It does sound like it, and I was hopeful (as the spindash is added), but it really just fails in too many aspects.
The sound is bad when compared to the original. This is surprising since the original was on Genesis, which usually suffers in the sound department (though Sonic games are a gigantic exception to this rule).
The game lags. A LOT. And I dont' just mean when you get hit (with lots of ring sprites bouncing).
The physics are laughable. You can be moving foward, and jump too late to clear a ledge or rock or whatever, and once your height passes it, sonic continues to move forward at top speed.
I've only played the first zone, so there may be better things (or worse things) than these I've noticed so far.
(Theg arbage is a running joke from our dear friend XPengiun)
Witness theg arbage for yourself with this partial extremely unoptimized lag-filled not-going-to-finish TAS!
Hmm, I guess this should be moved into the GBA forum...my bad.
<Swordless> Go hug a tree, you vegetarian (I bet you really are one)
The physics are laughable. You can be moving foward, and jump too late to clear a ledge or rock or whatever, and once your height passes it, sonic continues to move forward at top speed.
Heehee, that's like how Rockman World 1 and 3 let you build up speed even when you're pushing against a wall, so you can pop up over or under it with your full speed. Or just some speed, if you weren't pushing Left or Right but were recently.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Wow. They obviously didn't finish this before releasing it. It would make a fast and funny TAS because the physics are so different and broken this way, but the lag is just awful.
Here is my attempt, until I stopped somewhere in Marble Garden 3. It could be more optimized, but whatever. Even with the spindash and all of the other changes that cause Sonic to move faster and the ability to skip bonus countdowns, it would still probably be slower in real-time than a run of the original.
EDIT: Turning off the music seems to help a little, but not much.
To add to what JXQ said is different:
speed shoes don't let you go any faster
loop jumping doesn't work at all
Sonic jumps higher
jumping no longer reduces your speed at all
jumping on upward slopes to jump higher barely works
jumping out of a roll leaves you in full control of movement during the jump
you don't stop moving when you land after taking damage
damage always knocks in the direction you're not facing
you can't bounce high off of item monitors or enemies
you can't push blocks during a jump
bosses don't reverse your speed when you hit them, instead it matters where you hit them
bosses push you away when you hit them even if they're still invincible
zipping doesn't work anymore
if you press in the direction you're already moving while running backwards, you instantly stop
in general, when moving at a high speed, the only effective way to slow down is to press forward (in the wrong direction)
you can jump into and out of lava or fire without taking damage
if you beat Labyrinth 3 too fast, the game freezes
The Game Gear would choke on Sonic 1 without some huge sacrifices (like the ones they already made when they made the 8-bit Sonic games). Though the physics in this "port" do remind me of those a bit.
Huh... Disabling music in the options makes a bigger difference than I first thought it did. Green Hill 1 became over 4 seconds faster, and the act still took 12 seconds by the in-game clock. It looks much smoother, and the background stopped glitching out, as well, but as subpar as the music was, it sounds rather empty now.
Ugh… The shit. :\
I was hoping for anything but this. The game basically runs at 20—30 FPS all the time as if it was actually emulated on GBA. How did this abomination of a game even slipped past the quality control?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Apparently you can simply choose Restart at any checkpoint to reset the clock to 0, which makes it trivial to get an in-game completion time of 3 seconds on Green Hill 1. A TAS would ignore that, but I don't think this version even deserves one.
VANDAL wrote:
What were they thinking?
That's not such a mystery, but a better question is "What happened?"
When Sega released Sonic Mega Collection, they claimed to have lost the original source code for Sonic the Hedgehog, which is why the game is actually a ported and modified version of Gens, with a Sonic related ROM collection.
I'm guessing that Sonic: Genesis is just what happens when you have the current Sonic Team rewrite the Sonic engine from scratch.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Writing most of it from scratch is probably a necessity anyway when you're going between such different hardware while both ends need to be written in assembly and emulation is impossible. You would think they would still have the source for one of the Sonic Advance games, but my guess is that they couldn't use it because it would be technically inadequate to handle the (ironically) more demanding Sonic 1.
As for the physics, they are so bafflingly different that the only explanation I can think of is that they are placeholder physics that they never got a chance to replace with the real ones. They couldn't have lost the source to practically every 2D Sonic game in existence and also failed to notice that Sonic handled differently.
upthorn wrote:
I'm guessing that Sonic: Genesis is just what happens when you have the current Sonic Team rewrite the Sonic engine from scratch.
And/or when someone greatly underestimates how much time it would take them to do it and pushing back the release isn't possible and they can't spare people from other more important projects to work on this one. I heard that it also had to do with Yuji Naka leaving, but I don't know how much that really had to do with it.
In any case, there are better Sonic 1 hacks for TASing than this, albeit none of them for GBA [yet; I wouldn't be surprised if someone is able to do better with no budget], so...
In any case, there are better Sonic 1 hacks for TASing than this, albeit none of them for GBA, so...
Heh, the instant I read that, I thought of a certain Sonic fangame that runs on GBA emus. I highly doubt that it would be seriously considered and/or (especially) published, but it's a rather amusing thought nonetheless.
*vanishes away*
Joined: 6/21/2004
Posts: 247
Location: New Hampshire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btE4bmED5pA
WOW. I cannot believe this was released by an actual company and not one person working independently for an hour a day for about a week.
Writing most of it from scratch is probably a necessity anyway when you're going between such different hardware while both ends need to be written in assembly and emulation is impossible. You would think they would still have the source for one of the Sonic Advance games, but my guess is that they couldn't use it because it would be technically inadequate to handle the (ironically) more demanding Sonic 1.
I honestly wouldn't mind if this game had Sonic Advance graphics/engine - it would be better than the steaming hunk of fecal matter that he have now.
Writing most of it from scratch is probably a necessity anyway when you're going between such different hardware while both ends need to be written in assembly and emulation is impossible. You would think they would still have the source for one of the Sonic Advance games, but my guess is that they couldn't use it because it would be technically inadequate to handle the (ironically) more demanding Sonic 1.
I honestly wouldn't mind if this game had Sonic Advance graphics/engine - it would be better than the steaming hunk of fecal matter that he have now.
You are starting to remind me of some Angry Nintendo Nerd...
As crummy as this game is, I bet it would be pretty interesting to TAS. There has to be a plethora of new glitches to find now.
Yeah, there are a whole plethora of new glitches, and the physics are interesting, and would be fun to play around with.
But then there's the constant, mind-numbing, lag.
And, because the lag can be reduced, it would have to be managed.
And so to TAS it properly, much more time would have to be devoted to lag management than to actual gameplay.
And therein lies the issue.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
No, that is "fadeout lag" (duration of the post-exit fadeout based on the score), and it's barely noticeable. SMW generally is rather lag-free. In Sonic Genesis, we are dealing with computational lag, and it looks ugly in any case.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
