Which, given that it occurred so late in the day development-wise, caused a few problems of its own - the infamous Mystic Cave spike pit definitely seems to have been created with the old behaviour in mind, which wouldn't have led to getting stuck there for a bloody eternity waiting for death should you mistakenly fall in there...!
I don't think that's really evidence of anything regarding the spike bug. Could have been designed as a ridiculous trap for all we know.
It could also be that the "fix" in Sonic 1 was made during the final days in development and by the time they realized it it was too late. I think it was stated in an interview that the developers bug tested Sonic 1 themselves and might have just marked it as fixed and moved on. Doesn't explain why it is still there in the revision though...
I'm pretty sure the Mystic Cave spike pit had a spring on the right side in the beta layouts, just like the other pits around it, so I don't know if this holds water. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have time to verify it right now.
Also when people think of the spike pit being annoying they are usually thinking of going down there with invincibility or Super Sonic. Neither would be affected by the spike bug.
No, you get damaged, your rings drop, they go back to you, rinse and repeat. Worse with both characters in. I didn't hate the S1 spikes or prefer the S2 spikes; they were different and spikes as an insta-death made sense to me (and they weren't that hard to avoid in that game. But lava pits should have been insta-death too, and they weren't, so I'm on the bug side of this. Didn't someone say it would be useless to discuss this again without an official source to give us the truth? Now that Angela and Brainulator have had their answers, let everyone think about it with what's already been explained.
Then the same is true of the spikes in Ice Cap Zone - they obviously had time to fix the invincibility power-up spike behaviour between S3 and S3K and they fixed it. If the rest were also viewed as a bug then they would fix that along with it. So the spikes in Ice Cap Zone are supposed to hurt you when you're invulnerable, even though the other spikes in the game don't have that behaviour. Either that or it's a bug.
Good point, I'd forgotten about that - can't remember, was the spike behaviour changed before or after the spring was removed?
My point is that we cannot use the Mystic Cave pit as evidence that Sonic 2 was originally designed with Sonic 1 spike mechanics in mind because, while falling in with rings is annoying as you say, it's far more annoying waiting around for 10 seconds with the invincibility going, or worse still, as Super Sonic. It's clearly just a trap which is supposed to be a bit trolly.
The closest thing gameplay-wise to a bed of spikes is the MZ lava lakes. Lava damages Sonic in the same way as enemies or projectiles (NOT when you touch the solid part) so of course it behaves the same as those, but if they really for some reason wanted to give large solid areas that damage Sonic this "extra danger" and if they apparently put so much thought into changing how these sorts of things work, you'd imagine they'd do it to Lava too. Not only does it look and feel VERY clearly unfair, it's an anomaly with how the entire damage system works (why lose rings and fly back -without control- if you can insta-die after?), MarkeyJester made it very clear that it wasn't thought through for sideways spikes (so if it was deliberate it was not thought about very hard, and if it was a mistake... it wasn't thought about very hard), and it is it an omission of 1 check which is too easy of a mistake to make if you're rushing. Juuuust by coincidence the ONE hazard which both hurts Sonic and is solid (and therefore has to work differently and use separate code) just happens to behave unfairly? Well yeah. That's why. They F'd up.
I've always thought the spike 'bug' really was a bug but it's been really great to get the perspectives of you guys who know about the game's code. Thank you to the experts on Retro!
Apparently, they were changed at the same time: Beta 5. Now responding to the conversation as a whole, the pit seems like no more of a stupid trap than the part of Metropolis Zone Act 3 near the end where a Slicer waits for you at a ledge to the left of the screw that Sonic runs on. Besides, it's not like Mania where rings bounce between walls; in Sonic 2, as long as you're not Super Sonic, your rings will bounce out of reach soon enough. If these are meant to be instant kill traps, though, why even have the spikes there? That idea would make the spikes outright superfluous in any case where they cover up a bottomless pit in most cases. In any case, it is horribly inefficient. This pit is an exception, but Green Hill Zone has a mix of bottomless pits and pits covered up by spikes. Still, there's the argument that because it was kept between REV00 and REV01, it must be intentional. I can put forward a bunch of other ideas with the same amount of evidence (i.e. none): The developers did not know the bug existed. The developers did not know how to fix the bug. The developers forgot to fix the bug. This is also applies to various other unintended things that are unaltered between the two revisions: the missing "Press Start Button" text thanks to insufficiently-cleared RAM, Sonic's speed instantly dropping as soon as you hold forward if he's running really fast (aka the speed cap), Sonic using the walking animation when jumping next to certain objects, and other oddities. My conclusion: the spikes not checking if you're flashing after being hurt is a form of death that is only kept around out of habit and inattention than any actual complete analysis of the code and level layout structure.
Crap, I can't find the interview. The temp head of STI (a Japanese fellow) mentioned he was impressed by the QA team during the development of Sonic 2, and mentioned games in Japan (at the time) were tested by the development team themselves. This would go a long way to explain why the spike bug wasn't found. Anyone know the interview I'm talking about?
I know what you are reffering to: https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...nfo-new-interview-with-masaharu-yoshii.40066/
There's only a month separating these two builds, as opposed to the later revisions you see in compliations. If the remit was just to make some backgrounds scroll as opposed to making changes to real game logic, it makes sense why it would be overlooked. Mind you I don't actually know what REV01 changes other than things we wrote down.
About the Icecap spikes, are you talking about normal icecap spikes, or the spike balls found on Knuckles' path?
The spikeballs - in Sonic 3 alone their behaviour matches Sonic 1 Prototype; in Sonic 3 & Knuckles their behaviour was changed and matches Sonic 1 Final. In all cases they can hurt you while you're invulnerable - I don't believe this was ever intended to be the case for either S1P, S1F, S3A, or S3K.
I seem to remember somebody mentioning that the spike pit is there actually because it had to be, not because they chose to put it there. The way the levels are designed, they have a vertical wrap. That pit is so far down that an entire row of spikes was needed to kill the player as, otherwise, they would land on the 'roof' of the level. I may be totally misremembering this, though. EDIT: Upon checking Zone 0, I may have remembered this correctly as the pit is indeed right at the bottom of the zone. http://www.soniczone0.com/games/sonic2/downloads/s2-mcz-act2map.png
Mystic Cave has no vertical wrap. You can get to the bottom with debug mode and drop your character. You die as expected, no wrap.
