In terms of gameplay, is Sonic Adventure DX substantially different from the Dreamcast version?

why are people bringing up Sonic X now

 

There's no such thing as a test of time: the evolution of standards for both gameplay and presentation isn't objective, but historical and contingent. SADX doesn't reveal anything about Sonic Adventure, nor do re-releases say anything about the cultural phenomena of the original releases. They are not the same object, aren't related to the same circumstances and don't share the same place in the general gaming culture. That's the same for every cultural industry segment ever.

With that out of the way: even making the mental exercise of imagining what it would be like if we somehow had SADX for the Dreamcast first, I don't think we can really overlook the impact of some choices and problems, like yeah clipping through the floor in the first level and crazy ass ligthing.

 

It's not wrong to say that SA1 is buggy, but whether that information comes from jank in Final Egg or Emerald Coast will make the followup statements vary wildly. I don't think people are "blinded" by the buggier new ports so much as they're blinded by nostalgia for most stuff from that era that doesn't have SA1 and Sonic's baggage as a whole. Dreamcast SA1 is jank in the same way Mario 64 is jank. I didn't play Mario 64 the whole way through until, like, two years ago? And that was on the cranked-up PC port with quality-of-life improvements. I'm not going to say it was wholly worse than SA1 or anything, but it hasn't aged any better than the rest of early-3D platformers and gave me just as much annoyance with physics and collision inconsistencies as any game from the era could reasonably be expected to. This is just a thing these games do.

SADX, by contrast, is just more embarrassing. Its legacy rests entirely in the fact that SEGA decided it was the definitive version of SA1, which makes it more damaging to its original title than any other Sonic port, including Sonic Genesis on the GBA. The way that game's atmosphere and feeling is destroyed is bad enough to make you take a closer look at other parts of the game, where the bugginess rears its ugly head more than on the Dreamcast. I know calling Colors Ultimate the worst port is hot right now, but as someone with nostalgia for both I can't understate how much the experience of SA1 is cheapened and...crustified by DX.

Sonic Adventure is buggy. That's never going away. "Sonic Adventure is a poorly-constructed mess" is a complaint that rises out of DX's fumes and probably the mid-2000s state of gaming journalism. I think everyone owes it to themselves to do a "best-case scenario" playthrough of modded SADXPC, but the only way for the exaggeration to get stamped out as a whole is for a good official release to replace the bad ones.

 

Gameplay? No not really I've played both many times over the years, SA1 is one of my favorite sonic games and most I can say is SADX does have a few things that are easier to do like collision glitches. I would say SADX is probably about on par with the jank of the original Japanese release of SA1. Can't say for sure though, I haven't played it myself that's just what I've been told from people who have.
Visually? Idk its preference man I've run into people who do in fact prefer the DX models. All the back and forth kinda just comes off as personal preference or even gatekeepy, I don't even remember people hating DX this much before like 5-6 years ago. Wonder what changed.

 

Probably because of this:

Spoiler

And I kinda agree.

But at the end of day, despite me thinking it's worse, in no way I think it's unplayable. It is still Sonic Adventur. I just wish the Steam version was like the Dreamcast, tho'. I dunno.

 

While I do think that younger Sonic fan perspective on Sonic Adventure is very skewed (I wrote about this on my blog very recently), the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of things that Sonic Adventure DX does that are visibly worse and hurt the overall presentation.

DX has worse textures, more simplistic lighting, a lot of cutscenes are more broken, the volume of music isn't balanced correctly with the dialog, and DX tried to "fix" the poor collision detection of some areas but in some cases made it worse (like in Lost World).

Sonic Adventure was no masterpiece but Sonic Adventure DX is actually a much worse version and that does matter.

 

I like Sonic Adventure but frankly I don't think it makes it into the gaming pantheon regardless of the version that came to GCN. I think the core problem more than any version is that the games's actual appeal is more niche than any of the contemporaries that Sonic fans like to compare it to, and that....isn't a good look for your AAA hardware seller.

But I could be wrong. I've been wrong plenty of times wrt the hog. The fact is we'll never know for sure due to decisions SEGA and Sonic Team made with the game. If fans are going to be angry at anyone I wish they'd point their ire at the people responsible.

Like, there's enough wrong here to acknowledge that it's a bad port. Think about any gaming classic and imagine if it had it's lighting and color choices vomited on so thoroughly less than 5 years after release. Collision wise every version of Sonic Adventure I've played has been shit here short of the PC fan patch but having the very first setpiece in the game fail can be a catastrophic first impression.

At the end of the day though t's on sega to release a good port. it's not on the fans to run interference and posts insane screes at everyone who simply buys the version of the game that's publicly available and streaming it, and it's not on consumers to go through the legwork of downloading a fucking fan patch or emulating the dreamcast version. Sega left an an already precocious game in bad shape, so this is the legacy they have. It's on them if they want to do anything about it or let the wound fester.

It's nobody else's responsibility, so until then i think everybody should chill the fuck out. There are not enough Sonic fans in the world to right the ship here, so it's best not to worry about it. And if you genuinely believe the game's critics are biased or were never going to give the game a fair shake, why do you care so much about what they have to say? Enjoy what you enjoy for it's own sake and stop worrying so much about what the world thinks.

 

DX is a terrible port aesthetically but gameplay wise its only slightly inferior. Dreamcast Adventure always had glitches although it wasn't a broken mess either. And neither is DX.

 

I really wanna know what version of SADX you guys played because being compared to the GTA Trilogy or calling it worse than Colors Ultimate is wild.

