It really is! Like they literally could've saved time emulating it but they went through all that effort of a recording rig.
(puts hands together) my bro. my man. I work in tech as a software QA and test programmer and have done so for the past eight years. Sega is dumb, and allocates their time and budget in all the wrong ways for any team they actively direct. But regardless of how stupid, or well-managed, a given company is, certain processes will generally be exactly the same regardless of what subset of the tech industry a team is in. As someone who is generally positioned near the end of the process (features/bug fixes are hashed out, the programmers implement them, the code is peer-reviewed hopefully, and then it "crosses my desk" so to speak), I get to see how the sausage is made in this way. Me pointing out that every sane programming team, who is limited by paid time, project budget, and deadlines, has to implement triage such that an "easy" bug like the blur was "fixed late" is not me defending Sega, it's me pointing out for the hundredth time that there are very real factors in tech development that are at play here. Fans? Your budget is infinite (because it's zero), your deadlines are infinite (because they don't exist), and your salaries are infinite (because you're not being paid). That is how some rando can fix the blur bug within a few days, because they don't have to look at a database of prioritized bugs while also having your manager breathing down your neck to fix the most glaring things that can impact sales. Oh and, you only have 8 hours a day (if you're lucky and the team isn't being crunched) and in that time you have to pick and choose which bugs to fix, which then have to be fired off to, chances are, severely underpaid and overworked QA people*. And if they find a problem in your fix, you get to spend even more of a limited eight hours of your day to fix that. Repeat until you go insane, or the team stops existing. * I will never, ever, ever take a QA job in the game industry. It pays like shit and the hours are murder.
He directed the audio off a cliff. I can look past a lot of the issues that Origins has. I'm not excusing them, but they don't hinder my time with the collection enough to really harm the experience. The S3K audio is on another level though. Origins butchers the original tracks that didn't need touching, it butchers all of the replacement tracks because no effort was made to get them sounding good and it even adds a completely unnecessary new track that sounds like an S4 track over a decade after all the S4 criticism. It beggars belief.
Incidentally, the new SCD Knuckles route alterations are kept out of Classic Mode as one of the few oddball additional specific differences between Anniversary/Classic Mode (a different S3/S&K jingle, an S3&K Amy change). This weirdly isn't the case with the prior Tails/Knuckles route alterations of S1/S2, or S2's MCZ>HPZ pit transition. I'd say SCD not being included in Jam and not having any Easy/Normal versions might've done in their inclusion, but they did add the Knuckles stuff to the various Time Travel variants of the Zones so IDK. Seeing as MCZ is more like the original in 2P VS by not having either the spike pit or HPZ transition and just being a bottomless pit, original level design and a few other things like S1's toggleable original settings seemed like a no brainer if they wanted to make Classic Mode just that bit more authentic to the originals over Anniversary Mode. At least if they're remaining firm on the decision to keep Lives exclusive to the former, it's a bit of a weird in-between that should either go full on Classic or at least let either mode have either options.
What are you talking about? There are no limitations that would make the sound effects off like that, and Sonic CD would've worked fine. That comparison doesn't make sense. You can get far more done in less time if you get paid to do it 8 hours a day, while having the source code in front of you and other colleagues to help you. A fan has to do other shit for 8 hours, come home tired, maybe has a couple hours to tinker with a professional product, has no source code, and yet they were still able to fix something in three days. Not because they had loads of time, but because it was just that trivial. Entire games were programmed from the ground up in the time it took to fix these things, and Sonic Origins (which is a compilation of old 2D games and not a triple A open-world adventure with tons of content) still isn't what I'd call a finished product.
Let's being the discussion back to the Sonic 3 audio for a second. First off, in Mookey's post... that recording is actually from the original Genesis game, as mentioned in the video description. It's in a playlist called "Sonic Origins OST" but that's a bit of a misnomer. This is (afaik) actually a recording from Origins: ...and it sounds exactly the same. I don't think it sounds bad, though. As someone who frequently plays on real hardware, this sound feels more "correct" to me. It's what the game sounded like when it came out, and I think that counts for something. And while the Sonic games don't suffer from this as much, there are a few Genesis games that sound way too screechy/whiny on most emulators, which leads me to prefer real hardware whenever possible. I actually wish Sega rerecorded every game in the collection from real hardware - I think the inconsistency between games is what makes Sonic 3 sound "muffled", when in reality that's the way it always sounded. (Also: I might just be hearing things, but I think the background music is quieter relative to the sound effects in Origins? I'm not sure on that, but that could also make the music sound "duller".) By the way, the spring sound doesn't sound like that on real hardware, even on the revisions of the Genesis with low volume distortion*. Well, it sounds like that in the sound test, but not in-game - because it gets interrupted by the background music. iirc, SMPS has a flag that signals when a sound effect "ends" (even if the sound hasn't gone silent yet), after which it can get interrupted by other notes (which usually happens pretty soon because the music will use every sound channel if it can). The sound effect lingering for so long is unique to Origins. *I wish people still called this the "ladder effect". That name was always inaccurate but it still feels right in my heart.
