That's just their catch all emulator at work. I wouldn't use that as some sort of comparison, especially when they still have the SEGA AGES versions up. For now at least.
I asked some programmers I know if anything would break in the platformers they've made if they changed the characters' hitboxes after development was already done, and the answer seems to be "probably not much". Granted, that might not be the case depending on how hitboxes work in the Retro Engine, but it doesn't sound like a fix that would break much of anything.
You are very naive about the "superior" versions being on mobile. They are usually the ad supported "SEGA FOREVER" versions these days, which are all around a poor experience much worse than the Origins wrapper, not to mention playing precision platformers with precise reaction timing on a touch screen has 'never' been ideal. And a great many gamers still prefer playing on consoles with controllers. "Mobile" for these gamers would be the switch version. Mobile was a compromise for getting enhanced versions to exist at all. And they lack modern moves like the drop dash entirely, and had their own sets of bugs and problems too. Origins did remove some of their features, which sucked, but the only reason to praise the mobile versions was because we finally de-compiled them and made them PC accessible. And that took 8 years in the case of Sonic 1-2. All of those are fan achievements which are accomplished under remarkably different circumstances than professional game development and do not have the same real world rules or limitations inherent to them (this of course, comes at the cost of new problems). To 99% of the players outside of this core retro obsessed community, this collection is fine. A few might notice an unfair death or 2 in S3 (though those have been 'greatly' reduced now), and they'll be annoyed when a few songs don't sound the way they remembered, but that's about it. All 4 major games are easily playable and beatable from start to finish with more modes/options than people have had before in most versions of the game they remember. That's the objective reality here. Now, if we're lucky, we might still get a few more tweaks and fixes (someone pointed out that there are still newer builds in the SteamDB), but it's very unlikely there will be any more major official changes. Beyond some basic bugs, the collection as it exists seems to be as Sonic Team "envisioned" it, and a lot of our complaints come down to things they are choosing not to change deliberately.
I believe M2 did the emulation work for the Genesis app on Switch, but it probably didn’t get nearly the same TLC that the more dedicated versions get. Love how Sega went out of their way to delist all these extraneous versions of Sonic 1, 2, 3 and CD allegedly to eliminate confusion, but then on Switch alone there are at least four different ways to play Sonic 2.
More like allegedly to eliminate legal ROM access so you can't play fan ports and realize how little Origins has to offer in comparison.
What'd I do? You can disagree if you want. OH do you mean fan ports lack concept art and the like? Yeah sure but I'm talking about the games themselves.
Sega probably removed the older versions because they weren’t selling. I highly doubt anyone outside hardcore fans was really buying them by 2022 (in particular, the PSN versions don’t even work on PS4/PS5). The Switch AGES versions are newer and cheap so I imagine they were still doing decently. Doesn’t make the removals any less shitty but that’s the reality of the business.
And I thought that urban legend of SEGA delisting the original ROMs from Steam to cover up the removal of 3&K with the MJ tracks was true But honestly I have other legal means to play the original ROMs so this didn’t bother me like it did other people It is very difficult to go back to the current mobile/SEGA Forever versions of the games because that wider aspect ratio on modern phones led to a wider range of issues (graphical pop in, seeing things you’re not supposed to, being unable to adjust the d-pad position in CD’s case, etc.) For my money Origins is the best way to play these games and it far surpasses any previous emulated collection
There's this aspect, but also the fact that Origins is far easier to work with than any of the emulated versions. It's native support, which means that porting to different platforms and modifying the games will be much more straightforward. They've got the four classics now running on a single engine. There's a reason that the enhancements to previous emulated versions of the Classics were so minor. And on top of that, it would be incredibly confusing to have multiple different versions of the same games on a single storefront. It's even more confusing when you factor in that S3K would often only be available through Origins, but the other games could be bought separately. It just doesn't make sense. The shortcomings/negative differences of Origins are going to be negligible to most users (if they even notice them at all), whilst the benefits of widescreen, additional playable characters and coins instead of lives are as close to being objective improvements as you can get. Removing all of the old versions was kind of shitty. I wish that there was still a way to purchase those versions through direct links, even if they were delisted from standard storefronts. But I just don't think that's a supported feature on any platform right now.
I got Origins Plus for the switch. I started playing S3K with Amy and I’m having way more fun then I expected. There are some finer details with her moveset that make her engaging to play: 1. In her hammer/drop dash state you can move left and right, 2. The longer you hold the hammer drop dash the farther she can go up slopes. I see a lot of potential for this moveset, especially in a new game that has level design focusing on using amy’s hammer to wrack up aerial combos. I also think Headcanon did a great job improving the graphics in S3K’s 2 player stages. They were a joy to run through at full size. I have some criticisms regarding Sega’s handling of museum mode. It’s super aggravating that you can’t flip through your collection in full screen mode. All in all I think Headcanon has done a great job on 3K. I hope they are given the opportunity to make a new 2D Sonic.
IMO the timing is too coincidental and we have no evidence that those games are selling any less than *insert any random SEGA game / emulated title that wasn't taken down*, or that they'd have reason to remove them because of it. The timing of their removal lines up with the lead-up to Origins and we have no data on their sales performance before then. Plus, iirc there is no fee or upkeep charge to leave them on the platform, at least you can say that for Steam. They surely just knew they'd lose money if someone were to realize they can buy most of Origins' content at a ridiculously cheap price.
