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Sonic Origins Collection - General Thread

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by HEDGESMFG, May 27, 2021.

  1. Stink Terios

    Stink Terios

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    FYI: if you're getting stutters, the first thing you should be trying is capping the framerate at 60 with RivaTuner. Most PC games have framerate limiters that are bad and cause issues, and Sonic Origins is no exception.
     
  2. SuperSnoopy

    SuperSnoopy

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    Slice of life visual novel, coming soon...?
    Can't I tho? :V
    Widescreen is such a huge improvement for me, it kinda trumps all other 246 Sonic 1 re-releases by default.

    I should've clarified I meant official definitive versions, AIR will obviously always be the best but this is the next best thing really.
    I'm surprised how much they added in S3 honestly. A bunch of cool new sprites, the S3 completed theme in launch base zone, a sonic complete style transition between S3 and S&K... great stuff all around.

    I think it's just that I'm a "glass half empty" kinda guy, I genuinely expected them to do the absolute bare minimum for this compilation.
    But...they didn't! With mirror mode, boss rush and the missions there's a surprisingly high amount of content here, and of course we have the incredible Retro Engine versions of all classic games under one roof.

    No, I think I'm gonna keep my stance on this one. This is the definitive official version of the 4 classic games, and I don't see it being dethroned anytime soon.
    I'm by no mean a Sega shill, like it's obvious they could've polished it a bit more but...meh. I don't have the energy to be angry at stuff like this anymore. It's just the way the game industry is nowadays.
    If having the blue sphere music not speeding up is the price to pay to play these games in 16/9 on consoles then I'll happily take it.
     
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  3. AzuraRacon

    AzuraRacon

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    I’m noticing Sonic 2 Tails actually will properly, consistently de- and respawn if he gets too far off screen

    when he’s player controlled

    i had my pro controler set to the side for captures and started pressing right on the D-pad on it when he got stuck and noticed he would respawn pretty quick after

    not sure what got fudged there
     
  4. Hydr0city

    Hydr0city

    > Kamikazee Member
    Dunno if anyone else said this yet but if you really want to, you can avoid the grind for coins through Debug Mode. For some ungodly reason, if you farm lives in it (see: placing down a bunch of lives monitors) in Anniversary Mode, then clear a stage (just place down a signpost), you keep every single coin after it saves.

    Go buy all the stuff in the Museum! Relish in whatever else you use the coins for! Seems weird to let people keep the coins for this purpose, but...hey, whatever! Guess it's not a big deal in the long run so they let it slide, but they gave you 100 of these fuckers for pre-ordering the game and treated that as a separate pack worth buying.
     
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  5. DefinitiveDubs

    DefinitiveDubs

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    The bugs suck, but what really gets to me is the museum. What a fucking waste. They touted it as including "never-before-seen" material. Bullshit. It has maybe 5-10 new pieces of concept art for all the games combined, and none of it is particularly interesting besides maybe another look at R2. Everything else is shit that's already been online for over a decade.

    Sonic Jam had real never-before-seen shit, or at least never-before-seen to Western audiences. Damn near everything included in that 25-year-old collection had either never been seen by Westerners, or was completely brand new, awesome stuff, like Man of the Year. Even Mega Collection had more value in its extras. Why couldn't we get Man of the Year in higher quality? Maybe a description included for what it was actually for? Why couldn't we get more concept art for Sonic 2 than what was published in the Cook & Becker artbook? Why couldn't they include the Technical Files, the American Sonic Bible, or even that rare one-shot comic SoA put out in 1991 showing the American backstory? Why not that one MTV special in higher quality? Why not the original tapes for some old commercials, or the original pilot for Sonic X? Or even the Sonic 1 TTS demo, if they managed to find the binary in the last 20 years. Fucking anything other than the same shit we've seen already for so long.
     
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  6. Chimes

    Chimes

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    ...okay, I actually have a answer to that one, and even it too weirds me out because of how some games used it.