hmmm let me explain further. You can prioritize whatever (relatively) tiny bug you want because you don't have to tell people in standup that morning that you were working on something inconsequential while the project is on fire, and you work on it as long as you want because you don't have finances wondering if they're wasting money paying to work on it, and also because you don't have a deadline. Think about how long Skyblivion is taking. If that was an official Bethesda project, it likely would've been canned years ago for not being done yet. Think about how much money would've been spent on salary for that, how that resource (people) you're paying for aren't being put to more fruitful things that can """bring value to the company""" (shoot me). Let's come back to the blur thing. On top of the aforementioned issues I mentioned before (the inherent pressure to not work on something cosmetic when the game crashes if you look at it funny, quite possibly task quotas, limited number of days with a limited number of hours to work on the project as a whole), consider: - did the modder have to tie their code to an existing ticket? if no ticket exists, can they actually justify it to their boss that they're working on it? what is the priority of the ticket? - did the modder have to go through code review, which usually involves your other programmers, who at this time are also very busy with the same pressures you have, looking at your code? - did the modder have to merge their fix through a branch, and spend far too much time fixing merge conflicts? - did the modder have to have someone do a full battery of tests, which, since this is a graphical thing, would likely involve looking at its behavior during many scenarios of all four games as a whole? Teams have processes, and while this tends to solve problems involving the work of tons of people, it also means that they take more time and butt up against the aforementioned pressures of working for a company that really wants to make money. When you don't have any of that structure, you can just do...whatever. Yeah sure just fix this graphical thing and throw it into the ether.
For what its worth, I do applaud them actually using real hardware for this. It's effort that Sega wouldn't have gone to not so long ago.
It doesn't have an YM2612 inside nor does it have a PSG. So some of the effects were LQ recordings and others were reconstructed using the YMF292 chip inside. If they were all wav recordings like SK collection, they'd probably be at the same (very low) quality.
Apparently, now Origins does NOT acknowledge Super Tails and refers to Hyper Tails as Super Tails: https://x.com/daviehedgehog/status/1695594001712423238?s=46 I don’t know if this is an intentional change or not. The patch note list doubled down and referred to Amy’s second form (the one with afterimages) as Super Amy instead of Hyper Amy, so maybe they really do intend on calling all of Amy and Tails’ Emerald-powered forms Super?
By the way, I don't hate the way that they recorded everything with a actual Genesis. In fact, I actually like that there's a modern avenue to listen to the OST this way. It's just that this level of effort for something people wouldn't notice outside of "it's kinda muffled?" is very, very out of character for Sega in contrast to the seemingly rushed QA the rest of Origins has. Like they couldn't find the time to fix Tails getting stuck on everything and anything, but they had time to sit on their butts lugging out a old Genesis console and hooking up the headphone jack for fifty-five minutes, manually going through all of the Sound Test codes on a Sonic 3 cartridge to record them for the new game, and (presumably) dug out old sound data to run on the same console. I love that they did, but like... man! It's like suddenly animating on cels with a film camera for a cartoon, instead of just drawing on a computer. If they wanted, they could've used the Sonic 1 & 2 Soundtrack masters since those were recorded on real hardware too.
To my recollection Tails has never had a Hyper form, only a Super one. I must have missed anything different to this in Origins, I haven't actually played it as Tails yet.
Origins lets you transform into Super Tails with just the chaos emeralds (shining without flickies). In earlier versions Tails super-emerald-powered-form was indeed Hyper Tails in Origins. Now both are called "Super" forms.
Super Tails is also accessible by just collecting the regular Chaos Emeralds in Sonic Mania, where he behaves identically to the former Super Tails in Sonic Origins by way of not having Flickies follow him.
Prior to this patch, getting 7 Chaos Emeralds in S3&K didn't give the "Now Amy can be Super Amy" prompt, even though she could transform. Is that still the case? And does Tails still get this prompt after 7 Chaos Emeralds? Pre-patch he got the Super Tails prompt after 7 Chaos Emeralds and the Hyper Tails prompt after 7 Super Emeralds.
For the love of Super Saiyans... I don't remember having so much trouble distinguishing Super forms from Hyper forms.
Yeah, if you go into old threads about Mega Collection or other emulated re-releases you'll often see a bunch of people making the opposite complaints so it's been a bit interesting to see it the other way around when Sonic Team actually does finally put the effort in. I guess at this point a lot of fans grew up on emulated versions of the games, so now that they finally listened to us boomers, the younger fans who grew up on emulation are now upset and claiming the right thing to do would have been to record off of an emulator. I think with infinite time and budget I'd have given options for Model 1, Model 2, and a clear sound recorded using Nuked-OPN2 or something, but I don't mind the path they took as it sounds just like it does when I play on my own Mega Drive.
