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I didn't find Sonic Unleashed's werehog stages to be fun at all. Sonic doesn't have to be running constantly, but speed has always been the point of the game. (He's called Sonic for a reason.) You spend more time floating around as the werehog, who is incapable of running at all, than playing as Sonic himself, and that means something has gone horribly wrong between the Sonic games from back when Sonic was actually fun and Sonic games today. (Minus Rush and Rush Adventure, which are awesome.)

And yet that's somehow not enough to keep it from making what could have been a pretty good Sonic game into a pile of crap. The Sonic levels feel like some kind of reward for trudging through the werehog levels.

If you're referring to the werehog levels, they would have been sad God of War knockoffs with or without Sonic. If they were their own game, I wouldn't have bothered to play it at all, but at least they wouldn't be in the way.

At least you're not playing the 360 one-- I've gotten to play one daytime level and one nighttime level, and the nighttime level didn't bother me.  It was mundane, but not really bad so much.

Then I come to Tails' Quicktime Hell, which in itself isn't so bad until I get to a boss who constantly opens up everything in his arsenal from halfway offscreen with buttons that don't work except to buzz annoyingly and cheese Tails off as we get blown out of the sky.

No other routes, can't go back and collect more coins-- turned the whole thing into a big waste of money.  Seriously, if I could, I'd pay someone to get me through that.  Not a whole lot-- I only paid 20 bucks for the thing, after all-- but I'd definitely love to see more of the game.

Anyway, I do agree-- people are way too harsh on Sonic.  He has his flaws, but Mario gets away with a lot of the same stuff, though his games do manage to do it differently.

Personally, I'd love a 3D Knuckles game full of punching, gliding, and climbing.  Even the treasure hunting doesn't bother me so much, though I would like it if things were varied up... oh, and NO TIME LIMITS.  At least not if treasures are randomly placed each time.

I liked the treasure hunting in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 and I would totally buy a Knuckles game.

Hi there...I'm one of those up on the day stages, down on the night stages people, but it's absolutely not because I expect Sonic to run forward and nothing else all the time.  Something Sonic Adventure (1) got right that very few subsequent 3D Sonic games seem to have remembered is that there are more forms of speed than running.  Every character's game in SA1, even Big the Cat's, contained *some* element of hectic...ness.

Sonic games and, more importantly, Sonic himself, are all about speed, but this can mean many things.  I personally think that if Sega stepped back and took a look at Sonic's *character*, they'd see that if he were thrust into a new situation (i.e., transforming into a werehog), he'd try to find a new way to be fast besides running.  In my imagination, the werehog stages operate like a 3D Ristar, with truly active grabbing, swinging, launching, etc.  This could have opened up the door for some really groundbreaking melee combat, and also might have allowed for the stages to be challenging by virtue of their layout instead of by proliferation of pits...the biggest reason I disliked the werehog stages was that I was constantly fighting with the flickery lock-on cursor or the slugging arm-stretching animation (which was often slower than the speed of falling, if you get my drift).

What kills me is that the werehog *did* work more quickly, creatively and smoothly during some of the cutscenes.  I refuse to believe that there's no way to achieve the same effect in actual gameplay.

"I remember sampling a bit of Sonic 1 and 2, and seeing some of 3 played. Shockingly, the games did not focus entirely on running fast. There are slow stages with platform jumping and other stuff. When I hear the demands to return Sonic to classic form and just have him run fast, I wonder what games people are talking about."

"I almost feel sorry for the little blue insectivore to be so hobbled, like a character actor forever doomed to reprise a signature role. "

Thank you, I was beginning to worry I was the only person in the world who thought like this.

This mantra of 'Sonic should be about speed' seems to come from people's need for an explanation for what went wrong with the series.  Some people defend it quite aggressively by citing their status as 'real' Sonic fans.  It doesn't help that the statement is vague enough that people can make their own interpretations of it and take any criticism of it as an attack on their own personal ideas.

I don't care if Sonic tries different things so long I find the result fun but I'm sick of internet know-it-alls telling me how anything the series tries to do differently will always fail and I'm stupid for not accepting this.