Generations actually bothered to give the missions level-appropriate platforms and they were incorporated into the existing level design nicely.
Keep an eye on the Sonic Retro wiki. (anyone can edit and/or create pages). The actual games themselves aren’t translated, only the Sonic Origins menus/ui & museum. A missed opportunity… Unfortunately, the official names of Dr. Eggman’s machines for boss rush were not translated from English to any other language, except Russian. The official Japanese names for the bosses aren't even used when the language is set to Japanese in the options menu.
Playing as Knux in S3&k and I noticed new small animation when you get pushed out of water in Hydrocity, Knux makes a small 2 frame animation. It seemed new to me. I remember usually he was still in that pose.
Listening to Carnival Night in Origins and I noticed that some of the PSG channels sound actively broken. Like they sound EXACTLY like what happens when you assign a PSG channel to a non-existent waveform. This makes me believe even more that these are unpolished, earlier versions of the songs from an early version of the game.
I was noticing something strange with it too regarding the PSG. I haven't broken down each individual note to figure out what's being played, but as a musician, it makes me think these might be perfectly valid notes from a theory perspective, but the tones don't go well at all together and make it sound like bad notes are being played. I have experienced that very thing many times before, especially when writing songs. Two instrument patches on my synthesizer sound really great, but using them together on two different parts sounds jarring. Then I change one of the voices while leaving the notes the same, and suddenly it sounds superb! I'm sure there must be a name for this phenomenon or some scientific explanation of it, but I couldn't begin to tell you what it is. But anyway, I believe that strengthens the argument that these are recordings from an earlier prototype.
Awww you cant jump off the pole in Marble Garden zone (the one where you go downwards in circles) I remember i used to jump off left or right side to get to places but here I can't do that :D
Im in the same boat, up to the and knuckles portion of story mode on PC and ive only really experienced the sonic 2 bug with tails. All else has been smooth sailing and sonic 3 is running like a dream for me I have seen all the bugs folks have been posting but i guess its just a bit inconsistent
I can't beat the final 2 bosses in Sonic 2 without save states. Is there anyting that helps with it? Extra rings or something?
No rings, its all gonna be a test of patience. What are you having the most problems with, if you dont mind me asking?
I'm in S&K and I had no idea you could opt to NOT play a special stage so I killed a big ring for myself by accident which hurt my soul. I've never really been very good at finding the big rings in S&K, am I able to go back after the credits to clean up or nah?
Before he comes down, spindash in place right in front of him to get 3-4 hits in. He makes 2 noises before he curls into a ball. Then he's be on the left and he's gonna do his dash that's where he's basically fair game to hit as he goes back and forth. Once he's back on the left he's gonna spindash again after 2 noises but this time he's gonna jump, Stand on the right and be ready for his jump to that side and by then you should have hit him all 8 times. I was the same way but I just tried to learn it, he does the same thing every single time.
I'm also leaning toward that the replacement tracks were taken from an earlier prototype rather than remade from scratch. Whether or not the audio is played from a prototype or just off of an actual console using a ROM-RAM board for debugging the songs is another possibility, but either way I think the songs themselves are based off of older data that predates our prototype. The songs all exhibit the ladder effect found from the first Mega Drives. There's audio feedback thats audible in silent portions of the tracks hinting that these were recorded from an analog source (listen close to the beginning of ICZ1 and you'll hear feedback in the track). If recorded from a PC8801/PC9801, it wouldn't contain the ladder effect and the PCM samples would be higher quality (compare Yuzo Koshiro's recordings of the Revenge of Shinobi soundtracks off a PC8801 vs an original Mega Drive and you'll hear the subtle differences). Even rendering the songs and using a fake ladder effect would be different. The quality of the recordings are consistent with the rest of the other recordings for the most part suggesting they were all recorded similarly. The songs themselves suggest that most of them are based on the initial conversions from the SMF/MIDI data, which would explain why CNZ1/2 sound similar to the MIDI tracks but also lack ANY channel balancing or panning. Songs like LBZ1 use instruments from the universal voice bank, which all the unoptimized songs in the prototype include in the song data themselves (this data would've been removed during the optimization phase, after the song sounds good, ie HCZ2 in the prototype). It's possible that