Sonic

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Re: Sonic

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:40 pm

Yeah, I did not hate that at all! How disappointing.

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Thad
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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jan 19, 2021 11:44 am

Somebody got the Christian Whitehead versions of Sonic 1 and 2 to run on PC: repo/Windows binary

Game files not included; you'll need to get the iOS or Android versions of the games somewhere else. They go for pretty cheap in the app stores.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Mon Feb 01, 2021 12:13 pm

Sonic Prime coming to Netflix; that's just confusing.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 14, 2022 1:40 pm

Early Frontiers gameplay seems promising?

A few of Sonic Frontiers' systems brazenly crib from Breath of the Wild, with the biggest being a circular "stamina" meter. Instead of pausing and "spin dashing" to build up speed in a pinch, Sonic can now simply tap a gamepad trigger at any time to give his running speed a "nitro" boost, and the stamina meter impacts how much Sonic can maintain high speeds when he's either moving straight ahead or running vertically up walls. This is a great series addition that not only keeps Sonic moving but also encourages players to explore the world in search of increased stamina points.

[...]

Yet I found that the various scattered-across-the-plains challenges felt less like Breath of the Wild and more like a clever spin on Microsoft's Crackdown series, with a hearty dash of Super Mario Odyssey. These challenges consistently exploit Sonic's most fun actions, like his homing strikes, his wall runs, and his general proclivity for going fast on loops and corkscrew grinding rails. And they each conclude with useful rewards that move the plot along, give Sonic points to spend on his skill tree (yes, Sonic has skill trees now), or open up new zones to explore.

(links/formatting not included in copy-paste)

It's still beta and there's plenty of shit they have to fix, ideally before release. But it sounds like they've done a solid job with the fundamentals, and this could be the rare actually-good 3D Sonic game. I'm not getting my hopes up yet, but it's piqued my interest, at least.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:17 pm

Sonic Origins seems like a real debacle. $40 for the base game, DLC nags if you buy the base game, 4 games, some concessions to modernity (widescreen, and the extra 2-player levels on Sonic 2 seem like a neat idea) but not as many as you'd get from emulating them (no screen filters or rewind). And Sega's delisted the Genesis versions from Steam, and Origins has Denuvo. And they've changed the music in Sonic 3.

Sega can do better than this, and has. I guess people buy shit like this, but I'd really like for this to be one of those Sonic releases that fails so spectacularly they resolve to do better next time.

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Re: Sonic

Postby beatbandito » Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:28 pm

Sonic Origins does seem like a trash product the way it's being marketed. But the Sonic 3 tracks are the originals from before the MJ tracks were added on the genesis release. So I can both understand why they needed the change, and am excited for what they managed to replace the tracks with. I wouldn't count that against it.
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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 21, 2022 1:06 pm

I mean I'm sure they sound better than the MIDI versions from the Windows 9X port, or the beta versions that have been floating around forever, and they make for an interesting historical curiosity. But I still don't want to play Sonic 3 without the Ice Cap music.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:10 pm

Stuart Gipp at Retronauts has a list of complaints mostly focused on the changes, and how playing "Classic Mode" doesn't actually revert most of them. (It doesn't even drop the spin-dash from Sonic 1.)

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Re: Sonic

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:24 pm

At this point in 2022 I would consider an omnibus rerelease of the 16-bit Sonic games that didn't have crippling core issues to be unfaithful to the classics.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:28 pm

But Mega Collection and Gems Collection were --

...nevermind, I think I just spotted the crippling core issue.

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Re: Sonic

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:58 pm

Thad wrote:I mean I'm sure they sound better than the MIDI versions from the Windows 9X port, or the beta versions that have been floating around forever, and they make for an interesting historical curiosity. But I still don't want to play Sonic 3 without the Ice Cap music.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Niku » Thu Jun 30, 2022 9:02 pm

cranberry limeades are so good
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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 12, 2022 4:28 pm


Lots of Robotnik's traps in this one.

