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

Just to clear this up. Yes, I do understand that Flying Battery a reference to artillery batteries. What I was getting at, was that on top of the artillery batteries reference I found it coincidental the level it was based off of also may have had batteries in its foreground art. Batteries all around!

 

Honestly, people really should take a closer look at these level maps. So many unique details and gimmicks are thoroughly detailed in them, yet most recreations only reuse the layout and fill in the blanks with completely original stuff.

I tried to document most of the level gimmicks on the Wiki page, but I probably still missed a lot of stuff.

And that specific object at the end of Act 1 is actually depicted as a mini-boss in some hack whose name I can't remember right now. And while I don't believe that to have been its intended purpose, its shape and movement patterns (or that's what I assume those arrows to mean) do remind me of this boss from Mega Man 1:

 

It makes me think of Death Egg Zone (S3K)'s gravity room with the bouncer.
It's looking like a lot of unused concepts from Sonic 2 ended up in 3, so I wouldn't be surprised. I think Cyber City's maps also had those up/down gravity tubes of sorts?

 

There's at least a section where the fans push Sonic to walk on the ceiling, effectively reversing gravity. It's shown in Act 1's map I believe.

 

Which is weird because I did put quite a few into the "remake" fangame engine in the accurate spots according to the map.

 

So I really hate to be that guy again, but people need to take a closer look at the end of "Act 2", because the transition between Act 2 and 3 does not point to the usual "end sign" map. There are small details suggestiong how the gimmicks work that I think people are overlooking.

In the last batch of fans, clearly they would push Sonic upwards, and it appears the water would rise along with it while the fans blow him up one of 3 paths. How can you tell? Because in the start of Act 3, and the end of Act 2, that both connect these same tunnels... there are bubbles being drawn surrounding the fans in the first and last section. This suggests that the entire first section of act 3 was underwater until you reach the end of that first wind tunnel.

Now, earlier, I suggested this means Acts 2 and 3 were one act, but there's another possibility... what if there were no end of act signs and the level was just one continuous level that had fade to black transitions at the end of each "section", suggesting a giant deadly super city?

The loop and elevator shaft at the end of Act 1 also seems to suggest an almost mini-boss arena of some sort, but the game hadn't really had any up to that point and there's no clear suggestion for exactly it was, only that there's some spiked object in the middle which seems to move up and down both. While it seems like a cool spot for a Mecha Sonic encounter to me, there's 0 evidence that this was ever the case, I'm afraid. What does appear likely to me is that you'd somehow head up the shaft at the end... perhaps to have the same "fade to black" transition, as there is 0 indication of a spot for a level sign at the end of this act on the map layout as well.

 

I can see that being the case, with the island map being shown between sections to indicate the current location on the island. The idea, then, would be that Genocide City extends to all the island, and you're traveling across it as you advance in the level. The domes would be the spots where each GCZ section begins, as opposed to the acts being set entirely within them.



That might explain why the place is destroyed in the last map, with the idea being that that you're tearing Eggman's base (Genocide City) apart as you advance through the zone.



^ The third dome (GCZ3) is still intact because that's the map shown the moment you reach it (it: when you clear the 2nd section/act of GCZ). Everywhere else was already traversed and destroyed by Sonic by that point.

So here the player is like "Eggman is cornered, now I just have to destroy that dome and he'll be defeated at last!", but at the end of GCZ3 Eggy escapes in the Neo Death Egg as it launches (or takes a spaceship or teleporter to it?) and you board it, leading to the final zone (Or second to last? Is "Last battle in space" separate?).

 

This is what I've been assuming all along; there's clearly not enough flat ground for goal posts, so the levels must end some other way, much like the transition from Scrap Brain Act 3 to Final Zone.

I never was convinced by the "Acts 2 and 3 are just one act" -theory, as not only would that make Act 2 way longer than Act 1, but the ending corridor of Act 2 wouldn't even properly align with the beginning corridor of Act 3 if you were to put the two act layouts next to one another.

That being said, what does this mean for the island maps' depiction of GCZ? Is the "eruption" that flushes Sonic into the beginning of Act 3 the same event which sets the whole island on fire after Act 2?

