Sonic 2D games have always run at 60FPS... unless you were playing on a PAL machine, in which case they run at 50FPS. The Mega Drive games exhibit slowdown if you get hit with 4738924832 rings in hand, but it's otherwise pretty stable. Unless you're a whackjob, 60FPS in animations is only achievable if you're interpolating between (key)frames (see: most 3D animations). That doesn't happen with 2D sprites like these, because at a low resolution it becomes pretty wasteful. Games like Rayman or Vectorman do it by treating bits of the body as separate sprites, but you can see the limitations. However, when Sonic rotates while running around a loop... that's arguably a case of animations updating at 60FPS. But it's not really a selling point because games have been doing that for years.
Instead of 60fps it's better to say the animations just run smoother due to mostly double/triple the amount of animation frames shown.
This might be getting ahead of myself, but I really hope that around launch Sega decides to do an art contest like they did for Sonic CD a couple of years back. Those kind of events are always fun to do.
If that's the size of the final statue, the Mega Drive it stands on has to be full scale, right? I have no idea where I'm going to put this.
I'm kind of surprised no one has pedantically brought up the whole "Studio-Ahpolis" vs. Studio-polis pronunciation thing yet. Since we know it's officially Studio-Opolis, it kind of prevents fun little conversations and realizations like the whole 'Hydrossity' argument (I really pronounced it that way until that topic came up here, and still do occasionally haha). It makes me wonder in what ways the experience of Sonic Mania would have been different if we experienced it relatively blind, like the classics and what not.
Aaron has always pronounced it that way (if I recall, anyone else from Sega that has spoken about it has as well). But yeah, I always pronounced it phonetically; its almost like pronouncing Hydrocity as "Hydro-Ocity. To be fair, it does emphasize the "Studio" aspect of the stage.
I was thinking about that earlier as well, and my only conclusion is that Casinopolis is a shitty level name :specialed:
We pronounce it "Studi-opolis" Zone, like Sandopolis so that's our "official" answer (though I don't mind really). A bit of Trivia for you - when we found out Studiopolis Inc. was actually the name of the post production studio that records the V.O. for Sonic we had some alternate names like "Opening Night" or "Fame Plaza" in case they weren't cool with it, but they were so it's now a cool reference!
So did you guys come up with Studiopolis first, then realized that was the name for the post production studio, or did you hear about that and wanted to see if you could use it as the zone name? I kinda like the ring of Fame Plaza Zone though.
Not a fan, glad we got Studiopolis. Although, something similar like Opening Scene Zone - Act 1 sounds like a cheeky movie production reference that could have worked.
It was the former. Maybe, although it was meant more as a riff on Casino and Carnival "Night" naming. Overall, I'm happy our original choice is in the game. Anyway, it feels weird talking about Sonic Mania in any sort of past tense, since we're still working hard on it right now!
Still, "polis" is a valid Greek word, so please, if you'll ever decide on official abbreviations, make it SPZ, like Sandopolis should have been, too (e.g. a city of sand). I see too many people using SOZ instead, which makes no sense at all from a linguistic point of view, there is no "Opolis" of Sand. At least, it's even easier this time, as you would end up with two invalid words if you break it like Studi Opolis. So yeah, please, please, abbreviate it as SPZ. edit: obviously, this post isn't a direct reply to the post above. It took me some minutes to write it, so Taxman got inbetween.
Thanks for the response and interesting trivia! It seems like such a silly point, but its cool to have this kind of info. To be fair though, Sandopolis at least makes sense in that "Sando" isn't a logical word either, whereas "Studio", "Metro" and "polis" are. Either way this would make it easy to distinguish SOZ from SPZ.
