Sonic 1 and 2 getting the Sonic CD treatment by Taxman and Stealth

Also, they can take their time to look for any relevant documentation they may still have at home, for example.

 

I'm an advocator of e-mail interviews as well. While you can't capture the emotion attached to the interviewee's replies in a telephone or Skype conversation, interviews conducted over e-mail allows both the sender and recipient to articulate their questions and answers much more elegantly and plus it allows the interviewee to recall certain time-specific information and document them in text more gracefully rather than giving you constant "umm"s as a reply or even giving you a lousy "sorry, I don't remember" (depending on the person's memory that is).

 

All true. We prefer face to face interviews for the purposes of the magazine as they allow for photography (having people posing with their games looks good in a feature, y'know?), but I don't actually think that any one interview method is definitively better than any other from a non-commercial standpoint. Emails are considered and asynchronous affairs which negate the need for transcription, while doing things face to face or on the phone allows for a greater volume of content, increased flexibility and a lack of self-editing.

In my experience, a lot of the advantages of doing things face to face are negated if you're interviewing through an interpreter. Even if the interviewee's grasp of your language isn't perfect, as long as it's sufficient for you to carry a conversation I'd advise it. Compare the quality of answers gained from Takashi Iizuka (interpreter) and Jun Senoue (no interpreter) - even though Iizuka isn't a particularly open interviewee in general the gap is pretty representative, with Senoue's answers coming off as more natural and flowing. As a result, email is usually my preferred option if I'm going through an interpreter.

 

This is unrelated to the above, but...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75_QvTsArjQ[/youtube]
Concrete proof that Egg Gauntlet is still accessible. As to how it was done... I don't have that information as of yet, since it doesn't say so in the video description. This makes me wonder whether or not Desert Dazzle and Final Fever are still accessible in Sonic CD.

 

Whoa, well-done! I'm surprised and kind of depressed Sega didn't let a level so complete and polished be part of the final product officially, but it's awesome it didn't go to waste :D

 

Was that directed towards me? If so, then this wasn't my doing. All I did was link to the video, but maybe I should have been more specific about it in my above post.

 

Their assets do not exist in Sonic CD 2011. Besides, Taxman himself said that all that existed were the mockups he showed.

 

The levels were partially playable, but never included in the retail copy. As for Egg Gauntlet, the WIP assets slipped through on the first version of Sonic 2, but it's not in the data file in the subsequent updates.

 

That's a shame. You did great work on it! It looks super fun

 

Those assets... where... Wait! Isn't that looking like the assets from Sonic Crackers, or am I just imagining things here?

 

Yeah, a lot of the graphics are placeholders. Had we gone on with this design, it would have been cleaned up with new art and looked much better (for example, the Death Egg Robot would have been inside an aquarium). But obviously, before that sort of dev time is invested we have to be sure that the design is going to work - and after several discussions it was decided that the Sonic 2 bosses should not occur outside of their "canon" environments.

Looking back on it now, I think I actually prefer just being able to blast though the bosses with next to no filler.

 

It could always be reused as Final Flashback Zone Act 2, in Sonic 5. =P

But first we need Sonic 4 Retro Edition. =P~~

 

It was a fun novelty with Robotnik's Revenge, absolutely. But that mostly worked as a challenge mode (rank grade, anyway) rather than a simple boss rush stage.

Hell of a lot better than E.G.G. Station anyway, which was an even worse X-Zone/XX-Zone.

 

I decided to record a full, non-lagging video of Egg Gauntlet. Took me approximately 30 rerecords because of failing recording software and the level actually being hard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSrEAVFnKc0

 

Well, there's someone's challenge: backporting this and HPZ into the rom. :specialed:

 

Thanks for doing this! It was a delight to see this.

 

Egg Gauntlet Zone will now officially ALWAYS be Cyber/Genocide City Zone to me... I want this in a hack. It's a good thing I saved the previous version of the game on iOS

 

Lest we forget what Egg Gauntlet was based upon?
http://info.sonicretro.org/Robotnik%27s_Revenge

 

Taxman, was there ever any music done for the scrapped new zones in Sonic 2 and CD? If so, would you be kind enough to share it with us?