Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: GeneralAdmiralChipotle - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Black Squirrel, on 03 March 2013 - 12:28 PM, said:

I agree with you for the most part, and I knew beforehand that Sonic 1 SMS didn't have a game to base itself off of, but you can still see some things that weren't very hard to do for Sonic 1 SMS. Notice the gradient background in the two minigames in Edusoft. The SMS game even uses some of the same colors in drawing the spikes on the ground that could just as easily be used to give the skyline color depth. I also noticed that Sonic's sprite in Edusoft is hardly bigger than his SMS sprite. Color and animation really make the difference with this game. The Edusoft game has rippling water effects as well as rippling lava in the trampoline minigame. Even Sonic's jump in the trampoline looks like a much smoother parabolic trajectory. I can nitpick, but I'm running out of trial posts and I don't know if one of the admins will let me have 20 more posts, and I don't want to make it obvious I had enough free time to spend doing 2nd grade math and word scrambles in Sonic Edusoft for 5 hours (WHO SAID CRAZY!? I AM NOT CRAZY, YOU'RE CRAZY!). I did notice the viewing area is a little bit smaller, but it's nowhere near as bad as the small viewing area of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for GBC (viewing area reduced from 16x16 tiles in SMB to 10x10 tiles), and that game was still great despite losing over half the viewing area. Hardware just isn't a massive constraint. Cutting the color palette from 64 to 32 colors reduces VRAM usage by 1/2, and reducing the field of view by a couple tiles and lowering the onscreen sprite count should take care of the rest. Sonic 1 for Genesis/MD didn't even push the hardware to its limits. I can't really think of a part of that game that used more than 90% of the VRAM while hacking it until I started throwing in badniks and switch puzzles all willy-nilly.

EDIT: Capitalization error fixed

AerosolSP, on 03 March 2013 - 03:20 AM, said:

I suppose so. Nonetheless, I imagine that is because the design was more efficient. On top of that, the SMS had 16KB of VRAM, the same as the boot RAM and main RAM combined. Perhaps it has more to do with the handling of collision mappings. Sonic Edusoft never had to process collisions from what I saw. There really wasn't anything but scripted movements...

I can only hope that this game sees an Android port like Sonic Jump and better yet, a release on just about every major platform like Angry Birds. It's one of those games that you would want to own multiple times; cheap enough to do so, and then you can have one copy for your PC's 1080p monitor and one copy you can take with you. Porting games written in Java takes all of 2 hours primarily for quality assurance. As fun and addictive as Sonic Jump was, I'm sure Sonic Dash will be great.

Still praying for that Android version of Sonic Jump so I don't have to wait until I come home for Christmas to play...

Don't get me wrong; Ken Penders is a jackass, but it makes sense why a guy like him would go and try to seal away all of his work. As a comic book artist, he makes VERY LITTLE MONEY especially when you consider the fate of his media. Even from the start of his career writing Sonic comics, comic books were a niche market at $2 per book. Nobody that I knew of in school even as far back as 1999 read comics because of the relative ease of obtaining free entertainment coupled with the fact that for the cost of 10 comic books that you can read in less than 2 hours, you could get a Game Boy Color game that would entertain you for hours during recess and lunch. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe vs 10 volumes of any comic- it's hard to beat spending your money on the best handheld game of 1999. I love the comics, we all love the comics, but I would be shocked if even for his level of fame and notoriety that he ever made more than $100k in a year. His entire well-being is stake in the Sonic comics, so this was a rational decision on his part even if it is morally and legally unjustified.

Nonetheless, I'm just grateful that he doesn't have a claim to the comics being that he was under contract to use another entity's intellectual property to write a comic book on behalf of said entity. Just imagine how stupid it would be for Michael Bay to claim property rights on Transformers, take away 95-97% of the money involved, and you have the sad story of a dying man.

Josh, on 20 February 2013 - 09:47 PM, said:

I know, but it's not the same when Sonic handicaps himself my driving a car. It didn't take much effort for me to get amazing at Sonic Generations. In spite of all the cheaters, I still outrank 99.2-99.6% of all the posted course PRs in the leaderboards. I've developed fast reflexes over the years as a byproduct of over 750 of hours of F-Zero X (the most challenging game ever made until F-Zero GX) and SSBM. Sonic Generations is just too easy because the boost gauge is rarely less than half full unlike Sonic Colors which demands using boost power wisely. I've found all the shortcuts, and while it feels fun to go fast, there is no challenge in that game whatsoever sans a really painful mission that involved bouncing renegade eighth notes back at Vector.