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

Shadow Hog, on 26 June 2015 - 12:56 PM, said:

Yeah. if there's anything weird about the overworld music, it's that the first half sounds more like something that Masahiko Yoshimura might have done, which makes me wonder if Takenouchi was basing it off an unused tune from one of those two games he did (Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force); The first 40 seconds are in a completely different style from the rest of the song and loop almost cleanly.

They'll almost certainly expand the 2-player mode too. I mean, think about it -- they can reserve a screen for each player rather than use split-screen and the 3DS resolution is too low to support the interlaced mode anyway, so the normal limitations about adapting the average level to 2-player don't exist. Just change around a few scripted sequences (hell I think the mobile ports still replace the bits with moving ground in Hill Top with springs) and you're good. I hope this is part of the plan, since it would be the one thing the other mobile ports would obviously have over the 3DS aside from Knuckles.

Just commented on twitter that the one saving grace of those treasure stages is that each emerald is guaranteed to be within a certain region of the stage. The only reason I liked them in SA1 was because they took places in sub-stages that I was already familiar with as Sonic due to having run through them as him (or vice-versa in a couple cases), so I had a good idea of how to maneuver through them efficiently. Knuckles' stages in SA2 have a tendency to be both much larger and far more closed off (I would argue that there is no way that the layout of pyramid cave is justifiable), meaning the two things that made to stages interesting in SA1 were removed from them.

To me the big problem is that in making the Sonic stages so linear, most of what I found fun about SADX's levels (specifically, that Sonic was vastly overpowered compared to their structure and a number of especially cheat-y shortcuts exist in each stage) was removed. Trying to speedrun the game by hand (I.e., not a TAS) is pretty dull because there really isn't a lot you can do at any one point, especially due to how forcefully the physics engine tosses you around.

I hadn't played this game until the HD remake came out. I've come to hate it. For one thing, it's incredibly slow; while this does a lot for fixing the collision detection over the first game it just makes the supposedly "fast" stages pretty dull. Then, there's the harsh physics, typified in the missile-boarding section of Metal Harbor -- if you move the controller just a little bit out of position, Sonic and Shadow lose all of their speed, making the game more like The Irritating Stick than anything else with Sonic in the name. Furthermore, the requirements for ranking are pretty asinine, especially considering how a lot of things in the game that give you points aren't mentioned anywhere (the hoops in Pyramid Cave, jumping at the end of grinds in Sky Rail or Final Rush/Chase). This also doesn't get past the fact that several stages, Crazy Gadget in particular, are pretty flat and boring! Aside from the gravity gimmick, there really isn't much of anything to that level.

Plus trying to do spin-dashes is just painful due to the amount of time you have to wait for it to charge. At least in SA1 with the unlimited dashing you could go about as fast as your reaction times could carry you, but here it just emphasizes how nasty and unforgiving the game is!

The treasure-hunting stages were inexcusable, but most of the mech stages were pretty aggressively okay, and since they weren't as beholden to the nasty physics I feel like I can actually casually start up the game and probably play one of those levels and not hate it. But they also don't stand out, and they feel less thoughtfully designed than Gamma's stages in SA1 -- particularly because they're their own levels, and not Sonic's levels expanded or developed on at all. The first feels like a take on the same ideas as Sonic 3/K does with different character abilities leading to different paths through the stages, but the second just makes me wonder why they spent the time developing these new stages at all and didn't try to make a couple levels that were more in line with Sonic's abilities.

And I have nothing good to say about Pyramid Cave.

Shadow Hog, on 24 April 2015 - 12:49 PM, said:

Yeah, it's like the exact opposite of future proofing. For background music playback, there's a configuration file that's hiding in the install directory that lists basically every sound card that was available to use at the time; if your sound card isn't in the list, the music errors out and doesn't play. I've been able to get music working in a virtual machine using the Windows Virtual PC (or Microsoft Virtual PC, whichever's the more recent one). It seems like there's a sounblaster setting available on VirtualBox so that might work too, but trying to run any Windows before XP on that thing is a hassle -- which is why I went with Virtual PC instead, since I had a 98 setup handy.

Also, when I was trying to get the game working, this happened:
https://www.youtube....h?v=0dHoYe-3fy0

As with the scenes in that review, the game is pretty trollish.