The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

Be the change you want to see in the world, man

 

Even weirder about it is the fact that Jun Senoue is on the damn song, yet he doesn't get brought up in the criticism at all. And he worked with Senoue for the TSR OST fairly recently too. Imagine badmouthing your collaborator's work publicly, saying it's a bad rendition, while attempting to tear down another dude...oops

 

I think it's a fantastic rendition (sorry Rich), I do wish it had TJ Davis's original vocals on it though. Tee's sister is alright but the delivery needs MORE POWER, I wanna feel the sunshine and right now it's overcast.

 

I don't think its better than Jacques' bouncy original, but I love it. Main gripe is that its rather slow, and feels like a lounge rendition. It was clearly recorded out of passion though, which should have been taken as a compliment by Jacques. The guy apparently just doesn't like Tee being in the spotlight. Perhaps he feels left out?

All complaints regarding credit definitely should have been directed towards Sega though, as surely it wasn't uploaded by Tee himself.

 

Jacques ripping into Tee is the best thing I've seen all week.

 

When you're right, you're right

 

I didn't know where else to post this, but I do find it very curious that "Crystal Egg" in Sonic 2 for master system has cacti that resemble the one from "The Desert Level"

Considering the team likely shared concept art. I dunno. I just wanted to make a note of it. The whole last zone in the master system level is quite strange.

 

https://xcancel.com/SonicJPNews/status/1193863039453409280

"Maekawa-san notes that today marks the 10th death anniversary of his good friend and Sonic series artist Honda-san, who was very talented and created great characters who live on to this day. He wishes he could work with him longer. Thank you, Honda-san."

I'd be surprised if the Sonic 2 MS/GG team had much access to materials relating to the Mega Drive version. None of the Zones seem to have any relation, the enemies are all new or based on Sonic 1 robots, it uses the Sonic 1 Egg Mobile design, only Sonic 1 animals appear, there's no spin dash and there are only 6 Chaos Emeralds and no Super Sonic. The only commonalities appear to be Tails and a very different Mecha Sonic. I have to wonder whether Mecha Sonic came about from communication with the Mega Drive team, or if it was a complete coincidence, a robot version of Sonic being such an obvious idea.

 

There must have been some connection:

 

That's a fair point. I'd forgotten how similar the "bricks" and colour schemes were in those two Zones.

 

There were also similarities with some of the scrapped levels, like Hidden Palace/Scrambled Egg (a cave with tubes, and what seems to be sparkling gems) or Blue Lake/Aqua Lake (a lake with submerged ancient ruins). And let's not forget Mecha Sonic.

 

Yes, this is exactly why I wanted to bring this up. There have been discussions about this in the past but they have been shrugged off as "the teams were separate" but with the new concept art documents and the more knowledge we have, it seems more likely the teams at the very least worked from the same concept art, and the sms version is more like their interpretation of some of the levels discussed.

EDIT: Yeah, i've been looking through a lot of the new stuff again, and I find it very interesting that the areas marked "Green Hill" and "Wood Zone" in the concept art are located in the same spots in south island as the Sonic 1 SMS map for GHZ and Jungle Zone. (And ocean wind zone is in the same location as bridge zone) Perhaps they liked the idea from the sms version and wanted it to be a feature in Sonic 2? I didn't realise just how alike south island looks between these images. It has closer relation to South Island than "West Side Island", which i'm not sure we have any official art for at all?

 

The theory I have is that the 8-bit Sonic 2 was built entirely independently until maybe the 75% mark, where they were given access to one of the Mega Drive prototypes. That's the point where you see Tails being added, and Green Hills/Sky High being changed from their original Sonic 1-esque designs. And of course the title screen, which is straight out of a Mega Drive prototype.

I imagine it was late because they didn't think to add things like the spin dash and corkscrews and whatever until Sonic Chaos. And there's basically no influence at all in the Sonic 2 Game Gear AutoDemo we have.

i.e. they didn't see the Mega Drive game early enough to change levels en masse and make a carbon copy, but they did see it late enough to swap out a few level tiles.

 

I always thought those looked very similar.

 

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/sonic

Huge Sonic sale going on on Steam right now. Ends on Friday, 10am pacific time.
You can grab TSR for 66% off (at least in the UK, not sure if steam sales are worldwide). Forces and Gens are back at 75% off, ect. ect.

 

I’ve just realised something after playing Sonic 2 for 26 years...

The opening ascending music at the start of the special stage is basically the same as the start of the theme of Super Sonic.

That’s a pretty awesome link and not sure I’ve ever heard anyone make the link before.

 

I don't think I've ever actually noticed that before. What a thematically clever yet subtle tie-in.

 

I came across something interesting while browsing the wiki.

Currently, on the Sonic 3 development page, we have this image from the MTV special "Inside Sonic & Knuckles":

Which we would be led to believe this as concept art for Sonic 3 / Knuckles, right? One would assume so anyway.
But now that we have access to concept art from Sonic 2, something becomes painfully obvious!
That's Madness Mountain at the bottom, and Emerald Isle in the middle there!

Curious, I went to track down the video source:

Skip ahead to around 6 minutes in, and the camera pans out to show clear images of Metropolis and Death Egg, among other images which are a little harder to make out.

So, it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to assume some of these artworks are for Sonic 2, right?
In that case, in the first image, could we be looking at a concept drawing for the Winter zone, complete with Christmas tree?

I don't want to assume that this is all art for Sonic 2, but the fact that there's so many pieces here that we can already verify as part of Sonic 2's development, it makes you think what else could be out there!

 

Good thinking, that's certainly a possibility. However, we can't know for sure, since there seems to be some S3K-exclusive art there as well, like Sky Sanctuary.

Either way, we really need a cleaner, higher res rip of that video, at least of the part with the concept art. Do we know anyone who could produce one?

 

I made a post about this a few years ago - feel free to read through it.