Sonic the Hedgehog 2 appears on the iPhone

Well, that's a bit sad. 60 minutes have gone by, and not a single person has anything to say about this. I'm betting it's because everyone's gone off searching for the indie developer that's promising to make a better version for the iPhone in 2 months.

 

Didn't Iphone have a (unofficial) Genesis emulator, though? Is this version better in something (better emulation speed), or just the same?

 

Hah, are you talking about me?

 

Somebody please figure out level select for this thing.

I basically found Sonic 1 to be unplayable for iPhone because Marble Zone requires too much precision. When I discovered the level select is when I really started to enjoy it.

And also, yes please let us know if it is in any way better than playing Sonic 2 on genesis4iphone, though I assume there is little difference.

 

It's most likely running the Classics Collection version of Sonic 2, meaning that we can now expect it to appear on everything...

 

I know, I was saying I didn't find it playable until I figured out how to levelselect.

So this is only live in the NZ store - any way to buy it from a US- and Canada-only acct?

 

There is one, but it blows ass because ZodTTD is a stupid piece of shit who doesn't bother testing his shitty ports of GP2x/PSP emulators before releasing them, and never fixes bugs in them.

 

You mean everything that doesn't already have 2 controllers built in. As I said before, they probably just couldn't be bothered making it connect to other iPhones, so they just slapped an existing multiplayerless ROM in.

 

Yeah, sadly I don't see it in the App Store. :/

Is it not released in America yet?

 

Yeah it's only on the NZ store right now.

As for multiplayer, they could have done upside-down split screen like on a lot of iPhone apps... which would work especially well on the iPad.

 

The joypad on this emulator simply beats the shit out of any other control scheme on the iPhone I've ever seen, ever. To see this officially released gives me so much joy inside to think that Sonic 3 and Knuckles could be next...if they did that it would officially make me stick with the iPhone instead of my Nexus...the iPhone might be *almost* useless for decent gaming but the nexus is a bad joke with it's poor quality touch screen. At least the iPhone is somewhat usable - if you think ZodTTD's emulators are terrible, just try Gensoid's touch controls on the Nexus One, or, even worse, the touchscreen controls on a G1 or ADP1, which don't support multi-touch, thus you cannot jump and move right at the same time, for instance.

Sega's done a great job with these - it's great to see that they're putting the effort into getting a fluid 60 FPS, my 3G runs it like a dream, and my 3G chugs it along, dropping frames every once in a while but still providing a totally playable, shockingly responsive experience. A rare instance in emulation where the real product is infinitely better than what the homebrew community is coming up with. I blame ZodTTD for this.

IMO, these are the best Sonic products Sega's released in years. Fucking sad but true.

 

As much of an Apple fanboy as I am, I think the lack of tactile feedback makes Sonic for iPhone really hard to play. I can see Apple's perspective: making a Gamebone-style addon shows a lack of faith in the touchscreen paradigm, but I'd so much rather have a D-pad and buttons.

 

Not worth getting if the emulator controls are still awful like the first one.

Seriously, who the hell has the bright idea to make the imaginary d-pads so god damn small on these things.

 

Even if they did allow access to the options screen, you still wouldn't be able to use the sound test properly, due to A being the only emulatable button. As one discovered when using an 'unofficial' version of the Sonic 2 app (from around last year) built out of some hacker taking the Sonic 1 app and replacing 'rom.bin' with the S2 equivalent.

Except the rom runs on all emulators off the bat, and the menu options haven't been butchered/changed, so not quite the SCC version.

They have, however, altered the attract mode so that it no longer demos Emerald Hill Zone period - with Chemical Plant Zone coming first and, rather interestingly, Metropolis Zone now getting a demo run.

 

The best d-pads in these kind of games are the wandering ones, like in Nova, where it follows you as you move your finger.

 

Well it's either that or cover half the screen with your finger. >_>

...Which is one reason why handheld touch screens just don't make much sense to me, but whatever...