    For some reason that I can't fathom, the YM2612's volume is... to put it lightly, fucked. Model 1 Sega Genesis consoles used the YM2612 chip, which meant that early games from around 1988 - 1993 was written around this screwy volume curve.

    When sounds are played on the YM2612 at a low volume, instead of playing that sound cleanly it instead comes out very crunchy. This is what's called low volume distortion, or LVD. Several sounds (including in Sonic games) have strange artifacts when played in isolation, and the spring sound is no exception. Here's the spring sound recorded in BlastEm, which emulates LVD. Notice how just like the Origins clip, it trails off imperfectly into a crunchy "oh-woooooooooooah." sound.

    Due to the low volume distortion, the YM2612 also can't pan perfectly, as when a sound plays in the right speaker a highly distorted, quiet copy of that sound plays in the left speaker. This manifests in Sonic games as the rings very slightly playing in the other speaker as it plays in this speaker. It's weird.

    Low volume distortion was fixed on later revisions of the Genesis (known as the Model 2s and 3s) by replacing the chip with a newer revision known as the YM3438, meaning some games like After Burner II or Alex Kidd that used this screwy volume curve were unintentionally broken. In other words, the jank has jank.

    For some reason, the Sonic Origins sound effects seem to have been recorded from a YM2612, as that spring sound has that LVD artifacting. My guess on what happened is that instead of using a more common later Genesis model, SEGA used a earlier Model 1 console and unintentionally recorded the LVD when capturing the sound effects. Interesting...
     
    Last edited: Jun 24, 2022
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  7. Hydr0city

    Hydr0city

    > Kamikazee Member
    Very minor, but I'll be the one to say that I don't think all of it is completely uninteresting. Sure, it would've been cool to get more out of it, but what we got was still interesting to at least me. The stuff for Super Mecha Sonic is pretty interesting, as are the other shield ideas they were throwing around, to name a few. I feel like that's very subjective, but I'm someone who enjoys getting any details on little bits of game development, so I dunno.

    But yeah, most of it we've seen already, which is kind of disappointing. Was hoping for a bit more, but what we got I'm still interested in.
     
  8. DefinitiveDubs

    DefinitiveDubs

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    Ok, yeah, that's fair, but what I'm saying is that yeah, it might be interesting, but it elicits a reaction of "Oh, that's pretty neat". At least for me, there's nothing that really makes me say "Oh wow holy crap this is so cool" like the things Jam included. Jam was like Disney World for a Sonic fan. This is like...your local library.

    SEGA surely has tons and tons of really cool, mindblowing stuff in their archives they could be showing us that they haven't already. I don't get it. It's not like they have to worry about disc space or anything like with Jam, and it can't be that difficult to add things to the museum. Do they have to go through some complicated internal process determining what parts of development are and aren't ok to show to the public?
     
  9. synchronizer

    synchronizer

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    Oh boy, I've heard really disappointing things. --and sadly as I personally predicted, the music was handled quite poorly. The specific thing I was hoping would be fixed - the loop point in Launch Base 1, was not. Seems the conversion was based on the PC MIDIs and done with minimal attention-to-detail and a poor audio interface.
    And it sounds like the graphics are all blurry because the scaling isn't integer-based? oof... any chance that can be resolved at all?
     
  10. RikohZX

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    I imagine the bilinear scaling for the rendering is probably on the Hedgehog Engine side of things, but I can't know for sure. No one seems to have come up with ideas or solutions yet.
     
  11. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    At least for the classic stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the development stuff is simply lost to time. It's been 31 years and hardly anyone from that time is still with Sega save for Iizuka and Senoue, and they were only around for Sonic 3. I'm honestly impressed we got this much.

    And no there weren't commercials or like the ova trailer but there's more concept art and custom animations and I think that's an ok trade off.

    Oh and I noticed the blurry backgrounds and I'm playing on the Switch in docked mode and I'm getting lag. Ffs is this really because they had to shove some 3d models onto a menu? Just amazing.

    If Sega was a cat they'd get the squirt bottle lol.
     
