Is the speedway an act? If so, there's a particularly nasty (especially for a FIRST FREAKING ZONE) platform jump I need to slap you for. :3
I must say, this is obscenely good. The mission system itself is amazing, the layouts are astounding and give an actual purpose to each move, the artwork is beautiful.. this is one amazing hack. I actually got right to the end without cheating (yes, I actually cleared a load of missions, go me. :D) The hidden things outside of the levels are a lovely addition too. A few things, though. :U As always.. The rotating palette in Cascade Valley looks a little.. off, as some of the water uses 3 entries and others 4. It makes the water look very odd on the 3-entry falls. Something about the emerald sound after completing every mission irks me.. I think something like the Sonic Jam mission complete sound would be better. Has the wallkick's power been gimped since your last video showing it? Some of the things you did I can't actually reach far enough for.. or there have been collision changes to the tiles. I can't tell which.
I completely agree with you here. DNX did some art touch-ups to the level, but it required a custom layer deformation that I didn't have time to implement before the contest, so it's sitting on the wayside. I don't remember if it cleaned the waterfalls, but I remember that it edited the water touching the mountains in the background. Classic sound is classic, sorry. That's here to stay unless I hear something that causes an audiogasm. It hasn't changed at all, I can assure you. Maybe I had a Speed Sneaker active? The tempo change is fickle as always, so you might not know it. I have an idea I want to entertain for that issue before I jump on the bandwagon and give it theme music. Welcome to 2009, bitch. You've had 17 years to practice this game. :P I'm more than willing to budge on the requirements to access new zones -- after all, the only beta tester I had to judge difficulty was myself (and DNX, but I never really heard any mission feedback from him), so I'll listen to the masses on this one -- but general zone difficulty is set in stone. I'm catering to a crowd that's beaten Sonic 2 a hundred times over, so I'll be tough by hopefully fair. And hey, you have infinite lives. :P *shot* It's looking like I might end up re-releasing this a week from now with lower completion requirements. Ah well.~
Fair enough. :P Pfft. I say leave it. It's a huge challenge, yes, but that's what makes it fun. All those people who can't work it out are just lame. :U *runs* EDIT: Oh, one more thing I forgot to nag about. Are the mission objectives screens going to be kept like that or made more beautiful? Something about them screams "placeholder" right now.
I'm going to agree with Jayextee - obviously, since he was agreeing with me! Mario 64 is a good comparison, in that during the first few levels you were practically tripping over stars. However, there were still a few hard to get ones that you could either stay and keep trying at or continue onto the next level. Seeing the mission list for the first time, I thought they'd be in order of difficulty, so I tried for the time attack first and failed miserably on numerous attempts. Something tells me that it should be quite easy (1 minute?), to get the player off to a good start. Add in another couple of simpler ones like the one I actually managed to get and the player is soon progressing, rather than stuck on the first level. If you start ramping up the emerald requirements later then he/she may decide to come back and attempt a few more, which is one of the great things about this mission system. The player still sees everything you've worked on, just with a bit more variety and without so much of the feeling of being stuck on one level for hours. To summarize, I don't want to win by holding right, I just want myself and others to see all of this hack and not give up too early!
Pretty much everything I've said about this hack in the past applies now—the art is brilliant, the layouts are phenomenal and extremely well thought-out and creative, and the music choices are just as fitting as ever. You very well may have created one of the most unique and enjoyable ROM hacks in the entire history of the Sonic scene, so well done—you deserve it. A couple of minor niggles with this release, though... I didn't like that the mission system became a mandatory requirement for progressing to the next level. Several of the missions are either beyond my skill level or level of general patience, and I either can't be bothered to figure out how to beat them or I simply don't want to. I don't think the inability to progress should be a consequence of preference; it ruins for me what would be an otherwise brilliant playing experience. A welcome alternative would be to provide incentive to collect emeralds through means of unlockable levels per-zone—based on the number of emeralds you can obtain through a particular zone, you can unlock up to three new acts or something. In addition, at the end of the game, the number of emeralds you've collected will determine whether or not you're able to access the "true" final level or something like that; alternatively, you could pull a Spyro the Dragon and have a bonus level full of goodies and a unique challenge for any players who were completest enough to get all of the emeralds possible. Stuff like that. The other problem I had was minor, but nonetheless pertinent—I think the use of the spring tricks are a bit scarce. I hadn't found much use to them except in a select few areas, and I generally feel as if I don't particularly need them to progress normally and forget they exist as a result. I would suggest trying to introduce a large benefit factor in using the skills as they were in Sonic Advance 2; that way, their use can be encouraged a lot more. I also think you should introduce a sound effect and frame delay to the skills upon execution just like in SAdv2 so there's better indication that you just performed them, as well as a small amount of time in which you can properly aim the character towards the proper destination. All in all, though, this is still one of my favorite hacks of all time. Keep up the fantastic work!