 

I guess I would compare SADX to Crash N. Sane Trilogy in the sense that the art direction is changed and new bugs and quirks were introduced that weren't there in the original. Crash gained the title of being the "Dark Souls of platforming" but really this is because N. Sane Trilogy butchered the hitboxes and made things harder than they actually were in the original games, which skewed the perception of these games and presented an illusion that was never really true.

Like yeah functionally these are the "same" games but the experience of playing the original versions is very different.

 

I read somewhere that the Dreamcast analogue stick is built differently to non-Sega sticks.

Typically when you measure an analogue stick, you have an X value and a Y value for position (let's say for the sake of argument +/- 255) . If you're holding it say, top left, you'd have (-255, -255), and you'd do some trigonometry to get the circle (so you're not moving faster in the diagonals: (-180,-180)). Supposedly an official Dreamcast controller reads in a different way so you don't have to do this calculation.

But the net result is that in some cases, an unofficial Dreamcast controller that didn't get that memo, can register higher (or lower) values than should be possible, and if your game isn't programmed correctly, movement can get screwy.


That's what I heard, although I've never looked into it, and I might be getting confused with the Nintendo 64 or something else. But it might explain why Sonic might feel a bit twitchier in DX (or SA2B, or whatever, if this is even a thing).

 

I disagree. I think the only 3D titles more broken than SA1 are Shadow 05 and Sonic 06.

The collision of the game breaks on a hairpin compared to all other 3D titles, and while the engine has a momentum based movement system that is much closer to the classics (a good thing, really), the team's struggle to balance a 1998 gaming console's limited resources, need to show an impressive visual presentation, and the practical limitations of designing for Sonic's speed... all show off an often problematic, scripted mess when it came to stage design and collision. A mess that's made even worse by the other characters with their various forms of gameplay being added on top of Sonic's own.

In a sense, I don't entirely blame the team... designing a 3D sonic game with 1990s hardware was simply always going to be a gargantuan task, but their scripts for stages break all the time in all versions and the game engine at first gives you the assumption you have a form of freesom, while the narrow scripted stage design quickly presents you with the harsh reality that you often don't. A lot of us presume those deaths are purposeful (don't deviate from the path, ect), but in many cases they're simply because the game's stage design is barely holding together by a shoestring and the deaths we see are far too often unintentional on the player's part, happening with even the slightest attempt to go against a scripted segment.

I love this game for many reasons, but the collision has always been a mess and the scripted speed paths break extremely easy.


Take this video here. Sure, it may be ps3 footage, but in my experience the ease of which wall breaking glitches are accomplished here in the adventure stages was normal in all versions. I see comments saying they don't work in the DC version, but I think at worst there are just slight differences in where the breaks happen. I'm not convinced. Even if this person is intentionally exploiting that for fun, even if this is ps3 version footage, it was still common in dreamcast runs that I remember, and that's because the game's glitchiness is ultimately a product of a collision system that frequently breaks with high speed action.

This is just how the game is. Across the board. Any extra breaks between the DC and DX versions are relatively minor compared to the game's overall struggles to hold the collision system together.

Edit: Here's a great video showcasing DC specific bugs that work in almost the exact same way.

 

I think you're talking about the N64 controller. On the physical controller you can't actually go further than a certain range due to how it's built (-85 to 85 out of a max of -128 to 128), but not every game bothered to program in failsafes for if a third party controller or emulator goes beyond those expected values. That's why N64 emulators typically have an option to map the N64's range to a modern controller's joystick or in the case of Nintendo's emulator just have it as the default behavior.

But there's definitely issues with SA2B's controls at least. SA2B's PC port messed up the joystick sensitivity and grinding is fucked because of it.

 

Honestly I think SA2B's pc port did more to fuck that game up than SADX's pc port did. Does anyone else have the problem where like half of City Escape will just have a random model of a tram hovering above Sonic.

 

I've always actually had a pleasant experience with SA2B's pc port, at least on Windows 7 and Linux. Besides the weird Chao fruit texture bug I can't recall anything in particular being off. It's probably broken on Win10/11 like every other "old" game.

 

Yeah, what both sides of this discourse need to remember is that 99% of the people who are nowadays calling SADX a butchered mess grew up with that port. It was what made them fall in love with SA1 in the first place.

And that alone should serve as proof about how different it actually is from the DC original.

 

I agree with this, though I think the issue is mostly one of control problems... like the earlier mentioned control stick issue (which is well documented and has mod fixes), and issues with input latency (which are less well documented, but I believe do exist).

I have no reason to believe these were major problems with SA2B GCN though.

But in my personal experience, I play SA2B objectively worse than I did in the early 2000s on PC despite having only become more skilled as a sonic player in pretty much all other titles. I don't think this is merely a 'gitgud' thing, I genuinely think the game is harder to play and less responsive than it once was, making it very difficult to replicate my old speedruns.

I would love to see more documentation on if there is any known input lag on the PC port compared to older versions, and if there is, how bad it is.

As one very clear example, 3D Blast Satun on retroarch has much more obvious input lag than the PC port of the game does, so despite the Saturn version being objectively the best version in just about every other way, the game plays much more smoothly on both PC and even in the emulated steam roms. Sucks, because it means my favorite version of the game is 'still' hard to play outside of real hardware (which has awful load times).

 

This?

 

I didn’t see any differences as a kid, besides the character models.

To me, Sonic Adventure is about the presentation and the feels. It’s a bygone era, packed with cheesy voice acting, superior music and weird gameplay choices.

 

Some of the game-feel differences people are reporting could be attributed to the different analogue sticks.

An unstable framerate won’t help either.

By the way, DX broke more than the lighting. Transparency is super broken, there are outright missing effects, and sound is of lower quality apparently (e.g. Egg Carrier transformation).

The presentation as a whole matters, as some have said, and DX really does do a “bla” job. I started with DX on gamecube by the way.