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Re: Sonic

Postby hngkong » Tue Jul 12, 2022 5:47 pm

So what I'm hearing is this is the best Sonic game ever.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Upthorn » Tue Jul 12, 2022 5:50 pm

To be fair, about a half of those are glitches that are in the base games
And about a third of the remaining bugs are errors in the base games' logic that were exposed by adding a new feature (HD resolution, restart level from pause menu)
And about half of the remaining bugs new, only because the original game glitches in a different way under those circumstances (terrain ejection logic is very different from original games)

Then again, to be fair, the bugs that are genuinely new are pretty bad, and every instance where there's a glitch in both games, but it behaves differently in the new one, the new behavior is significantly worse.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 12, 2022 6:26 pm

Upthorn wrote:To be fair, about a half of those are glitches that are in the base games

Yeah, I edited my post to add a "Robotnik's traps" joke.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 09, 2022 3:22 pm

I've been playing games on my Pocket, and while I can play pretty much anything 8- or 16-bit on it I'm currently gravitating toward old handheld games, because that's really the main thing it's for.

I keep hearing Triple Trouble is the best 8-bit Sonic game, so I decided to give it a shot.

And I think I agree that it's the best 8-bit Sonic game, but man oh man that's from an era where we graded handheld games on a serious curve. It looks wrong, it sounds wrong, and it feels wrong.

Still, it's got a lot going for it. It has complex level layouts, interesting boss fights, and variety in its special stages. The sprites are big and detailed, but not so big and detailed that they take up too much space and create gameplay problems (which is the main problem with its successor, Sonic Blast).

I don't see going back and playing it again, but I respect it for managing to be a decent, competent portable Sonic game.

(Not like Sonic 2. Hey, let's start the game with a mine cart level. And then let's design it for Master System and then crop the viewing area down for Game Gear so it's impossible to see where you're going. I'm not sure I ever got past the first area in that fucking game.)

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 28, 2023 3:37 pm

Sonic 3 AIR is a fan-made engine that runs Sonic 3 & Knuckles on PC with a lot of tweaks (including widescreen) and customization options. It seems really cool but I'm getting this lag on the sound effects that's driving me to distraction.

Ah well. I've played the everloving fuck out of this game as it is; maybe I should play something else. I never did try a Knuckles playthrough of Mania. Or finish Freedom Planet.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Sat Jul 29, 2023 11:21 pm

Thad wrote:Sonic 3 AIR is a fan-made engine that runs Sonic 3 & Knuckles on PC with a lot of tweaks (including widescreen) and customization options. It seems really cool but I'm getting this lag on the sound effects that's driving me to distraction.

The Flatpak version works fine on my Deck; no sound issue. (Also, if it can't find the ROM on launch it lets you browse to the file; the one on my desktop just quit with an error. Which is weird; they're supposed to be the same version of the program, it's just that the Deck one is a Flatpak and the one I'm using on my desktop is from the AUR. I'll probably try swapping out the AUR version for the Flatpak on my desktop since it seems to work right.)

I played through Angel Island as Tails (because he doesn't have an opening cutscene and was the quickest one to test the sound with) and didn't immediately notice anything different except the bit at the end of Act 2 where you run from the Flying Battery isn't "hold Right to win" anymore; you have to dodge the bombs it drops. I hear that Origins has the same change, so I suspect that the conversion to widescreen messes up the timing somehow.

I whiffed it on one of the special stages (the one with the sphere in-between two bumpers) but still managed to complete Angel Island with three Chaos Emeralds; I can't 100% the Blue Sphere stages as reliably as I used to but I've still got them mostly down.

Had some trouble getting my save to copy to Nextcloud; something to do with how Flatpaks handle storage that I guess I'll have to figure out if I want to get cloud saves working. Which won't matter anyway unless I can get the sound to work correctly on my desktop.

But yeah AIR is quite good and if you want to give S3&K another play it's probably the best way to do it.

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Re: Sonic

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 30, 2023 2:15 pm

Meant to add: I'm impressed by how well the Deck's D-pad has worked on Sonic in general and on Blue Sphere in particular. I haven't had much trouble with it, but the one game it's consistently given me issues on is Pac-Man Championship Edition, so I figured that another game based on precise 90-degree turns at high speed would give me similar problems. Nope, at least not as yet; every time I've flubbed a Blue Sphere level (once on Sonic 3 and a few times on Mania) it's felt like it was my fuckup, not the controls.

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