The people calling his tweets "unprofessional" and saying he "didn't have to air out dirty laundry". One of this site's own moderators' reaction was "Wow, I'll be shocked if SEGA ever wants to work with him again." Maybe that's technically true, but the way that's worded implies it's Stealth's fault for speaking out, not SEGA's fault for mistreating its contractors. As if SEGA dropping their relationship with him for this would be a totally natural and understandable reaction to have. I myself had a similar reaction before, but after thinking about it, it's a foolish attitude to have, even as a shocked initial reaction. At the end of the day, professionalism is bullshit. It's a tool corporations use to control their employees and intimidate them into never exposing bad behavior, because they might lose their careers, which would totally be their fault, apparently.
Professionalism is bullshit. But virtuous standing for your principles and against it doesn't pay your bills. Stealth isn't culpable of anything here except at most "maybe should've waited a bit", but he DID do something a bit risky. Not even due to Sega reacting it in a vacuum- but because now the fanbase, as shown through this thread, is going to grab it and make it a bigger deal than it is, which runs the risk to then be blamed on him. It's unfortunate, and if you want to prevent it and help him, best thing to do is try and make the least drama and least clickbaiting out of this, and maybe contact Sega and politely go "I hope you do a patch for this, and I think the devs that did the Sonic 3 portion could not only do that patch justice, but even help the other portions- but must be given the conditions to do it correctly." And obviously, buying Pier Pressure. EDIT: Simplifying in case it's not understandable- people by and large aren't blaming Stealth, they're worried this might affect his livelihood
I'm surprised that, in anniversary mode, you can't steer jumps out of rolls (Sonic 1, Sonic 2). It's such a "modern" thing, and it feels so weird to have this in the same game we have the Drop Dash. It makes it feel so much worse to play with.
I get the feeling that Stealth and co. already tried that themselves first to no avail. I really doubt he would have just jumped straight to tweeting like he is given that he's had a rather productive working relationship with SEGA for years now. Something must've gone terribly wrong behind the scenes. I doubt fans will have much of an impact at all. Fact of the matter is, fools are buying this overpriced turd in droves, and that's a win in SEGA's eyes. This franchise is dead to me, only the fans can do anything good with it. On a semi-unrelated note, I think it'd be nice if someone ripped all of the new unique sprites in Origins' version of 3K. Maybe they can be put to good use in fan projects.
Damn; Just checked the mobile version and yeah it’s the same there. It just struck me as so off putting. Any chance it is there in the Hardware version? It’s the one I’m most used to but I could be getting Mandela’d here… despite playing it like a month or two ago
I am reminded of the fallout that happened between Mick Gordon and Id Software/Bethesda over the Doom Eternal OST release, where it turned out that at the end of the day both sides fucked up. I give Stealth the benefit of the doubt because of his stellar work on Mania and the mobile remasters but I want to wait and see if there's any statements regarding this coming from Sega and/or Sonic Team, I wanna hear out both sides. That being said I think that "feeling bad" if you purchased the collection is just being needlessly hyperbolic, the games are fun, the collection for the most part works well, I just got done streaming story mode of 1 through 3&K and a Knuckles playthrough of 3&K, 100%ing them and I had fun, the game was stable and the only real annoying bug was Tails not respawning in Sonic 2. Now, full disclosure, I live in Chile and I paid regional price for it, which turned out to be around USD 22.3, and it was worth every bit of that price, whether it would be worth $45 I don't know.
I recall it didn't make a sound in the Gems Collection emulation as well; which by that means, yes, the Spin Attack never had a sound effect in CD.
Here's a comment shedding some light on why HeadCannon's PathTracer was implemented in S3&K: I'll add that I've always been unhappy with the over-sensitive collision in the Retro Engine. It wasn't too much of an issue in Mania, but it's much more noticeable to me playing through Origins.
Obviously he did. Are you seriously unable to connect the dots as to why having multiple fans politely ask for the same thing isn't the same as Stealth internally asking for it? I'm talking about showing Sega there's demand for it, not saying Stealth somehow didn't notice this was a thing. Come on.
