Oh because stretching everything would help (and let's not forget about the awesome not-slippery and ultra precise controls S3D has). Also: performance issues.
It would help seeing more stuff around the player, which was the main problem why this was ditched, yes.
The console would display more things around the player, but with the stretching, actually perceiving the surroundings would be a lot harder. The game uses a fake 3D, and with the stretching, running upwards would feel really slow and sideways ultra fast, it would look even more fake. Now imagine trying to hit an enemy or capture a flicky with that distortion. Seeing less is the lesser problem -- Have you ever noticed how weird a loop-de-loop looks in Sonic 2 2P mode? At least you can just hold -> and you'll go through the loop, now imagine that but present in every single corner you take.
^ I have to agree. Squashed screens are pretty awkward, which was why Sonic 3's Competition mode used a zoomed out view instead, and why Mania's was a step back in that aspect. They would have been even worse in Sonic 3D, as it uses an isometric angle and has diagonal movement, so they would have made it extremely awkward to control.
Isometric squashed sounds terrible, no thank you. And that wouldn't have been a problem with Mania if the multiplayer was online now would it :v:
I don't have anybody to play local multiplayer with, but setting my TV to 4:3 was already the thing I was planning to do whenever the time comes.
Knuckles' Emerald Hunt has two-player, and all of the relevant custom spritework had to be made 2P-compatible. SonLVL also supports 2P-friendly level creation, so that's covered too. I also believe there was (is?) an unreleased project that actually did port levels from S1 and the like to S2's two-player. I'd say it's less 'people don't know how it works', and more 'people don't have friendswant to play multiplayer'. I mean, just look at Sonic Bash in that one Hacking Contest, it just got ignored.
Hadn't noticed until now that Sonic seems to have inbetween diagonal angles (as in, twice as many possible angles as the final version) with this control method. Neat.
I have actually thought about how well (or not) tank controls would work in a Sonic game. Theoretically, it should provide the most direct control over the character, vs. being relative to the camera. Would be an interesting experiment, but you'd have to figure out a good camera scheme. First person is out of the question (unless you don't spin the view when rolling, but then that's not really accurate, now is it?).
Sonic R - you can hold B to accelerate and use the D-Pad to turn. (p.s. I'm not really sure where the term "tank controls" came from - surely the vast majority of racing games* have the same basic control scheme, it's just the camera that's different) (*or driving a vehicle in real life!)
I think the main idea behind "tank controls" is that you can turn around in place before moving forward.
I've always hated tank controls on anything other than racing games TBH. I really don't see a game Sonic game working with them.
Tank controls were useful for early 3D when you didn't have analogue controllers - the alternative is being restricted to eight-way movement, which is often worse. There's no place for them in modern times outside of first/third-person shooters (where the camera is always facing in the same direction as the player anyway) and racing games.
A rare two-part version of 3D was made for the Sega Channel apparently (I didn't knew of this myself), and Mr. Burton has uploaded footage of it this evening.
Wow. They had to split the game because it wouldn't fit into the adapter's memory. There aren't any specs on the Sega Retro page for Sega Channel, so the adapter must have had less than 4MB avaliable for games. We can asume games with equal (or more? Don't know if a +4MB cartidge exists) size would have to be splitted somehow in order to get into the service. What an interesting piece of history! Mr. Burton sure is a cool guy. Makes me wonder why they went through the development effort of splitting the game; surely someone way up wanted Sonic 3D Blast in the service no matter what.
