The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Hopefully if SEGA gives more of a shit about providing a satisfying stream of releases than Nintendo, we could 3D Blast and Spinball on NSO as well. Sure, they may not be the masterpieces the originally trilogy are, but they don't seem to be a part of origins and Mean Bean is already going to be on the service, so this seems like a good place to put the weirder classic games. I wonder if the CD and 32X are on the cards as well, given that they're expansions to the Mega Drive. Again, would be great to make Knuckles' Chaotix more widely accessible.

 

I've been trying to figure out what's behind Rocket Metal. There's some kind of red vehicle with black windows to the upper right, but is the red thing on the upper left supposed to be Honey the Cat in her regular colours?

 

Huh, I actually did not notice this at all.

 

He doesn't show the second almost falling animation when Sonic's back is towards the ledge.

 

Thanks for saying that because I had no idea what I was looking at lol.

 

The final portrait image in Fighters Megamix is this glorious thing:



Anyone who's played the game has probably seen this, but... not everyone has played the game.

 

Wait is the Flying Carpet stage in Megamix? I thought it was just South Island?!

EDIT:

I never thought it was notable to document the rest, but yeah I guess you're right that it should be included.

 

Its music is. For whatever reason it's used in Aurora Icefield.

I've spent the afternoon not doing proper work:


It's been a while since I've played Fighters Megamix, and I was never in a position to judge it side-by-side with Sonic the Fighters, but... yeah they're both quite loose approximations.

 

I've never understood why we got Fighters Megamix and not Sonic The Fighters on Saturn?

I mean, Fighters Megamix is so abstract it should exist, but having it while not having STF is just weird to me.

 

According to Yojiro Ogawa, Sonic the Fighters for Saturn didn't happen because it was difficult to reproduce the experience of playing the arcade version on the Saturn. It's why they waited until Gems Collection, because by then it could be ported without losing anything.

 

Do you have a source for that? Hiroshi Kataoka said StF's announcement for Saturn was a mistake:

"difficult to reproduce the experience of playing the arcade version on Saturn" then why release VF2 or FV?!

 

Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers are comparatively easy. Other than Shun's stage, the battles take place on solid ground, so you can get VDP2 to draw an endless plane and fake some scenery with 2D backgrounds. The perspective never really works, but by making the play areas look huge, 80-90% of the time you don't notice. The polygon budget doesn't really let you do anything fancy with the backgrounds - from what I understand Last Bronx managed to get some 3D scenery, but Virtua Fighter and Tekken didn't get that far.

They got around Shun's stage by placing the fight "next" to the river rather than "on" it, but it's a compromise you can live with, given it was one of a dozen stages that otherwise were pretty close to the real thing.

Sonic the Fighters, meanwhile... is anything but static. Literally, half the stages move - Fighters Megamix cherry picks the easy ones and even then there's big cuts - I'm really not sure how they'd get Magic Carpet or Canyon Cruise to work on Saturn.

 

It comes from this Ogawa interview published by GameSpy in 2005.

 

This bothers me a lot. Ogawa was put into Sonic Team during Sonic Adventure's development, no? There's no way they would have known anything about AM2's capabilities during the Saturn era, as that quote seems to negate the "similar experience" that Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers both offered. Kataoka was the director of all three of those games at AM2, the company that made the games, not Sonic Team. Also AM2 had ported VF2 and FV to the PS2 in the Ages 2500 collection and the literal emulator from those ports is used in Gems Collection to run StF. AM2 was moving to much bigger and better projects in the '97-'98 era and the Saturn wasn't doing so hot with it's 3D titles anyway. I feel like this was just hot air blown by Ogawa under the wire of an interview and not representative of the behind the scenes shenanigans, which I feel Kataoka would have more intimate knowledge of.

EDIT: Missed this

Alright, I might buy that. To perhaps merge these two statements together, marketing could have announced StF for Saturn first, then AM2 went to marketing and said "This can't happen on the Saturn", though I don't really buy that with all the technical aspects pulled off in the Shenmue for Saturn builds, as those were built as a descendant from the VF2, and probably FV engine for Saturn.

 

While I believe they could have pulled something off for StF on Saturn, the resources that went into making Shenmue happen would not have been devoted to it, so I don’t think we can use that as our reasoning. Also, AM2 probably would have wanted better performance in a pure fighter like StF than what Shenmue was able to achieve on Saturn.

 

I kind of suspect that if the idea for Shenmue had never formed in the first place, Fighters could've got on the Saturn in some form - we know that AM2 also had to abandon handling VF3's port and outsource to Genki because of it becoming a bigger focus, so perhaps with less on their plate, StF could've had a better chance of making it over.

 

I think you are misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that the same resources that went into Shenmue development would have been poured into StF, what I am saying is that because of what the Shenmue builds were able to pull off, I am sure StF wasn't technologically hindered by by Saturn specs. They both share a same game engine foundation, but I do agree that AM2 would not have poured as much energy into an StF port as they were putting into Shenmue.

On a personal theory, I believe Shenmue already was in motion at AM2 not long after Fighting Vipers, or maybe even after Virtua Fighter 2, and quite possibly the team may have already been devoting more time to Suzki's new project in the background outside of documented record by the time Sonic the Fighters hit arcades. The footage of Shenmue we have for Saturn is very impressive, but it did not pop up over night. An StF port could have eaten into resources into Shenmue's potential launch for the Saturn during it's lifetime, as Suzuki would have needed the team most familiar with the engine on Saturn to work on it. But we all know how that turned out anyway.

 

AM2 had a few things going on at the time - Yu Suzuki's and the "main team"'s focus for much of 1996 was Virtua Fighter 3, but there were teams working on Sonic the Fighters, the Saturn port of Fighting Vipers, Virtua Fighter Kids and Fighters Megamix. And a bunch of projects for 1997, like Digital Dance Mix Vol. 1 Namie Amuro which I'm sure the world was crying out for.

My gut feeling is that Shenmue didn't become much of a thing until 1997, and wasn't diverting attention until 1998... and even then it wasn't until 1999 when deadlines were being missed and the game was being split into bits.

 

https://xcancel.com/Sonic_Hedgeblog/status/1442950589302804480?s=20

The Japanese ‘Sonic: Triple Trouble’ manual has lyrics to go along with several of the songs in the game!

 

TIL Meta Junglira's name is a reference to Shangri-La.

Btw, those manual scans look much better than the ones we have in the wiki. Is there a full scan like that we could use to replace the current one?