Anyone dissapointed about gems.

[LOUD-TREE]

I'm dissapointed beyond belief! We only get three good sonic games. I'm not counting the Game Gear games because I've already unlocked them all in Sonic Adventure DX... And well, because they suck. The GG games are just filler to me. We should have gotten SegaSonic Arcade, Knuckles Chaotix, Sonic Pocket Adventure and Sonic Shuffle to go along with Sonic R, Sonic CD, and Sonic the Fighters.

While I'm at it, Sonic CD is VERY poorly ported. The C button wasn't even fucking mapped on the GC controller, making the debug mode totally useless. Although they fixed the speed of the ending videos to Sonic CD in Mega Collection, they pretty much went ahead and said: "FUCK NO! We don't want to re-use those videos because it would be too damn convenient! Lets redo the whole fucking thing, and slow 'em down a bit to piss everybody off!" When trying to beat the game as fast as possible with no time stones, the game freezes. They took out the color of the water in Tidal Temptest, and the flashing sega logo, and to top it all off, they never gave us a choice to switch the soundtacks.

Honestly, this collection was horrible.

[Zeta]

I WOULD buy a Sonic collection that packaged together:

Sonic, Sonic 2, Knuckles in Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, Flicky, Sonic CD, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R, Sonic the Fighters, and Knucklex Chaotix . . . but having them all split apart sucks.

[Esrever]

I've got mixed feelings about Gems collection. The whole thing just seems so... irrational. It's not the kind of out-and-out horrible, effortless cash grab that you can shit all over. But it's so inconsistent!

They go to all the trouble to create a bang-on port of an obscure Arcade game that never saw a home release and is nearly impossible to emulate... and then they leave out half the well-known game gear titles because they were "already collected" on a game for a different console. They get Sonic R -- a port of a port of a 3D Saturn game -- running smoother than ever, but they can't get the bonus stages in an ancient Sega CD game to run at the proper speed. They go to all the trouble of implementing multiplayer in Sonic fucking Drift 2, but they don't bother to make the water in Sonic CD the right colour. There are remixes of the Japanese soundtrack but no actual Japanese soundtrack! The one game that I can emulate perfectly on my elderly PC is the one that doesn't work right here!

All the things that would have been difficult to implement were done perfectly, but all of the easiest tasks were completely screwed up. It's not even lazy. It's just madness. MADNESS!

[Kishi]

That's some Lovecraftian shit.

[Green Gibbon!]

And the piss poor sound. Don't forget the sound, I personally found that more grating than anything else on my one sitting.

There's multiplayer in Sonic Drift 2? Like, more than just two people? Also, how do you unlock these rumored remixes?

[LOUD-TREE]

And the piss poor sound. Don't forget the sound, I personally found that more grating than anything else on my one sitting.

There's multiplayer in Sonic Drift 2? Like, more than just two people? Also, how do you unlock these rumored remixes?

A couple:

Are You Brave? (StF theme)
Collect all of the StF artwork except the "Clear Game" illustration

Can You Feel the Sunshine? ACID Mix (Resort Island Theme Remix)
Come in first place on Radiant Emerald in Sonic R

Living in the City LTN Mix (Radical City Theme Remix)
Collect all of the Sonic R artwork except the "Clear Game" illustration

Sonic 6290 Mix and Sonic Boom D'mb Mix
Play Sonic CD 5 times

Sonic After 6290 Mix
Play Sonic CD 10 times

Sonic Heroes No-GTR Mix
Unlock everything in the Museum

The remixed music is crap at best, but whatever.

[big_smile]

Sonic Gems suffers from the same problem that has plagued every Sonic title since Sonic & Knuckles – instead of letting it develop to perfection, Sega shipped out when it was good enough for retail.

I’m not too bothered by the quality of the ports, but I am disappointed that Sonic Team made no attempt to enhance the ported games. All of the main games could have benefited from extra unlockable characters, which would have made it more tempting to play through them again. Seeing as some of the code was re-written especially for Gems, there is no reason why Sonic Team couldn’t have added a few extras.

The Sonic Museum does make up for some of the disappointment. While most of the art work has been seen before, it’s pleasing to see that the effort has been made to collect it all in one place and even add a few new items such as the music remixes, concept artwork and artwork descriptions.

The save mode is another pleasing addition and helps to lessen the more irritating aspects of the Game Gear games.

Gems is an improvement in comparison to Sonic Team’s other post DC-era titles, but it still lacks the effort needed to make it a ‘good’ game.

[Koosh Koosh!]

I still haven't got the fucking thing. Fuck you, Playasia.

