Really looking forward to playing this, the changes are very welcome indeed! Echoing what Dark Sonic said about the Flicky pointer, great idea EDIT: New Green Grove tiles look fab. Also would be cool to have a toggle between MD & Saturn soundtrack
As noot-noot would say, aweee daaamn. You nailed it, right there. I'm in the small bin of people who *prefers* this game above, say, Sonic 1, at least, especially these days, so none of what I'm seeing makes me want to try this. The only cool thing about this thread was the crab. I don't care if Super Sonic works, don't show me a video with that vomit-inducing pallette in Green Grove, pls. As already discussed, there is no way for Super Sonic to work in GG as it stands due to the lack of emeralds so why are you fucking with the colors of one of the most beautiful pieces of art to hit the Sega Genesis?
I think he enjoys the technical challenge. One of the other things to consider is the amount of rings in a stage - in the 2D Sonic games it's not hard to accidentally collect 50 rings (Marble Garden Zone Act 1 gives you that many for just falling down the introductory hill), but in Sonic 3D you have to make the effort, i.e. any speed increase you'd get from Super Sonic is offset by the time spent collecting rings. I don't think the game is designed for it, even if there was a save system allowing you to revisit earlier stages with all the chaos emeralds. It's really frustrating because I totally see what he's trying to do, but Sonic 3D as a concept just doesn't work very well. Fixing controls, cameras and bugs is about the best you can hope to achieve without ripping out all the assets and starting again. By the way, it was mentioned earlier that in the introduction sequence, the plantlife always faces the camera, suggesting it wasn't rendered as a 3D model. I just watched a bit of Digital Foundry and it turns out the same technique is used in Forza Motorsport 7 for its trees. I thought we were beyond that in 2017, but apparently not!
Honestly I'm quite of the mixed opinion regarding the changes. I admit I found the game to be obnoxiously difficult due to its poor control and isometric gameplay really not being compatible with a directional pad. Though that was when I was far younger. Here and now I can see that the game already offers little in terms of challenge and that the only reason it's tedious is because of the aforementioned control. The fact that Burton took steps to not only improve the control, but also the camera and HUD is amazing. I'll go ahead and list my basically irrelevant points anyway because I'm an avid time-waster and hardly anybody pays too much attention to some random geek on a forum :v:/> I like the improved controls a lot, as it was the main reason the game is considered hard by most if not all. The rewritten camera is a God-send, especially with proximity based obstacles, those purple things in GG, for example. Quasi-invincibility using the speed shoes is a good thing, for all the reasons someone before me mentioned, such as the penalty for hitting an obstacle being loss of speed as opposed to rings, flickies, or your life. The invincibility isn't made redundant by the speed shoes, as you aren't able to destroy badniks using it, and well, YOU try jumping or rolling into enemies with any level of precision while Sonic is able to outrun the camera by holding a directional key for a few seconds. The GG floor palette changes don't bother me in the slightest, the only issue I might have with it is the floor looks too similar to Rusty Ruin now. The waterfall was changed because Burton knows damn well that someone is going to use PAR (or game genie) codes to gain access to the emeralds before they're theoretically allowed to, and if someone casually playing the game with codes enabled saw the waterfall post-Super Sonic they would probably freak out. I like all the flicky enhancements, the only exception is flickies being invulnerable whilst Sonic is moving as I actually like the idea of the flicky shield. Personally I think that the only time the flickies should be invulnerable completely is when Sonic is super. Why you ask? Super Tails from S3&K, that's why. Getting to the ring and realising you're one flicky short was never a fun time unless you were some gaming masochist. The flicky radar is therefore good, as are the notifications which should immediately draw your eye should a flicky be missing. The boss camera is amazing, especially for the first boss which could move around so disgustingly fast when following you it was unreal. I don't think the same camera should be implemented for the stationary bosses however, such as Rusty Ruin or Volcano Valley. If possible an entirely new camera should be made for the Final Fight which has the camera focus on the bosses weaponry rather than the boss itself, but that's just my opinion, feel free to hate since it's 2017. I love the animations when transforming into Super Sonic. Not a fan of the music that'll clearly play really loudly in the background for the entire duration of the Super form. The score being visible doesn't bother me since I never cared about scoring high in Sonic games to begin with. The timer being visible is a good thing, though I think that Burton should at least add in the Sonic suddenly suffering from cardiac arrest after 10 minutes of rolling around at the speed of sound, so that players who spend too long searching for flickies even with the new radar have something to fear. If I've missed anything I'll probably edit my post about 5 years from now with new and equally as irrelevant information.
