#drop dash

[blazehedgehog]

If you could only pick one classic Sonic move, would you prefer to have the drop dash, insta-shield, or super peelout?

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.

So generally I'd pick the drop dash.

[dizzydennis]

Every time GameXplain talks about Sonic Mania, they say that the Drop Dash is an ability they easily overlook and forget about while playing.

I don’t see how that’s possible. For me, the Drop Dash was the biggest game changer and has become my favorite ability for the Blue Blur!

[blazehedgehog]

In twitter, you mentioned something about the post-Sonic Mania trend of implementing the drop-dash (badly). Can you give us an explication of that and how they fail at implementing it? I'm asking because I assume it would become a plagee in the fangame community from now on.

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.

Regardless, it’s not hard to implement an accurate-to-Sonic-Mania drop dash. Heck, I did it before I’d ever even played Sonic Mania! All it takes is a few minutes of research where you pay close attention to what’s going on. I’ve said it before, but watching gameplay footage in slow motion helps a lot when it comes to understanding what’s going on under the hood of a game. “Gamefeel” can be a very subtle thing and the only way you can unpack why something works the way it does is to dissect it, individual frame by individual frame.

[dizzydennis]

My constant dilemma with Sonic Mania...

[blazehedgehog]

Not sure if you've gotten this one before, but what are your thoughts on replacing Sonic's amazing Insta-Shield in Mania with the much less useful Drop Dash? It's the only thing in Mania at the moment that annoys me, as the rest of it looks fantastic. Freedom Planet 2 has incorporated an Insta-Shield-like ability and it's great! I really hope it's lurking around somewhere in the options menu for Mania, or something.

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.

By comparison, the InstaShield, while a fun thing to reflexively do every time you jump, only has a tiny handful of places where it’s actually necessary.

[c-x-3]

I love how Sonic Mania introduced the drop dash and it was such a good feature that it has literally been in every single game since except for one. Forces, Origins, Frontiers, Superstars, and now we get news it’s being added in Sonic X Shadow Generations. The only game they skipped was Colors Ultimate and that was probably just because they were allergic to changing the controls in that game for some reason (literally didn’t remap the quick step to be on the bumpers for some reason).

[bearofsquares]

im blue da ba dee da ba die

[dizzydennis]

I love the Drop Dash so much that I don’t want anybody to be surprised when I name my son or daughter after it!