I noticed that when a re-release is buggier and less polished than the original companies do tend to remove the previous versions from stores. Doom 3 BFG (Temporarily, thank god!) and GTA Trilogy. Are ones that I'm remembering right now. Origins do follow that pattern. Final Fantasy don't quite fill that mold, the re-release is indeed more polished than the previous ports, but they do however have less content. That might not be the reason, but pretty sure their bean counters in their idiotic "what is good will and optics?" little short-term minded brains, it's to maximize the sales of the new toys they throw out in the wild. By the way, Sega fans, look out for P3P availability in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if that's removed in the future too.
There is, you can play with perfect scaling if you do 6x the horizontal resolution and 5x the vertical resolution, no shimmering at all. The choice on 1080p would have to be perfect 6-by-5x scaling versus fit to height.
I think you're giving the bean counters too much credit. They do want old releases gone to avoid competition and will more than happily fuck over preservation and other ideals to do it, but they would never pay attention to the condition of the games themselves. They only pay attention to "market research".
Except there was nothing truly wrong with SCD on Steam. Maybe for us, we can pick apart every little thing, but most people did not consider there anything horribly wrong with those old releases. They stayed up forever, so clearly SEGA didn't think something small, for example the refresh rate issue, was worth pulling the game from the store or they'd have done that way sooner. Again, I understand it from a purely profit perspective, but my ideal wish would be for them to have left those titles up and then people would still buy Origins for the convenience factor of a collection, playable Knuckles + Amy, and a few other bells and whistles like Mission Mode. It's not like there would be no reason to buy Origins period.
Random thought, do the infamous Sonic 3 Complete-plagiarised sprites still exist as is in Plus? Or were they altered from that? Fun fact, apparently Sonic CD is still up on the PS3 store to purchase despite the delistings. But yeah, as said they also had the one excuse for S3&K because of a certain one-gloved musician and people tend to not acknowledge that. At this point I'd kinda wonder even if there was anything else major to at least add to the game, it'd just be more stuff to QA test, create new glitches with and then also ignore the fixing of. Granted, any patched addition to a game is kinda inevitable to bring in new bugs with it and there's been already been a few new things with Knuckles/Amy that are hopefully getting an additional look at, though surprisingly not a terrible amount for something allegedly implemented by Sonic Team. But you notice a bunch of the obscurer cheat codes still aren't given the proper fixes compared to SOME of the more obvious errors fixed; Sonic+Tails in S1 still crashes the game w/ 6 Emeralds, Super Peel-Out in S3&K still breaks with Super/Hyper Sonic, Super theme disable still breaks upon level music interruption and disabling & Knuckles branding still crashes the game at the Slot Machine Bonus Stage (though then again, they did fix the Hyper Ring HUD and placing Item Balls in Debug Mode in terms of cheats; the S Item Balls do in fact give you a Super Form as suspected). It just sucks because half the fun of these versions is the cool new options Tax/Stealth added for them, even if they were just things they snuck in without telling Sega about prior to the QA process, but what's the point if a bunch of them don't even work correctly? If they weren't going to add more like Max Control for Sonic or Elemental Shields or Tails partnering in all games (which would've been an easy finishing garnish for me personally), they could've at least fixed the ones they have if they already went through the trouble of including/not removing them in the first place, unlike Proto Palace Zone. Could've asked Headcannon on their lunch break about fixing Sonic+Tails while they were also adding in Amy+Tails to the same game in the same way somehow entirely without the issue. I'm not asking for fan version levels of minute toggles for things, just a few more neat new options like those have, but not even fixing the new S3&K codes they just added for this collection makes me wonder why Sega even approved those over other things. Also yeah, like I don't see too much reason to go back to 2011 SCD considering what Origins did add to it, even if we did lose some voice clips and Japanese soundtrack loops in the process. They also changed the aspect ratio to be a bit wider and how the pixels worked in the Special Stages. Something else to bring up that's a fascinating glitch, I was messing around with original Blue Sphere's character selection from picking Amy in the main game's Level Select, and you can briefly enable a bunch of weird character options. You can select an invisible graphical glitch character that crashes the game when you jump sometimes, you can somehow get Sonic partnered with Tails, Knuckles or Amy, and you can even have him partner up with the nothingness glitch character or himself. https://twitter.com/TomGyroid/status/1673021735963074560 You basically scroll through the character options in this glitched state, and there's an excessive amount of values for it, some of which glitch the colour of the sprite or are just the three standard options for Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. Am I in the code of the game? https://twitter.com/TomGyroid/status/1673024690967781461?s=20 I almost wonder if they wanted to put in a bunch of character partner combinations as a silly bonus option for Blue Sphere because why not, it wouldn't take much effort to implement compared to doing that in the main game. Like perhaps it'd be a nice add-on to a cut Blue Sphere editor idea. As it stands, Sonic+Tails/Amy+Tails is only available for in-game Special Stage Blue Sphere while the & Knuckles mode cheat from Mania was cut for S3&K.
I'd like to think someone would notice the Game Gear games being in the incorrect aspect ratio. I mean granted, it took me a while back in the day to realise not all pixels were square, but previous collections didn't have this problem, and Sonic spends a lot of time in a (now not circular) ball. Hilariously this is the one part where a bilinear filter would have genuinely helped.
I didn't expect Amy to be as fun as she is. Her hammer really extends her hit box and I keep finding myself beating Eggman bosses before they even have a chance to attack (and not just in CD either). I wish they did a little more with her hammer attack on the ground in terms of exclusive paths but I'm in love with her play style and I'm very happy they added her to the game now.