  12. synchronizer

    synchronizer

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    You're getting lag on Switch? During gameplay or in the menus?
     
  13. Chimes

    Chimes

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    As someone who found gems like There Was A Old Lady Who Swallowed A Horse, Walter The Farting Dog, and House of Leaves at my library, you take that back right now. :(
     
  14. Dark Sonic

    Dark Sonic

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    Both. It's not always but every once in a while I get weird hiccups
     
  15. KingOfBunnies

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  16. synchronizer

    synchronizer

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    Ugh. That's the version I got... that won't do.
     
  17. saxman

    saxman

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    I think your expectations are a little too high. When Sonic ROM hacking was just beginning, it seemed like we'd *never* figure out everything there was to figure out. Same with all those hidden assets in the Simon Wai prototype. And then one day you look and realize that it really *is* finite.

    I'm not saying we have all the documents, but we probably have a most of what has turned up. Those working Origins aren't into this stuff quite the way we are, because they have better things to do, and other games to work on as well. I am appreciative of the efforts that were made here, because they didn't have to share anything with us at all.
     
  18. Hydr0city

    Hydr0city

    > Kamikazee Member
    Very minor thing, but is Sonic 3's competition mode kinda broke on Switch for anyone else? I try to go into Time Trial and it's begging me to plug in a 2nd controller, and refuses to let me proceed if I don't have one. That's always been a 1-player mode where you don't need a 2nd controller, no?
     
  19. DefinitiveDubs

    DefinitiveDubs

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    So you think what we're seeing here are the last scraps of development material they could find and there's nothing left? I don't buy it. They should have everything related to Sonic archived somewhere in a vault. Nintendo obviously does (if the gigaleak is any indication), and Capcom does, according to at least one person that's worked for them. It's not as if when employees leave SEGA, they take their stuff with them.

    There are only two possible reasons in my mind why we didn't get more than what we got:

    1.) SEGA knows there's value to be made in continually dripfeeding development materials out via more collections like this, or artbooks.
    2.) Internal politics about what they're comfortable with showing the public.

    Even if you think we have most of what SEGA has to offer, I don't think it's too much to ask that they at least include things that were in previous collections, in better quality.

    And why think it's such a privilege that they share anything? When you buy a Blu-ray, don't you want things like making-of featurettes, commentary tracks, or deleted scenes? Wouldn't you be disappointed if it only came with the movie and a few extras that were already uploaded to the publisher's Youtube channel? The reason my expectations are higher is because I grew up with classic collections in the PS1 and PS2 era that came with a plethora of neat stuff, whereas nowadays game collections are barebones with barely any extras to speak of. Should I lower my expectations just because developers are getting cheaper?

    It's not as if any of the Origins devs have said "We combed every nook and cranny for some never-before-seen stuff". We don't know how much effort they actually put into this. Hell, if the old Calendar images are any indication, they just grabbed what was already uploaded online instead of giving new, higher-quality scans. If they genuinely lost that material, I would understand, but there's no actual evidence to suggest they have.

    And regardless of what you think, SEGA is guilty of false advertising in that they said the stuff under Premium Collection was exclusive, never-before-seen content. That implies all of it, otherwise why not put it in the normal collection?
     
  20. Chimes

    Chimes

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    Oh my god... oh my god... Our collection is complete... SegaSonic moon door, Dust Hill title card, alternate Sonic 1 sequence data, Splats the Bunny, proto-Drop Dash, Sonic 4 prototype, the popcorn machine, Australian Sonic arcade games, Sonic stationery set, Venezuelan exclusives, Sonic strawberry jam jars, slow Has-Bean credits scroll, Blue Gale jacket stitches, Chaotix voice samples, Harmony magazine scans, Shadow vertex frown...

    snapshot.jpg

    This... isn't good... Researching Sonic is all my life... NO, IT'S NOT ENOUGH!

    moves over to researching other sega games like puyo puyo, cotton, shenmue, and altered beast