Sonic Origins Collection - General Thread

Really now might be a good point to remake Chaotix since they now seem to be allowed some level of liberties such as extra stuff like mission mode to give the game actual substance it lacked.

I'd love a version of Chaotix with new layouts and extra gimmicks (eg. actual water in Marina Madness) though I think the fact SEGA were very restrictive about correcting, er, altering their work would have nulled out that possibility before. Now it seems at least halfway allowed so long as the original is still available in there in some form.

 

I bet the 2P zones in Sonic 3 aren't going to be in the package either.

 

I’m glad that Stealth was able to clarify who did what with Origins. I’m also a part of the camp that thinks it’s unfair for SEGA to be getting major slack just because they’re the primary developers here. I have faith that the extra modes will leave fans very satisfied; also remember that Jam, Mega Collection, etc. were also developed in-house so SEGA is certainly capable of pulling off a quality collection. There’s features that haven’t been fully shown off and I wouldn’t be surprised if SEGA is hiding a few things to surprise fans.

I mean the original mobile remasters still play just fine (despite the bugs due to the wider aspect ratio on modern phones) and I still consider them the definitive versions only because of their accessibility and what new they brought to the table. Mr. Casual might not want to go through the technical process of trying to extract files to play Forever, Absolute, AIR, or Restored so Origins will be the next best thing since it will be easy to purchase and play.

Also in regards to 3&K, the probability of it getting a mobile release is very high because of the other remasters not getting delisted. My only fear is that it won’t be fully optimized to run smoothly on phones with wider screens. Maybe this will finally wake SEGA up and get them to optimize the other remasters but I may be hoping for too much there.

Origins is still a day one purchase for me and I will always support Taxman and Stealth’s work along with Tyson Hesse and the Powerhouse team that worked on those awesome animations.

 

Everyone I've seen takes issue with the character select menu on new files in particular. It's a lot of little things adding up imo.

• The menu is inside of the game already loaded, which doesn't look good plastered on top of it. The music also cuts out as they pause the game to bring up the menu, instead of letting it play in the background.
• It appears and disappears within one frame(?) and in a tiny window, kind of like the Colours Ultimate Rival Rush menus that everyone dunked on, comparing them to pop-up ad infested websites.
• The button prompts fade in late for some reason, and the name tag for Knuckles isn't there with the others first frame.
• Some characters in certain poses don't look like they're centered nicely. Look at that empty space on Sonic running or Tails standing there.

It looks very slap-dash, and is the only menu to really have that problem. Which really sucks, as that's presumably the menu you're going to see every new playthrough. I think the other menus shown look fine enough.

2P Co-op would be super cool, but is logistically a nightmare for shoving into pre-existing things that were only ever planned around a single screen, like boss arenas and rising water levels and one-ways that close off.

 

I'm still hoping 2P mode is still in there, it was in the remake after all.

It is a side mode in the game so it might make sense why they're not really marketing it.

 

2 player was in the mobile port but it was online only, so it doesn't work like it did in Sonic 2 or Mania even. They'd have to recreate the split screen local multi-player. I hope they reimplement it but let's be real, at least for me, I never have anyone to play 2 player Sonic with so no huge loss personally if it's not there.

Plus even if it is there it'll still be restricted to Sonic 2 zones. Why they don't just make multi-player more encompassing and provide a universal selection of zones from all 4 games is beyond me (CD would have to likely disable time travel in multi-player, and 3K's bigger levels might cause issue, but still even if it was like a selection of 4 zones per game for multi-player that'd still be pretty good).

 

While I do think that we, as fans, tend to have our expectations a little too high at times, I do think its fair to hold Sega accountable when they're blatantly cutting corners at times.

I think its completely fair to want the best possible product from a series like Sonic (or Mario) and when the companies running them drop the ball, its completely fair to call them out on it....respectfully and within reason mind you.

 

But, as far as we know, they don’t even have 2P VS. Which was in the original Sonic 2. And Sonic Mania has a pretty extensive 2P VS mode. So just dropping 2P VS entirely from Origins is a glaring omission.

Like I said, as far as we know there is no 2P VS mode. They could be saving it to show it later. But if it's not there, then that's a big source of disappointment, especially given the price.

 

Have they though? Movie comes out in April, comes to streaming in May, and the game releases in June.

