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

Interesting observation - from the concept art, it looks like the single bright red and green shades in the palette may actually have been intended for those neon red/green directional arrows? The concept art makes it look like the intention may have been that they'd change between red and green to show which direction Sonic could travel through tubes or other gimmicks - for example, the tube on the right looks like Sonic could pop out of it as the left-facing arrow is green, but not back in as the right-facing arrow is red.

(Though if I have interpreted that correctly, it looks like they may have been miscoloured in the concept as Sonic is travelling the same direction as a red arrow, haha!)

If that is the case, it's possible the red/green in the palette were intended to swap around depending on which routes were opened/closed. If such a gimmick did exist, I wonder if it would have been automatic or controlled by a switch?

...Actually, it looks like the small blue arrows in the tube could also have been intended to function this way, as again there's arrows marking out each possible route in the tube depending on whether the hinged door is open or closed. However, if this was the intention in that instance, then whoever coloured the artwork clearly didn't get the memo...!

Hopefully the level layout may help give some indication of whether or not a gimmick like this was actually planned. Here's hoping everything can be scanned successfully...!

 

those arrows might just be emphasising how the player could interact with the layout rather than stage graphics.

 

The narrow tunnels are roughly similar to those utilised by the lift in beta MTZ which is seemingly confirmed to originally be part of Cyber City.

 

I think they mean the narrow tunnels in the concept which look only just large enough for Sonic to spin through. It's true that Metropolis doesn't really have anything comparable to those - the closest it has are the enclosed automated tubes, but those function much more like the teleport tubes from Scrap Brain than these, which look much more like regular spin tunnels.

On that note, a similar difference can be observed between Emerald Hill and Hill Top - only Hill Top actually uses the S-shaped spin tunnels, with Emerald Hill having none. Meanwhile, Emerald Hill uses the corkscrews, which never turn up in Hill Top. Emerald Hill only uses loops on slopes (or to transition to them), whereas Hill Top uses only uses ones on flat ground which end in a spin tunnel. Little differences like these, in addition to the more obvious ones, can really help to give a different feel to the stages, and from what we've been able to observe so far it seems with Cyber City they planned to implement an even greater amount of differences compared to Metropolis.

...To be honest, Hill Top itself could probably have felt even more different if they'd also patched the tiles for the main block shapes in the ground to look like something different, and maybe the checkered background seen in underground spaces. I don't think it would have looked like such an obvious reuse of Emerald Hill assets if they'd done that.

 

It does make me wonder if at one point, more art may have been developed (or at least intended to be developed) for Hill Top.

Update to the tileset I've been working on. I'll probably take a pause on it until we get those better scans. (if someone can tell me how to make these things collapsible, I'd greatly appreciate it)

 

Hez, you hot, sexy BITCH!! That looks incredible.

 

I wonder how those bear traps worked. In my mind, I'd think you'd bop the little ball in the middle, which would act like a bumper and would bounce you out before the trap closed. If you missed, you'd hit the spikes, or if you didn't bop out far enough, you'd get snapped.

 

This might be a dumb question, but whats up with the duplicate floor tiles, with some of them having bits and pieces missing?

Also, unrelated to your post, but do we have any clue what song was for Cyber City? Was there a song ever made for it? I doubt so, because Sand Shower got one (final Oil Ocean), although we have almost nothing on that level besides a level slot, a mock-up, concept art (for Badniks) and music.

 

Ignoring that it got used for Hidden Palace in the remaster, I figure Mystic Cave's 2 Player song would be a good fit. A bit more 'serious' than other tracks, faster paced if the fans/tunnels shot you around a lot and a bit of an electric beat to it that'd suit the 'cyber' theme to the zone.

Also with how much the art of this zone's coming together now I'm wondering if this had been found years earlier if Cyber City also could've been worked into the Taxman Sonic 2 remaster? There's (arguably) more to put together how it'd be in a finalized state than Wood Zone now.

 

Not a dumb question at all. I did this a while ago, and basically copy and pasted parts of Metropolis zone for references for some places. I just kind of threw tiles in at the time to get a good feel for what it should look like. I planned at some point going back in and cleaning it up a bit more while referencing The Machine.

As for music, I'm kind of now in the boat that it may have infact been Death Eggs music. The Machine has some eerie music as well, so it seems this one may also have been going for that route.

 

CPZ music was assigned to GCZ in the Simon Wai prototype. Could it have been a placeholder? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

 

Suppose one day this zone found its way into a future version of Sonic 2 as Hidden Palace did 10 years ago. Where would it fit in? What narrative purpose could it serve? I'm thinking it could work as the launch site for the Death Egg perhaps - or the place where the launch countdown is initiated.

 

I can definitely see it being added the same way as Hidden Palace and being a secret location inside Metropolis.

In fact done that way would likely be a service in two ways for many fans since it could also serve as second route around one of the most drawn out levels in the game.

 

Here's The Machines tiles if anyones interested in seeing if any go unused. The Palette is basically 1:1 for what Cyber City was going to be.



EDIT: Another shower thought....Metropolis absolutely makes no sense for the name of that zone. Like, at all.

 

So I'm just going to point this out...

Did none of you notice Tom himself posted in this thread a few pages ago with an account not used since 2009?

We're probably getting more real scans fairly soon.

Also...
https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1643011664948920320

Frank posted this yesterday, and no one here saw it. More evidence of stuff happening as they talk past all of us.

 

I guess classic Eggy had a thing for giving his bases weird names.

Scrap Brain. Metropolis. Genocide City. Titanic Monarch. Gene Gadget. Panic Puppet. Scrambled Egg


Though at least the names of Metropolis and Genocide/Cyber City tie into each other. Both reference cities, which goes with the fact they're counterparts.

 

I like how it says "INTARESTED" on the bottom

BTW: I called the telephone number listed. It is no longer in service, but it does say it's connected to California

 

Maybe a reference to this old and famous (because it was the first of its genre) movie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)
It takes place in a dystopia and steampunk futuristic city.

 

That's actually probably the simplest but most reasonable explanation given that film has often been influential within Japan's media culture.

 

This has always seemed weird to me but made sense in a typical 1990s-Japanese-video-games-with-English-level-names sort of way. It's a busy level so it's similar to a city even though it isn't in the least a ‘city’ but might make sense through some sort of backwards transliteration or something.