yep. to add to this, it uses the ROM header to generate the level in question. fun little tidbit: because their headers are exactly the same as Sonic 1's, some of the Sonic 2 prototypes will unlock the full Blue Spheres game if "locked in" via an emulator!
In Sonic 3D Blast/Flickies' Island's The Final Fight, after Sonic manages to land a hit on Dr Eggman's Final Weapon, the road to the next section will open up. If, for some reason, you do not move onto the next section quick enough, the entire floor will become electrical charged and is an instant death on contact. Rings also do not prevent the instant death. Sonic has 6 rings on him here, and is still instantly killed. I've shared this behaviour before, many years ago, but I still find it fascinating. It's one of the few times in a Sonic game that I've seen the player actively punished for not following the game's intended progression.
On a related note, if you don't hit Eggman during the final chase section of Sonic 3's Death Egg Act 2, the game will just crash: Hope you weren't playing on NO SAVE...
I knew about the one from the final fight (ValleyBell told me in 2013), but what DigitalDuck said is completely new to me, is that documented anywhere? We should probably add that to the wiki if it's not there yet.
I mean I have those videos from six years ago with more than 300 bugs, many of which are still undocumented. A lot of them are covered by ORKAL's videos (and ORKAL also has many that aren't here) but those are basically all the bugs I know about that I could fit in a single playthrough. Let's pick another random one: because the "can I collect rings" timer doesn't start until you hit the ground after being hurt (and it applies to Tails too), you can be left in a situation where it's impossible to pick up dropped rings because the rings disappear before you land, and it looks weird because Tails would normally be able to collect them shortly after they drop. (9:10)
For all things Sonic related: if it's not on the Sonic Retro wiki, put it there. It'll be lost in YouTube videos and forum posts. Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Bugs Sonic & Knuckles/Bugs Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles/Bugs The magic wiki fairy won't do it for you. Although if she's bored she might verify it and provide screenshots.
The only thing I can think of is there's a timer that runs out. Some sort of int related to the floor, maybe. Does it still crash if you just hold out for long enough with doing a couple of hits in the process? I can easily believe this wasn't fully tested to find this simply because this part of the boss is NOT difficult and they'd have been getting close to the end of dev.
Just as a quick test I played that boss in Kega Fusion, held the right button down, then turned on fast forward. You should be safe when doing this - Sonic and Tails will collide with the right edge and stop, but always recover before the pit. However after a few minutes an unknown force teleports them to the left hand side of the screen, and then they fall and die. I don't know whether it's the same bug, but my guess would be the game's literally run out of road. As in, maybe there's a horizontal looping routine that goes wrong. Here's a free save state for you:
Not really, because S3K actually uses very little code from the S3 ROM (only some level scrolling routines iirc), most of what it reads is just compressed data files, which it will crash trying to read if they aren't in the correct format. Knuckles in Sonic 2 doesn't use any code from the Sonic 2 ROM either (unless you count the sound driver), all of the code for that game is located in an extra chip on the S&K cart. I mean, if you're going specifically for emulators, and not carts, then you could swap out the extra chip for an arbitrary program and have S&K run that, but that seems overly complicated. The bottom line is that S&K had to be specifically coded for each game that they wanted to lock-on with it, outside of the automatically generated Blue Sphere levels.
I am fascinated by early CG renders: https://info.sonicretro.org/File:SonicOrigins_museum_pic_l_art_33_1.png Curtosy of Sonic Origins, the PAL render of Sonic's face from Sonic 3D Blast, stupid size. It's not exactly "on model" but once you realise it was from a independent studio that made a living in the mid-90s making weird psychedelic music covers, you can start to forgive their shortcomings. It's from 1995/1996 and we weren't really that bothered at the time (I actually prefer the striking look of the PAL Sonic 3D box art - it's "Sonic", and it's "3D"). This image was never designed to be viewed at resolutions as high as this, and it doesn't take much to see why - polygon counts are low, the geometry isn't symmetrical, and lighting calculations go a bit awry at the edges. But my favourite bit is the gold ring surrounding Sonic's head - it doesn't look as if the team were able to make that kind of geometry in one go, so they've stuck a load of cylinders together and manually tried to make it look round... and it doesn't meet properly in the middle. Sonic's head also isn't casting a shadow (probably because it would hide too much of the red background - it's some weird object underneath. With modern 3D model packages, you would have to go out of your way to make it looks this inaccurate, but again, this was seen as amazing, cutting edge stuff 25 years ago.
Somehow, the thing that bugs me the most about that render is the fact his pupils protrude out of his eyes and have their own shadows...
I read somewhere once that it's just a clay model touched up to look like a render, is there any truth to that?
Yep, a photo got unraveled of said clay model used for the cg render. https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_3D:_Flickies'_Island/Development#PAL_cover_art Still seems a bit creepy ^^"
my least favorite thing about it is actually the damn ears, for 3D technical reasons (no edge loops to connect them to the head etc - that's why they have no real continuity with the rest of the model, it looks like they're just clipping through it)
IIRC, Naka told "Good luck" to Chris Senn on meeting, when they showed SoJ a X-Treme build (I hope I am not mixing things, it's been a while since I've read on X-Treme). So, either one of them could be misrembering.
I would find it odd for Chris to make up a story about meeting Naka when those interviews with him were made either when the Dreamcast was relevant or shortly thereafter. This really isn't a case of asking Sonic Team members questions about Sonic 1 thirty years later, for example.
I'm pretty sure that Naka met Chris when STI was developing Sonic Mars. It's possible that he was unaware it evolved into X-treme until after its cancellation.
