I thought I wasnt the only one that was put off by the weird Sountrack choices. I just play the decompilation of Sonic CD and leave it be. I thought I was going crazy when the CPZ2 Shortcut didnt have the top loop thing that sent you back if you went to fast on the Retro Engine port. It seems that was changed, but I did not even know they added some extra stuff to CPZ2! I did discover the new Tails route for HTZ1 which was pretty neat when playing story mode and messing around with tails carrying me over.
So remember how in Sonic 1/2 mobile selecting a completed save would bring you to a level select menu? Well turns out said menus still exist, although I can only trigger it in Sonic 1. If you put a capsule at the end of Final Zone via debug, instead of beating the game as normal you're brought back to that level select menu. So they could've found a way to keep them with completed save files like in Sonic 3, they just didn't. Jfc Sega This doesn't work in Sonic 2, as putting a capsule in Death Egg will bring you to Hidden Palace, and a capsule in Hidden Palace brings you to Oil Ocean, you get caught in a loop. Sonic 3 has the most interesting results of all though, putting a capsule in the gravity bonus stage brings you to one of the launch base missions . Putting a capsule in that mission will continue to bring you further down the line. But be warned, the game gets very crash prone in this state, and debug mode itself acts weird if you have Tails following you (its weird moving in debug mode becomes like semi dependent on what Tails does) Also is it just me or is competition mode in S3K unplayable as one player on the Switch? It'll insist a 2nd controller needs to be activated even when you only want to play solo, which is incredibly broken and awful. Oh also in Sonic 3, don't place the F or S balls in the bonus stages. They will immediately crash the game.
The omission of the mobile versions' Sonic 3-esque save feature is one of my biggest criticisms of Origins. To review: In Sonic CD 2011, saving worked similarly to the original game. Once you completed a save, you could only restart from Metallic Madness 3. No functionality is lost in Origins. In Sonic 1 2012 and Sonic 2 2013, you'd get a "COMPLETE" save file upon finishing the game. Selecting this would allow you to start at any zone, and collect any Chaos Emeralds you might have missed. Origins, for some reason, reverts to something even WORSE than the CD 2011 style for all three games. Not only do you lose the ability to level select from a Complete save, you now only get one save per character, and have to erase it to start from the beginning as that character. Sonic 3 & Knuckles in Origins, thankfully, keeps its original save system. In the mobile versions, I made it a point to get a Complete save file for every character. It was worth doing because from then on, you could easily start the game from anywhere with all emeralds. But in Origins, I've only bothered to get the emeralds in Sonic 1 and 2 on my initial playthrough, because why go out of my way to do that if I can't do anything with them once I finish the game? It's made me less incentivized to play those games. Origins has less longevity because of it. So yeah... if I could fix just one thing about Origins, this would probably be it.
I know Origins is full of bugs and glitchs, but I hope the bugs in Sonic 3 will be the prority to fix stuff because this game needs it, like, it's supposed to be the big deal of collection y' know... Tails' IA really needs to be fixed in Sonic 2 tho'.
https://steamdb.info/app/1794960/history/ So according to the users on steam, there's been work on some form of patch behind the scenes recently on Steam's side of things. This could just be the patch that was put out on PS4/5, or it could be something more. No one know what it is or if it will even drop, but there it is. Sadly, there's a real chance that if SEGA never hires Stealth & Co. to fix some of these bugs, they'll never get fixed. I want the S2 Tails bug fixed at minimum, but I don't know what to expect anymore either. You can also see signs that Origins hasn't been doing great lately in terms of user reviewscore and active playerbase, which is honestly a damn shame, but not surprising. This topic has slowed down a lot too, naturally. While many of us have already played it, I'm starting to fear that this could be it for retro style Sonic? Hopefully this isn't all we ever get, but who knows?
"Are we making iffy products? No, its the fans who are sick of him. No more classic sonic for 10 years"
I wouldn't doom about it just yet. Sonic games tend to have enormously long tails, and once Origins gets a price drop, that'll put it within impulse buy distance for a lot of people, kids especially. (A physical release would also help, there. Fingers crossed!) The user score versus review score split is fascinating, because we saw the same phenomenon with Colors Ultimate. That game, like Origins, had a good bit of positive buzz before it was released, even including some fans who got review copies. Also like Origins, it reviewed in the 7-8 range. Then it came out and within a day, it was like its reputation had been driven into the ground. I think this has a lot to do with how much better stirring up negativity does on social media, versus more nuanced or positive viewpoints. The modern internet kind of predisposes people to being angry. Of course, it's also because most reviewers aren't diehard Sonic fans who aren't likely to even notice this stuff. What this tells me is that an idealized Origins, where HeadCannon was hired to remaster all four games, where you could freely toggle between sprite styles, or play all four games in Max Control mode, or even one which featured the full original 16-bit soundtrack for Sonic 3... probably wouldn't have reviewed much better than the Origins we got, because these sorts of things aren't going to be all that notable to the vast majority of reviewers or, for that matter, the vast majority of consumers. However, the modern internet is one where the opinions of the Hardcore Fans are increasingly magnified, and I do think fans raging has probably affected Origins' reputation among casual observers in a way that, for instance, fans raging about Mega Collection (or even Sonic 4, at first) definitely didn't.