Yes. Social media is already calling out the game for its blunders on nearly every gaming forum. That message does carry weight, and a collection like this still appeals more to the traditional gamer crowd than to new players. This is literally what happens when every game gets released broken, and with enough pressure the big publishers often do patch these broken messes over time. It's a very common process in the industry now. Also, frankly, I'm not just some naive Sonic fan. I've been part of many fandoms over many, many years across a wide variety of media types and have career experience in marketing/content creation outside of this forum to back that up. Based on the trends I'm seeing, I can say with confidence that this will negatively impact sales, which were already at risk to begin with due to other problems with the collection before launch and the mixed word of mouth it was generating. Doesn't mean SEGA will even fix it, but if people speak up enough, they might at least try.
Just to be clear, Gems collection did not emulate CD, it was a port of the old PC version. You are right in that Sonic CD never had a rolling sound effect from the very start.
Well, the aforementioned moderator could be right in the end. That was my original position before rereading the tweets and softening up a bit, but I'm still wondering if second-guessing myself is a mistake. One thing I have been consistent on is that the tweets as written are a mistake, particularly that first one. And I'll just repeat what others have already said since I've been fairly vocal as of late: nobody is attacking Stealth, including me. I don't enjoy sitting back watching someone shoot themself in the foot, and I say this as someone who goes waaaaay back with Stealth and didn't exactly get along with him too often. But I still want success for him. I also would love to see more future collaborations using the Retro Engine. If you have a mutual partnership with another company, you don't then directly point out (or even imply as Stealth did) that your partner screwed something up when things don't go right. There's a time and place to defend one's reputation, and that's not it. Sega didn't throw Headcannon under the bus, so it's not fair. In my profession, I am a software developer. Every single team I've ever been on, miraculously my team always talks (internally) about how it's the fault of outside teams we collaborate with when things don't go right. Always. For the last 10 years. But it is *unprofessional* (i.e. bad business manners) to point fingers like this in public, or even in certain internal meetings where both parties have the same product owner or client they communicate with. Period. That's well understood. And the reason for it is if you do that, then how can either party trust the other and work effectively with each other as a unit? So I don't buy into the argument that professionalism is bull. It matters a great deal, and Sega is completely justified if they decide this is a deal breaker for any future collaborations. But back to the "it's always the other team's fault" bit... that's the built-in bias that needs to be accounted for when dealing with Stealth's tweets. I don't think many people really get that. So it's completely fair to keep an open-mind and *not* just blame Sega for everything that went wrong as many others have.
I don't mean this in a pretentious way but this is the best way I can describe my feelings on the collection. For people who just want to play the classic titles in widescreen with very little effort on their end this collection is worth the price of admission. For those in the know who know about the other options to do the same thing, like the decompilations of the android ports with a controller, Sonic 3 AIR which has the original MJ music and hella mods, and other options like Sonic 2 community's cut this collection might not be for you. It might be convienent but it definitely isn't the best way to play these titles and you can do so at a fraction of the price.
I just look for reviews of this game by some Russian youtubers, and... game was translated? Wow. For the first time, we finally had a OFFICIAL translations for classic levels! And... translation is not bad! Interesting, how many languages had a game? Maybe, somewhere exists a list of translations?
We've been on this specific subject for a while, but I'm still of the opinion that we don't really need to worry about Stealth or Headcannon. I'm sure him and the team have thought about this before he made the thread and they're prepared to deal with whatever professional consequence there is for making it public. Other than issues with SEGA's implementation that they may not have known about until launch, most of the issues he describes have clearly been ongoing for a while now and they had some time to think about it before he made that thread. It's very considerate to be concerned for their careers and everything, but I'm sure most - if not all - of the potential negative consequences we have been mulling over are things they've already considered. Also we should all keep in mind that Stealth himself never explicitly said SEGA is responsible for everything. Although he gave some pretty solid reasons for why, he was honest about Headcannon submitting the game with some glaring issues that SEGA played no direct part in.
