Zackenstack, I must say that I'm still not sure exactly what angle you are coming from here. At first I thought that you simply didn't appreciate arcade-like simple gameplay. But now I'm not sure.
How do you feel about Devil May Cry 3?
And if it's not too much trouble, could you take another stab at explaining your main contention with the old Sega games?
I haven't played Devil May Cry 3 at all. I have played an hour or so into Devil May Cry 1, but that's not enough to say much about its combat system. Suffice it to say that I had no problems dropping it at that point (if anything, it starts slowly).
About the Sega games, let's talk about the Golden Axes and Altered Beast for a while.
Your character has essentially the same attack range and attack capability than any of the standard enemies you're supposed to beat up. That means to attack, you have to move into a position where you yourself can be attacked immediately. But then the enemy attack behaviour is randomized.
Many times the game will simply spare you and you get your own attack through, while
sometimes the game reacts like a good human player and beats the crap out of your approaching character as soon as possible. In a basic 1-vs-1 confrontation, whether or not you lose health is determined
by luck.
To get through 1-vs-many confrontations unscathed, you need
more luck.
And against boss enemies there's IMO nothing you can do to prevent a massive loss of health (and a few lives).
What these games need very dearly is a good block mechanic, where the player can
react to cues that indicate an attack is coming and do something about it. Both games have a block, but the cues are absent (or I possibly might be too dense to notice them in time), so it just isn't useful. You can of course always
guess when attacks might be coming and block "just in case", but that hampers your own progress more than it helps you.
Lets ignore the combo system, button-press mini-games etc for a while and look at what God Of War does. Every enemy gives cues to attack, most give you a second of animated warning (basic soldier, first battle scene, Minotaurs, etc), some give you a specific sound (Gorgons), many give you both actually, and the harder enemies you meet later in the game are usually harder because they have shorter warning times. You pick up the cue and block. If you engage the block just in time, not only will it prevent damage, but your enemy will be destabilized and open for a
safe counter-attack. 1-vs-1 confrontations against basic enemies are patently predictable once you have mastered the system enough to react to the cue in the given amount of time. In other words you will not lose health if you play well, which makes for a satisfying game, and yet it is something an arcade machine will rarely allow you to pull off. It would stop the flow of coins.
It's worth pointing out that even the basic enemies in God Of War will block if you try to just button-mash them. Unless you play the block-counterattack system, it's
impossible to progress on the hard difficulty and up.
When you herd many opponents in God Of War, they will usually attack in a staggered pattern, and you can only destabilize the last attacker to prevent being hit be the follow-up attacks yourself. It's a shorter window of time for your reaction, but you can predict when it will open. It's a rhythm game, basically.
Of course this is still a simplification, there is a lot more depth to the system, but I hope you'll see how, even at the very basic level, there is a difference between how the two games value the player's inputs.
To summarize, the old Sega brawlers will let you progress a little and hurt you a little, no matter how you play. A good game OTOH lets you progress if you master its rules, and if not, then not.
<scheduled break>
<hmmm, cookies>
<pours coffee>
The Sega platformers (Kid Chameleon, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Ristar, Ecco, Sonic to some extent) show an entirely differrent malady. In their fixation on a character design, to whatever ends, gameplay design has become an afterthought.
That collection includes many interviews with Sega staff involved in the original games, and while such extras can be expected to leave out many aspects, basically every single interviewee talked only about character design, and sometimes back-story. None of them gave the impression of having spent thought on a gameplay system. It didn't do much to contradict my feelings about these games.
The most grating demonstration of what's wrong with that fixation is IMO Ristar.
Ristar has two hands he can stretch out far to grab stuff. The game world is littered with handles on walls and ceilings for him to hold onto and climb.
And because Ristar must use his hands everywhere, because they look so nice or whatever, yes, also to overcome height differences, they gave him a pathetic jump. Half the character's own height is hardly normal for a platformer, is it?
Hanging from a series of
handles on a ceiling to appease the character concept really doesn't achieve anything IMO that the default rope couldn't have.
Making every wall climbable doesn't achieve much IMO that the default jump couldn't have.
On the contrary, because characters could plausibly jump
above the default rope, which would allow, you know, more variations in level design.
It's at its core the very same generic 2D platformer, with a character-driven difference in presentation. Theoretically. If jumps weren't useful for more than just getting up on higher ledges (
certain platformers let you bump your head into stuff ... or let you do things with air control).
