And the award for "worst depiction of Sonic on a magazine cover" goes to... (Undocumented) Swedish magazine Interface https://www.tradera.com/item/1000457/626435400/interface-dataspelstidning-1993-nr-6
Sonic Frontiers' double jump storage is a very odd mechanic. When you jog or boost/airboost off of a platform, it behaves about as expected. Sonic forgoes his first jump, and you only get the weaker second jump, which is how double jumps work in pretty much every platformer. For some reason however, whenever you dropdash, slide, or spindash off of a platform, you just get both jumps for some reason? And the dropdash isn't even consistent about it! If you jump in the ball form, you get two jumps, but the second you unfurl you only get the double jump. Here's a video demonstrating this very janky mechanic: I love Sonic Team but they make some of the oddest decisions I've ever seen
Question, is there any logic behind Green Hill's background having its vertical scrolling in reverse? I always chalked it up to a mistake, but the Sonic Mania team seemed to think it was deliberate, as they replicated it with their Green Hill.
I always liked this, because (to me at least) it gives the illusion of looking downwards when up higher and looking upwards when down low; which is a pretty natural thing to do even if it's not conveyed as such in 2D videogames.
I considered they might have been going for this, but it would be weird for them to do that only for that zone. I don't suppose the source code sheds any light on whether it was intentional or not?
Not the source code, at least not at the moment, but a prototype might have answers for us. Let's take a look at the GamePV footage of Sonic 1 This is a strange prototype of Sonic 1 that a few of us like to call Revision 0.5. This is because Green Hill Zone has it's Revision 1 parallax, while the rest of the levels still have Revision 0 or even broken parallax. And it even has some prototype object layouts, seen in Spring Yard Act 1 near the end where this right facing red spring is a yellow spring in the final game. The working theory is that the extra parallax effects were intended for the worldwide Revision 0 release, but Sonic Team could not get it working in time and so they used the more primitive parallax just to get something more consistent and presentable, and then finish it up for Revision 1. Evidently since Green Hill was the only level to have it's Rev 1 parallax done, we can assume it had the most time spent on it. So they probably put more detail into the depth of the vertical scrolling, a treatment that the rest of the levels did not have enough time for.
So even as far back as the original game, they put all their effort into making the first stage really wow the player while the rest of the game got the shaft, warts and all. Yeah, that tracks.
You only need to really sell the player on the first level to get them to play the rest of the game, regardless of quality.
New Hirokazu Yasuhara interview just dropped. Don't think there's much explosive new insight into game design or whatever in it, but worth a look for photos like this
At EPCOT, no less. Funny how the article mentions living in LA and going to Disneyland, and then he also has a photo in front of EuroDisney's castle. Quite the travels back then.
Hmm. Looks like this site is just now learning about SEGA's area at Innoventions. Here's a fun fact. When the Dreamcast and SA1 came out. They made a brand new area promoting them.
I'm pretty sure most of the CES and Epcot stuff was posted when it was fresh. It's a pretty great place you know.
Sometimes I wonder how a SEGA-Disney partnership would've looked if they took things further, and the topic comes to mind even more these days with Super Nintendo World at Universal. Sonic is a bold enough IP to where it could easily make a big presence as a themed land somewhere like at Universal's Epic Universe (would certainly be amusing to have it in the same theme park as Mario ) or Island's of Adventure. Just imagine what a Green Hill-themed looping + corkscrew coaster could be like with todays technology.
