Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic 1) to be realeased to GBA

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Forza Johnman
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Post by Forza Johnman »

Omni Hunter wrote:I found the different shields kinda fun, I know the lightning shield has gone through different itterations, but I'm suprised that the fire shield hasn't been seen since Flickies Island.
There was a Red Shield in Shadow. The only place where it quite easy to get one is Death Ruins. It was a normal shield with the ability to destroy/kill things on touch. (eg. Trees, Soldiers, Aliens...)

I enjoyed the Lightning Shield the most in Sonic 3 and Knuckles purely for the double jump and the ring attracting.

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Shadow Hog
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Post by Shadow Hog »

From the "celebration" thread:
Shadow Hog wrote:It gets worse, actually. You know the GBA game? I've played it (well, ROM). And trust me, you <b>don't</b> want to.

The audio is <b>horrible</b>. The songs themselves are <i>okay</i>, but largely sound like tunes trying their best to sound like the originals - and failing miserably. The sound effects are completely messed up, though. They get the job done - mostly - but sound completely different from the original game's (save the ring sounds, which are recorded directly from the original). Some sounds are way, way off, though, like how crashing through walls and hitting Eggman both have the "bust a badguy" sound effect (it's as bad as it sounds).

Graphics are more or less identical to the Genesis game, which is good... save the flickering background.

The physics are really, really off. It's hard to explain - you'd have to try it to understand it, but things like jumping higher than you should be, being unable to recover from being hit as quick (which killed me twice in Marble Zone 2, I swear), movement feeling clunky... It's horrible.

The slowdown? VERY prevalent. Maybe that's why the physics feel off - you're moving slowly one splitsecond, and the next you're moving much, much faster - your actual speed. It's very disconcerting, and I swear it's making level completion take at least twice as long as it normally does.

The pop-up? More like pop-out, and it's not that noticeable for the most part - except for the breaking cliffs in GHZ, which disappear in the blink of an eye instead of properly crumbling. Same goes for the breakable walls in GHZ...

In short? <b>Avoid like the plague</b>. This is an insult, Sega. You can do better than this - the <i>Advance</i> games ran better than this, and they're not even as good! There's no good explanation.

Sounds like Sega's big week of <i>Sonic</i> titles is going to end up as one of the worst weeks in <i>Sonic</i> history ever.

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Post by Green Gibbon! »

Gee-yah whillikers. I wonder if the cell phone versions are this bad?

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Spazz
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Post by Spazz »

I was actually just thinking about that myself. So far it seems that Sonic Mobile is actually more accurate to the original than this (given you have a semi-powerful phone), including the audio, physics and graphics.

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Post by Frieza2000 »

Nobody's mentioned it here yet, but Sega has also announced they'll be releasing <i>Sonic the Hedgehog High Speed</i>, yet another port of Sonic 1, for download on Xbox Live Arcade.

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Post by MegaKitsune »

:( Sonic 1 is my second favorite Sonic game (next to Sonic 2). To be frank, I'm not surprised the GBA version sucks, but the 360 port has no excuse not to suck. NO EXCUSE.

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DackAttac
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Post by DackAttac »

It's time to worry for Sonic Team when they can't just fall flat trying to recapture the glory of their heyday, but they can't even xerox it.

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Post by MegaKitsune »

LOL, that's going in my sig!

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J.E.Smith
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Post by J.E.Smith »

Well, I'll say one good thing about it.

It may be a crappy port, but at least you can play a classic Sonic game on the road or when the power's out instead of Rush or the Advance series.

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Post by James McGeachie »

No you can't, this is so broken it doesn't retain any of the fun of the original game whatsoever.

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Post by Ngangbius »

J.E.Smith wrote:It may be a crappy port, but at least you can play a classic Sonic game on the road or when the power's out instead of Rush or the Advance series.
Wrong. If you want classic Sonic on the go with a handheld then get a PSP and the Genesis Collection for only $30. You'll get a near flawless port of Sonic 1 and 2, plus some other classics such as Phantasy Star 1, 2, & 4, Ecco the Dolphin and Shinobi.

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Post by MegaKitsune »

Ngangbius wrote:
J.E.Smith wrote:It may be a crappy port, but at least you can play a classic Sonic game on the road or when the power's out instead of Rush or the Advance series.
Wrong. If you want classic Sonic on the go with a handheld then get a PSP and the Genesis Collection for only $30. You'll get a near flawless port of Sonic 1 and 2, plus some other classics such as Phantasy Star 1, 2, & 4, Ecco the Dolphin and Shinobi.
Or get a PSP and downgrade the firmware...then put a Genesis emulator on it...

Or get one of those Gamepark GPX things and put a Genesis emu on it...

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Post by Tweaker »

Ngangbius wrote:
J.E.Smith wrote:It may be a crappy port, but at least you can play a classic Sonic game on the road or when the power's out instead of Rush or the Advance series.
Wrong. If you want classic Sonic on the go with a handheld then get a PSP and the Genesis Collection for only $30. You'll get a near flawless port of Sonic 1 and 2, plus some other classics such as Phantasy Star 1, 2, & 4, Ecco the Dolphin and Shinobi.
They aren't ports... they're an emulator with ROMs. That's why it's perfect. =P

I'm sure if it was a port, it would've turned out the same way that Genesis did. And that's NOOOOO GOOD!