Well also for all the bells and whistles at the end of the day, it's classic Sonic, the games we've played for years and years. And you can complete all 4 games in the course of a day. It's not a long set of games and it's all familiar. It's not the kind of game you binge for 2 months then put down forever. It's the kind of game where you get a taste of nostalgia and when you get that itch for classic Sonic every few months or years, well there it is in a convenient package. It's a slow burn title, I wouldn't expect massive activity.
Speak for yourself. And this is in addition to about 20 hours on the Switch version! (But I keed, you're right, these aren't the kinds of games that'll keep most gamers coming back every day.)
I think it's just hard to go backwards after seeing Mania get such a stellar reception, and I don't think the Tails Sonic 2 glitch can be ignored by even more casual players. It's super annoying, most other bugs are frustrating but less likely to be noticed aside from some very unfair deaths in Sonic 3. Again, I'd care less if SEGA didn't de-list everything except mobile versions that are hard to actually play and SEGA AGES versions that are limited to a single platform that almost no one knows about. It's more the "this is classic Sonic from now on" that bugs me, as it may be a very long time before a newer port is made, if ever, if these don't get patched. Again, hopefully they do get patched.
Oh I very much have been playing the crap out of this but I've never been the typical gamer lol (also bless the PC mods that make the sprites more consistent and Mania like. A small detail but one that makes a difference to me). I was referring to most gamers ya.
Agreed, if they fix NOTHING else, they really do need to fix the Tails respawn bug. I keep forgetting about that one since I've always played Sonic Alone, but Sonic & Tails is the default, and it's canonical, and it's your only option in story mode. (Actually, I've only played story mode twice, and I hesitate to do it just because of that.) The other broad issue with Hardcore Fans bleeding into the mainstream and steering the discourse more than they used to is that like... aside from Adventure 1, Colors, Generations, and Mania, every mainline Sonic game (and a lot of the side-games, spinoffs, and compilations) since I got on the internet have had a split-to-negative reception among internet fans, at least initially. Like, imagine if there had been a Twitter when Sonic Adventure 2 came out. I'm kind of bracing myself for this to happen again with Frontiers: It reviews pretty well, only for fans to get their hands on it and rage about every story scene that's not to their liking, every glitch, and every minor inconsistency they can find. Like I said, the collective fandom has usually been pretty damn cynical, and I wonder if we're getting to a point with social media and the internet's ubiquity where that sort of thing will affect sales.
Sadly, post-release support is now crucial to games being good in the long run. Should they be good at launch? Yes. But patches and post-game support has saved several botched launches (even if the reputation never fully recovers). Many infamous games like Mass Effect Andromeda, Cyberpunk 2077, several Assassin's Creed titles, PC Releases of Horizon Zero Dawn, Batman Arkham Origins and Dark Knight, and even older more acclaimed titles like Fallout New Vegas... All of those titles had terrible launches that damaged their sales and reputation, all were eventually fixed and now review much more positively and are more enjoyable. It's not necessarily a great trend, but the truth is post-launch support may be the most important indicator in whether or not a game is worth investing in. That's the other reason why I consider how SEGA handles origins here to be a real test run for buying Frontiers. If SEGA just dumps and abandons Origins and keeps trending towards not patching their games (something they already struggle with, though not universally), Frontiers probably will be a mess not worth buying, sadly. This applies doubly if they decide to never remove Denuvo. This is why I consider this so crucial. How they handle this now may determine what games I buy from SEGA at all going forward. (And just to be clear, I'm not bringing the music into any of this. I don't like how they've handled music in all 4 games at this point, but I don't consider it game-breaking and mods have already fixed it to my satisfaction).
Reviewer aggregate updates (two weeks post-release, and then some): Opencritic - 77 "Strong", 61 reviews, 65% of critics recommend Metacritic: PS5 - 78 "Generally favorable", 38 reviews Switch - 75 "Generally favorable", 17 reviews PC - 73 "Mixed and/or average", 11 reviews Xbox Series X - 74 "Mixed and/or average", 9 reviews PS4 - 72 "Mixed and/or average", 4 reviews - Xbox One (1 review) Will probably do one final review aggregate update a month on from release.
I've stopped my story mode playthrough at Sonic 2 in hopes it's patched. I tried and I can't deal with it. It's just simply too dumb to tolerate.
Did a live-stream of Knuckles in Death Egg & Doomsday zone and Tails in Doomsday (which you can do by activating debug mode (01, 09, 09, 04, 01, 00, 01, 08). No issues getting Knuckles through Death Egg apart from having to use debug mode to be able to reach the mini-boss in act1 (also act1 didn't transition to act2 so I had to go to level select to start act2 - although the transition worked fine when I played through Death Egg again). I like that Team Stealth went to the trouble of animating Egg-Robo for the Death Egg boss chase-scenes. Also, Tails flicky army of death does attack the second phase boss in Doomsday (but not the first phase).
I also began Sonic 2 this weekend, and immediately experienced the Tails issue. Honestly, I was livid. That is completely unacceptable! It's an insult to the music composers, and its the default option if you're playing through the full story. You literally cannot hear anything except Tails jumping around and there is little other option but to turn down the volume. My dog, "Tails", must have been very confused why I kept cursing her out...
This is by no means ideal, but there is something you can do for now: Activating Tails' flight manually will let him respawn. So if you hold up and hit jump (say, while you're in mid-air anyway) and can get Tails to fly, he'll come back to you. I mean, he'll probably almost immediately scroll off-screen and get stuck again. But y'know. It gives you some relief.
Perhaps because the spring you placed was in the way and messed with the automated transition process?
