Sonic 4: Episode 1 Discussion

Yeah, but the 40MB file size probably isn't as big of a problem for those games. Why else would the WiiWare version have midis for music?

 

As I recall, Polygon Jim rattled off this long, rather hard-to-understand explanation that basically boils down to "The Sonic 4 designers fail at space management" a while back. He essentially told me that the game takes up more space than it needs to.

 

The Xbox 360 version is about 173 MB. Obviously I know most of that isn't music, but the music must take up a lot of space if they can convert it to MIDI, make some graphical modifications (lower quality models and lower resolution) and manage to get everything under 40MB for the Wii version. That's 133 MB missing between the versions.

 

Not sure if this was pointed out by anybody, but in the iPhone version, Sonic's idle animation features him taking out an iPhone and rocking out to music.

 

Yes, it's been pointed out.

 

Oh, my apologies then. Well, just in case anyone wants pictures.

 

I've seen the animation on the Retry screen, but I never noticed he was holding an iPod/iPhone. Probably because of the black background.

 

Actually, a large chunk of that can be music, from the early PartnerNet build of the game, we got to see the files being used and as with most sound formats on XBLA, it uses an altered form of WAVE/WMA which is set to 48Khz at a high bitrate, so, let's say each zone is 2MB, that's 24MB of music, Double that for the Speed shoes tracks, that's 48MB, throw in invincible and Super Sonic, we're at 52MB, throw in the boss parts, let's say they're 1MB each, that's 54MB, throw in the final zone and special stage, now we're at 58MB and let's say the title screen, options and world map are 1MB each, and we land at 61MB (est) on using a proper music format alone, over what would be barely 2MB in MIDI form.

 

I had a thought the other day. I was doing a playthrough of SA2B, I noticed how when you let go of the analog stick you loose all forward momentum when jumping. Rather like what's reported to happen in Sonic 4. I haven't actually played S4, I've resisted temptation to buy the ifag version, £5.99 is too much for a game that I'll probably think is crap.

Anyway, I simply thought that maybe Dimps had created an engine that mimics the 3D games instead of the 2D games.
With all the physics complaints I've read, it seemed to match the handling of the adventure games.

 

With exception that Sonic Adventure actually had rolling physics and you couldn't stand on a wall.

 

And it had wall-running physics which were woefully inconsistent and nearly broken, don't forget that part. =3

Still, at least it had wall-running physics in the first place. With more polish, that aspect would have been immeasurably cool.

 

SA1 actually has proper slope physics, it's just Sega hardly uses them in the entire game for no reason.

 

Perhaps it is unused because of camera issues, which would make it hard to see on the loop at times?

 

hey, are the midi files from the wii version about yet? 'Last I downloaded were rseq files or something that I couldn't get to convert right.

 

This isn't entirely true - the loop 'physics' you speak of are used when sonic runs through a loop, and various other sequences. Otherwise, if you take the physics out of the equation, the autoloop function would have to process like 300x more data, forcing sonic from one position to another each frame. Instead what it does is it just inputs rotation data for you.

 

Retro Gamer review. No scan, but I typed it up:

EDIT: Just making formatting slightly less obnoxious.

 

Would've been funnier if it tried to be more like Ken Balough instead of just taking the whole "sarcasm=funny always because it's sarcastic" approach.

Some parts would've been better if they weren't dragged out, like the '06 thing. The Elise scene could've been cut out entirely and it would've made the sequence 10X better.