Sonic and the Secret Rings

Sonic and the Secret Rings is a really good Sonic game because it uses the Wiimote.




An issue the Sonic series has struggled with from day one is that the series is centered around speed, but inevitably any given game ends up finding itself choosing between focusing on speed vs allowing the player to have some actual gameplay to interact with.

In the 2D games, the fundamental nature of the screen is limiting. The faster Sonic is moving, the less time you have to react to something coming on-screen. The old Sonic games end up mostly not trying to have you react to what's coming at all -instead you'll spend a bit running at speed, then come to a screeching halt when it's time to fight some enemies or do some platforming or whatever, Spinning may or may not be necessary to slice through enemies in your path, usually correlated to how readily you can maintain speed while rolling; if you're going downhill, might as well start a roll, not only because you'll still go fast but because it's likely the game has planted enemies in your path. The original Sonic The Hedgehog is particularly blatant about this stop-go dynamic, but later 2D games are mostly just better at hiding it, such as how Metropolis Zone in Sonic 2 frequently ends speed sections by you ending up running right into a transit tube and being zipped somewhere else. This feels less jarring than simply slamming to a dead stop by ramming your face into a slightly-too-tall ledge, but the net result is still that the game has stopped you running and probably expects you to deal with a problem speed will make worse rather than better.

The 3D games -past 3D Blast, which is probably the slowest Sonic game ever- dodge the 'can't see what's coming' issue, but they bring to light a different issue; even a control stick really isn't precise enough to allow both rapid reactions and reasonably precise control, especially when you've got 'hold forward/up to move forward' further restricting things. Sonic Adventure onward tends to end up having Sonic and company traveling fast, but their reaction times mostly feel pretty slow; the game can't force you to go through an obstacle course where you need to rapidly re-position left and right to weave your way through the threats. You just can't react fast enough, precisely enough. The only time in the 3D games Sonic's reaction time feels particularly fast is when you're chaining homing attacks -and that's both not very interactive (Tap a button repeatedly, watch Sonic handle the rest), and if you try to go as fast as possible Sonic will fail to acquire a lock and dash in some unrelated direction. Given some of these sequences are how you travel across instant death drops, this ends up punishing trying to go fast with death.

Then along came Sonic and the Secret Rings, and its gyroscope controls.

Most Wii games that try to use the Wii's unique functions are gimmicks. (And, bizarrely, very few FPS and RTS games were on it, even though the Wiimote is perfect for both of those) Initially I assumed Sonic and the Secret Rings using the gyroscope to control Sonic was the same -I imagined that tilting right was directly equivalent to tilting a control stick to the right.

In actuality, the amount of tilt you apply determines Sonic's horizontal position on the track directly. Tilt to the right, and Sonic goes right. Return to the neutral position, and Sonic returns to the middle of the track, rather than remaining where you left him. How far right Sonic moves to and then stays depends on how far right you tilt the Wiimote.

On the face of it, that might still sound like a gimmick, but it directly allows Sonic and the Secret Rings to challenge the player with rapid-fire obstacle courses where you need to repeatedly shift from one horizontal position to another in less than a second, precisely. The result is actually amazing, and makes Sonic and the Secret Rings the first game Sonic really just plain feels fast. And it really is the gyroscope controls; Sonic and the Black Knight is theoretically Sonic and the Secret Rings' successor, but it switches away from gyroscope controls to using the control stick and it's just plain unable to match Secret Rings when it comes to challenging-but-doable rapid reaction obstacle courses. Sonic and the Black Knight is, in fact, much more a stock 'Wii game that uses the controls as a gimmick' game -the switch to using the nunchuk was made entirely so that you'd swing your in-game sword by flailing the Wiimote like a sword. There's things I like about the Black Knight, but this is a misstep.

Notably, later 3D Sonic games basically borrow the Secret Rings design and just reframe it into something easier to pull off with a control stick: both Sonic Colors and Sonic Forces, for example, have sequences where the track is temporarily defined as 5 lanes that Sonic will cleanly and rapidly bounce between each time you press left or right, while expecting you to fairly rapidly dodge aside dangers. And even then, the games end up having to give you more warning than Secret Rings had to, and so it's a little bit less effective.

It's too bad the significance of what Secret Rings did seems to have mostly gone over people's heads, because it's successfully striking at the heart of what a Sonic game has always supposed to have been, but normally struggled to actually implement.

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