Tails in Sonic 2 (8-bit) *!Release!*

Omigosh, what?!?

I mean, ugh, I have issues with Sonic 2 SMS, I absolutely cannot stand the boss of UGZ, even playing the SMS version with the larger screen than the GG version that I grew up with gives me no love.

I can *do* it, I just don’t get joy out of it. Everything after that is pretty much a-okay.

This is massively impressive, and will cause me to do a replay.

Before the internet, I had always wondered what I was missing on how to play as Tails.

I painstakingly got all the Chaos Emeralds on the GG version, thinking; maybe this is it...of course, no. :P

Tails has always been my favourite. This is amazing.

 

I love your hack. Sonic 2 (GG) is the first game I ever played. Playing the game as Tails is incredible. Congratulations!

 

I have to say I'm impressed by this. We don't see enough 8-bit hacks and this is the character hack that always needed to happen.

I like you even altered the cutscenes according to the role reversal.

 

Hi, nice work. I made a playthrough of it.

 

This is great! I love it.

Here's one for you: in underground zone act 3, wait for the timer to get to 9 minutes (or set $D29A if you can't be bothered to wait), then jump off the ledge and hold down+2 while Robotnik lifts you up. If you time it perfectly, when Robotnik lets go you can immediately hold right, jump over the boss and go straight to the animal capsule at the end.

This only works if the timer is >9 minutes so it's useless for speedruns

 

Realise I'm bumping a thread from two years ago, but I was playing your hack this morning (there's something absolutely charming about finally playing as Tails after all these years) and it occurred to me that you'd mentioned Sonic 1 and the lack of editor way back when it was released.

Over on smspower, there's a terrific new editor created by Maxim that has support for new sprites. Not trying to sway you here, everyone's free time is their own, but if you were plugging away in secret with a hex editor, then this might make life easier!

View topic - STH1EDWV - Sonic the Hedgehog editor - Forums - SMS Power!

Great job on the hack, I love the little touches like swapping over the characters in the intro and the sprites used when you look up and down riding a mine cart. It's very well done.

EDIT - dodgy grammar

 

Ha! That's awesome. I'll hold my hands up and admit I have no idea how to use the sprite replacement capability, just that I read on the forum post that it was possible (and the author posted a few screenshots using it). You can certainly view the title screen and ending credits screens in the editor, but quite how one imports new tiles in is beyond me!

All I've done with it so far is create a little hack which moves the emeralds and extra lives into new hiding places (and modifies a bit of terrain to support this), I haven't tried anything smarter than that yet. Good luck with the hack

 

Hey Hackwrench, I recently discovered this and have been sending it to my friends. :D
But I really prefer the Game Gear version for its difficulty and boss music.

Is it possible you could create a Game Gear variant? Or if not ... maybe an SMS version that uses the Game Gear's boss music?

 

Aspect Edit should be able to edit all the compressed sprites. It's just a matter of locating the compressed sprites you're needing to edit. I don't believe there's a list of rom contents for the Game Gear version... Emulicious is a handy emulator that has debugging features that can help you locate compressed sprites in the game.

 

I would chalk that up to the developers being lazy, I doubt it was intentional. The tails are typically a separate sprite, they probably just didn’t include it, rather than deliberately remove it. Though you do mention how he has his tails in the balancing sprite, which is certainly inconsistent with the former.

 

Actually, Sonic is using his Sonic 1 sprites in the S2 8-bit title cards. I've heard people say it's his CD sprites, but that's impossible given the development timeline since the only replaced sprite in the 0.02 build (December 1992) compared to S1 is the springing frame that has the shoes redrawn, and that was cut anyhow in favor of the twirling spring animation (not to mention that the balancing frame in Gimmick Mountain's title card is clearly S1's). Also worth noting that Sonic is using his brighter/more saturated prototype palette in the S2 GG autodemo in the "coming soon" screen.

That could very well be the case. My money's on "they forgot to add the tails back". It just makes no sense that his tails would disappear, since they're his defining characteristic.

One thing I find amusing is that there is absolutely no point in having a separate tails sprites for quite a few frames, such as his walking animation. The tails there are synced with the main player object (they're actually baked into the main object's sprite mappings), and are exclusively used for just the walking animation. There's also a layering issue. In Sonic 2, the tails are always behind him, which is weird. In Sonic 3, they alternate between underlapping and overlapping depending on which half of the walking animation is currently playing, but this still causes problems.

