#melcodriggs

A level in NiGHTS contains four "Mares." As in, Nightmares. Every time you retrieve the next ideya crystal, you move on to the next mare, until all four mares are complete and you fight the boss. That's kind of weird and notable, I guess.

Yes I’m late on the draw. I upload so little here I forget I have the ability.

I’ve never really posted saucy pictures here (not that I draw much FILTH) but I read something about Tumblr shadow-banning visual artists so, to be safe here are some alternatives:

Probably very few! It's been a point, both in Archie Sonic and now IDW Sonic, that if Omega ever goes rogue, it takes multiple people and a coordinated effort to deal with him.

Now, of course, that's not raw Omega. In Archie Sonic, Naugus and his sister got their hands on Omega, turned him evil and gave him crystal armor:

It took Knuckles, Amy, Rouge and Shadow working together to deal with him.

And then, in IDW, Eggman installed him as the core of a new set of robot armor following the Zombot outbreak:

Arguably, this is a much bigger upgrade compared to the crystal armor, and probably isn't even fair as a point of comparison. It took the entire village to deal with this guy, including a last-second appearance by Sonic.

I imagine that one-on-one, only Sonic, Shadow or maybe Knuckles could have any meaningful shot at handling Omega under normal circumstances in terms of raw strength. Tails might be able to come up with a strategy to deactivate or depower Omega, too. I feel like there must have been a point where Gemerl and Omega fought in one of these comics, too, and they seemed sort of evenly matched.

Everyone else would be outclassed, though.

In those games, the floating rails are there to provide flow in a specific direction. Like, it's not realistic, but it feels like they are leading you "forward."

A rail is a tool that helps you reach the end of the level. It is either leading you towards the end of the level, or away from it. And it's called a "rail." When people talk about games that are on rails, it's like, Star Fox or House of the Dead or whatever. Again, games that are directing you towards an ending. You can't "explore" when you're on a rail. You only have a destination.

Rails in Sonic Frontiers kind of do this, by their nature they all lead to a "destination," but they're crisscrossing all over the place and a lot of those destinations are strength or defense seeds, or caches of rings. Which are things that are basically everywhere, so having all these rails lead to them doesn't really mean much. So it's a lot of weird clutter.

Think of it like... Mario. In Mario you have pipes, bricks and coin blocks, right?

But if you think about the more open Mario games, like Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Odyssey, you don't see as many of those things.

Because things like bricks, coin blocks, and pipes are tools designed to push Mario forward. Bricks can be smashed and don't come back, coin blocks can be emptied and become useless, and pipes take you somewhere. You can't really have these things in a big open area you're going to be revisiting multiple times, because their usefulness is limited and otherwise they just take up space.

And it's not just that a 3D Mario game cannot have these things.

It's a concept of linear versus open. The pacing of following a pathway and having tools or obstacles on that pathway. This is even part of Super Mario Odyssey, because there are routes that get more linear, as you ascend cliffs or buildings. And when that happens, you start seeing the return of coin blocks and things of that nature.

But never just floating out in the open. It's pacing, it's clarity, it's flow. And sometimes having a clear view of the sky is good for understanding scale and location.

Rings looked better in Sonic Advance when the inside was flattened out similar to rings in real life, and I will never call Red Rings by their actual canon name because the alliteration was RIGHT THERE. >:[

The rings in SA1 and SA2 look similar, too.

I also sort of have a soft spot for the rings in SegaSonic Arcade, though only a little.

I think it's because they're everywhere and nothing about those islands feels organic. It's very clear they made the island landmass first and then put everything else in around it after the fact.

The thing about open world design is that you are still technically guiding the player. There are roads they can follow. Marked pathways. Zelda, Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout... you get this sense of being on a road vs. going offroad. You get the sense you are visiting places, and those places have a purpose. Dungeons full of culture, cities for housing, farms with crops...

Starfall Island is like the most basic, under-developed open world I've seen in a long time, if not ever. It has stuff in it because it needs to have stuff in it. So it's full of trees and rocks and its dotted with settlements that have little to no visible purpose. They're just there to be there.

This ask is from 2021 and I thought for sure Billie Bust Up came out by now. Right?

Nope! But I know how it goes. No shade intended.

I actually forgot this was a musical game. Honestly, I'm not sure I ever looked super close at the game before now. This looks neat! Not sure there's much else to say, given there's only two videos on the steam page, but at least they still seem to be providing semi-regular developer update logs.