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Hybrid
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Post by Hybrid »

Wow, this is worse than I thought. I don't know why they thought it would be a good idea to zoom the camera in so far, I got almost dizzy just from watching it. I also couldn't see anything around me in the Special Stage, which makes them more of a chore than they used to be.

And what's with the lag? My emulator said it was running at 100% but the game was still extremely choppy, is that what its really like on the GBA as well?

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Post by Plorpus III »

Yup. Or so I hear.

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Post by Tsuyoshi-kun »

Here's a footage of someone playing through Green Hill Zone on Sonic 1 GBA:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5BNzHSbAQo

Looks like shit. Oddly enough, unlike the U.S. version from 1991, you do get an extra life every 50,000 points.

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jenkins
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Post by jenkins »

Ugh. The mechanics seemed bad enough, but the lagging sound effects are enough to drive me insane. I don't see myself ever buying that.

On the plus side, I liked the music for the most part. Not bad at all.

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Post by MegaKitsune »

1.What's with the health message, are they doing these with all games now? And the Sega Logo is cool.

2. That has to be the least punchy/enthusiastic version of the Sonic Theme I have EVER heard. And OH MY GOD, they FUCKING RUINED GREEN HILL ZONE! Dreams Come True must be weeping over the cartridge. These aren't even FM, it's like a cheap-ass ROMpler's emulation of an anlalog synth or more exactly a cheap-ass ROMpler's emulation of a even cheaper VA! You could say "ALL SAMPLES TAKEN FROM THE ROLAND SOUNDCANVAS SC-50" and I wouldn't bat my eyes. And while the music samples are inaccurate and lagging, the arrangements are spot on, which makes me think it IS some shitty-ass softsynth as opposed to a high quality MOD (a MOD shouldn't lag like that). More than likely though the culprit is the GBA's limited sound capability (only like 6 PCM channels than that shitty GBC soundchip). Seriously though, how hard is it to fire up FM7 or some other capable FM chip emulator and sample waveforms that ACTUALLY SOUND LIKE THE ORIGINAL GAME!?

3. Damn, that game is jerky.


But you know this is nostalgic. Maybe not nostalgic in the sense of playing Sonic on the Genesis for the first time, but rather nostalgic of that P2 200MHZ running Megadrive/ KGen/Genem.

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Post by Dragonfox »

Tsuyoshi-kun wrote:Here's a footage of someone playing through Green Hill Zone on Sonic 1 GBA:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C5BNzHSbAQo

Looks like shit. Oddly enough, unlike the U.S. version from 1991, you do get an extra life every 50,000 points.
I stopped watching after he got the emerald. I'm certain that during development, they were playing the original and held a microphone against the speakers while someone was fiddling with the sound test. Then they asked EspioKAOS to remix the music through his MIDI synthesizer and held a microphone against his computer speakers. Then put the recordings on the game.

Will (or can) Sonic Team stop making games with their toes for once? We have a rushed Sonic Adventure 1 wannabe, a hand-held with Sonic R influences, a buggered-up port and a game based on running through Baghdad. What next?

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Post by MegaKitsune »

Dragonfox wrote: I'm certain that during development, they were playing the original and held a microphone against the speakers while someone was fiddling with the sound test. Then they asked EspioKAOS to remix the music through his MIDI synthesizer and held a microphone against his computer speakers. Then put the recordings on the game.
You can't do that.... GBA can't do streaming audio, it would require way too much CPU power that the GBA can't provide. You see, MP3 and OGG codecs need a floating point processor to decode the compressed audio. While the GBA CAN do floating-point math, it's damn sluggish because floating-point math is being EMULATED; there is no dedicated floating point processor (FPU) in the ARM7.

So the other options are softsynths (which eat up a lot of CPU) or MODs (which is an old Amiga format that combines MIDI and sample data together.). Most people go with the MOD format because the GBA's PCM channels can help out with the MOD playback, taking some load off of the GBA's CPU. Most likely Sonic is using a softsynth, because it has some FX artifacting that softsynths have, and obviously the lag/slowdown that you all see.

Either way, you cannot put audio recordings on a GBA without a larger cart containing more ROM and a FPU.

Secondly, WTF is EspioKAOS?

EDIT: Google educated me, don't make fun of John Weeks. I've listened to his MIDIs on VGMusic for quite some time and I must say he is QUITE the sequencer.

This Sonic music sounds more like the music in Sonic Roboblast 2.

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Post by Shadow Hog »

In defense of both, Espio's compositions are EXCELLENT considering the limitations of the medium, and <i>SRB2</i>'s music's actually very catchy. You can't try to make analogies with those MIDIs and this dreck - as Johnny Turbo would say, <i>it doesn't even compare!</i>

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Post by MegaKitsune »

Image

And yeah, SSRB2's music is actually quite catchy, the synth they used must be the same one for the GBA samples though.

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Post by TapamN »

MegaKitsune wrote: You see, MP3 and OGG codecs need a floating point processor to decode the compressed audio.
Wrong. You can use fixed point math. Tremor is a fixed point Vorbis player. (Also, OGG is not a codec, Vorbis is a codec. OGG is a container format, like AVI.)

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Post by MegaKitsune »

You still wouldn't use OGG when your maximum cart size is 32MB, and when most developers are only allotted the 24MB carts.

And BTW, Gamespy says the developers are TBA, is Sega/Sonic Team REALLY the developer of this travesty?

EDIT: IGN says the same thing...maybe they're hiding from this shitpile?

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