^ Regarding your minor problem with spring tricks, remember that the real game won't start you with any abilities outside of normal Sonic 2 moves, jump dash (obligatory), and curling into a ball in midair. Metropolis's second area in particular demands a good grasp of midair actions, because it's late in the game and the full version will have had them learned by them. I received a request for a sub-0:40 time attack of the first level. Here's an 0:33 for Gens Rerecording (done without rerecording, though), and my best is 0:29, but I'll never have that run again. Back up your SRAM if you've going to watch: I hit Continue so that you could uncheck the option to clear SRAM while playing it and get the emerald for free, but who knows if it'll work. If anybody would prefer a .giz recording I can do that as well. In any case, the video walkthrough will come soon enough.
I've found only like 6 emeralds in the 5 stages so far, I can't for the life of me figure a route to get all the emerald monitors cause the game is too fast to find them, and I'm always 1,000 points or so off from the first stage's score attack. Damn if this isn't already one of my favorites, though.
I love this, it's so incredibly fun, and the art for Cascade Valley is really nice. The mission mode, while it potentially has downsides, actually makes the game more fun, at least to me. The wallkick works really well, and it's one of the things I'd like to see used more in hacks to the point where it's lame. And Eggman in the second act with his "run-the-fucking-hedgehog-over" technique actually made me giggle. I did manage to uncover a glitch, though. You can completely circumvent the boss this way.
Damn, I'm stuck on 21...need 30 to get past Casino Night. Are CNZ and HTZ going to stay 1 act zones? Also I really hope your new ARZ is in this.
I've actually tried to patch that -- notice that the spring you were using is actually on top of a second spring resting in the floor that stops you from falling through. The fact that you managed to hit it at just the right angle to get around it is... well, I guess I hafta patch it even farther. I didn't want to use invisible wall objects because you can't wallkick when you touch them, but I guess it's not really a problem there, so I'll patch it tighter. There's another spring-under-a-spring patch in the Cascade Valley hub, on top of the loop. That one used to let you spindash into the wall on your left after phasing through the spring, killing you. Your position would register as (0,0) upon death, and that would be close enough to a level entrance to send you to said level. @Ashura: No, Aquatic Ruin is not in this. The layer deformation for DNX's new art is a work in progress. The only thing that was truly finished in ARZ is the boss area, which is finished no longer because the tall objects look wallkick-able but aren't (I could code around that, though). CNZ and HTZ will not stay that way, but when I noticed that I had exactly two acts without twins, it seemed logical to make a zone out of it. That's why there's no progress barrier in Hill Top. You're near the end, btw... that's the last door. I'm saying that beforehand to avoid leaving you disappointed when the beta hits an anticlimax, not because I like spoilers. There is a prize for getting every emerald, though... nothing too special, but enough people have asked for it for me to put it in.
I've been playing this for roughly ten minutes, got two emeralds, and I must say, this hack is absolutely fantastic. The art, the music, the everything. And with this difficulty, I'll be spending heaps much time with this game. Seaching for the emmies is heaps hard. xD Just one request-thingie though; please keep Cascade Valley's second act's music. I shed a tear while listening to it, it's that epic. Please.
Heh, found a glitch right at the Chemical Plant overworld. Right before the Emerald barrier it is. If you make a spindash at that dash panel, you'll roll to the right very fast, then up to the loop and trough it. If I touched that barrier with full-speed, I died. EDIT: Found another one. After I got that special stage at Chemical Plant Zone, and if I won that emerals, VRAM of the HUD and Rings will be messed up in Act 1 or 2.
From what I played so far, this is one of the most outstandingly well-done (like a good steak kind of well-done 8D ) hacks I've played and the only mod of Sonic 2 I actually like (considering I don't like the source-game to begin with, this says a bit, I guess). It's fair, it's fun, it's fast. The soundtrack's well chosen and doesn't ever seem out of place. The mission-system and hub-worlds are kickassery to the max and the level designs are so vast and explorable... I was speechless the first time around. Eventually, I was like "Finally! A FAST Sonic game!" And even after playing a stage 5 or 6 times, there's still new stuff to find. : D Kickass job. Keep it up, please.
Right, so here's a new release with some bugfixes. * Casino Night Zone's overworld exit barrier should no longer crash the game, although it seemingly happened at random before so it might just be avoiding me. * The special stage has the results screen put back in, so that the HUD loads properly afterwards. * Dying in Casino Night Zone's main act now sends you back to the correct overworld. * More invisible barriers were added around the glitch Emerald Spirit videoed. One of three things might happen: the glitch will still occur, the glitch won't occur, or you'll start to zip through the wall only to be crushed by the invisible barriers and die. Who knows? Scratch that, you still slide right through. Man, if I could wallzip through invisible wall objects on TSC, I'd be awesome... so why does it only work here? At the very least, it's not an obstructive glitch... the odds of doing it by accident are ridiculously low, and the glitch is beneficial to the player. :P You two will be pleased to know that there's two more NiGHTS-based tunes in the game, although only that one was touched up by Tweaker and is therefore any good. :P There's a third that's in the sound test (which you can't access), but it's so horridly voiced atm that I don't feel like making it accessible.
Any chance of this hack being made into a .bin file as well as a .gen file? I cannae run it due to not being able to run Kega (Due to not owning an Intel Mac (inb4 "BUY AN INTEL MACK DERP DERP DERP!1!1!1112345666)).
