These guys are fun.
Sonic The Hedgehog
- Thread starter Paladin
- Start date
I find it interesting that there wasn't a Sonic Central this year. I mean, there also wasn't a Twitter Takeover either but CrossWorlds doesn't have a story. With Sonic Central mostly being previews and advertising, you'd think they'd do it since more eyes are on the franchise.
Yeah! Sonic doesn't need the free to play excuse to make crap games!
Had a thought today: There are all kinds of fan projects out there, including an attempted remake of Sonic 06 from people who are convinced there's something of value buried under all of the everything. Is anyone trying to remake Sonic Adventure on the same platform? Not just to fix what the PC port broke (which I'm sure there are already less drastic solutions for), but to improve on the elements that were questionable from the start or simply haven't aged well compared to later games.
Not that I'm aware of, but I wish. There is so much potential. It would probably be a harder project to conceptualize though. Like where to start and where to stop. Obviously the cutscenes need to be completely redone, and that's a mountain of work. After that, it's less obvious how to fix the gameplay. Fix the glitches? Sure, but there's really not that many. Fix some of the dumber puzzles in the Adventure Fields? I'd be okay with that, but that would take some serious brainstorming. Make Froggy a lot more hungry for the lure? I vote yes, but I can imagine the project having competing voices who prefer to embrace the meme and make the fishing even worse.
I think that's just it. How would one ground up "fix" SA1? '06 has a much more clear path of what to do and what can't be done. The whole game is buggy, the script has pitfalls, the Adventure fields are not well utilized, and the action levels are buggy and control bad despite a good layout. Project 06 only attempted to fix the first and last problem. There's no Adventure fields since things are accessed from menus and the only cutscenes are the ones directly in the levels themselves (and usually just establishing shots or moments of context). There's a lot of the game that isn't touched at all by the project.
Adventure 1 lands in a situation where a lot of its issues either have already been fixed by mods or fundamentally can't be fixed without a redesign. I think it's part of the reason why the Adventure games haven't gotten a rerelease.
Sonic '06 also has a weird legacy of existing in a way that shows it could have been better. The E3 demo build had polishing work done and people recall it being decent. The E3 demo was done on Xbox 360 but the final game was based off the Playstation build. The original game on newer hardware runs smoother with fewer bugs than on original hardware (thus the suggestion to run the game on Xbox One or Series S/X if you want to play the original game for some reason).
This is an official pic so it leaves me wondering, just how tangible is Sage? Is it something she can turn on and off?
I kind of figure Sage is a "hardlight hologram" sort of situation. She probably can turn it on and off as she pleases.
That's... WHAT??? How is it even POSSIBLE to make a game with bugs that disappear when you run it through a compatibility layer? I swear that game isn't just badly made; it's haunted.
Pocket: it's a sonic game. It's not haunted.
It's hugging CURSED.
It's hugging CURSED.
The simplest explanation is that better hardware gives the code more room to breath. You see this on almost any game that can run on newer hardware, but designed for the previous one. They tend to run better and smoother and sometimes lack the issues they had on older hardware. Sometimes those games were pressing up against the metaphorical box, and putting them in a bigger box helps them.
It's like how Windows Me runs fine as a virtual machine. When you abstract away all the hardware and driver incompatibilities suddenly it seems totally stable.
Yeah but aren't console games usually made for such a specific spec that newer ones have to convincingly pretend to be the old ones in order for games to work, and at the very least games need an official patch from the developers to run any differently? That's why Bloodborne on PS5 is still locked to 30FPS, for example.
Mostly, but some games are coded differently and at times there is a hard better or worse way to do things. A lot of the strictness on specs is due to internal clocks and not throwing off timing. I'm pretty sure Shadewing is right on the money on the game code not having room to breathe, especially since newer hardware doesn't fix every bug. I'm pretty sure this can be explained by one part of one level: the High Speed section of Crisis City.
Boxes and cars are thrown in Sonic's path as he runs and these have collision and physics reactions. The boxes and cars explode as they hit the ground and the pieces are active hitboxes that are calculated on the fly as you're playing with realtime physics. Surviving the level is almost more of a roulette spin than Casino Night. On better hardware, the game has the memory to handle all those calculations on the fly. And while you might rightfully point out that the whole game isn't Crisis City, all sorts of other problems like things loading into memory before you can interact with it are better resolved on better hardware.
Though hindsight is really showing that the game's physics engine was okay on paper but horrible in practice.
Boxes and cars are thrown in Sonic's path as he runs and these have collision and physics reactions. The boxes and cars explode as they hit the ground and the pieces are active hitboxes that are calculated on the fly as you're playing with realtime physics. Surviving the level is almost more of a roulette spin than Casino Night. On better hardware, the game has the memory to handle all those calculations on the fly. And while you might rightfully point out that the whole game isn't Crisis City, all sorts of other problems like things loading into memory before you can interact with it are better resolved on better hardware.
Though hindsight is really showing that the game's physics engine was okay on paper but horrible in practice.
Obviously nobody optimized Sonic 06 for the hardware it was intended to run on, but in this case that's working in our favor. It doesn't need to be untangled from the original specs because it was never optimized for the original specs in the first place.