The S&K Collection came bundled with the Sonic Screensaver, at least in certain areas of the world, yes. The Screensaver included a bunch of low-quality WAV recordings of the OSTs of the Mega Drive / Genesis Sonic games. Consistently enough, the incriminated tracks from Sonic 3 were conveniently missing. Perhaps I should document the WAV files on the wiki, since it only lists the pictures as of now.
I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere, but surely they aren't forgetting about including Time Attack in each of the games? I guess it might be an option inside of the Anniversary Mode for each game other than CD (which should have it in both formats).
Ooh that reminds me, my Aunt bought me S&K Collection from K-Mart in 2000, and it basically sat around unplayed until 2006 when I got a proper computer. One day I decided to dig around in the game's files and there it was, an assembly of bizarre and outstanding music that I'd never heard before. By this point I'd played Sonic CD on GameCube with the U.S. soundtrack and had no proper internet so I soon figured out it was the original soundtrack. I burned the entire folder onto a CD and took it everywhere with me and listened to it a lot, and I do mean a lot. Not only that, I also found all those beautiful wallpapers that were also included in Sonic Jam, and I often listened to the soundtrack whilst looking at them. The combination of the low-quality WAV files with low-res BMP images made for quite the surreal otherworldly experience. I still have my copy to this day...
Please do, this was 'also' my first true experience with Sonic 3, and it was a really great one. In fact, due to the still limited availability of game consoles as a whole (not everyone could convince their parents to splurge 350$ish bucks to play the games in 1994/95), I suspect a lot more people played the games on the PC port first than is widely known. Hell, next June it'll be 25 years since I owned that collection, and it's the first Sonic game I owned. Also, my copy had the Screensaver too, the infamous "Robotnik Traps" bit from the manual, and those wavs were my first discovery of Sonic CD's soundtrack. I kept imagining all these songs as boss themes, but they ended up being bad future (Wacky Workbench) or past themes (Metallic Madness) instead. (The digital manual had the first official translation of the JPN storyline, though. Which was much better than what the USA manual got, and helped make Sonic Adventure far more interesting when I played it 2 years later.)
I hope to see some more restored Sonic 2 levels. I'll chime in and say that the "coins" replacement for lives looks absolutely atrocious. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I've concluded that it looks so off because it uses colors not common to the classic games. Literally anything else would have looked better. I'd had also used "emblems" or "tokens" instead to avoid clashing with Mario. better examples.
Coins is an anagram of Sonic though, so no need for new font graphics But seriously not even red star rings?
What are the chances that the trailer footage that we saw in the Origins trailer is actually final?? Not to be very nit picky but I do agree that the coin counter seems a tad bit off (along with the Sonic 3 HUD being much wider on the top left).. perhaps this was just for the trailer and these will actually be fixed? (not expecting it to happen though but I’d like to be wrong)
Would've looked cleaner/nicer to simply remove the lives part of the HUD entirely instead of adding the coins bit. Also why even have coins to begin with? Rings themselves have been established as currency for awhile now. Could've made it to where your score is converted into banked rings at the end of levels (gives score a purpose) and checkpoint/special stage rings collected go into the bank too. Maybe even bank rings over X amount at checkpoints? Dunno, just seems like there were better ways to do currency for unlockables instead of coins.
I'm happy and a bit surprised Choatix soundtrack is being included in Origins. Would prefer to have the game included as well and not just the music... Nice that they've also added Spinball & 3D Blast OST's, but the main appeal for me is finally getting a new release of Chaotix full soundtrack. It says 73 songs on the Jp site which I think covers all tracks from these games. IIRC Chaotix soundtrack hasn't had a new release since the game came out in 1995 (and that obscure 2000 release)? So I wonder why SEGA have decided to rerelease the music now? Has there been any legal issues with Chaotix music preventing a new release (I know Door Into Summer was remixed in Gens)? There's obviously no issues with Spinball & 3D Blast's OST since those games have been rereleased many times.
I imagine it's to make things less frustrating. It may not happen to use lot, but you can lose all your rings at any time, and it'd be pretty crushing for the museum currency to be so fragile. the implementation we've seen so far may be a tad rough around the edges, but I do think this is the best approach to unlockable content like this.
That's why I mentioned converting your score into rings at the end of a level, any leftover rings in your possesion would just be an added bonus. I gotta disagree about this being the best approach, something tied exclusively to a bonus/extra menu shouldn't be so prominently displayed during normal gameplay. But this is just my nitpicky opinion, I'll still be picking this up on switch.
True - but remember the max length for names displayed next to the life icon is generally 5 letters, presumably the reason they shortened Knuckles to just K.T.E, so TOKENS would be a little too long for that format. Counting both the Tails/Miles variations, I think the total list of letters available in the Mega Drive titles with no wholly new art required would be: A, C, E, I, K, L, M, N, O, S, T - meaning CAKES, KNOTS, CROCS and MITES were all fair game as potential collectibles. We should probably be thankful we ended up with something as innocuous as COINS, haha! ; ) Personally I'd have avoided the issue entirely by reformatting the coin icon display to match the Sonic CD style of life icon, with large numbers and no text - that way the Red Star Rings already established in later games could easily have been used. That would have meant drawing two separate currency graphics - one for the counter and one for monitors - but that's not exactly a huge amount of extra effort required. They clearly weren't above a bit of work to integrate them anyway, as the counter in Sonic CD has been reformatted to match the format of the other games in Anniversary mode, complete with the unique small numbers not normally seen in that game. Maybe they decided it was just less work to modify the counter in one game rather than across three?
You are giving me flashbacks of Sonic Advance where I would play Neo Green Hill Zone Act 1 and get 400+ rings in it so I could buy shit for my chao.
The Coins system already existed in Colours Ultimate as Park Tokens, and also existed alongside Red Rings within that same game. Merging the Tails Saves (partial lives replacement resource) and Park Tokens (currency resource) into the all-in-one Coins (lives replacement + special stage retries resource + currency resource) makes enough sense. I don't think Red Rings feel right to be amalgamated into Coins, since they're meant to be unique collectables/checklist keys for accessing things and not consumable gameplay resources. For those who think it should be tied to score somehow... it technically is? Can't remember if all of the games follow 50K points = 1UP, but if implementation is as simple as Ctrl+F lives for coins, that would stay intact. I think the name is hilarious, since the "I'm gonna call Rings coins like in every other video game" people are gonna get auto-replied with "Rings and Coins are separate things you absolute buffoon" by like 5 kids at once. Look forward to seeing this prophecy unfold in a reply chain/forum/chat somewhere near you~!
