Oh ho ho ho... trust me, they are not. The boosters essentially function like they do in the Rush special stages. In fact, they're almost the same, except the fact that Tails is there, you have that rubber-band gimmick, you can speed up, the and movement is sluggish enough to feel like it's a different special stage entirely...
I was trying to do this earlier, but every time an act specific item is about to show up on screen (in my case, the pulleys in SHZ3) the game crashes. Also, for some reason now after collecting all the Emeralds Death Egg refuses to load. It stalls infinitely on the loading screen. EDIT: Oh Lordy, Super Sonic has E1 physics!
GUYS GUYS THEY PUT SPHERES IN THE SPECIAL STAGE THAT LAUNCH YOU HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD FOR NO REASON, WHAT THE FU I love the special stages to death. The music is peppy, the challenge is obviously there, it may not be the best recreation but it's probably a bad thing to recreate it perfectly. One, people would complain that it's too much a rehash. Two, that's not really taking advantage of new hardware.
You would think with how much they're trying to suck the old games off, they'd get the fucking spindash and rolling sounds correct...
I would say they are on par with each other. The work is lazy as well as the ideas. If there is ever an Episode 3, I don't think they would hesitate to use the blue sphere special stage.
Don't worry though, just like Ep 1, the "Restart the special stage while in the special stage" glitch is still abusable. So if you know you're going to fail, simply restart some more.
"Shitty" instruments aside, I rather like this mix. For a moment it took me awhile to recognize but it's kind of like "Aquatic Ruins Act II". Where did you get it from?
I know that, that's pretty freaking obvious, but my point still stands, the instrumentation is terrible. :p
Spoiler [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=Z2JdZT7zJ-I[/video] Not seeing enough love for this track. This gives me a lot of Sonic 3D Blast Genesis Boss v2 vibe, which I love. This one needs a proper soundfont remake. Overall, the game doesn't look too bad. I'd even go as far as to compare it to Sonic Advance 3, and not just for the Sonic and Tails tag team. A lot of the level design seems to feel like it. Seems decent enough for a $10 sale price, $15 is pushing it.
Looks are different from actually playing it. Having actually played it, I can say that they're better. Significantly? Not really, but they fixed the biggest offenders (stopping on a dime, wall standing, and momentum). Rolling/spindash is still pretty weak. Actually Casino Street plays really well in Episode Metal because it has momentum now, so Metal bounces off of the springs and bumpers. They even have a little section at the beginning where you get to bounce around bumpers. As far as physics, think more along the lines of Generations 3DS only with a weaker spindash. Also funny thing I noticed. in Episode Metal, Metal Sonic stands on slopes like Sonic did in Episode 1. Sonic doesn't do this in Episode 2 though. Not quite sure why it works like that.
If you swap Sonic's E2 model, animations and textures with the originals from E1 he'll stand on slopes in that awkward way again. EDIT: Fuck, how did I miss spell "animations" as "animetions"? Like, srsly
So if you replaced Metal Sonic's Episode Metal with (I'm assuming exists) his Ep 2 model and textures, would he still stand in that awkward way?
But here's the thing... After watching all the videos before Episode 1 launched, it played exactly the way I imagined when I finally got my hands on it. You could very plainly see how clunky the jumping mechanics were, how stunted his airborne (AND running) acceleration was... how mechanical the gravity and rebound physics were. (Where's IceKnight, he knows what I'm talking about. I wish you could tag forum members in posts and have it notify them like facebook lol) The "stopping on a dime" aspect of Episode 1 was hideous, it ruined any kind of flow to the game. It was as if the people developing it never let go of the D-pad when playing the older games... which is unfathomable. THe wall-standing was just a byproduct of how running paths were programmed, a glaringly obvious indicator that the game had no actual intelligent physics engine beneath the surface. The momentum issues were a result of the fact that every action they ubilt into the game was rigidly scripted instead of allowing Sonic to act as an individual object interacting with factors in an environment. I don't see how they could have "fixed" those unless they rebuilt the game from the ground up. Generations was a lot better, but still obvious that they missed some of the intricacies involved. Still don't know what the Metal Sonic stuff is, I haven't paid any deliberate attention to Episode 2's progress outside of occasionally stumbling across a trailer. But I can't believe they still don't know how to program a ball rolling down a god damned hill. I guess I'll just have to wait for it to be released. I still refuse to buy episode 1, and have sincere doubts about episode 2... so I'm not losing sleep over any of this, I'm just disappointed that they seem to be putting so much effort into it but it's still gonna play as stilted as a fucking Turrican game.