Sonic 3 Sales Video

From a quick glance, looks like the parallax water surface background in Hydro City is bugged and, like the prototype we have, Sonic doesn't snowboard in IceCap Act 1.

 

Did we not know if this build still had the old Hydrocity Act 1 BG? It looks like they replaced it by this point.

It would also be nice to know whether or not they added the MJ/Buxer tracks when we find the VHS or prototype (whatever one comes first).

 

Huh. So Knuckles' platform there was originally made up of those circular blocks from the speed boosters and the Ball Shooter boss. This is news to me, was this already known?

It looks silly how his feet appear to be hovering on the air. Although I reckon the animation of the platform wobbling and falling apart when the Death Egg launches would have looked less ridiculous. In the final it looked like a janky attempt at simulating rotation.

 

This is actually a feature shared with the 1103 Prototype, but not the restored Sonic 3 VHS prerelease footage. Therefore, this prototype is somewhere inbetween those two.

 

The Ice Cap part is quite fun - so weird that they included a shot of Sonic abruptly stopping, semi-clipping into the terrain, in a promotional video!

 

Another thing I just noticed is that we see a shot of Carnival Night in the dark, but in a section that, in the final, is underwater, before hitting the blocks that would lower the water level to drain this area.

This means that, by this point, while the lights out sequence was implemented, the water rising that goes with it was not.

EDIT: The spot also says “Six huge zones”, not seven. Flying Battery’s long gone by this point, and since this prototype still has distinct 1103 similarities, it therefore wouldn’t surprise me if 1103’s Flying Battery was nothing more than a leftover by that point in development, akin to Sonic 2’s Hidden Palace and Wood Zones.

 

I’ve always suspected that part was never meant to have water initially, both because of the utterly useless electric shield and the presence of those electric badniks, which makes very little sense underwater.

 

I’m a little confused about the electric shield - isn’t the shield box in this part a water shield? Is there an electric shield box in the part immediately before the Knux cutscene?

 

Okay. So looking through the video again and going through Silver Sonic 1992's recent videos regarding showing, at the time, newly documented magazine scans and shots. Screenshots line up with most, if not all, of the footage from this VHS tape.

Two examples are from the January 1994 issue of Die Hard Game Fan (Volume 2, Issue 2) and VideoGames - The Ultimate Gaming Magazine Issue 62 (March 1994)

According to Silver Sonic 1992. The screenshots were "apparently sourced from a VHS tape that was also seen in advertisement footage for Epcot Innoventions 1994."

Both of SS1992's images vids were released within the last 3 weeks. Here's the first part:

 

From my knowledge of how Sonic 2 works, it's entirely possible this is just the Sega screen taken directly from Sonic 2. The problem comes from the fact that that Sonic's graphics were updated from his Sonic 2 design to his Sonic 3 design, since Sonic 2 actually scales up the in game graphics directly rather than having a pre-scaled tileset.

 

It was changed in 3K. In vanilla 3A final, it is an electric shield instead. It is after the cutscene. You immediately lose it by going underwater, only to face electric enemies there.

 

Nah, it was an electric shield in S3 vanilla too. I just checked.

 

Sonic and Tails’ sprites were already remapped entirely by the 1103 build. S2’s by necessity used 8x16 tiles for the interlaced mode for splitscreen. They were already refactored to use 8x8s with empty tiles removed.

 

Speaking of utterly useless electric shields; the one used in the ICZ portion of this promo video doesn't seem functional. Right around 1:05'ish, Sonic runs underneath a set of rings with the shield activated yet they're not attracted towards him — or if they are, it was delayed here and got edited out. Just a small observation.

 

I've not had a chance to check out the video myself yet - is there any evidence the Lightning Shield has its double-jump ability implemented in the Sales Video build, or is it still acting like a Sonic 1/2 shield (i.e. with no extra double-jump abilities) like in the 1103 proto?

From concept art shown in Sonic Origins, we know that the shield's two abilities from the final game were originally conceived for two separate shields - the double-jump was supposed to be the only ability of the Lightning Shield, with the ring attraction ability instead assigned to a separate Magnet Shield (similar to the Sonic Adventure and Sonic Advance games). If it has the double-jump already but not the ring attraction, that could be an indication that the decision to combine those two shield ideas came fairly late in the development process.

EDIT: Just checked, and typically the Lightning Shield is the only one where there's no footage shown of its abilities in-use...! The double-jump moves for the Fire Shield and Water Shield do appear to have been implemented, however, so while that suggests the Lightning Shield's double-jump should have been in by this point, without actual footage of it we can't say either way.

 

There are so many bugs shown off within such a short video that it makes me wonder: is it possible that this video was largely put together from existing footage that was recorded by testers in order to report bugs?

Now, I realise that some of that video's oddities only stick out as wrong to me because I know they're different from how the final game turned out.

But even so, you'd think that if game footage was going to be specially recorded for the known purpose of making a promotional video, the people recording the gameplay and editing the video would try to focus on clips that looked finished, and avoid things that were a bit janky.