Sonic Jam commentaries tell all~

I think any relations of time travel made that occur between levels in the final game are purely coincidence. The idea is that any levels related to time travel were canned—anything else is groundless and doesn't make much sense.

 

Well it does make SOME sense Tweaker. I mean why bother canning a level that's perfectly good if you can just use it without the original concept? Wood Zone was kind of...meh, for example. The work was a little off so why not can it? Combining its quality with the lack of time-travel, I'm not surprised it got canned. But Hill Top is a perfectly good level that was getting good development. Why bother getting rid of something they sunk such good effort into? Though, I'm not sure Hill Top was a variant of Emerald Hill personally, I'm just saying it's an example if it was.

All I'm saying is it wouldn't be right to simply ignore the idea that levels originally made for the time-travel concept were left in the game, simple based on the fact that they were good levels that would be wasted if just tossed out with the time travel concept.

 

Wait, what are you talking about? You just agreed with me, but acted like you disagreed with me.

Are you trying to say that the springs in Hill Top are a carryover from Wood Zone? Because those were there in the earliest prototype of Sonic 2 we have. There's no relation.

If you had any idea how data was read from a CD, you'd know why there needs to be loading on a disc-based media system. For the Sega CD, programs need to be loaded from the CD into ProgramRAM so they can be run, and programs are a max of 256kb per program. There are plenty of reasons for loading, and the CD drive in the Sega CD was only 2x max—a loading screen would provide something to make the transition seem like it's taking less time.

 

No no no, what I'm saying is the idea that some levels made for the time travel concept could very well be levels in the final. For all we know, some of our levels in the final might be future or past versions of canned levels, ya know? All I'm putting out there is that the idea shouldn't be totally ignored or blown off. I'd keep it in the back of our heads in case the day comes, such as what happened here, that there's a revelation and we find out it's true.

 

Wait... what?

He was saying the springs maybe leftovers of the time travel idea. If they were in the earliest prototype we have then he may have a point...

His comment about Wood Zone was just that no only was it a time travel level, it no longer fitted (even in the Wai Beta the tile designs (not layout) look oddly out of place in comparison to all the other levels)

...gah, beaten to it...

 

Oh... no. No relation. That's when you cross the line from plausible theory to pulling-shit-out-of-your-ass-because-you-think-it-makes-sense. There is some tangible evidence to suggest that the scrapped levels could have, and were related to time travel in some form. There is nothing to suggest that there were any links between the levels that made it to the final game, and with good reason—because there weren't.

You can grasp at straws all you want, but that doesn't make it any less plausible.

 

OK, well fair enough. But some of the "spring traps" that force you to move back and forth over and over make sense in line with the time travel theory. I would suggest that those would imply time travel was in the game at some point. Or at the very least, very close to being in the game.

 

What's to say you are right about the links between the scrapped levels? You linked final levels to scrapped ones remember... Metropolis -> Wood Zone?

What's to say Hill Top didn't have a scrapped variant?

 

Because it didn't. The technical evidence (number of level slots), the practical evidence (magazine scans, testimonies), and any line of reasoning would show that the levels we know about are the only available scrapped levels that ever had any concrete plans to be put into the game. As such, Hill Top would not have had a variant, especially since it's one of the earliest levels and didn't have any insinuations that time travel had anything to do with it.

Remember, the time travel in Sonic 2 would have been different. Sort of like in Shadow the Hedgehog, but less gay; certain things you did in the game would lead you to a different version of the level. No Sonic CD-esque mid-game transition stuff—they were separate zones, just based around the same area.

 

How are we even sure Sonic 2 would have used the same method of warping that Sonic CD did?

 

Personally, I see no evidence on either side, but your willing to slap people for conclusions you yourself seem to have made in earlier posts in this same thread.

I don't see how we know anything of how the time travel worked or what levels were, or weren't affected. Heck, 'Winter Zone' although just described as a colour change, could have easily been Hill Top after the volcano had stopped and it had more snow... but there we go, all of this is speculation on all sides.

