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

We still had development materials related to Genocide City, along with interviews, and its reused assets in Spinball. There was proof of its existence as a separate zone.

That's where your argument falls apart. When Sky Chase and Sky/Wing Fortress were added, they were given proper names, not the names of the level slots they took. The same deal with Metropolis Zone act 3 over Tropical Sun. These were also not entirely new, complex zones: They were 1 act gimmick zones with evidence suggesting they reused cut zone assets.

EDIT- To further emphasize this, Sky Chase went over Death Egg and Death Egg was moved to over Genocide City. This wasn't simply a matter of adding a name to a blank slot, they actually changed the names.

Apologies, I misunderstood you there.

 

Did not intend to start yet another Dust Hill debate lol

But then again, doesn't this entire forum owe its existence to discourse about this zone?

And I agree, a Dust Hill -> Madness Mountain -> Mystic Cave evolution line sounds pretty far-fetched to me. Were it not for that awkward middle man of a castle level, I'd totally buy a Dust Hill/Mystic Cave connection.

 

One thing I'd like to know is why level slots were created for levels which weren't really far in development. Why did Dust Hill get a level slot but not Ocean Wind? How far did a level have to be in development to get a level slot? I'd appreciate a Sonic wizard enlightening me!

 

There were level slots for most planned zones, Ocean Wind included, but the level select screen didn't list all.

They probably listed only those that were already being worked on, or were about to be worked on, due to screen space. They might have figured that as they implemented more zones they would add them to the level select screen, and eventually implement scrolling on said screen, or perhaps redesign it (which they ended up doing).

 

I think people tend to forget different teams worked on different parts. The slots were probably done by a separate part of the team. It's the same reason Hidden Palace has a level select icon.

 

I think the slots were created with the original plan in mind for a crap-ton of levels. By the time the level select was created, they had shifted to a new crap-ton-lite plan. Then by August/September, they shifted again to crap-ton-ultra-lite. To me, that level select reflects their thinking. But when those slots were reserved, the level select probably wasn't established yet.

 

Anybody wants to talk about interesting sonic 2 things? Anybody? No? Oh...ok...

 

Ocean Wind does have a level slot...it's just not in the level select.

A better question would be, is there even enough room to fit every level on the level select? This screen is pretty cramped.

 

That's basically what I said above. They probably put only the levels they needed access to at the time due to limited screen space. Most of the empty levels weren't included, as they hadn't started working on them yet.

 

When did they switch from the Sonic 1 style level select to the new Sonic 2 style?

 

Beta 7


Btw, I read tcrf, translated page, and find the info that devs put new zone before death egg in the second dev document....

Neo Green Hill mystery now is solved???

 

Hold on, can you elaborate?

 

https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(Genesis)/Scrapped_Zones#Future

 

Here is my attempt at removing the scribble (fortunately a very simple pattern, easy to identify) and fill in the blank portions. Unfortunately, I haven't the foggiest fucking clue how to read kanji, but maybe someone can make sense of this and figure out what the characters actually are supposed to be (and more importantly, what it means).

 

wtf isn't that Hebrew

 

Whatever that says, it's definitely not "Neo Green Hill".

 

Just plugged the image into Google Translate and uh

Mind you again the ruined future map shows most of the island on fire...

 

I think the third character is supposed to be 凶, to my knowledge there isn't a version of that character with just one line in the box. The first one might be 乂 or a VERY sloppy メ but I can't make heads or tails of anything else.

Every combination I get though seems to lean towards something with a negative connotation however, so food for thought.

 

The idea that Neo Green Hill might be yet another concepted zone unrelated to anything else, and the only reason we've assumed that was ARZ's original title was it contains grass, is so funny I'm legitimately laughing.

 

"Mountain of fire" zone...fire mountain zone...Fire Hill Zone?!