I was walking home the other day, drunk, confused, dizzy, and then a sudden thought came to my head, sure a Sonic 4 game would be awesome? I mean like, it would be a direct sequel to Sonic and Knuckles, and only feature characters from the old era, so no Shadow, Silver etc. It would play like the old 2D Sonic games, but could have HD 2D graphics, kinda like the street fighter 2 HD edition, and maps very much like the older game, but could feature alternate routes, like if you finished a level in under a minute, or you found an alternate route etc, I'd like to hear what you guys think about this, obviously it doesn't have to exactly like the one I was thinking of, but just A new 2D sonic game with gameplay like the older ones.
Recent Sonic games like Sonic Rush have a raw gameplay value pretty much identical to classic Sonic games. Doing something much more close to the spirit of classic Sonic, however, just in the way of its appearance, would probably tickle my nostalgia enough to get me interested.
Good luck getting a "no new characters" rule on any such game, though. Unlike series such as Street Fighter and Mega Man which have done this kind of thing, Sonic has always worked to appeal to younger, newer gamers rather than the gamers that remember him from back in the day. If any such game like this were even to be considered, there's no chance they would leave out characters like Shadow or Rouge, favorites of all the thirteen-year-old wannabe emo kids.
Oh I know the chances of this happening are zero, I mean the new Sonic and his crew of generic characters is what is keeping Sega alive. I was more eluding to a "what if" situation, not "they should definitely make this, petition now!!!!". In an ideal Sega world we'd all be playing our editions of Skies of Arcadia 2, JSR3 and Shenmue 3 (or probably a later edition as it was planned to be a pretty long series) on our next gen Sega consoles.