Sonic 1 With Fries - Lock!

I don't know whether these are known or not. Super Sonic keeps Sonic's pallette when underwater. Is that normal? Also, Septic Slide's music glitches sometimes, but it sounds awesome when it does. Also in the level, the screen flashes white when the music changes.

I like the lack of signposts at the end. Makes it look like he really is going off to the next part instead of distracting the player with a big sign.

EDIT: Also, forgot that the Ball Hog just exploded instead of just releasing bombs in RRZ.

 

General rules of shading are all well and good, but I much prefer the darker pallete you were using for sonic. By changing it back to the boring old conventional one, you've nailed every subsequent screenshot you've taken right between the eyes with a bland cannon. It may have been some unspoken pixel art taboo, but good practice or not, your old sonic pallete stood out against the endless parade of more conservatively coloured sprites adopted by everyone and their mothers. I'm not saying 'unusual = good, so lets have some violent green sprites' but in this case, it wasn't exactly a stretch of my imagination that Sonic was dark.

As for the rest of the criticism which is being pouring liberally over this hack, it looks like theres a bit of a mob mentality going on here. Thats not to detract from the issues which are being mentioned, the garish palletes for example, have been the subject of scrutiny since the first screenshots of ...with fries were posted. I'm not debating the content, but it does sort of seem like since Tweaker posted his thoughts, there has been an unspoken competition to paraphrase him as closely as possible. Incidentally, the winner is Ice Sonic, who went the whole nine yards with his imitation, from his 'I was so excited - now I'm disappointed' introduction, right down to his closing paragraph, where he finishes sticking the knife in and then throws Afti a bone, just to soften the blow.) I suspect its more to do with people reading posts first and then seeing what they expect to see upon playing, rather than a gleeful ride on a bandwagon. Either way, criticism, no matter how constructive, can be disheartening enough the first time round, without bombarding him with the same problems over and over.

My thoughts? The bugs (which I can say with confidence you have already come across, since I've played this for five minutes and you have been labouring over for considerably more), palletes and placeholder music notwithstanding, this is primarily a layout hack. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that you ensure that these layouts are polished and refined. At the moment, they do offer a fresh challenge to a seasoned sonic 1 player, but they vary in places from straightforward, to masochistically hard, and sometimes it is ambigious which direction you need to travel in order to progress. Concentrating on this is more likely to separate your hack from the pack far quicker than finetuning the pallete of a level which we've already seen a million times anyway. Looking pretty is fine, but if its not fun, people aren't going to play it for long.

 

Under-water waterfall?

You broke physics. I hope you're happy.

 

A 4MB S1 rom? Doesn't matter if it's a hack but @_@ come on <.<.

 

PCM audio by itself is GIGANTIC.

I doubt that the uncompressed chunks REALLY have much to do with it >_>

 

According to you, though, the uncompressed chunks only take up 0.05 of a MB...

Wait, why are we blabbing on about this? Back to the original question; more zones in a hack would rock, in my opinion. More gameplay is almost always good, unless it's boring gameplay that's cliqued.

 

You don't *need* to pad your rom, you know. You can just disable the padder in the batch file and live with a 2.5 megabytes ROM. Most emulators will play it anyway, and if someone wants to play it on real hardware, he can spend 30 seconds of his time padding it by himself.

 

Send the disassembly to a team member so he could work on something for you? If he is an artist, let him do the art and if he is a musician, let him do the music.