 

That's a good point and I actually don’t know how cross-media works and maybe having games come out a month after moving hits streaming is the ideal sweet spot (in which case my comments would be wrong).
But as a layperson, I would have thought you'd want a game like Origins available to purchase immediately after a person has seen the movie as that's when I imagine their interest in Sonic and finding out more about him would be at their highest (especially if they are part of a younger audience that has never played these games before). But like I said, I don’t know how this works. It would be neat if there's any data that shows when the best time to release a game after a film release is. I tried Googling but couldn't find anything.

 

This is just another issue that is cropped up from not actually porting these games to the same base engine, instead just connecting them together via a shared launcher. If instead we had Sonic 1, 2, 3 and CD all running on the Mania engine, we could have had the classic trio playable in two-four players split screen for most of the levels, along with the possibility to have an unlockable Mighty & Ray if you owned Mania Plus.

Instead we have no Knuckles in CD, potentially cut split screen content from both Sonic 2 and 3. Hell, since the included Classic Modes aren't even just ROMs on an emulator, meaning there's no way to actually get the classic experience in this package.

Imagine the release we could have got if Sega actually cared about Sonic as much as the fans do. We could have had the difficulty options from Sonic Jam being a hidden extra. An IDW comic museum comparable to the Archie one in Mega Collection. Music customization options for Sonic 3 that factor in both the differing tracks between the base release and Knuckles, while also including the Beta/PC tracks.

Hell, if they really wanted to make this the "Ultimate Origins Collection", give me a new playable character like Amy or Metal Sonic. Give me a remaster of Knuckles Chaotix with playable Sonic and Tails. Give me both versions of 3D Blast, with an Anniversary version that allows the player to swap between graphics, stage effects, and music. Give me Sonic Spinball using the classic/mania physics engine. Give me the rest of 8-bit Sonic games in an emulator with save states, preferably the Master System versions where applicable.

Call me a whiny fan if you want, but at this point with a new rerelease that is promising new content, this is severely lacking to my already low expectations.

 

Yeah, you could say this is less "Sonic Origins" and more "Sonic Mania Origins". It's kind of a collection of the original games, but it's more specifically and more accurately a collection of the remakes of the original games that lead to Mania, which it was built on, etc. A remastered 3&K is 'new content', in a way. I'm fine with that being what this is, rather than the "Ultimate Origins Collection" you described (which would be amazing).

At the same time though, that way of looking at it makes the delisting of the original roms for the Genesis games more shitty than it already is.

 

The drop dash physics in the latest footage seemed off, and since Stealth confirmed he hasn't altered the remakes other than S3K I'm afraid it might be the inferior Sega Ages implementation of the drop dash, which I'm afraid is terrible. Not a fun time

 

also, when they released the OST on CD for the 20th anniversary, it was the JP OST. I actually can't remember, if at all, when the US OST was officially released, though they know it exists - that 20th anniversary CD actually has a remix of the US version of Stardust Speedway with Jun Senoue as a bonus track!

 

I legit don't get how people keep saying that the Generations UI is great. It's fine. But it is a very specific aesthetic that never really came up in the games themselves - largely being a vague resemblance to the Sonic 1 JP box art and like, the primary colors and "teeth" of Sonic 2 mushed together in a way that vaguely resembles something someone saw thirty years ago and applied it in a broad-strokes fashion.

I don't think the Generations UI is more authentic than the Origins one, at all.

While on the subject of UI design, largely nostalgia talking but I do have a soft spot for everything involving the Sonic Mega Collection interface, especially that almost mystical, "this is a secret location" background music in the menus.

 

I never understood the rage about the games having touch controls. There's ONE action button, that's the whole deal of classic Sonic games. How often can you fail touching the same button repeatedly?

I can beat Sonic 1, 2 and CD on my Pixel 4a with the touch controls invisible and still get all emeralds (except 2 because fuck the half pipe), no problem at all.

 

hahahahahaah. Half of me typing on a phone is backspacing to correct errors - without tactile feedback and my shaky hands, I can't really do much with precision on it*. Also, if the buttons/menus are even the slightest bit laggy, it gives me a hard time - managing my mons in Pokemon GO is a chore for that reason.

And also, people already complain about not being able to see ahead of Sonic in the 2D games...now imagine putting your big-ass fingers on the same screen you're trying to watch. That strikes me as unnecessarily difficult.

*this isn't even getting into hand size for instance. After a point in a convo my mom will just call me because even with how big phones are these days, the keyboard is still too small for her to accurately text on it in a timely fashion. I have tiny hands so my issue is the lack of tactile feedback and, well...also the tiny buttons. Phones are kinda the worst.

 

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