Sonic 2 HD

Tyvm Falk.

BTW - Time Over doesn't reset the clock.

 

The only complaint I've heard against the palette with a rational basis is contrast, and here you've halved the distance between Sonic and the background's brightness and hue. The colors are fine, guys. This is the sort of sodomy that doomed the project to begin with!

 

Sonic is too pale, and the effects make it look like sun-set instead of high-noon.

 

I honestly think just fine-tuning the contrast on the current Sonic would be enough for me, though it might cause some problems with consistency (this is an extreme example). The Sonic 2 palette may be easier to see, but it's substantially uglier and off-model. Gameplay before graphics, but find new solutions rather than fall back on the old ones. I'd also rather the title screen, despite how lovely it is, be changed to the final mostly because I can't get past how awkward it looks for Sonic to tilt his wrist back and forth while holding that peace sign.

I don't really want to complain about the art direction too much as I'm actually pretty content with it. Sonic and Tails' sprites in particular; Tails because he animates really well, Sonic because I think the Sonic 2 sprite looked like ass anyway (the only wonky animation that stuck on me is the looking up frame, since it's still just his head rotating to an absurd angle). Compared to what directions people were originally pushing it in (Even more of a 1:1 match to the point where it retained blatant flaws in the art, changing intermittent parts of the level so that the style wasn't cohesive, or shoving realistic textures into a stylized environment where they classed horribly) this is a sort of nice breaking-even.

 

Ok this always had me wondering when I was a kid, and now it's just ticking me off.

The magic tunnels in EHZ. Sometimes I get in them, sometimes I try for a good 30 minutes. I'm referring to the hidden tunnels where you jump in from the left, with a vertical spring near their entrance that must be avoided.
Is it just random or what?

 

Well at least we know where LOst used shaders! Look at the objects in the lava/behind it, it has some distortion shader :O!

Meh~~

 

Accessed Hill Top Zone. It's very incomplete and I'm guessing the fire is just a placeholder. I do like the heatwave effect, though, very nice. There is no boss at the end of act 2 BUT you can spawn the sprite with debug mode:

 

I believe they activate depending on the plane you're currently coming from, as in the two planes loops need to work.

Try getting to the other end of the tunnel, then going back to the entry.

 

The backgrounds better be the most gorgeous things ever, because this just looks like a pallatte-swap of EHZ.

Suggestion for the fire: Make it into lava. Lava that is on fire.

 

...have you by any chance ever played Sonic 2?

 

I don't think "wildly" is the point. Personally I'd have expected some liberties to have been taken to differentiate the two levels a bit more while still leaving the connection obvious. This would go in hand with the greater level of detail thing, such as how extra plantlife was sprinkled around, or details in texturing of the ground tiles, or something like that. Obviously changing the graphics completely would be uncalled-for since this is based on an existing design, but if you wanted to be as anal about it as not further differentiating the two at all just because the original game saved on space by using the same tileset data, you probably shouldn't be doing anything to "HD-ify" it at all, because this looks different than the original game, too. Nothing more "faithful" than the real thing

 

It wasn't THAT similar, was it? It's been a while since I last played it.

 

The original game loads art data for HTZ from the exact same location that it loads art data for EHZ, and then overlays it with a small bit of patch data for the trees and S tunnels

 

I must say I'm surprised with this game it looks and plays better than I though it would after all this drama, my system is old and was able to run it pretty well with only a few frames skipping and somewhat long (~1 min) loading of the second act after the score score finished computing.

I'm digging the style and it felt great to replay my first Mega Drive game with HD graphics I sincerely hope that all the party involved in this don't let all the undeserved criticism lower your morale, keep up the great work.

I'm not obsessed with physics like most of the people here but I felt them a bit slippery but I guess its my system acting up.

-------- Here is my system spec ----

XP SP3
Processor Core 2 Duo E6750
RAM 2 GB DDR2
Video Intel Integrated Graphics G33/31 Chipset <-- Yep, I wasn't even going to try playing but in the end it surprised me, there's no "OMG Crysis requiriment" going on.



Edit: But the DRM is bullshit and unecessary it could even make SEGA try to shutdown this even though they don't usually do that.

 

One thing that is impressive...

Spoiler

With debug mode I put over 200 sprites on screen. I don't think the client even noticed. Not a single flicker.

 

At this point, I'd like to point out to some people that "old" is a relative term, and that fact is becoming more and more important as time goes by. A matter of a fixed number of years from the ever-moving "present" doesn't really change the fact that this is still 2D and based on a game that was built for a 7mhz single-core system. As ambitious as it is or should be, it still doesn't make real sense for making it a reality to actually require anything nearly as powerful as it's claimed to