#drop dash

I don't like the Super Peelout. It feels kind of pointless in the face of the Spindash. Every time I play a fan game that has the Super Peelout, it feels like one of those nostalgia things where people remember it from old games but they never actually internalize whether or not its useful. I don't think it is.

Instashield is one of those things I do unconsciously a lot but it doesn't feel very well explained as to what use it is. It's also one of those things that's only useful on things it was designed to be used on, like spiked enemies that need the extra range. So I like it, but I don't love it, because it's weird and doesn't have enough utility.

The Drop Dash has the benefit of being a thing I also do unconsciously a lot, with the added benefit of always doing something for better or worse. But in some ways, I think that's better, because it gets you into lots of situations where you're making tons of tiny mistakes that you want to try and correct. At least for me, it helps me improve my understanding of a stage's flow.

I do wish maybe its controls were better. Mania's "double press and hold" is a little awkward, and Frontiers upgrading that to "triple press and hold" is downright garbage. It works, but I will pick nits that it's not intuitive at all. Fan games like Sonic GT handle it best where it's given a dedicated button like a bumper or something.

Some of it seems to be associated with LakeFepard’s Simple Sonic Worlds variant engine. In it, you initiate a drop dash just by holding the jump button after jumping. In theory this means you can both use shield effects AND retain the drop dash functionality, but I don’t know if I like that. It basically means that you’re going to be triggering the drop dash a lot by accident just in the normal course of a jump.

There was one other fan game that did a really bad job at implementing the drop dash, but it’s been a week since I finished up my SAGE reviews and I can’t remember which game it was or how it messed up the drop dash. In my defense, there were nearly 90 games at SAGE, and a lot of them kind of blend together in retrospect.

I have no qualms with the Drop Dash. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s actually fairly brilliant as a means of traversal. This is something I’ve talked about before, about how gaining speed in Sonic games gradually became easier over time.

Sonic 1 is kind of a nightmare, right? It’s where momentum is king, and if you lose that momentum, you have to take the walk of shame to manually build it back up. Sonic CD and Sonic 2 introduce the spindash, where you can reclaim lost speed by charging a spin from a standstill. The spindash became so vital to Sonic’s moveset that Sonic Team back-ported it in to Sonic 1 for Sonic Jam on the Saturn, and most versions of Sonic 1 that don’t provide this luxury look genuinely inferior.

Then we get Sonic Adventure’s spindash, which doesn’t even require you to stop moving to use it, and eventually we end up at Sonic Rush’s boost system. All of it is built towards the same goal: to keep Sonic moving without needing to stop (or necessarily even slow down very much).

The Drop Dash rests somewhere between the spindash and the Sonic Rush Boost, but more importantly, it seemingly brings about a very important feature: the ability to change directions without having to slow down and re-accelerate. Previously, if you were moving to the right and wanted to instead turn around and go left, you’d have to stop, turn around, and accelerate in that direction (or stop, and then spindash).

The Drop Dash, from the way it looks, lets you change direction in mid-air and shoot off in that direction the moment you touch the floor. Combined with the fact that it essentially functions as a spindash where you don’t have to stop moving to use it, it has MASSIVE potential. I assume a scenario where high-level Sonic Mania play is one where you never exit your rolling state. You just spin through the entire stage all the time chaining Drop Dash after Drop Dash together forever.