Possibly notable, most likely not There are no jumping badniks in the final version of Sonic 1. But there is... evolution?
Which has gotten me thinking... I wonder if in some small way "needle mouse" is kind've a pun on another famous cartoon character: Mickey Mouse (considering they're relatively similar, and they both wear the same gloves)? SEGA wanted a character that can compete with Mario, so why not choose something that is similar in style to Mickey Mouse.
...But we were just saying that SEGA seems to have never really used "Needlemouse" until Sonic 4. Something like that might have been the reason for the TV show guys to fuck up on the translation, though.
I think needlemouse is just the literal translation of the japanese word for hedgehog. (So Mr. Hedgehog would be a better name for his early days.) which reminds of that 06 cutsceen that Eggman compares Sonic to a mouse, him beeing a "needlemouse", that sounded extra lame in the english. (which Eggman said just Hedgehog instead.)
I love your take on recreating the monster guy, Iceknight's as well. I'm curious as to if these enemies had names in this point of development.
I kept wondering why that badnik looked familiar. One good night of sleep and an eclectic dream later. Reggie!
So I noticed that in this shot that we have had for years, look at the clouds. They are overlapping tree. Just like the new shot with the japanese text. Also, if you look at all four shots we have, you will never see clouds behind tress. So I now believe that the Japanese text was in the ROM and for some reason all the clouds were in th foreground like the rocks and trees.
Is it me? or does the run sprite look alittle different too? Gosh just soo many new things to learn about this build out of new screenshots. we can study them for days and still keep an interest.
Yes, you are absolutely right! That's a discovery! Hmm, we must count for the sprite limit of the Genesis VDP hardware. It is obvious the Japanese text is not sprites, so it is probably a 256x256 meta block that scrolls with the level. The bottom palmtrees and rocks are too many horizontally stacked, so if those were sprites a few sprites would disappear, so they must be scroll A. Scroll B is then used for the floor that Sonic's running on, and low priority for the background. That means that the background is moving the same speed as the "floor" foreground (both sharing Scroll B). That makes the red text scroll with the level layout and background at the same time. The clouds might be part of Scroll A, or sprites (as long as there are no more than two at the screen at once, and the size is not too great, but I can't be sure about that fact!). With the fact that the clouds are overlapping the palmtrees, it is very difficult to imagine that demo looking any good in action 7 scroll layers might have been possible if there weren't any sprite limits or order restrictions between Scroll B and Scroll A High and Low plane. I wish we could get more infor about this demo from Naka himself. EDIT: I forgot you can still use scroll RAM or the H-int to split BGs into scroll stripes. That means the bottom clouds that overlap the palmtrees are of Scroll A but scrolling at a different speed than the Scroll A front palmtrees and the stone. Because the top clouds are being overlapped by the bottom clouds, they must belong to Scroll B but of course scrolling at a different speed than the palmtrees that are behind Sonic. Sonic is between Scroll B's low (back palmtrees) and high (grass) planes. BUT I can't explain the red text overlapping the back palmtrees, unless the red text and the palmtrees of that same plane is just art, like drawn together. ============ On another note, I decided to clean up the CES 1991 Sonic 1 prototypes videos so that you can (almost) see pixel movements and (almost) all frames: http://www.logotypes.se/sonic/LOst_S1_CES_1991_50_percent_speed_720p.avi Youtube can't keep the same quality, but here it is (watch as 720p full screen): The early build (the debug coordinates) must have come from Sega, as video media! That video might still be around, and might have more coverage! It has water color the same as sky color and backdrop border color. And Sonic is not fully developed "Naka-certificated", as the frame he jumps, his bounding box Y offset change happens one frame before the jump animation kicks in. But that is not all. The bridge translates Sonic wrong. How it is wrong, I can only guess, and I guess it is one frame lag. This build is so interesting because it would really show how much trouble naka went through to order Sonic's bounding box changes, and how he first developed the interactions that became the foundation of his Sonic games. He has stated that this development time was his best times as a programmer because it was so difficult to tune everything in. That build would testify the difficulties of creating Sonic from scratch and really show how much of a geneious Naka was. However, just because the HUD says RING instead of RINGS doesn't mean it is just one build of Sonic 1. The playable build of Sonic 1 that was available at CES 1991 is not the same build, as the backdrop border color is now light blue (the same as the water color), to cover up the nasty water scroll tile update bug. It is still a "RING" HUD prototype, and still has the purple sunflowers palette, but this build is possibly a much later one!
His early full-speed running animation looks similar to the SMS one, in a sort of horizontal squished sort of way.
Very interesting: changing monitors! Notice how the monitor changes from being an Eggman monitor to being a life monitor then, at the last few frames of the monitor being on-screen, into a 10-ring monitor. Edit: and the second monitor comes from being a static monitor into being an Eggman monitor.
The icons are just the the order of how their frames are stored in the sprite tables. Then it is just a matter of making a simple animation script to cycle through all of them. All with the purpose for the artists to see their art ingame. A placeholder before the monitors are used/working. Sorry but the CES 1991 Sonic topic got so old it was auto locked. So most of the info has already been discussed before.
LOst, what's going on with the clock? It's probably well-known information, but exactly why is it flipping around like crazy?
It looks like that perhaps at one point Dr Robotnik may have had a different suit to wear. In all of the original monitors his body is a dark blue, whereas his head is the same. Robotnik boxes don't even show up in Sonic The Hedgehog at all, only in garbled forms. It seems odd that they would put a random colour of blue in such a place beneath Robotnik's head in the monitors. Perhaps at that stage they hadn't finalized his design, as he went through many. Brilliant video, it really shows the image quite clearly, and it's obvious the game would have been vastly different. Things really were changed right up until the game was released.
...Here's the old topic LOst mentioned, since you guys seem to have missed it for some reason (perhaps it should have been archived). Some illustrated info I gathered back then: Original link for the videos, here.
Whether or not the clouds being in the foreground is a mistake, it gives it the zone more of a "high in the mountains" feeling like Sky High Zone where the clouds are passing right by you. It's kind of cool. Well, it looks to me like it's flat-shaded with fewer colours of blue, more like a cartoon than the 3D look from the final. ...Also, I just noticed the palm trees are different, too.
I never watched the entire video, just the Sonic-specific clips from this. However, I noticed something VERY interesting! Remember how Green Hill Zone music starts out differently on that Sonic 1 & 2 soundtrack that was recently released? Go to 20:00 in that video and listen! =) EDIT: Okay, it doesn't sound exactly the same, but listening to it many times over, it doesn't sound edited at all. It's definately different though.
Um, hate to shit on a theory, but to the left of the palmtree in the second shot is a waterfall not present in the first. even accounting for scrolling, it's doubtful the background moved THAT much.
I'm still far from convinced that the Japanese text is actually rendered in the game. I still think that it's magazine artists doing what they do best, sprucing up images. I think the text was pasted in and they cut out areas to make it look like it was behind the objects in the game. Here's two poor exhibits of why I think they're not in the game. I think that the text's curves are far too clean and accurate for them to be sprites in game. Specifically the one on the top, it has a smooth gradual curve that seems to me like it'd use a lot more pixels to render than the system could reasonably handle. If you look closely, the top of the bottom bit of the cloud is as dark as the sky, but is layered on top of the red text. I think that was an oversight of the person who was cutting out the text, not something that was in the original sprite. My arguments don't have enough technical basis to validate them, but hopefully this points out something to someone who can explain it better.
