Something has been bothering me long after anyone else ceased to care and I would just feel better putting it out here and out of my mind. The control scheme for Sonic Heroes, the last generation sonic game where you switched between characters in a team of three to zip through levels, strikes me as a 'duh' moment for game controls. Completely discounting the camera controls and glitched level design their was something inherently fun about running around as Sonic, then switching to Knuckles to KO a few enemies, then switching to Tails to fly up some incline and back to sonic to keep moving.

This character switching mechanic was a bit hampered, however, by a bit of uninspired mapping of the four face buttons. For my sake I'll describe it using the X-box controller since that's how I played it and it's relevant for later. The controls were pretty much identical on all systems to my knowledge.

The basic control mapping was A for jump and X for an all purpose attack button. This is fairly standard for 3D sonic games as all sonic needs to be able to do is jump and rev his blue self to speed on the ground. The other two buttons were dedicated to character switching. When you were Sonic and wanted to be Tails you would press one of the two character switch buttons (i forget which, which is part of the problem) to switch to Tails and the other to switch to Knuckles. The problem is that when you switch characters the buttons change, I think it rotated like a wheel so that whatever character you had selected was like a point in a triangle relative to the other two characters but I couldn't tell you for sure. At the end of the day I was constantly looking at the upper right hand corner of the screen to figure out which button I had to press to switch to a character and it made switching characters so clunky and artificial feeling that I usually avoided it whenever I could and stuck with sonic unless forced to do otherwise. This was fine with the game since it's level design was basically built for that but it would have been so much more interesting to have a more natural feeling character switching system.

A potential solution came to my head a few days later after getting rid of the game because a glitch in the forest level sent me careening to my death 20 times in a row. Dedicated character buttons. Instead of one jump button, one attack button, and two switch buttons, why not have one jump button, and one button mapped for each character so that when you pressed the button once it would switch to the character and each successive press would do that characters attack? Quick and natural character switching would seem perfectly possible. The X box controller was even already color coded for this! The button they mapped as attack, because it's the easiest to get to alongside the jump button, is BLUE. X, in my theory, is now the Sonic (or other fast runner character, but lets ignore the other teams for this) button. You press that button once, and you are Sonic, when you want to rev Sonic or use any of his abilities aside from jumping, the button is easy to touch, right there for you. The B button, which i might add is freaking red, is the Knuckles button, just about as easy to get to as the Sonic button, it just requires a slight change of your orientation on the controller, when you want to switch to Knuckles and start punching stuff, you pivot to the red button and start pressing away. The Y button is, of course, the yellow Tails button. The least essential character, a weak attack and mostly used as a movement tool, would be regulated to the highest button on the controller, not as easy to get to but as tails you rarely need to be pressing attack and jump at the same time, you mostly just tap on jump to rise into the air and occasionally send out one attack to hit a special enemy or two. Y would be the perfect button for this character as well.

It's largely pointless to complain about it now but I find it so mind numbingly obvious and such an interesting improvement to the concept that I wonder how many other people, other then the games developers who were supposed to figure this stuff out, thought this one up and wondered why it wasn't used.