The ideal solution (and Mania does this) is to bake the tails directly into the walking frames, and manually crop out the parts where the leg and arm closer to the viewer are (so facing right, his right arm and right leg should overlap the tails, and his left leg and left arm should underlap the tails). This would not only save ROM and RAM space, but also reduce the number of sprites per line and thus mitigate the possibility of sprite overload on Genesis hardware.

Mania also has his tails included for his balancing animation, though they drew new frames to match Sonic's CD balancing poses. It makes sense to do that, because Tails' sprites in S2 have a lot more in common with S1 Sonic than S2 Sonic, including the balancing frames being based on Sonic's S1 balancing poses (not to mention not having a back-facing balancing anim), as well as not having an in-between frame for ducking and looking up. Sonic CD's forward-facing balancing frames were based directly on his S1 balancing frames. So for stylistic consistency, it makes sense to have given Tails Sonic's CD poses for both forward-facing and back-facing balancing animations.

 

It's a possibility, but I find it unlikely. S2 8-bit was released in November '92, while the 0.02 build of SCD was from December '92. Literally the only modified sprite in that build is the springing frame, and only the shoes were modified. It has some additional new animations, but none of them were replacements for S1's, such as how the final SCD replaced the skidding and balancing animations. With the exception of the spring frame, none of the sprites from S1 have been modified yet. Besides, I doubt that any SCD assets were shared anyhow. Yes, there is the Green Hills theme being quite close to "You Can Do Anything," but that's likely only because the same composer was involved.

Underground's title card appears to use crude edits of Sonic and Tails' balancing faces. I think Sonic's body is an original drawing by aspect, as it bears no resemblance to any existing frames.

I somewhat doubt that. Aside from the addition of new animations, the only difference between Wai build and later builds is the addition of a shine spot on his rolling and spindash frames. That being said, the inclusion of Tails' tails on the S2 8-bit title card is an oddity. Perhaps they manually added them in for Gimmick Mountain, but forgot to for Sky High? It just occurred to me also that in Sky High, he's using his flying frame and not his spring frame rotated 90 degrees like Sonic's.

I think you misplaced the first 8-bit frame relative to the 16-bit sprites. I think it's supposed to correspond with the second 16-bit sprite, not its first. Note how the right foot is pointing forward and not upward, and the left foot is pointing back and not down as much. Also note the position of the right hand, it is overlapping the belly like the second 16-bit frame, unlike the first 16-bit frame where it is not. I think what Aspect did here was cut every other frame, meaning frames 2, 4, 6 and 8 were kept, not 1, 4, 6 and 8 as you have it here.

I just checked the Sonic Chaos prototype (the one with the sprites closer to S2 16-bit) and there they are using 6 frames while skipping 2 and 6 from the 16-bit version. If you keep his animation at 6 frames, I suggest using frames 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8. This would require redrawing the first frame from that 4 frame anim to more closely match the first frame of 16-bit, as it currently resembles the second frame of 16-bit more closely. I'd also suggest using the Chaos proto sprites as a reference to re-add the head bobbing.

On an unrelated note, I've always found it odd in the 16-bit game how they gave Tails 8 frames at S1's frame duration, while their initial version of S2 Sonic had the framerate (crudely) doubled with a 12-frame count. Their second version of S2 Sonic was reduced to 8 frames and reverted to the S1 frame duration, however, it appears they screwed up the code and caused the first frame to last only 1 refresh. They also screwed up the alignment on frame 5 and shifted his entire body forward by 1 pixel (and the Tax/Stealth remake didn't fix this! Argh...). I wonder why they didn't give Tails 12 frames, or new inbetweens for looking up or ducking. Perhaps he was made before S2 Sonic? That would certainly explain why Aspect wasn't given either version of S2 Sonic if it didn't exist yet.

If the animation system is anything like the 16-bit animations, then it's simply an array of sprite indices, you could remove certain indices. However, I highly advise against making it 4 frame, it will look choppy and cycle too quickly. If anything, I would suggest leaving Sonic be at 6, and expanding Tails to 8. That, or just leave it all alone and have them both be 6 frame.