[LOUD-TREE]

Sonic Gems suffers from the same problem that has plagued every Sonic title since Sonic & Knuckles – instead of letting it develop to perfection, Sega shipped out when it was good enough for retail.

I’m not too bothered by the quality of the ports, but I am disappointed that Sonic Team made no attempt to enhance the ported games. All of the main games could have benefited from extra unlockable characters, which would have made it more tempting to play through them again. Seeing as some of the code was re-written especially for Gems, there is no reason why Sonic Team couldn’t have added a few extras.

The Sonic Museum does make up for some of the disappointment. While most of the art work has been seen before, it’s pleasing to see that the effort has been made to collect it all in one place and even add a few new items such as the music remixes, concept artwork and artwork descriptions.

The save mode is another pleasing addition and helps to lessen the more irritating aspects of the Game Gear games.

Gems is an improvement in comparison to Sonic Team’s other post DC-era titles, but it still lacks the effort needed to make it a ‘good’ game.

Sonic CD feels so freaking broken.

[Gaz]

I got the Japanese version a few days ago and I wasn't really disappointed with it but thats more because I knew what to expect rather than because of the actual quality of it. The only thing that really disappointed me was the poor quality of the Sonic CD port. The game itself is still very good but it's a shame this version isn't quite up to scratch.

[Koosh Koosh!]

Hey, Gaz, did you order from Playasia as well? When was yours shipped off and what shipping option did you take? I took the whole econ-o airmail thing, and they sent it off on the 16th and it still hasn't arrived, despite promising it'd be there in 1 - 2 weeks.

[Gaz]

No, I ordered my copy from Yes-Asia. That's really unlucky as I ordered my copy on the 21st with the free standard delivery option, they dispatched it on the 24th and it arrived on the 30th.

[Koosh Koosh!]

Well, fuck ordering from Playasia again. I know I chose the cheap shipping, but dammit, they're not the most organised of people.

The fact is that I pre-ordered two weeks in advance of the game coming out on the 11th. However, they didn't actually bother sending out the game until the following Tuesday, and that was with a little note to tech support reading "um... my order, guys?". And even then, they had to split the order in two (I ordered a Freeloader with it), so I have Gems well on the way, but my Freeloader has only just been sent off. I think they sent it off yesterday... but again, that was with prompting from another query from me asking why my game was so damn late.

Urgh.

[Baba O'Reily]

Note the lack of smily at the end of Big_Smile's post. I think I'm going to have to hold back on Sonic Gems now.

[G.Silver]

In truth the selling factor (I think we all knew Sonic CD was in trouble before the game was out..) for me was the Bare Knuckle collection in the Japanese version.

The Sonic Museum does make up for some of the disappointment. While most of the art work has been seen before, it’s pleasing to see that the effort has been made to collect it all in one place and even add a few new items such as the music remixes, concept artwork and artwork descriptions.

When you have already played all these games to a satisfactory extent (I never felt I was missing anything by not owning StF) the purpose and drive of Sonic Gems IS the museum. I played everything (by that I mostly mean I opened and closed Game Gear games over and over) until I had everything unlocked and that was that. I'll probably never play it again (unless it's SoR time!), but I stress that as I say this I am not actually disappointed, it's just the only thing that really kept me playing the games at all at this point was the unlockable stuff.

Also, I really like the Sonic 3 menu remix! It's a bit of Sonic music that I really enjoyed in the first place, but now that I think about it, I don't have any remixes of it at all from OCR or VGmix or anything like that. Did I just miss them, or is it as overlooked as I think it is?

[Professor Machenstein]

*Shrugs*

I've been thinking, is it possible to shell-out the Sonic CD port and substitute it with an ISO of the original game? If I remember correctly, someone at Sonic-CulT did that with Sonic Mega Collection by replacing the Sonic 1 ROM with Sonic CD.

[Esrever]

That definitely would not work. The Sonic CD found on Gems is, unfortunately, not an ISO running via emulator... it's a direct port of the PC version. There wouldn't be anything to swap out.

I did forget to mention the bad sound! But that's probably because I only ever owned the PC version of Sonic CD. As far as I can tell, Sonic CD is the only game that sounds screwy, and its sound problems are definitely the same ones that the PC version had.

The original Sonic CD used the console's sound hardware to create all the sound effects through FM synthesis... in other words, the same way that ALL sound was made in Genesis games. Direct audio samples were used only for the CD audio music. But for the PC version, none of the sounds were synthesized. The music was CD audio, and the sound effects were replaced with WAV file audio samples. Unfortunately the WAVs sounded terrible, and Sega Entertainment did a piss poor job "mixing" them overtop the music.

