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All the S@nics - the end

this is the place where lps are being talked about. it's important to talk about games being played on the internet.
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Re: All The 5on1cs - Spinball - Going All In

Post by Awoo »

Cyril wrote: 4 years ago i'm just glad you got to show off falling down the boss chute 'cause holy crap that terrified me as a kid

anyone wanna place bets on how long tomorrow's video is gonna be? I'm expecting 30+ honestly
That chain-hanging thing always scared me as a kid, too. I'd do my best to just avoid the crap out of doing that if I could. Glad raocow didn't go down a 3rd time, the chain broke after the 2nd.

30+ minutes at minimum, would be my guess too. The final level could easily be feature-length (pre-edit or maybe even post)
KobaBeach wrote: hot take: i do think pinball party is a funner game (outside of story mode, story mode is as bad as spinball, i could never get past amy)
it also has NiGHTS and other Sonic Team stuff so
Never played Pinball Party myself and I know next to nothing about it, but, man,

NiGHTS Pinball has to be one of my favorite segments of Sonic Adventure 1. Really looking forward to the 'cow's playthrough of that :3

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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by SAJewers »

SAJewers wrote: 4 years ago
Awoo wrote: 4 years ago
10204307 wrote: 4 years ago

I mean, there are actual Sonic racing games with Sonic in the title, so he's going to end up playing a racing game at some point.
Wasn't

Sonic R

on the tentative list? I'd be surprised if raocow doesn't end up playing it considering what he's already played so far. Waku Waku Patrol Car was kind of a racing game except it lacked the whole arcade cabinet experience.

yes, he confirmed Sonic R in the patapon spotzone. no idea on sonic drift or sonic and sega allstars racing

just quoting this because raocow finally confirmed in the spotzone he *is* playing drift, for anyone who wanted that answer.

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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Leet »

Kinda thought it was answered when raocow said "i am playing every official game that has sonic or another sonic character in the title" 86 videos ago

"raocow's playing all the sonics, dave" "really? even sonic pinball?" "yes, dave, it's ALL the sonics" "what about sonic drift?" "yes, dave, he's playing ALL the sonics"
Well it is a decent hack but sometime its just too repetitif there no level that actually pop in your face and your like oh yeah that level they all ressemble themselves and just monster along the way.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by ano0maly »

No one mentioned Super Smash Bros. Brawl yet
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Grounder »

ano0maly wrote: 4 years ago No one mentioned Super Smash Bros. Brawl yet
Well

Sonic isn't in the title and only shows up for the final boss.

It's much closer to being a Kirby game.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by raocow »

yeah the key here is the title of the game

this is important because sonic cameos in a *lot* of games
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Heavy Sigh »

Fun Sonic Facts!

While Spinball had been quickly approved by SEGA management, in what would become a time honored tradition at SEGA, no extra resources were diverted to the Spinball project, even with the short development time alotted.

With management ordering STI to do something essentially impossible, STI's new director Roger Hector decided on the only sane course imaginable, and outsourced a great bulk of the programming and technical management to two long time friends, Lee Actor and Dennis Koble, who had set up their own development company called Polygames.

Facing an incredibly short dev time, they set up the code for Spinball to be modular, allowing multiple programmers at STI to help out, tackling different sections of the game in small, discrete chunks that were then stitched together by the main programmers. All artwork and the game design itself was the result of STI's in-house talent, at least the talent not hard at work on Sonic 3.

Even with the modular design, just hitting the deadline required the bulk of the game's code to be written in the high level programming language C. It’s much easier to read and manage, but on a low power system like the Genesis it also meant far more inefficient machine code, resulting in a lower frame rate and lag spikes.

Level Facts!

Sonic Spinball's third level, The Machine, is based on the scrapped art assets created for Cyber City Zone, a level meant to follow Metropolis Zone in Sonic 2.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Crow »

turns out raocow raocow'd the level
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Piesonscreations »

For as much of a mess as this game can be at times, watching raocow play the game has been fun. I think it'd be nice to see other pinball games.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Ashan »

Nothing has really ever appealed to me about pinball. I get why it got popular back in the day cause it's a neat idea as an analogue game, but once video games were a real thing it's like... why do we want to go back to this thing where there's minimal interaction and most of the outcome is pretty much luck-based?

