The Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Megathread

So, with the update on the Sega blog, I think we can see how sonic acts when he jumps with the torch:

 

I hope that extends the range of his attack.

I wonder about rolling, though. I get the feeling rolling and Spin Dashing will be out of the question in this stage.

At least we know that lighting fuses will likely be as simple as jumping at them, however.

 

You have to burn the rope.

 

Shiny looking Sonic plus pre-rendered environment that looks like whatever the desert level was called in that game. Makes sense.

 

Has anyone noticed that they added a piece of concept art for Labyrinth in the relevant gallery on the site? Because, you know, they did. Just one. Still unremarkable.

 

The extent of Sonic Team's creativity for Sonic 4: Episode 1.



Boooooooo.

 

We're never satisfied with anything.

The extent of their creativity? That's a bit of a stretch. I'm loving the torch/fuse sections. Some actual platforming going on there it seems.

 

....I don't get it, it's just a sketch for Aztec style pillars with some glowy lights, why should we be hating this?

 

Nice reference. BONUS POINTS.

Oh wow, Concept art. Let's piss and moan. Nyarrrrr. I think they're kinda nice. What were you expecting, though? A clock that counts down to our doom?

 

So he couldn't find that Ultimate MD SoundFont or similar? Or even just use an emulator and tracker or something? You'd think Sega of all people would be able to cook up something like the latter.

Intriguing . . .

That would be a pathetic excuse for their bad instrumentation and short length.

Which brings me to:

I did wonder if this could be a justification for the tiny length of the songs (although the Special Stage track is huge in comparison; great, an extended lullaby). But couldn't they have used samples and a tracker instead? Admittedly I've no knowledge of cross-platform game programming, but I wouldn't think that would be impossible.
P.S. Is your FLAC rip of NiGHTS Perfect Album (previously on SonMA) available anywhere? :v:

 

That does actually remind me, the Wii has a 40MB limit on Downloadable Games, and if that version also has the audio at 16bit/48Khz in a compressed form, that's still not a lot of space to work with.

 

Take a look at Sandopolis Act 2 and then Lost Labyrinth.



The various sized blocks look very similar! Looks like they combined Labyrinth and Sandopolis, would explain the torches!

 

I think that's what we all presumed.

 

Won't be hard to fit, the 360 version isn't all the big. It's 180mb, with the music taking up an entire 100mb of that. some downsampled audio, and the art being downscaled to half the size, and adding LZMA compression to the files and it will easily fit this. There are much larger, and more resource intensive games on wiiware that fit at 40mb.

 

Sonic 4 would have been so much better if it turned out to be what people thought from the beginning; http://www.needlemouse.com/

 

The whole speed shoes thing is stupid. I see no reason why they had to resort to loading faster tracks rather than speeding up the current track. It's a waste of resources and last time I checked, classic games never restarted music.

Of course, this won't be fixed. =P

I think that Senoue also composed Sonic 3D Blast's title music and the 1UP in the game was S3K's tune. Jun must have problems cutting down his own music to make a 1UP track, because I have one in my head for Sonic 4's theme, although it'd use timpanis at the end and in this game, there are no timpanis and barely any toms, just kicks and snares from low quality Sonic 2 percussion. More reason to bring in more composers anyway.

 

To be honest, I didn't like the look of that at all.

 

Even if they are too lazy just to speed the music up in real time, they could fix it very easily by going modern/CD style and using an all new track for the speed shoes.

 

Are you kidding? People HATED that. Everyone complained that it looked like Dr. Seuss and not sonic, and now the franchise was ruined and blah blah blah, etc.

Seriously, I'm at least thankful it didn't turn out like that, or the amount of hate would be INSANE.

They did that because they made a separate track for the "fast" themes so they don't sound bad like in the advance series (from time to time). Some of the songs sound different while wearing the speed shoes, as in there are actual changes to the track when it's fast.

 

So..er...what happened to that Update that was supposed to happen today...