Sonic Month 2019: Sonic 2

So. True. Story. These last few years, history has been being made in this community, with so many protos finally getting found and unearthed.
Lots of dreams and expectations coming true, theories being confirmed or debunked, and small secrets being dug up from the roms themselves.
For many people here, it's a great time to be alive.

Thanks, @drx and those who've been going this far for this whole community. Keep it going, we've been WAY further than now.

 

So looking at this old page: http://info.sonicretro.org/S2Beta:Timeline

Do we now have all these? It's really amazing.

 

Wow... Reading a bit about the birth of this community... Quite the rollercoaster of events, people who came and left, a legacy for the ages.
Are the founders of this community still around in some way? To see how far their crusade has led so far.

 

Not wanting to miss next week makes me think sonic 3, I don't know if such a thing could be said for say 3D blast or an SMS game although early S1 SMS would be really cool. I'm not going to even expect to see a Sonic 1 build to keep hype in check.

Kind of hope we get to see a sonic 3 with 2's sprite and some leevl design changes, that would be enough for me.

The way this has been handled is brilliant and much nicer then a random post, as long as the wait between announcement and show isn't too large it's a really nice thing to look forward too.

 

They've been teasing us with a Sonic Erazer build for so long so it has to be a proto of that coming on nov 16!

 

Now that we have a build that contains a Dust Hill title card over Mystic Cave zone, I think we now know why the name was changed:

It was an extremely stupid name that didn't fit with the art of the level. It was likely never meant to be the name of the desert zone and given how vague and misleading the name is, along with the designers probably wanting to avoid having like 8 levels in the game with "Hill" in it (at that point - Green Hill, Neo Green Hill, Dust Hill, Hill Top. That's a lot of hills. We need a hack where every level is Hill, Chemical Hill, Aquatic Hill, Mystic Hill, Hill Fortress, Sky Hill, Hill Egg, Casino Hill, Metropolis Hill, Oil Hill. HILLS), they decided to change it to Mystic Cave and we're a lot better off for it.

:specialed:

 

Maybe I am mis-remembering, but wasn't there a screenshot from a version just a touch later than what we got yesterday, where Casino Night still had the pink/blue scheme, but they had added objects (rings, blue moving squares, etc)? IF SO, then we might have at least one more to seek. IF NOT, then I guess if we want to learn more about the development of Sonic 2, then internal builds would be what we try to find.

(I do wonder about how development progressed from the start to the Nick Arcade proto, from the Nick Arcade proto to the Wai prototype).

 

Can't believe we finally get to see the older version of Casino Night.
Thank you so much @drx and all other people who helped make this happen!

I can only hope we get such a similar month for the Streets of Rage series eventually :D (and I found some interesting informations as to which western magazines got a prototype of Bare Knuckle 3).

 

If there's anything in my mind for Hidden Palace, to be honest, it's a Metal Gear month. But that will never realistically happen.

 

The other Sonic wiki beat us to the punch

How should the rewrite work? Replace the Mystic Cave Zone section with a section on the debates over the name?

 

Yep ... we're aware of that (they have just one wiki... and more volunteers) ... Sonic Retro ; Sega Retro , Nec Retro, Retro CDN ... "MAN THE WIKIS" ...

 

Yes, I think we do. I had it up on the wiki that there were probably two prototypes left, and they've both arrived this weekend.

One thing Retro needs to decide on though - do we call these "Alpha" and "Pre-Beta" or August 21 and September 14 builds?

As in "this is in the Simon Wai and Alpha prototypes, but not in the Pre-Beta and CENSOR ones".




Oh and spoilers: the Dust Hill Zone wiki page isn't going to update until one of you logs in and updates it (spoilers: that other wiki is equally wrong). I'm not your dad.

Oh and double spoilers: this prototype is far more important either way.

 

Nah fam.

Death Hill Zone.

Pre-Beta.

Though it's bias as I was the one who said to name it that.

 

Hey, I'm trying.

 

Ah, you see I was going to name it that but I wanted to make sure the Egg was still included, it's the most important part.

Death Hill would be like Sonic runs through a Hot Topic or something.

 

That Sonic 1 Special Stage is the weirdest thing. I haven't managed to get the "chaos emerald" but I made it to a goal block, which sent me to a blue screen playing Chemical Plant's music.

Is any of this in the Wai or Nick Arcade prototypes? I assumed they gutted it... only to add it in later? What's going on?

 

Took a quick re-look and it seems in Nick Arcade you can load it but it crashes the game, wherein Simon Wai you can't even select it in the Level Select screen. Not sure what happens if you forcefully load it anyway, haven't tried that. So yes, very strange indeed that in a later build the selection not only got re-enabled again but also that the special stage itself 'loaded'

If I had to guess it was likely that the devs were very close on starting work on the Sonic 2 special stages around that version (Aug 21 build), so they re-enabled the function again in the level select, wherein the build after we got the heavily WIP Special Stages (Sept 14 build).

 

So now that we basically seem to know everything there is to know about the original vision of Sonic 2, I'm really hoping some technical wizard creates a ROM hack that restores how the game was initially envisioned. Original zone order, names, etc. Like a more complete, up-to-date Sonic 2 Long Version or Sonic: The Lost Worlds. I'd do it myself but I don't have a clue how to hack lmao.

 

Regarding the special stage, the code still exists in the Nick Arcade and Simon Wai protos, and going into it results in the same thing as this build.