This is a very general post about my feelings on pinball that I'm posting several days into the pinball LP for some reason
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by DinnerSonic »

I'm sure someone's gotten to this somewhere else and I forgot, but Sonic Spinball actually originally had a different theme for the title screen, using a little remix of the Sonic theme song, before replacing it with a song that didn't require paying licensing fees. I like the use of the theme song, but I prefer the final one to the "Sonic Tesla Coil Mix" of the original song.

I never got far in Sonic Spinball as a kid, and I never got around to trying as an adult, but so far every boss has been kind of unsettling? A scorpion with a too-detailed Eggbotnik face and too much flesh-colored metal that screams at you, glowing metal Robeggman heads that vomit magma inside a boiler, and now the roboticizer that has the unneeded detail of electrocuting the animals... though somehow the animal torture device seems less creepy than the scorpion.

The art style makes use of some unused Sonic 2 tile designs, but the color palettes, general aesthetic, and music "instrument" choice, all give the game a grungy creepy vibe to me compared to a normal Sonic game, and I am both mildly creeped out and love it for that.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Falky »

Ashan wrote: 4 years ago Nothing has really ever appealed to me about pinball. I get why it got popular back in the day cause it's a neat idea as an analogue game, but once video games were a real thing it's like... why do we want to go back to this thing where there's minimal interaction and most of the outcome is pretty much luck-based?

This is a very general post about my feelings on pinball that I'm posting several days into the pinball LP for some reason
Because as the backglasses on a lot of the old electromechanical Gottlieb machines state, it's a game of skill. This link seems relevant. There's a similar story with darts as well.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Bean »

I like pinball because the thing's bouncing all over the place at fast speeds and is a game of reflexes for the most part. You're constantly focused while the action's going on, and if you aren't, you'll probably lose.

I made it past The Machine once and only once. Never cleared the fourth stage, and I remember why after looking at another video of it.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Nast »

I can appreciate pinball as a score-attack game, not so much when you are given specific objectives cause then it turns into "you gotta aim at this specific tube three times to win" which can take from a couple minutes to an hour depending on luck.

Case in point, the last emerald that raocow collected so effortlessly took me like an hour to get when I played the game. Turns out all I needed was to not believe in myself.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by AuraLancer »

I wonder what a 3D Sonic without an insane deadline looks like. Does it exist?
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Grounder »

AuraLancer wrote: 4 years ago I wonder what a 3D Sonic without an insane deadline looks like. Does it exist?
Sonic Forces.

Rebuilding the Hedgehog Engine took them two years out of a three year cycle, IIRC!
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Matt is me »

NastCF wrote: 4 years ago I can appreciate pinball as a score-attack game, not so much when you are given specific objectives cause then it turns into "you gotta aim at this specific tube three times to win" which can take from a couple minutes to an hour depending on luck.

Case in point, the last emerald that raocow collected so effortlessly took me like an hour to get when I played the game. Turns out all I needed was to not believe in myself.
It ain't luck at all, not in real life nor in Sonic Spinball. I'm super terrible at aiming for specific tubes or loops or anything, but I know people who are very very good at it. That's a skill gap, not a luck gap. Even the ball falling straight down the middle with no chance for you to catch it isn't luck--a skilled player won't let themselves get in that position in the first place.

I posted earlier that raocow should start over because he missed the mini-game for getting all the rings in any level. That was a joke in that obviously raocow shouldn't be starting over for such a ridiculous task, but it wasn't a joke in the sense that that mini-game DOES exist. And I know that because my brother can consistently get to it--he can control the ball real well. And while Sonic Spinball skills don't 100% translate to real life pinball skills, some people can do the same kinda stuff in real life.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Ashan »

Matt is me wrote: 4 years agoEven the ball falling straight down the middle with no chance for you to catch it isn't luck--a skilled player won't let themselves get in that position in the first place.
How can anyone do that when the ball goes into a chain of areas where it bounces around by itself for 15 seconds and then falls out?
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Falky »

