Last night I played 3D Sonic 1 and I noticed that the levels with extra background layers (and parallax scrolling) look amazing in 3D (for instance Green Hill Zone in the Japanese version). When you switch the game to the international version the background in Green Hill Zone is just one layer and does still look good in 3D just not as amazing as with extra layers and parallax scrolling. Since Sonic 2 doesn't have backgrounds with extra layers (and parallax scrolling) in every level the 3D might not look as good. When you say Emerald Hill Zone looks great in 3D I think it's because of the extra background layers. Chemical Plant Zone has just one background layer and therefore probably doesn't look as good in 3D. Just try 3D Sonic 1 and switch between the Japanese and international version and you see what I mean. I prefer the Japanese version myself and have it as default setting, but last night I switched to the international version just for fun and noticed how different it looked in 3D.
Chemical Plant is a real disappointment and the SEGA logo sounds terrible. The Special Stages and Emerald hill were really surprising though!
I noticed in the dev interview on the SEGA blog that they acknowledge the mobile version of it. Wonder what they think of it beyond it not being hardware accurate, or if they even know the details of what it involves. Hmm. Here's a nice touch about this version I noticed anyway. Aside from that weird bulbous super blurry filter in the options, you can activate a different, subtle blur filter by dialing in the 3D slider just so. That way the dithering and transparency effects work like they're supposed to on a CRT display, and it looks great with the depth the 3D adds. There's not much else to this release, but at least there's that one thing.
BG in one plane, level on another and that's it. The zone appears flat. In EHz they pulled out invidual blocks. Strangely, HTz is a lot less 3D than Emerald Hill.
So basically, EHZ is the only level they put any effort in, but others that could use it well potentially don't. I mean, I wasn't expecting much for most of the levels, but Casino Night would have benefited from it. Disclosure: I don't own this and somewhat don't want to own it since blah blah S2 mobile is better. You know my obvious skew by now.
The Sega logo sounds like my new 3DS got a cold /> I hope M2 will fix this with an update. I like the 3D in this game. Sure, EHZ looks better in 3D than CPZ, but I think it still looks great. CNZ has a nice 3D effect when you look at the stars in the sky. It really adds some depth to the level. In HTZ you can see the grass is in 3D too when you are in the blue checkered area. The grass in the foreground is separate from the little pieces of grass in the background. You can see this when you use the 3D slider to turn 3D on or off. The 3D effect in Sonic 2 is just a little more subtle than in Sonic 1. In MZ you can see there are 3 layers, foreground, middle layer (for instance fences) and background. When you look at it quickly it looks like it has 2 layers, foreground and background, but when you look closely, you can see there are 3 layers.
Though the 3D effect isn't as great as some of M2's other 3D ports, holy shit is the effect done right for Special Stages at least.
M2 seems more interested in trying to bury the mobile versions of the games than fixing problems. :v: Must be hard to be the inferior group.
It is a shame they went for such a direct reconstruction of the game, since from the interviews they gave, it sounded like it was a lot more work to translate the special stage to 3D than they expected -- or they would have had to have put in if they were doing a proper 3D render and not just applying depth to what is effectively a bitmapped image.
