New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

Except EHZ 2P plays in BLZ's level slot in Wai, so evidence points to it being that level's music. And the Results theme sounding "tropical" is anecdotal evidence at best. Sonic 3's data select theme sounds very tropical too, but we know it wasn't meant for a level.

If we want to be anecdotal, EHZ2P's demo also sounds very "watery" with its reverb, and the concept map shows palm trees on the surface. So it could still fit BLZ very well.

 

How do we know that that slot was for BLZ and not TSZ? The two are next to each other in the timeline document.

Not sure what the S3 data select theme has to do with anything, as in that game zone songs come in pairs (one mix for each act), and there isn't an alternate mix of that song, so we can indeed assume that it wasn't composed for a zone. But the same doesn't hold true for the 2P results music in S2.

We know that S2 had plenty of scrapped levels, and they repurposed many songs for the final game, so there is more reason to believe that the 2P results music might be among the repurposed songs.

 

Because the slot that would be taken up by TSZ is instead used for Metropolis Act 3. It's possible the music was for TSZ, but what little evidence we have points to BLZ.

The point of bringing up Sonic 3 data select theme is that just because a song sounds tropical doesn't necessarily mean it was meant to have tropical visuals accompanying it and it could've just been a pleasant sound.

I maintain my theory that 2P Results was intended as a password or data select theme, judging by the final sound test order and that they almost certainly had to have planned for a menu like that, with such a huge game.

 

Actually, that slot would technically belong to Warp Point. And since the timeline documents refer to Eggman escaping to the past with a time machine rather than magical means, this "Warp Point" being located at MZ3 would make sense.

EDIT: Not to mention how Yuji Naka said that Metropolis has three acts due to scrapped story elements.

 

When considering music, you have to listen to its length, how it progresses and where and how it loops. The 2p theme is a short one that doesn’t sound like it was meant for anything but a menu screen.

I’m sure someone with musical knowledge can delve deeper into that, all I know is that it doesn’t sound like it belongs in a level.

 

Actually Masa's demo is about as long as the zone songs (2:18). That's rather long for a brief results screen. For comparison, the options/level select song is just 0:40.

Some zone songs are in fact shorter than the 2P results screen, like Hill Top (2:11), Oil Ocean (2:06) or Wing Fortress (2:08).

As for it not sounding like a zone song, that's subjective. I thought it sounded just like a menu screen song until someone pointed out that it has a tropical vibe and would go with a tropical zone, then I found myself agreeing.

 

If you told me Hill Top Zone, which is a song that loops at around 40 seconds, doesn't have a clear chorus and is rather mellow, was intended to be a results screen theme instead, I might just believe it. (In spite of its extended introduction, which doesn't fit the idea)

It's extremely difficult to judge these kinds of things. I don't think we can accurately reverse engineer the prompts Masa got, not the least because they were reportedly as vague as can be.

...That said, the 2P results acreen theme would fit a stage like what we imagine of TSZ. Masa's demo especially.

 

Would be funny if somebody will contact Masato, and he will just say "I don't remember"

 

It's like that in the demo because it loops over and over. It's not actually "longer".

 

Legobouwer9 discovered leftover data from the Sand Shower Zone mockup in the Payne disk's raw data. The rest was overwritten, and there's no palette, so this is using Sonic's palette.

This means this is the first official art of Sand Shower Zone we have access to in its original form. It's been here since the disks were dumped, but nobody bothered to check the raw data until now!

 

A little surprised and disappointed the rest of the tileset isn't there but holy shit

 

Was wondering when this was gonna be posted here, since it’s been on TCRF for a bit! It’s, well, a bit amazing this happened!

 

I hope someone's checking the other disks and archiving anything they found on our wikis.

 

Wow, this past month or so has been insane - Genocide City maps and some palette/art data, animated version of the Sand Shower mockup, an actual glimpse at the proposed winter Zone, and now actual factual raw Sand Shower tiles from the original source file, even if it's only the bottom portion of the mockup. It's all come about so fast - feels almost like overnight, all the stuff we spent endless hours discussing, poring over and theorising about 20-odd years ago has now become tangible in a way we only dreamed about back then. What a time to be alive!

If you told 2001-era me that actual Sand Shower tiles were now something we had access to, my first response would've been, "What the heck is Sand Shower?" But if you then sat me down and explained it was the Zone we all thought was called Dust Hill back then, sufficing to say my mind would have been blown, haha. I never get tired of seeing what this community can dig up! = )

 

We aren't even in the middle of January and we already got the actual Sand Shower tiles?! Man, this year's gonna be wild.
I mean, it might be just a couple of tiles, but nevertheless this is rather impressive.

 

Which disk was this found in?

 

Oddly enough, on sonic_enemies_backup.

 

So here's yours, combined with these recovered tiles. Palette was a guess, but I think you're right - there's more colours in the "Amiga" version.

I suspect it's not very efficient with how tiles are being used too.

 

This is my take on it. Based on both the portfolio tape and a potential set of colors used for the sandcrab enemy in the Tom Payne disks. Highly doubt that it's perfect or totally accurate, but I tried ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



EDIT: With palette cycling

 

Wasn't it once speculated that the colours from the moving dirt frames included in the Sandcrab (early Crawl) enemy's Digitizer art could be related to Sand Shower palette data?

It would make sense in theory, as documents show a clear progression from the original "Banper" enemy sketches, which we know was conceptualised with the desert stage in mind, to that early Sandcrab enemy. The dirt frames seem like they were intended to be used when it rose up out of the ground - I can't remember if the implemented version of the enemy found in one of the numbered Betas actually used them - so it would make sense they could have been originally drawn to use the same palette as the ground in the stave they were originally intended to be found in.

Now that we have some actual tiles to work with, I'm curious whether the palette data from those enemy frames maps well onto any of them, though if it did then I'm well aware it could only confirm a fragment of a single palette line at best.

I'm stuck on my phone right now so can't have a crack at it myself yet, but for anyone else who wants to try in the meantime, ICEknight helpfully already extracted the palette data from the enemy art back in 2019, so there's a nice quick reference for the colours and their relative positions in the palette line. I believe the top palette line in Sandcrab's set is what was used for the dirt frames in question.