Matt is me wrote: 4 years ago Even the ball falling straight down the middle with no chance for you to catch it isn't luck--a skilled player won't let themselves get in that position in the first place.
I remember someone online once complaining about the Addams Family pinball, saying that they'd launch the ball, it'd go into the bumpers, bounce around then often drain straight down the middle, basically saying it's luck based. The answer is to not plunge it into the bumpers. You've overshot the skill shot by quite a bit if you do that.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Matt is me »

Ashan wrote: 4 years ago
Matt is me wrote: 4 years agoEven the ball falling straight down the middle with no chance for you to catch it isn't luck--a skilled player won't let themselves get in that position in the first place.
How can anyone do that when the ball goes into a chain of areas where it bounces around by itself for 15 seconds and then falls out?
I'm not the expert here--again, I'm quite bad at pinball--but from what I've seen, you wanna avoid those bumper pits. You get like 10 points (obviously the number depends on the pinball game, my point is it's a small negligible number compared to other scoring things in the game, in any game I've seen) in exchange for chaos. If you gotta hit some target thing behind the bumpers, it's difficult, but there's usually a way to sneak in there without getting caught up in the bumpers. No one is perfect at this (else pinball high scores would be infinite) but it's definitely a skill thing, and some people are very good at it.

I've also seen some games where the ball enters a tunnel and can't be seen for some time, then shoots out somewhere pretty suddenly...in those cases, it can be a difficult reflex test, but I've never seen a game that has one of those exits aiming straight down the middle.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by Ashan »

Forgot to post this here the other day
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by raekuul »

Woo, pinball talk.

So a lot of what's being attributed to "luck" isn't luck in the slightest. Because they're enslaved by basic physics, real life Pinball tables are usually deterministic - if you take precisely the same actions every time, you'll get the same results every time.

What makes it look like luck is that Pinball requires an insane amount of precision to get to that point. You have to learn whether or not pulling the launch plunger all the way back will overshoot you into bumper hell or into a high value target. You have to learn how to hold a ball on the flipper to control its launch timing/velocity.

Skills like that are usually basic, but can still vary from play to play even among masters of the art due to the sheer precision it takes to repeat an action. It's frame-perfect with a natural rate approaching infinity, but it's not impossible to learn how to do. Virtual tables like Sonic Spinball are a hell of a lot more lenient with the timings since they're limited by something else's refresh rate.

Sonic Spinball, much as I love it, is a terrible set of virtual tables for a beginner to learn with for the simple fact that you can influence Sonic in-flight. Kirby's Pinball Land and Pokemon Pinball R/B are (slightly) better sets of virtual tables (and I'd suggest Pokemon Pinball over KPL for beginners since it's closer to a real table than KPL is).

With all that said, Sonic Spinball in particular has more of a difficulty asymptote than a difficulty slope, just since you can't practice the later tables at will. Without cheats, anyway.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

raekuul wrote: Sonic Spinball, much as I love it, is a terrible set of virtual tables for a beginner to learn with for the simple fact that you can influence Sonic in-flight.
Which makes it readily and ludicrously accessible as a game, just not an in-road into pinball proper.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by raekuul »

Well... almost. It's in exactly the wrong spot - veteran videogame players will get caught off-guard by the physics (which are not the best even for a virtual table, though that's largely a perception thing due to the aforementioned "having to run C code on a Sega Genesis") and veteran pinball players will get messed up by the fact that the game actually expects you to be subtly nudging Sonic around while you play (in lieu of having a tilt function which I guess makes sense since you'd be kicking a volcano in the balls to tilt the table which is absurd in its own amusing way)

Also, having played Kirby's Pinball Land in the past half hour, I am morally obligated to amend my previous recommendation - even though you won't get a feel for making skill shots with KPL (or Pokemon Pinball now that I think about it) it's a very good game for learning ball control due to how simple the tables are in practice.
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Re: All The S@nics - Spinball - Going Full Tilt

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

raekuul wrote: 4 years ago Well... almost. It's in exactly the wrong spot - veteran videogame players...
Ah, now I follow. See, I first played this when I was six years of age, so... :lol:
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