Sonic 1 and 2 getting the Sonic CD treatment by Taxman and Stealth

Well, yeah. The whole level there is supposed to be ring-free. But other bosses aren't.

 

I assume this port of Sonic 2 will have save data, so I don't think rings in Death Egg Zone would be necessary this time.

 

He could be a dick and put a special exception that if you game over on DEZ, your save is wiped.

Good lord, that'd be hilarious.

 

This reminds me, Wing Fortress has a room that you can enter as Super Sonic, but is impossible to get out of once you run out of rings and transform back into Sonic (also, no way to die besides a Time Over).

 

I'm two pages late to this, but

what

 

Typo. It was act 2.



It's the section with a Sonic curled into a ball with the number '1' inside it.

 

I don't mean to bring up the Mystic Cave Pit argument back (as I'm just wondering if I'm right or not) but aren't the spikes there because that's the bottom edge of an act map and that the game gets glitchy when Sonic's position surpasses any of the map edges?

Nobody (even Tech users) are bringing that up but I could have sworn I read that before.

 

the bottom edge of the map acts like a death pit, and it's like this on every map except one of the metropolis zones where it endlessly scrolls instead.

 

Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. You can't die at the bottom of the map (assuming the camera isn't enforcing a lower boundary like in the boss battles) because they were aware this was a limitation of the engine. If the top of the foreground plane has solid tiles, then that's not going to happen, because it treats the bottom of the screen as solid and doesn't kill Sonic. Tried this one time messing about with the Chemical Plant layout, and it's true.


...

A short look on Zone 0 shows that for most of Mystic Cave, that's the case. In fact, one of the few parts where the top of the screen has been "hollowed out" is at that specific death pit. So I did some professional analysis:

That's what would otherwise be vanilla Sonic 2 outside of a single change -- removing the spikes in the pit. Note that it's sufficiently fatal like that.

So, you might be thinking, if Sonic is able to die without them, then the spikes were meant to be there. And I'm still not sure. They hollowed out the level in a place that, if it weren't, all but one the solid tiles that take up the top of the map would be in a single contiguous chunk. Probably not a huge stretch to assume they were at one time. If so, they changed it -- and if that's the case it was almost certainly to deal with that pit, because otherwise they'd have no reason to. 'Course if they didn't realize at first that solid tiles at the top of the map messed up the map-bottom-death routine then they might have had to cover it up with spikes in the meantime and only later figured out the problem.

So while I admit there's still some guesswork involved, also stands to reason that despite knowing how to fix the pit, they forgot to move the spikes back out; dead Sonic is dead Sonic, whether by spike or pit. Hardly the most glaring oversight in Sonic 2 -- I mean, somehow they let the even more damned game-breaking end-of-act Super Sonic bug slip by them, so they CLEARLY did not test Super Sonic properly.

Of course, even if they're supposed to be there, I don't know how any of you can can look at that and defend it as a good piece of level design with a straight face, intentionality notwithstanding.

 

If this is the case this might be a good time to suggest fine tuning it from the previous two ports and making it so the save files aren't stuck on the last level when the game is finished.

 

Yes, my god, that save file thing bugs the crap out of me. Plus it is kind of an issue in Sonic CD, as having all 7 time stones allows for easy good futures which are fun to run through sometimes. So help me god though if they ever remake Sonic 3 and remove the save system it had However as far as Sonic 2 emeralds go I can't remember the last time I didn't get all 7 emeralds in Emerald Hill.

Speaking of CD, why on earth did he recreate that awful level select screen from the cheat code?

 

You actually can play through Sonic CD again with all good futures. Just select a save data that has all of the Times Stones collected, exit back to the main menu, go to the level select screen and select the first level. Now you don't have to worry about time travel and all that jazz.

 

Bearing in mind that I am one of the people who was begging for people to shut the fuck up about 'fixing' the pit, I can actually agree with suggestions people are making towards more flexible save files. The above-mentioned method is an extremely round-about way of solving the issue.

 

It totally is, but more people need to know about it. I would prefer it though if any future versions of the Genesis Sonic games had a Sonic 3-style data select screen. You select your character, beat the game, then use that same data slot to select any level you want with the Chaos Emeralds/Time Stones you collected. I really liked that interface.

 

Oh I knew about this, but like the above comment it's quite roundabout.

 

Its from the SEGA Press Vault, Hogfather at SSMB found it.

So I guess that means we don't get a 2P mode huh?

 

Taxman, Stealth, please tell us this a typo. You can't take away Sonic 2's 2P VS mode. It's a big thing to omit.

 

I can't see any legitimate way to include it in a release for portable systems that can fit in your palm.

Even tablets is a bit of a stretch.