songs like ICZ/Credits/Unused were just more finished at the time of this particular prototype. @Mastered Realm had a theory that the data for LBZ1 was converted from MIDI twice, with the second attempt containing the notes that play in the PSG channels but messing with the note sustains. The incorrect loop point in Origin's LBZ1 is part of the recording and not improperly set in the file. The bad loop point in LBZ2 which exists in our proto I believe still exists in the Origins version, but the loop point was manually fixed in the recording. As far as the completeness in our prototype, the songs are in the end phase of getting the "sound" down, with instruments, panning, detune settings, etc are in place where they need to be. So what you hear in our prototype is most likely what the songs were meant to sound like if they were to be used with only slight changes left to be made (with the Credits theme and ICZ2 being the most finished). The reason for this is that most of the songs still contain the UVB baked into the song itself, and the macros aren't optimized. With the unused voices cleaned up, the next thing they would've done is start optimizing the notes to use less data by creating more looped sequences to replace repeated sequences. I think Jun Senoue is partly to blame for the way the sound turned out, as he was the sound director for the entire project. I assume partly the reason is that he must've been the one to insist that each game in the collection use audio recorded from ACTUAL hardware. While he broke his own rule with the Super Sonic theme in Sonic 3, this was most likely the reason why the replacement tracks had to sound the way they do. My theory is that Jun Senoue, given the restriction he or someone else set, had to use real hardware to record the audio but the presumed prototype they had found was the only one they could use. They probably didn't have a later build with the refined songs on cart like we do. And given they most likely don't have EPROM burners or ROM files, or know how third party flash carts work, or whatever, that's probably why we ended up with what we have. That's the reason we're extending an olive branch, because we assume they had to use these recordings because that's what they had to work with within the scope of the project. Offering our help would give them an out and still remain within the scope if they desired.
I don't understand all the technical babble about hardware and stuff. They could've used high quality recordings of the prototypes off YouTube and nobody would've cared. No?
Legally speaking it feels like Sega wanted to stay entirely in-house for their recordings and audio, as well as things like how the new graphics assets in 3&K were made separately of anything 3 Complete did in the same category. The problem when put down to its basics is that whoever recorded the audio on Sega's behalf did an awkward job that seems to have recorded things from real Genesis Model 1 hardware, or recorded recordings of hardware. I mean I've said it multiple times before but it really does sound like Jun or whoever was in charge of Sonic 3's music and sounds just stuck a microphone next to a device that was playing already-imperfect tapes of prototype recordings. That's the kicker in all of this, it feels like someone simply didn't care that much for a crisp Sonic experience, they just.. recorded away and didn't care for the issues. At least 3&K is universally muffled, though. CD is just waaaaay too quiet and muted, jumping volume levels from song to song, inexplicably missing the Sonic and Amy voice clips, messing up the ending by having lost the original sound clearly so they just slapped the ending theme on top the whole way through and sped up the footage to accommodate.. Sega really just doesn't give a damn.
Traditionally, Sega always favored sound recordings off original hardware if they aren't using pure emulation, even for soundtrack releases. To do your own recordings just means you can have them to the standard you see fit. But the reason you'd want to use recordings off original hardware isn't so much quality as to ensure that the sound is accurate to real hardware. It sounds silly nowadays since Mega Drive sound emulation is pretty much 'perfect', and a low pass filter and fake ladder effect could get you better results. But I guess that's not good enough for Jun Senoue/Sega, so they stuck with audio recordings instead. You also have to remember that Sega (of Japan) probably isn't as well versed in the latest advancements in audio emulation or whatever technical information as we do. That's always been the case.
quick interjection, this was totally in the original. I remember seeing this in one of ORKAL's S3&K glitch vids several years back. I do wonder if maybe this was also a legal thing? Voice actors definitely have more rights in Japan than they do here, and I wonder if maybe either they couldn't hunt down where the clips came from or who had voiced them, and decided to take them out for safety.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the removal of the CD voice samples is just another falling domino in the chain of “Classic Sonic is Mute now” decisions
