allow you to gain speed when you wanted to do so.
Alas, all we are getting is Generations but somehow much worse >.> The fuck Sonic Team?!
