I too think Sonic 3 has the best sprites, but here's aweird one: I like the classic Sonic 1 / 2 monitor more than 3, it even fits with the game, in my opinion.
Everyone talks about Sonic 3K sprites, but noone doesn't say about Sonic 2 beta and Sonic spinball sprites
It's because they're linking from that shitty Sonic Wikia for some reason? Not sure why people are doing that a lot lately, we have a good wiki attached to this very site and images from it don't break when linked externally. Edit: Changed one instance of "links" to "images" to make my meaning clearer.
Those wikia image links have a portion at the end of the url that needs to be removed for them to not be broken, starting with "/revision" and whatever appears after that.
If that is the case I will happily offer the unpopular opinion that Sonic 1/CD's sprites are by far the best in the mainline series until Mania. Ed: Though seeing as that poll offers Mania (and Chaotix for that matter) as an option I would guess that most people who feel similarly are voting for that. Mania did a *great* job on its original sprites in a way that feels like an update.
Unpopular opinion: Sonic Origins' cutscenes actively harm the series. But they are well drawn and lovely to look at, it's the story at issue.
Sonic Retro's wiki is... merely functional, and isn't particularly elegant for speedy image grabbing, to put it lightly. Like, just look at the "sonic.fandom.com" image gallery for Sonic 1 MD: [+] It has a list of contents, which when clicking on something, brings you down to a collapsible gallery about that particular topic. Regularly clicking on an image keeps the page you're on in the background, and just overlays the enlarged version where you can quickly flip through more images on with the arrow keys, or click back onto the main page. A nice convenient one-stop shop for all your image needs! Meanwhile, on "info.sonicretro.org" we have... the main page for the game: [+] Only twenty or so art images, along with a smorgasbord of covers, cartridges, and manuals. the promotional material page: [+] Sega's printed ads. the magazine article page: [+] Outside magazine articles reporting on the game. the development page: [+] An extremely comprehensive write up detailing the game's creation, sometimes broken up by images. whatever this is: [+] Lots of images pulled up and sorted by filename alphabetically. Dunno how unpopular this would be, I'd love to see a proper complete image gallery per game on Retro similar to the "shitty trash wiki" gallery in structure. Just another page sitting alongside the existing ones, ideally linking back to the others for details/clarification, with images put in concise collapsed sections. Maybe our forum users would actually bother to link to Retro if we had something just as convenient as (if not better than) Fandom's gallery to scour through. (side tangent: Some sites can spit out the image correctly even with the extra /revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20180824172302 junk on the end, while others cant. With the discussed Spinball pic, Discord and Imgbb can handle it unmodified, Chrome's "open in a new tab" only needs cb=20180824172302 removed, and Imgur needs all of it removed. Sonic Retro is very peculiar because it's both working and broken at different points. The normal writing window for posts as well as "More Options->Preview" display everything properly, which is why people will continue to post broken Fandom images [since there's nothing displaying wrong while they're drafting it up]. You'd expect it to either work consistently site-wide or break consistently site-wide.) Spoiler: test test preview on my end:
The preview only works for yourself because you already have in cache the versions of those images with those specific parameters, as you displayed them on your way. But yes, different websites handle hotlinks and parameters in different ways.
Would it be unpopular to state that pretty much everything around Sonic gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling of comfort? Yes, even the bad games, haha.
Care to elaborate? The amount of actual story contained in those cutscenes is so miniscule that I really don't see how they could be doing any harm...
BlackHole doesn't like that they needlessly contradict the story descriptions of the original manuals, which is fair. How that "harms" "the series" is quite the mystery though.
It was more heavily discussed in the Love and Timelines thread how Origins differs from all of the old manual stuff. Spoiler: from memory S1: - Fine??CD: - Origins OP has Amy doing readings as she watches Little Planet arrive, then immediately cut to Sonic approaching it chained up. ED has Little Planet already leaving. The launch JP CD manual says Little Planet stays above Never Lake for a whole month before disappearing.S2: - Origins OP has Tails lifting off the ground, where he has a surprised reaction, as if he just learned he could fly. The JP manual for Tails Adventures says that whole game happens before Tails meets Sonic, and he was more than capable of helicopter-lifting himself to new heights back then.3K: - Origins OP has Eggman land away from the Death Egg all the way in Hidden Palace, immediately learn of the Master Emerald then, and immediately meets Knuckles there. The launch JP 3K manual has him escaping the Death Egg (post-touchdown? it's weirdly phrased), only knows of a huge emerald signal from cracks caused by the crash, and meets Knuckles in some forest a few days later. Those are the only ones I thought were noteworthy changes. There might've been more things being complained about that I just don't remember.
We don't know (yet) if Tails Adventures was retconned to be placed after 3K as the other GG Games - and as itself in the US manual. But gameplay abilities were always inconsistent throughout the series.
Because they have completely changed the original plots for less put together ones and the fanbase has accepted this under the flimsy idea of "streamlining the canon". This actively harms the series since now they can do this with any game under the same pretence. "Shadow never had amnesia, we're making Team Dark's story in Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog non-canon to streamline the canon." Of course, I'm sure people will say that'll never happen, but can you honestly say that when they've already removed the Master Emeralds power at one point and made it nothing more than a big, shiny green rock?
It's not like the original lore isn't all over the place either, and it's not like retcons aren't a thing. The example you used about Shadow can't happen because that story is told in the game itself, we see it unfolding through the game and the cutscenes, plus that was after the series lore became more unified post SA1. The story for the classics though is all off screen lore and there's 3 versions of it for each game because regional differences. Hell the US plot for CD calls Amy Sally. And not even the Japanese back stories completely reflect what Sonic has kind of become to be seen as, I bet there are elements of that old lore current SoJ is just like "what the hell?" It's a series that's been around for 30 years, the older the series the more likely over time the creators are going to go back and retool previous lore to fit in with more recently established lore. Super Mario Bros for example. In Japan, the bricks are actually toads turned into bricks by magic, so each brick you hit you're effectively slaughtering toads. That didn't stick around did it? Originally Eggman was either Eggman or Robotnik and now technically it's both in a full name that didn't exist 30 years ago. So which story do you pick from back in the day? Well in this case they chose none and instead made a new story to streamline a complicated all over the place narrative. Personally I think they made the right choice. But the whole classic era is ripe for retconning due to how inconsistent everything was back then. The game gear titles too, clearly they had plots Sega just says like "idk Sonic dreamt it I guess?" these days. It's a shame, but it happens. It's not always for the worse though. Vector in Chaotix was on a religious pilgrimage and I mean... what? Sounds like a Penders B-plot.
I feel like it's a massive shame that the Origins cutscenes were less than 30 seconds long on average and only played at the bookends of each game. If SEGA were interested, they could have told stories that better explained the events of the Classic games. Don't get me wrong, because I greatly enjoy the cutscenes that we did get (apart from the 100% pointless S2 ending scene), but they don't actually tell us very much at all. And unlike say the original SCD intro, they're all quite goofy and slow. I'd have loved to have seen more action and more stort in the scenes. I don't know whether it's popular or unpopular to say this this. I'm glad that we finally have a series of canon stories surrounding the Classic games and an indisputable spot for CD in the timeline. It just would have been great if they included more details from the different backstories rather than glossing over most of them.
