For what it's worth Flying Battery is one of my favourite zones of S3&K, I'm really happy with the choice. Sandopolis, the zone immediately after, on the other hand is one of my least favourite. Fortunately thanks to Mirage Saloon it's a safe bet it ain't in Mania. =P
FBZ is one of my favorites too. I love all the play with the animal containers, using them for badniks, rings, and even making a boss out of one.
Damn guys, that background interior is completely different and I love it! I think one of the charming things about the 2D games is that they are never perfect....and that's ok!
This part I agree. It looks amazing: And since I can't help but to show it, a comparison of what it "could be": Spoiler Spoiler And looking at this pic, I feel like this: MY OCD NEEDS THIS, please guys! You can do it! :v:
Yeah, that effect for FBZ's interior background does remind me of the effect used in Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Where the sky BG is 3D behind the parallax layers. And speaking of Jazz Jackrabbit. I noticed the icons on the monitors have an animated gradient border. The first Jazz game's monitors had that effect.
Flying Battery Zone is my favourite Sonic level of all time. Alongside Chemical Plant and Star Light Zones. It flows beautifully, has some amazing set pieces, the music is insanely good and it has an extremely memorable end for a stage too. That's on top of the fact that like CPZ, I believe it epitomizes great Sonic level design. SXSW was literally all I could have hoped for. Next classic Mania level is FBZ? Holy shit. They used the U/C/G Modern style for Forces? HOLY SHIT. Couldn't be happier right now.
Oh wow, thanks for this comparison! Now I can easily see the palette changes. I honestly never noticed those pipes/interior bits before as there is always so much going on during the level, but apparently the level design wasn't even complete after the "let's split Sonic 3 in half" decision!
If they really want FBZ Act 2 to shake things up, the ship should either crash/or be on the way down, or maybe this is one of the later levels in the game and the damn ship goes all the way up to the top of the atmosphere to segway the inevitable space level.
My uneducated guess would be that FBZ acts as a segway level between 2 islands/games...or it could be just another level in the lineup...guess we'll find out in 10 months!
Other people have suggested setting the second act during a storm, like Sky Base or Sky Deck, which would be really awesome in my opinion. Lightning could definitely work alongside the new magnet gimmicks. Although the trash-chutes are an unexpected and interesting addition, so maybe they're going for that angle instead.
Oh my, that background... I imagine it with Batman & Robin's amount of Parallax and I know it will rule.
Flying Battery looks pretty dang cool to me. It always the most exciting stage to me in Sonic & Knuckles, and if they can do things to alleviate those elevators, which were the worst part of the level from Sonic & Knuckles, I think I'd really enjoy it. Also the foreground effects when you're outside the ship, being magnetized with the electric shield looks like it could make for some good "Gotcha!" surprises, this looks fine to me. Some of you folks really should lighten up, holy shit.
Speaking of "Gotcha!", I'm curious what sort of plan they've got for any fakeouts like the capsule miniboss. We've already got Green Hill Zone's Act 1 miniboss putting a huge twist on the GHZ wrecking ball boss, but it's hard to try to predict just what they may do this time around.
Looking at the background during the outdoor areas, I'm willing to bet that the next stage will be Sonic 3's rep Icecap Zone. Door snowboarding and all
It's an hblank interrupt trick where the vertical scrolling position of the background is modified each vertical line (on old consoles, at least. Something like this would be done with a shader I'm guessing in Sonic Mania).
To me the background just looks like lots of clouds. Is there something that makes you think it's IceCap zone underneath?
Ice Cap Zone was originally meant to follow Flying Battery Zone. You were supposed to snow board off of FBZ onto Ice Cap Zone. The original concept was for the snowboard to be a door from FBZ. FBZ is actually a great zone for them to remake in Sonic Mania because it's the only zone in Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles that has no knuckles-specific paths, because he originally wasn't supposed to go to the zone at all. By remaking it in Sonic Mania, they can finally give Knuckles a proper version of the zone.