Same camp, I liked Air Ride but I always kind of treated it as “eh but city trial is fun.” Air Riders made me realize how solid the vision always was, the first attempt was just clearly rushed and the second had 20 years of extra experience and hindsight going into it

I do SAGE yearly and on the Sonic side, you get some great stuff like Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit, or even well done ports or mods, but a lot of creators left Sonic behind to do much cooler original ideas instead. Those games are where it’s at, but even they get subject to the same expectations

I know you’re not referring to Sonic but that happened in that community really hard. I’m old enough where I remember all the wacky Clickteam fangames, but the need to pick up the slack when Sega fumbled in the late 2000’s, a lot of personality was just gone. Still some great stuff is being made tho

Yeah, was completely blindsided

Yeah like pressing the y button to grab my opponent’s ride when I’m close enough

Strato DX is, if anything, me just branching out into a new direction and that’s good! It is insanely weird for a shmup but it’s been doing well with steam wishlists and I’ve seen it get attention from circles that weren’t impressed with SF1UE, so it just means I’m not a one trick pony in the end

SF1UE on the other hand, it’s a platformer, you can only move and jump, so I can hand that to a 7 year old and they’ll immediately get it, in comparison. I think it’s by far the better casual experience and will likely still be a lot of peoples’ favorite super freaks game and I’m ok with that lol

I have actually been playtesting it with the kids at my job too. Despite me having made the controls extremely simple like in SF1UE, it doesn’t click with them immediately; they need to watch me play a total sweat run before they’re won over. Something tells me it won’t be a tutorial I need!