That looks... plausibly real. It's not like any fan sprite I've seen so far. If this is accurate, the weird thing is that we'll have GG Spinball, Blast, and Mean Bean archived in the collection while the Genesis (And Saturn for 3D Blast) versions remain unaccounted for. Even stranger when you see all the extras for Spinball, 3D and Chaotix in the music and museum collections... yet they won't include them in the main game? Oh well. Official playable Amy and Knuckles CD are better than ROMS I can already emulate, I suppose.
I also see no reason for spoiler tags for an image... but the fact that it was embedded in the article's data points to it being legit.
Why is the art book a physical exclusive? Frontiers had a digital art book. Not including a digital artbook is a slap in the face to those loyal fans who purchased the digital original. (Mania did the same thing, but I hope with Frontiers having a digital art book, Sega had improved). The survey mentioned enhanced 2P modes, so I hope that still makes it in. Disappointed that there’s no Sonic R.
Since it looks like Headcannon was able to touch the code of all four games again I really really hope Headcannon was able to intervene on the music issues too because this could be a huge turnaround and change this into my favourite Sonic game.
I mean on the one hand I'm surprised that neither Sonic Spinball nor 3D Blast appear to be included but I would be hard-pressed to believe their inclusion would be anything other than a wrapped version of the emulators already used for the Sega Genesis Collection, which is available on every relevant system anyway. At least the GG games are a novel inclusion for every platform other than PC (and even then, you'd only have them if, like me, you have a copy of the old 2004 port of SADX, which was not an optimal experience).
If Amy is indeed being added then it must be Headcanon. I can't imagine SEGA adding character like this. Which means hopefully Headcanon had the chance to fix the bugs.
So I wonder, what about an Origins decompile? That would be ideal to me, to fix things up to my own preferences. Indeed. We're not getting the Buxer/MJ tracks back, but polished up versions of the 1103 proto tracks or perhaps even BouncyGlowRoom's reinterpretations would be great to have. Also, having grown up with the PC version back in the day I'm biased in favor of the SEGA Sound Team tracks anyhow. :P This is assuming SEGA will budge at all and aren't mandating those godawful Origins versions of the proto tracks.
If Amy is being added then great and if Stealth and his team is involved then all the better. That said, getting Amy playable in all four games and Knux in CD sounds like a lot of work. 3K also needs some polish and there's still the matter of all possible playable character combinations not being consistent across all games; by which I mean Sonic (& Tails AI) needs to be added to S1 & CD and Knuckles (& Tails AI) needs to be added to S1, CD and 3K. So if Headcannon is involved with "Plus" they've got a lot of work to do. That's assuming of course that article from ComicBook.com isn't complete BS.
At this point, there's no reason. Every game in the collection except 3 has an identical decompiled version already out there. The only thing you'd get out of that would maybe be some bits of Hedgehog Engine 2. For an eventual Sonic 3 remake release on some TV stick or something... Also no reason, at least no good one: any "fixes" that Sonic 3 remake has can be applied to some other version. It'd also segment ROM hacks and the already messy Sonic 3 AIR stuff into an even further 3 separate messy communities. It's just not worth the time it'd take.
That's a 16:9 screenshot. The camera is too zoomed out to be 4:3, ruling out a ROM hack. It is most likely the Retro Engine version of the game. Whether or not this is a real screenshot is up for debate, but it is plausible.
If the major additions are Amy in Sonic 1/CD/2/3 & Knuckles and Knuckles in CD, the make-or-break for me will be whether Headcannon have been involved - SEGA's own attempts at making changes or additions in vanilla Origins were pretty slapdash, and in some instances actively broke the games (see Sonic 2's Drop Dash implementation pre-patch). Speaking of which, if Headcannon have been involved, hopefully they've been allowed to go back and fix up other things such as the Drop Dash implementation in Sonic 1/CD/2, along with the fixes they wanted to make to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, too.
Playable Amy in all games and Knuckles in CD screams Headcannon.. it’s just gotta be them. Who in SEGA’s dev team can implement that in RSDK’s code?? No one I remember half the comments speculating that Taxman and Stealth would not be involved during Origins’ original development and we were happy to be wrong back then. Now if this is real, this justifies a double dip, although my only disappointment would be not including Genesis Spinball, Genesis 3D Blast, and Knuckles Chaotix. I guess the Game Gear games kinda maybe make up for it but it would have been nice.
I hope if Headcanon is involved, Sega allows them to add some much-needed polish and consistency to the package. For example, making all the games use a Sonic 3 style save menu, adding elemental shields to Sonic CD and making them accessible in all games via a toggle option (rather than cheats), making it possible to select any character and sidekick combo, expanding the 2P split screen mode to more levels). This type of polish was sorely lacking in the original Origins, and it would greatly elevate the experience of the package.
While I agree all those things might make Origins reach greatness... I'm not holding a candle to any of that. Other than what was leaked. SEGA many times cheated fans' expectations, gotta learn from that.
Personally, I'm not even having high expectations for what was leaked. I mean, Sega couldn't even add drop dash without making Tails go all screwy. Or even make a museum that has sensible zoom in functions (It feels like they had to deliberate put time and reseach into the UI to make it so cumbersome to read the digital manuals). But at the same time, I think it's good for people to dream higher. I feel if the disappointment is too much for someone to cope with it, then they probably don’t have enough real life problems!
Knuckles in CD yay if Amy is just advance moveset, then this accomplishes nothing that e-122-psi's hacks didn't already, and if she can jump and roll like Sonic, then what's the point