All his changes have been solid with the exception of buffing the flickies, which ironically has nerfed the overall gameplay design. The invincibility for speed shoes is a good idea but bad execution. Personally I would turn it into a boost like state where you gain invincibility, but only if you reach and maintain top speed. Anything below max and you're back at a vulnerable state. I'm sure someone here will be obsessive enough to revert the questionable materials while maintaining everything else so there's no point in lamenting over it.
Did people really find Sonic 3D challenging? When I played it as a kid, I found it to be the easiest of the MD Sonic games. No thanks. That would be a downgrade, and this director's cut is supposed to be an upgrade.
That's subjective, personally I think that a player can easily avoid hitting that 10 minute marker. Every stage has at least one speed shoes monitor, so if you save it until after every badnik is dead and yet still have flickies to hunt well then the solution is clear.
I love this. All of it. These changes honestly make me want to actually play what I felt was the worst game in the franchise.
Huh, late to that party, but, about the "lava flicky" thing, I don't remember it either. They pissed me off so much in volcano valley, I was blinded by the pissing. I probably thought about both the exclusive flicky and the bugged pallette possibilities at the time, but I didn't give a damn as long as they stayed with me instead of wandering somewhere. About the changes, well, I don't know if they're for better or for worse. I always thought the game was ok but wasn't great, and that it was difficult to make it any better with its premise and its technical characteristics. I remember I was far more bothered by lack of plot connections withe the other mega drive games than by the way it was made, and knuckles being out of Angel island for no reason ( I was very zealous of those things back then). I suppose they're welcome if there's enough people enjoying them, the rest of us just ignoring the hack if we don't want to mess with it. That's quite fair, isn't it?
Honestly, I never had an issue with 3D Blast or the flickies, but the changes made to them is definitely nice. I just think that having all of the changes together is overkill. They're invincible so they don't get picked off individually as well as blocking bullets and whatnot, all of them now try to get back to Sonic instead of just the blue and purple ones AND you can't lose them unless you don't have any rings/a shield? I would have been fine with one of them being implimented, but having all three eliminates almost all challenge from this game and, given the new flicky finder mechanic and the icon bouncing if there's one running around somewhere, the changes involving the prevention of flicky loss seem uneeded.
I got a bit curious about the water change and decided to compare it to the pre-change water. It's a bit less vibrant, but I like it.
The water actually looks much nicer now, I think. It's far less saturated. I still dislike the colour of Green Grove though. The new green for tiles are fine - I'm talking about the walls. They're so brown and ugly. The Saturn version looked infinitely better with its greyer, brighter stone. I would be interested in seeing if he could adjust the palette to something more palatable.
The new water looks fine. Making the grays bluer also made all the metal stuff look nicer, IMO. I found some of the Flicky changes questionable, but Super Sonic is great! Repurposing the spinning animation for the transformation worked great!
I thought Mania's release ended my personal hype train, but these new updates are starting to throw coal in the furnace. What will this man do next?
Sonic 3D was supposed to be extremely colorful and oversaturated to a point. So yeah, the water looks out of place, and the grey objects turning grey blue, like the monitors and eggmobile is just weird. All of this just for the ability to play as Super Sonic in Green Grove which is completely impossible without cheating? Talk about overkill.
Well you don't want to be running on Piss Grove Zone now would you? Honestly thought I'm interested what other changes he might do to the game. Having access to the source code means he can do almost anything.
I happen to really like them this way, specially the Eggmobile! Sonic 3&K also had bluish rocks and metal objects, and those looked great too. So yeah, I don't even consider these color changes a sacrifice, everything looks fine and Sonic can go super, I don't see anything wrong. The green tiles on the floor, though... I'm still trying to get used to those, but I do question the decision of making this change.
This is quite a neat project, and I'm loving this guy's youtube channel. While I don't consider Sonic 3D Blast to be a great game, I've always found myself strangely drawn to it. There is something charming about it. The visual style may have something to do with it. I generally dislike CGI animation, but I do enjoy the visual styles in the DKC trilogy (really any of Rareware's 90s SGI renders), Mario RPG and Sonic 3D Blast. I'm not good at sprite editing or pixel art, but I do enjoy playing around with it sometimes. I decided to fiddle with one of the Sonic sprites to see if I could make him look more physically like Super Sonic beyond a golden palette. I'm not qualified or up to the task to actually be a sprite artist, nor did I know what the palette needed to be. So here's a little Mania-esque blue Super Sonic mockup sprite.
I'd be more interested myself if he'd be interested in art submissions? Hell...if he was super interested, we could legit have a Sonic 3d Blast 2.
