http://www.hacking-cult.org/s2hack/binary/screen.htm Under "Level Select / Options", I detailed the byte values representing each icon. Notice that they're in the same order as the level select from Pre-Beta through Beta 7. It seems to me they probably put them together sometime during that final month of development.
Makes sense then, I'm very much not a tech person when it comes to that so I appreciate the breakdown! Very informative, also matches with the fact that the level select icons match the final variant of each level (Casino Night being another giveaway of their late addition since it uses the final look)
And the third game is about Time Travel! Coincidence? Yes, probably. Anyway, good point, the first game could have taken an inspiration from Sonic 2, but it depends on how much Cerny was actually involved in the project.
I wonder how early the idea for the ending cutscene in the final was planned. With the original ambitious vision, I can imagine several cutscnes planned for transitions between time periods. PURE speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Is there any new information here that needs to be added to the Sonic Retro Wiki? Please let me know.
There are extremely minute differences with the NA title screen background and Simon Wai's, and their ingame counterparts. Might be of importance
To be honest, I am not exactly sure where to put what information on the development page, I have trouble navigating it. Spoiler
Do you know what bothers me? 2p mode Well, first of all, I don't understand the purpose of the results music. Like, did they seriously make music for this? But on the other hand - this topic sounds too sugary for the level. Seriously, if this topic was a person, then most likely she would be a little girl from the 80s movie, the daughter of the main character, who is being killed/kidnapped and her dad should tear all the villains' asses and avenge her. Second, why is there so little music? Like, if they had a lot of music, then why not take one or two more to choose a level 2p or a special stage? Okay, just kidding. Still, they needed to save space. I am also interested in the logic by which they turned on these levels in 2p mode. Seriously? A cave with a whole bunch of traps? Perfect for the race! Although, the game didn't have that many levels to choose from. My friend CaioST also found recently unused instruments in various tracks in the Simon Wai prototype, in particular boss, metropolis (there is an unused square-like instrument on channel three), and a special stage. Also, all tracks have a manually configured pitch, and when reset, they sound strange. I don't think these things have been documented anywhere.
https://twitter.com/judy_totoya/status/1666282909001728000 In case anyone missed this, Sega JP officially acknowledges the HPZ remake, and Judy comments on how much he liked the visuals and how they regretted losing the stage. Reiterating again that it was cut for time. Translation: From the designer's point of view, the graphics of this stage were very good, so I really wanted to keep it, but due to the schedule, there was no time to implement the map level design, gimmicks, and boss program, so I had no choice but to cut it. I think it was really good that it was realized in this way. We can't be sure, but this hints at the possibility that they at least once thought of adding a boss to the original version of the stage? He also could simply be saying that because a boss was later added to the remake, rather than stating for sure that one was originally planned, as in "There was no time to implement a boss, like the one you see in this 2013 version." Yet another mystery for us to contemplate.
The "In this way" part of his quote seems to further imply that indeed much of 2013 HPZ was reinterpretation and not accurate to what the original plan was (I know this is a bit of a "duh!" moment but still) I always love the occasionally wink and nod from the developers regardless if thats all the information they give. Half of the fun is the speculation
Regarding this, the Sky Chase music sounds like it could go with a calm ocean backdrop, just imagine waves crashing in the background. Which would fit with an oil-less ocean, or a seaside resort. One of the canned levels was themed around that, from what I recall. Aquatic Ruins is interesting because the song is more upbeat in the game and has active percussion and claps added. But if you listen to the original Masa demo, the song is slower and uses flute/string sounds which make it sound like a dead ringer to spaghetti western music. So it makes for a fine desert song.
Big update here, as there's a new article on Beep21 featuring Yasushi Yamaguchi (a.k.a. Judy Totoya) sharing Sonic 2 dev materials, including clear scans (albeit with the name "Genocide City" blurred out wherever it appears) of the now-famous island maps and extra variations that we've never seen before: https://note.com/beep21/n/nc711d5372986 The third image is really interesting, as it clearly shows the 3-Act structure for Genocide/Cyber City seen in the (still unreleased) level maps was still in place at the time the Zone maps were drawn, which I think I'm right in saying we didn't previously think was the case. The first image seems to be an unlabelled duplicate of the final map we had previously (which I've posted the new scan of as the second image here for the sake of clarity), which lists "Genocide City Zone 1" and "Genocide City Zone 2" as the two domes on the right. As you can see, the additional dome for "Genocide City Zone 3" was present all along, but was unlabelled in that version - it looks to me like the map was intended to change between "Zone 2" and "Zone 3" to reflect this time period falling into ruin somehow. Interestingly, aside from the additions of the fire/smoke in the ruined version, the linework is completely identical in a lot of places between all three versions, including little marks and slips of the pen - presumably the unlabelled "normal" version was created in order to use as a base which could be photocopied to produce the other two variants. There's also other development documents (including, I think, the one showing the intended Zone progression in text form - that had one unreadable name in the photos we previously had access to, so hopefully this scan may solve that mystery!), and what seem to be the highest-res scans available of a lot of the colour Zone concepts we've seen previously. Great stuff! More in the article - since it's Japanese language only, if anyone's able to take a crack at translating it that'd be much appreciated...!
Just another quick heads-up - Yamaguchi has also tweeted about this clarifying that, rather than a one-off article, it's actually Part 1 of a multi-part series of articles about the development of Sonic 2. Best to keep an eye on Beep21 going forward, there could me more previously unseen goodies yet to come...!
