Sonic Generations is a masterpiece if you ask me. It’s a throwback to the good ol’ days when Sonic was actually addictive and fun (ie. pre-Sonic 3D) and the game holds remakes of a selection of classic Sonic levels from familiar ones like Green Hills to more recent ones from Sonic Colors and Sonic Unleashed. The game reinterprets these levels as separate 2D and 3D levels and playing this as an adult, I’ve come to realise 2 things – 1) the level design’s fantastic and 2) my childhood’s really THAT far away. What struck out most for me was how much the fun factor in the original has in common with modern day iPhone/iPad games.

Back in the 2-button joypad era, there wasn’t a lot of room for gameplay instructions. Instead, games like Mario and Sonic were structured such that you will learn the use of certain buttons and the purpose of characters in the game as you perform actions. In Green Hills, you’re introduced to speeding through loops and as you jump blindly into nothingness when you’re launched at highspeed, you’d inevitably either kill an enemy by jumping into him, lose your coins by landing on an enemy when you aren’t curled or land in a roll of coins. No matter your intentions, there’s immediate payback for your actions and that’s where the fun is at. Player actions are simpler to predict for sure when there’s only one or two possible actions.

I’d consider games like Sonic casual because they’re easily accessible no matter your skill level. If you look at modern successful iPhone/iPad games, they’re structured around the same principle as Sonic. Angry Birds has the same payback system in place. No matter how you launch your bird the first time, you’re likely to see results in how the building breaks and learn from there. The breaking wood and the score multipliers are a similar concept to coins in Sonic and the question blocks in Mario. Tiny Wings rewards the players with coins no matter how rubbish they are as well and the XBLA/PS3 remake that is Pac-Man Championship Edition gets players to learn the worth of coins the same way too – by gifting it to them for little effort.

The takeaway from this is that the difficulty curve can be separate from the reward scheme. While difficulty ensures that the player is challenged each time he plays, being constantly rewarded helps the player learns as well and boosts the player’s ego. It counteracts with the difficulty, encouraging the player and creating a sense of progress.