Edit: Seems like Blue Spikeball was already doing some speculation regarding this, and I do agree with his theories.

 

there's a level card there, but reading this I was reminded of how the transition from Sandopolis Act 1 to Act 2 does this exact kind of thing. IIRC it's the only mid-level transition in the game that involves a fade to black as opposed to the character going through a tunnel or leaving the boss arena and the background is magically different.

Sonic 3 does do similar fakery with acts that ostensibly connect to each other despite the game itself faking it (there is no Act 2 loaded in while you're in Act 1...IIRC), so with "soft" transitions I could see similar shenanigans happening

 

As far as the level alignment goes from Act 2 to Act 3, it's really only 1 chunk off vertically on paper. They may have fixed that implementing it. They were experimenting with things with Wood Zones level slot, so it's not out of the realm they may have been also working on getting bigger layouts to work seamlessly.

 

No way to know for sure without further details, but given S3’s propensity for recycling cut S2 concept, I think it’s a distinct possibility that it may have been something like Doomsday zone. It might have been conceived as a more elaborate version of the ending of Final Zone where Sonic attacks Eggman as he is escaping.

 

So I was looking at the level maps again, and found something rather peculiar in Act 2.


The only way to reach this entire section is to fall down one of two pits in above sections, and it seems to consist of a flooded pit where a fan pushes you through the bottom of the level (the bottom row chunk marked '00').

This seems like a bit too much effort for just a bottomless pit that'd instantly kill you, doesn't it? I was initially speculating if it'd be a secret exit to Act 3, but I can't find any feasible spots in it for an alternate entrance.

 

Is that not a vertical-wrapping section?

 

It's flooded, and the top of the Act is not. And above it is only blank wall chunks, too.

 

I couldn't tell since you only showed a piece of the map. Whoops.

 

So I initially saw that too and figured the same thing. However, it appears to actually be a death trap. I've contemplated that maybe the two maps were one LARGE level top to bottom at one point too, with that weird section in act 2 seemingly going nowhere near the beginning.

 

That's rather anticlimactic. That whole section could just be replaced with two straight bottomless pits and functionally nothing would change.

Then again, maybe that is the point. A more elaborate section gives the player a false sense of security, and fools them into thinking that they could still save themselves somehow. Instead of a run-of-the-mill death trap, it's a crazy little rug pull.

 

Not to mention the fact that the Delta hack already connects them together seamlessly, only adds the signs. My argument was that there was no need for signs, as the acts would transition a different way, and that's most clear in the Act 2 drawing where spikes can still be seen as an obstacle in what should be the "exit" of the act, while the exit of act 1 appears to be something like an upward rocket or elevator shaft.

The final section of Act 3 is also very odd. It seems to be something like a trap of sorts Eggman sends you into, probably similar to the Scrap Brain Act 2-3 transition, as in something without a boss. You navigate down those sharp tunnels while Eggman escapes, and then find some way (like the suggested teleporter, similar to what the Sonic 2 Lost Worlds hack uses, or Mania/Sonic 3 uses as well...) to chase Eggman at the very end of the level.

Again, the role of bosses in this early Sonic 2 concept is never clear. We don't know how far along the conceptualization of any of those elements were, or if something like say, mecha sonic, had even been designed at all yet.

 

Or there could be springs at the bottom or a tube or something. These maps don't have all the objects do they?

 

They do explicitly have springs placed at multiple locations, so it'd be odd to not draw them in all of their intented spots.

That being said, I do suspect that some objects still could be missing. Early versions of Metropolis layouts have a lot of completely meaningless bottomless pits (that do not wrap around) which you can never reach due to the transportation tubes being in the way.

Spoiler: Big ass image

So the paper maps very well could be just missing objects which were meant to go into them.

And on the topic of Metropolis Zone, has anyone done a throughout comparison of its paper maps with the Zone's layouts in various prototypes? Not only would that provide a lot of valuable insight about Metropolis' development, but we could also use it to make educated guesses on how much the layouts of Genocide City might've changed.