Sonic 1 Review

He can't right now seeing as hes pending approval.

 

do you seriously believe that photo was a hoax?

fucking hell, Lord give me strength if we find another beta....

 

I hope to God Simon approves him. Take a look at the top-left corner of the left piece of paper. The foreground tiles are of Marble Zone, or so it appears, and what the hell is that backround? Mountains and Waterfalls... hm, I think the revies itslef is fake, but I think the pictures are real. I mean, those are actually from a magazine, but the reviewers never really played the game.

 

It's almost the exact same location, but the art is in way higher quality. Also, in the second picture, you can see the spikeball object. Obviously, it's real.

 

Different build. The balls are out of place, and one is over the goodbye sign, while in the other pic Rika provided, one is not.

 

I'm thinking that SEGA had just repositioned the object so it wouldn't be overlaping the 'Good-bye' sign like that, then they eventually took out that 'good-bye'.

Another possibility, is the 'good-bye' was part of the back-ground, and they didn't move it at all, it's just Sonics positioning.

 

Looks like the stars are animated in the background. And I don't think it is done by palette rotation. This is yet again a pattern switch animation like the planets in Marble Zone

EDIT: Look how the Good bye sign has a star over it in the middle image. That's why I believe it's a pattern switch animation.

EDIT: Now I get it. The stars are part of the plane A (256x256 meta blocks), and they are animated with a pattern switch

 

Do you know that those star graphics were found in the final ROM? ICEknight made a nice animated gif.

 

Did he make an animated gif?

I want to see because I know they are part of the foreground level blocks and not part of the background. They are animated like the GHZ flowers.


EDIT: If the stars are uncompressed art, then I'm proven right. Pattern switches can only be done with uncompressed art

 

No, the graphics are compressed.

The original topic on the Cult got lost, but Hivebrain said the animated flowers on the ending of S1 also use compressed art. (not the normal flowers, but the other flowers)

 

It can be compressed if there is room for all the animated frames in VRAM. And there isn't room in the final Sonic 1.

 

Could be why they were taken out.

 

It's called keeping an open mind. I'm attempting to ask valid questions about the article & cartridge, and not just label it a hoax - nowhere DID I call it a hoax. However, with the clarity of the scans, backed up with known prototype shots, I'm inclined now to think of it real.

Something interesting about the spike windmill in the scan - it appears to have more than one arm (check the bottom), whilst in the final version it only has one. Also, the fact that it is coming out of a star bumper is strange. Maybe the Sparkling Zone was more challenging in the prototypes.

 

After looking at the new high resolution scan it looks like the stars in Sparkling are different than those in the final ROM. These have 8 edges instead of 4, and seem to have just two animation frames, one of them being the other one but mirrored.

There seem to be 2 kinds of stars in Sparkling Zone:
-The static 8x8 yellow '+' shaped stars, fixed at some places of the same background plane as the buildings (such as the star in the top right of the building on the left). These seemed to use the same yellow rotating palette as many other background elements but weren't animated at all.
-The (seven?) 16x16 animated purple stars that seem to appear and disappear at random places. These objects used the purple colors of the second palette and only seem to use 4 8x8 tiles for their two animation frames. They can overlap the background graphics as well as other purple stars (as seen in the new scan), but not any other sprites.


Galvatron, can you PLEASE scan the screens in the other half of the article, even if there doesn't seem to be anything wierd going on? Preferably at the same resolution than this scan but saved in PNG.

Also, a non-GIF rescan of the pics in the second page would be nice.

 

Also some of the purple/pink stars are part of the background and not the foreground level blocks because they overlaps!

 

That's one of the reasons why I think it would make more sense if they were sprites.

 

Can you scan just the beta Sparkling Zone image in PNG?

I would love to have it in such a good quality!

 

They use that purple palette line for sure. But they are not sprites. You can't do sprites like that. Sprites need VRAM space too, like compressed art, and those are animated patterns, so unless you find enough room in the VRAM for all those frames (4 patters per star frame), it can't be sprites or uncompressed art.

Like the flowers in GHZ, the tourch(sp?) flames in MZ, the smoke in SBZ act 1, I believe the stars are uncompressed pattern animations used in both the foreground and the background.
The yellow stars are probably static using palette animations like you said.