Honestly I had far more trouble with Special Stage 5 in Sonic 2 than 7, the Sonic & Tails ring requirement is just stupid. But ya my plan is a Knuckles playthrough of S3K 1st followed by story mode
i honestly can't even decide which special stages are the hardest, but Blue Sphere is definitely a lot less challenging when you've played 304,786 different variations of it, so definitely not that one
Now imagine that somewhere in an alternate universe, we didn't find that prototype, and sega had to hire Masato Nakamura to write a new S3 ost for origins
Would massively prefer that, or something new from Tee Lopes. There's a reason these proto tracks were shitcanned in the first place - they weren't that good.
I think besides that FUCKING HALFPIPE I'm pretty confident in my special stage ability for these games. I learned recently that playing with Tails raises the ring count? Such bullshit, who wants to play Sonic 2 without Tails? But then, who wants to put up with those halfpipes?
I've always struggled with the S2 Special Stages, even when playing as Sonic alone. The ring requirements are just too high for me. But I can manage as Knuckles, because they were made easier and more forgiving by letting you keep the rings you used to access the Special Stage in the first place. But even if they're hard, I genuinely really enjoy the special stages in all of the Classic games. Blue Sphere is the best (even though Mania got me fairly sick of it), closely followed by CD and the half-pipe in a tie and then Rotating Maze is my least favourite. Mania's UFO Chase still manages to trump them all. And the only truly bad Special Stages aren't in Origins. Lemme know when Sonic Dimps Origins is coming out and then I'll start bitching about all the bad ones. In terms of collecting the Emeralds... In 3K I'll always have all of the Chaos Emeralds by Hydrocity and Super Emeralds in Mushroom Hill. The Special Stages are a bitt too abundant and reigning yourself in so as to not make the entire game a cakewalk actually makes the game more fun. S1 and CD are more limited in how many chances you get, but I don't normally fail more than once or twice. And with S2, I can sometimes make it all the way to Wing Fortress without them, but have also grinded them all out in Emerald Hill. Same. 3K Knuckles playthrough is peak Classic Sonic for me, so my first playthrough will be of it in mirror mode. That should be a sufficiently fun was to breath a bit of new life into the game. I'm also really eager to hear the new soundtrack firsthand without getting spoiled by the internet. And then I'll go the whole hedgehog with Story Mode.
Any info on whether S&K Knuckles’ game will be standalone? That’s technically the canon version, where the hyper emeralds are off limits and the game is shorter with the cutscene in Mushroom Hill as the starting point.
Speaking of special stages, to beat them I constantly pause, especially in Sonic 2 (I use only Sonic). I have no difficulty with Sonic CD, also because there are UFOs that give you more time. I don't think, otherwise we would have had five games instead of four.
The latest trailer shows Knuckles' Mushroom Hill cutscene, so somehow that's still in the game. S3K is being treated as the canon, true experience in Origins. It's one big game. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to use cheat codes or unlockables to play either half of the game separately, but as yet there's no word on it. S3K is the main event.
S1 special stages are the hardest because of the lack of control and having only 10 possible attempts to get all 6 emeralds sucks. S2 & 3K are straightforward enough once you've memorized most of the layouts. CD's are the best because of the freedom to improvise and because of the UFO (which appears in the middle of the stage with only 20 seconds remaining) which extends the remaining time once collected makes these special stages far more forgiving. Normally I try to collect all emeralds in S1 by the end of Spring Yard as I really don't enjoy having to collect 50 rings in Labyrinth zone. I hate going Super Sonic in the original S2 because he controls like ass (so glad they've mapped the super transformation to a different button in Origins). So I normally don't collect the emeralds until Metropolis zone (I know this zone inside out so getting the emeralds is easy, lol). For 3K (same as Blue Blood), all emeralds collected by the end of Hydrocity act2, all super emeralds by end of Mushroom Hill and a "perfect" in every special stage for good measure. The special stages in S2 & CD remasters are definitely slightly easier to beat compared to the original versions, whilst the the ones in the S1 remaster are harder to beat than in the original game (as I said in my previous post).
Okay so general consensus seems to be that CD's special stages AREN'T the hardest in the Classic games and Sonic 1 and 2's are probably the ones most people are going to struggle with. Interesting.
I think that the difficulty with the SCD ones comes lately from the difficult perspective, because most of us weren't aware of the trick with the coloured bars on the UFOs that a few people have pointed out here (plus this isn't a feature in the remastered version). And then in addition to that, punishments are really harsh. Just a few brief seconds on the water will slash your timer down to zero. One failed jump with the dodgy perspective/scaling and you're out. The only problem that I've personally ever had with S1's is the blind paths. Sometimes you just can't tell which path leads to an exit panel until its too late. Thats not really difficult as much as it is just trial and error.
Yeah, I'd argue that, from most difficult to least, it's SCD, S1, S2, S3&K. Maybe this'll change when I revisit them all but I find that Blue Spheres is generally a pretty chill experience that guides you through the patterns at least up until the Super Emerald stages.
After watching another video that showed off every game mode and seeing how everything is going to be presented in this, I'm definitely going to buy 2 physical copies of this for PS4. One to play and one to keep sealed in my collection alongside my other favorite games I've got extra sealed copies of. Just a few more days now... can't wait!
I still don't know what they're referring to with the colored bars. You just have to avoid the water and hit the UFO's, there's no attempts to trick you, just learn when to jump to hit them and you can clear them easily. And even if you do hit the water a UFO to regain your time in special stage pops up if you go under 20 seconds so it's easy to recover instead of just being doomed like in S2 or 3 if you mess up. I remember beating all of CD in a little under an hour at school to show off to people and I was able to beat all the special stages with one attempt each. This is after not touching the game since I beat the 2011 remaster with both Sonic and Tails. They're just not hard to me.
Oh dear God, how did I overlook that? Guess I didn't notice due to a lack of them being more explicit about that as they should have been... ugh damnit it all to hell... I just checked and yeah, all digital, for now apparently... fuck me.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/sonic-origins-release-date-june-2022-digital-deluxe-preorder/ I guess you just missed this but it was in the first announcement about the games release date. Maybe they'll do a physical later on though.
What's not to get? In the original Mega CD version of the game, the sprites for the UFOs changed depending of their distance from the camera in order to simulate depth. They had various different sprites for far away (small and undetailed) and close up (large and fully detailed). Look at the following image of the original version of SCD: You can see the yellow bars on the close UFO and the black bars on the distant UFO, right? All UFOs that are out of reach will have black bars. As you approach them, their sprites are swapped out for larger ones. The larger sprites have room for detail and therefore have coloured bars instead of black ones (yellow, red or silver depending on the UFO). As soon as the bars become coloured, the UFOs are within jumping distance. This gives you a surefire way of knowing whether or not your jump will connect, which is very useful in pseudo-3D environments. In the remastered version of CD, the sprites for the UFOs don't change. Instead, the full-sized sprites with the coloured bars are used all of the time. They are scaled natively by the engine to provide an even better simulation of depth. However, this technical improvement has the side-effect removing the differentiation between UFOs that you can and cannot reach. This is a screenshot of the remastered version from 2011 that will also be in Origins: See? You can make it the coloured bars on both UFOs in this picture, even though they're very far away. If if was the CD version, the yellow bars would still be black.