On Gems, not only do the sound effects sound bad and screw up the music audio channel, but also they are way too loud. On the PC, you could adjust this by going into your system's audio settings and adjusting the volumes of CD audio and WAV audio manually. But of course, on Gems there is no such option.

All and all, choosing to port the PC version was a really bizarre decision, especially when the Sega CD is incredibly easy to emulate nowadays. It HAD to have been harder to port the PC version.

MADNESS!

[G.Silver]

I figured that it wasn't so much a port as an "emulation." Obviously the ending was altered, but I doubt they did much reprogramming at all. I think the main problem is that Sonic CD was not really a Sonic Team production, there was no one there to play it and check for problems, it's become pretty apparent in the past that not all Sonic Team members (least of all the guys in charge) actually follow the games they don't work on very closely.

Since Sonic R is also a lot closer to the PC version (did someone say it wasn't really the PC version?), it seems to me that it makes the most sense to trick the GC into being a PC emulator and then running the original games, rather than porting them both individually (being able to trick the GC into a more PC-like environment also has advantages that extend well beyond porting old Sonic games--heck, could they have done it all under Renderware like Sonic Heroes?), and that could explain some of the oddities for Sonic CD, like the water color (it's a more complicated effect than you would think), the sound effects maybe, and the speed of the Special Stages.

Really, AM2 already had Model 2 stuff handled on the PS2 reasonably well, so I wouldn't give them too much credit for the StF port either, I'm sure the PS2 port of Virtua Fighter 2 paved the way for both the PS2 and GC versions of StF.

If this is in fact what they did, my new question is could they have emulated a PC running Gens emulating the original Sonic CD for a near-perfect port?

[Esrever]

Honestly, I don't think the Gamecube is powerful enough to emulate a windows PC. Especially not a game like Sonic CD, which is so finicky that it won't even run on Windows XP's win95 emulator. Besides, wouldn't a windows emulator require some kind of illegally copied portion of the Windows operating kernel?

[G.Silver]

I'm thinking it wouldn't necessarily need Windows--Windows is only the operating system, and most "high level" PC programming is getting around Windows and into the guts underneath it. Both games are old enough that they might not be relying heavily on DirectX, which would definitly require a sizable chunk of Windows to back it up. All it really might need to do is get at the "guts," and powerful or not consoles are essentially just tricked out PCs anyway, so those guts should not be all that different these days. I am sure the GC's architecture is much closer to a PC than it is to the SegaCD (similarly, the SegaCD is also probably closer to a PC than to the GC).

I am of course, totally talking out of my ass.

[Professor Machenstein]

I'm not too offended by Sonic CD's porting. I say it's more of a give-and-take affair.

- Low resolution.
- Muffled sound.
- Loading screen.
- No "C" button.
- Malfunctional code system.
- Lack of water-color in Tidal Tempest.

+ Slowdown fixed.
+ Cleaner cut-scenes.
+ Requires less acceleration to time travel.
+ Data select.
+ Can exit to title screen via pause menu.

I'll stick with my emulator, but I'll play the Gems version if a friend comes over or something.

[Brazillian Cara]

Let's say someone who never played Sonic CD buys Gems Collection. It will still be worth the money?

[G.Silver]

The question is, "would you have liked Sonic CD in the first place?" Sonic CD has all this hype around it which may or may not be entirely justified, and there's no question that it is the oddball of the 16-bit Sonic family, quirky, unrefined, and contrary to the design path the series took (especially) with Sonic 3&K. Sonic CD has rough edges and the PC version gives it even more, so you'll have to get over both that and the fact that expectations for the game are really high.

But I don't think the problems destroy the game. If you're going to like Sonic CD, you'll probably still like it (but you're better off getting a copy of the original off Ebay and emulating it through Gens!)

[Crazy Penguin]

PC emulators are great and all, but I never quite feel that I'm actually playing the game. It's like an out of body experience. I need it on a proper TV screen, a decent joypad, a couch/bed to sit/lay on, and a remote control to adjust the volume with.

So anyway, I figured I'd look on eBay for one of those old Multi-Megas - save the pissing around of having to get a new Mega Drive and a Mega CD separately. Holy crap are these things expensive. Okay, I understand that Multi-Megas are rare and all, and they do look pretty slick, but how can anyone really justify spending over £100 on a console that's just a Mega Drive and Mega CD in one?

[plasticwingsband]

Okay, I understand that Multi-Megas are rare and all, and they do look pretty slick, but how can anyone really justify spending over £100 on a console that's just a Mega Drive and Mega CD in one?

Because people keep on bidding on it and the buyer doesn't want a bad reputation on eBay.