I'm from the camp that asserts Sonic was never great (I'll give you good, but not great), so take this as you will, but the shoot-from-the-hip defensiveness and condescension in this thread has gone a long, long way towards persuading me that maybe people aren't joking when they say the fan base is the worst thing about this series.
Man, let's not act like this thread didn't have direct shots at Sonic fans from the get go. The OP's incredibly strange questions were like if you were to explain a videogame to anyone who has never played them, yet plenty answered his questions seriously. It was all the other posts that just went straight to "the games are terrible".
Since many of you clearly decided to read the thread title as uncharitably as possible and hit Reply without thinking—gotta go fast, right?—I think it's worth emphasizing that a lot of scepticism or befuddlement towards Sonic comes from players who are otherwise very experienced at 2D platformers, particularly from the Nintendo school of design. In a way it's not all that helpful to lump all of them into a single genre (a mistake people still make in spades with "Metroidvania") and I think the diversity of side-scroller design, and the unique design personality afforded each distinct IP, was a lot clearer in the SNES/Genesis era when this format was the biggest game in town. The question here isn't how to get through the stages from left to right, but how to have fun doing it, and I wouldn't fault anyone for thinking that Sonic sends mixed messages about how to get the most out of reading the stages and exploring them. That's certainly how I felt on returning to the Genesis games on the Wii VC as a significantly more experienced and design-literate player than I was back when the Nintendo/Sega rivalry was at its peak.
Sonic does not send mixed messages. The only way for anyone to think the game is contrived in design is if you expect, nay want, the game to be something else. Which is honestly in the eye of the beholder.
Also, design-literate? Lol.
With this in mind, I appreciate the posts that actually try to break down the arcade design philosophy underlying Sonic and answer the question of what kind of mindset it takes to not only play the games but enjoy them. The thing about Sonic is that there is this massive discontinuity between the two separate experiences of speeding through the environment and plodding around if you run into spikes, a lack of gradation along a spectrum from one end to the other that makes these experiences feel like one game instead of two (with one of them, the slow one, leaving a strong and encumbering impression that you are doing it wrong). It's like the Baby Mario sequences in Yoshi's Island, except all the time—either you're in the flow or you're stumbling. So it's illuminating, and important for the sake of conversation, to look into whether Sonic benefits from a different approach in terms of how to read the stage, because forming a mental map of the layout certainly doesn't work the same way it does in a Mario game, where you can do it all in one brisk pass.
First of all, comparing "slow" Sonic(which is really like two to three seconds of holding either direction) to the Baby Mario sequences is hyperbole of the highest order.
Sonic does benefit from a different approach because it's a different game compared to Mario. With different abilities, physics, and layout. It's strange that I never see this brought up with Mega Man. Or we don't because the question itself is rather obtuse.
DKC is a good point of comparison here, not least because the original game's reputation has faded in its own right, only for the series to come back in exceptional form. DKCTF is the game I hold up as the king of speedy momentum-driven platformers, and a lot of it comes down to two things: (a) the mechanical continuity between the slow, exploratory experience with your eyes peeled for every secret and the frantic speed-run route where every enemy and stage element is like a boost pad; and (b) the quality, shared with Mario, that if your mastery of the mechanics is good, you always, always have a chance to read the screen and react no matter how fast you are going, even in an apparent move-or-die stage like the notorious Bopopolis. In my experience with the original Sonic games, you don't really get that same window of reaction conjoining the fast and slow game and letting you swap smoothly from one to the other. The skills at mentally mapping out a stage layout that you might cultivate in a Nintendo platformer aren't really transferable.
This entire paragraph to me just says "I like the design of Nintendo's side scrollers more than I do the design philosophy for other games". That in itself is fine, because Nintendo makes some damn good games, but that's not a flaw. Liking other games more isn't an inherent flaw to a series that chooses another path.
I've been noticing this all over, and it explains a lot to me. Most who somehow can't wrap their heads around Genesis Sonics don't because the games have sloppy execution, it's because it isn't a Nintendo game. I don't mean that in any dumb console war way, I mean that in how Nintendo designs their games compared to others.
Sonic is a bit more twitchy than Nintendo side scrollers, considering much of the gameplay was inspired by Pinball and having it be developed by a team adept at arcade gameplay that makes a lot of sense. Sonic certainly does demand more of the player, but those reasons are exactly why I prefer the Genesis games over any 2D Mario(Mario is by far the better series, mentioning just in case you misconstrue my words). The issue a lot of people in this thread are having with this thread's question is if that's considered a flaw, and I don't see how that is. A game having a different play style to another game doesn't make it inferior, that's just acting as if subjectivity is objectivity. It all lies in the execution.
And before you ask the questions brought about the series seem to have nothing to do with how it's executed, but more with the game's core concepts which have been put under examination here. And all arguments here seem to boil down to "I like how Mario plays more". That's not a flaw.
So either you bounce off the design philosophy—I sure did, and so have many others by the looks of it—or you find another way into it, like an RPG packrat adjusting to a game designed around aggressively spending consumables or breaking weapons. And if there is another way into Sonic, a more pleasurable way, it's useful to know what that is. I'm surely not the only one here in the position of contemplating taking a chance on Sonic Mania despite never really clicking with the series before, and this is practically the only way to inform the decision.
Or you could just not buy it, or do. Decide for yourself, really. If a series never did anything for you then why bother. If you're interested just to see if it clicks for you then long posts detailing the essentials might help, but your best bet is figure it out for yourself by playing it and going in with a clean slate. Don't have Mario, Donkey Kong, or what have you in your mind and act as if it's something else entirely. If it clicks, it clicks. If not, play what you like instead.
I'd like to fall for a Sonic game for once, and this one looks like it has a real shot, but from my lukewarm experience with the originals, it's hard to tell. The people selling Mania the hardest are the incredibly Nintendo-literate players who had the same reservations about Sonic's core paradigm but tell me the level design has markedly improved in the execution. But I'm still on the fence for a reason, and those of you here who are quick to assume this position must be disingenuous are too busy revealing yourselves as either poor readers or poor players to offer much in the way of insight.
Nah, because it's honestly a waste of most people's time to explain to others who have said they either don't like or don't get a game why they should. I've wasted too much time in this thread already.
It's not that people who can't get into Sonic don't know how to play platformers; it's that there has long been reason to suspect that, much like a lot of films or books I can name, Sonic might fall into the category of things that are paradoxically harder to appreciate the deeper you get into a medium. The snots and boors in this thread scrambling to announce that Sonic's priorities are obvious aren't doing the series any favours. Nobody's asking for hand-holding tutorials; what they're asking for is a sense of conceptual elegance. If you think it's obvious, you had better be prepared to make the case.
At the bold: That rhetoric is mostly used by those who take themselves way too seriously and only to denounce whatever they don't like, get, etc. That's not an objective truth that could be revealed, that's just a fact that not everybody is going to like everything. Whether they have knowledge when it comes to a subject or not.
And man, I respect you for taking your time to write out this post. But you're not really saying much that hasn't been said in this thread. Majority of your post is "I don't get Sonic, I wish it was more like these Nintendo games" and the rest is shots at Sonic fans. "You had better be prepared to make the case" when there isn't a case.
Sonic, by all accounts, is a simple game. The only way you can state the contrary is if you have some sort of bias, or want the game to be something it's not. Sorry you guys couldn't get into them, but saying "it's the games fault" over and over doesn't change the fact that it isn't.