 

Well I wasn't saying Hill Top was the only level subject to the idea that it had variants. Really, if the time travel concept got far enough that it was ever so slightly implemented in the game, there's always the chance that all the levels have scrapped variants of one another. And I don't remember the quote exactly, but I recall someone posting the Sonic Jam commentary that a developer mentioned 18 zones were planned, and we got 11 in the end, right? A few of these levels got scrapped rather early on, yes. But what if there were levels that had variants of each other that were far enough in development it would have been a waste to scrap them? And granted, yes, a lot of this could be considered "pulling it out of my ass" but given that time travel was gonna happen, how do we know, for example, that Aquatic Ruin Zone wasn't suppose to be a past version of Emerald Hill or something like that?

I will put it plain and simple, so there's no confusion to what I'm trying to say. It's really just a simple question: How do we know that none of the final levels aren't variants of other levels for time travel? Perhaps even variants of scrapped levels. (After all, they did recycle Cyber City Zone.) Just tell me what makes you so sure. That's all I want to know.

 

First of all, if those were loading screens, they'd take some time to load because of the scrolling stuff and moving things going on, thus rendering them useless (you can see part of the scenery from one pic in another one). Besides, Sonic CD didn't need loading screens, nor should a hypothetical Sonic 2 CD need them.

It also says that those pics were taken from a demo, and they might not appear in Sonic 2 CD. If you're a big company that wants to show a project like "Sonic 2 CD", you don't make a demo with stuff that has nothing to do with the game.

I said that because I thought that was from when Sonic CD was being worked on, but anyway we still don't know the date from that article.

The other things I noted? A realistic angel scribbling something and Robotnik's ship from Sonic 1. If those make sense as being related to Sonic 2, then I must be blind or something.

 

....could you please show me how these loading screens are moving and/or scrolling? And I'm not sure what you mean by Sonic CD not needing a loading screen. What about the loading screen we've all come to point at when saying the missing R2 is the missing Desert level?

 

...That's from the PC version. The Mega-CD version didn't have any loading screens/times.

 

Once again, the Sega CD version did have load times—they were just covered up with long periods of a black screen.

Do you guys seriously not notice load times unless they're spelled out to you? o_O

 

They just take a few seconds... Not worth a loading screen.

EDIT: Specially not worth an animated, scrolling loading screen.

 

Ah, good, somebody brought up the "Sonic 2 on Sega CD" scans. It's been ages in depths of the internets, but the way I always remember hearing it was that Sonic CD was originally just a port of Sonic 2, but poor communication between the two projects lead them to becoming so different that the Sega CD project was just simply renamed.

It also may be worth bringing up that the Sonic 2 JP manual features some pixel art that has very vague resemblances to the Sonic CD animated intro. It's the only place in any of the manuals for any of the games that artwork in that style appears. It's a stretch, but if one were going to do an animation of some kind on the Genesis, it would have to be very low resolution... (and while we're at it, there was an interview somewhere regarding Yuji Naka writing code to load bitmap graphics very quickly in Sonic 2, which was eventually used for animation in the special stage - now, for what other reasons would you need to write code that loads full-screen animation at such a rapid rate...?)

As for a hypothetical Sonic 2 CD not needing loading times, please keep in mind that early in development, an unoptimised game would probably need longer loading screens. Games today certainly do. Optimising and streamlining how games load off the disc is usually something that takes place in the final stages of development.

 

Wait a second... That's the pre-Sonic 1 design, with the differently tilted spikes and ears, and even with its lighter blue color. Wow.

 

<!--quoteo(post=197472:date=May 26 2008, 10:08 PM:name=ICEknight)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ICEknight @ May 26 2008, 10:08 PM) [/quote]

Well I see how the first two can look like a scrolling animation to you. A small piece of the second picture is in the first one. But I don't know how that angel image looks like it scrolls from the previous one.

EDIT: Never mind...I see it now.

In any case, what Blaze mentioned in his post about an optimized bit of code of quickly loading bitmaps would help this loading screen theory a bit. I would say code that runs the Sonic 2 special stages as fast as it does could handle doing a loading screen. But IceKnight still has a point that it'd be hard to for a system of the time to load those images just for a loading screen off a disc.