Topic: Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis)

[JonLeung]

Now that I recall, I heard it said that the name "Mobius" was a mistranslation.  Someone involved with the Sonic games (Yuji Naka?) was referring to the loops that Sonic runs on, somehow that was mistranslated as being a Mobius loop, which then led to the planet as a whole being known as Mobius, at least in the English versions of the game.



Odd.  I could see how it could happen, but you'd think translators could be more careful.  Or maybe they really just thought "Mobius" sounds cool.  And it kind of does.



EDIT: I suppose we could just read the Wikipedia article on Mobius...

[DarkWolf]

When I was younger I unfortunately bought into the licensed comics and such that they made.  But now that I look back, the simplicity of the first Sonic game is awesome.

[marioman]

DarkWolf Said:

the simplicity of the first Sonic game is awesome.

That is what has been dogging Sega since Sonic Adventure 2.  (Arguably SA1, but definitely SA2.)  Too much storyline, too many new characters, and not enough emphasis gameplay.  I hope that this new 2.5D Sonic Unleashed game will be a step in the right direction, but I am not holding my breath.



Oh and by the way, humans in a Sonic game ALWAYS mean bad news.  Look at Sonic 2006...

[Maxim]

Necro-post for the actual posted maps

Why does Marble Zone Act 3 have an extra white-outlined are on the right?

Does the game limit scrolling to the visible portions, or were they chosen arbitrarily? I'd expected rectangular maps.

[TerraEsperZ]

Ah crap, how come I didn't notice that? I was trying to get them all out by the end of January in order to avoid changing the map header, and in my haste to resize the maps to put it on the left something went wrong. I'll submit a corrected version tonight if time permits.

As for why the maps aren't rectangular, well I was trying to be as accurate to the game as possible. I'm not always consistent on this point depending on the game so I understand the confusion. In Sonic the Hedgehog's case, I decided to outline the maps based both on what the scrolling allows you to see and what's actually there.

Since the maps are actually made of 256 x 256 pixels blocks, it's obvious with the Green Hill Zone maps at least that there are areas that I've cut off to conform to what's visible in game, even doing everything I could to get every tile that's even partially visible without the auto-scrolling activating. I actually debated showing everything that's on the map by using a map extractor but in some cases that would have looked wrong. For example, there are many pits with spikes pointing up from them while playing, but the actual map keeps going down a bit further and showing that would result in pits with spikes hanging in mid-air. So I decided that for aesthetic reason, I wouldn't show what's not visible because of the scrolling.

As for Marble Zone, the forced scrolling can be defeated in Debug Mode to visit the whole rectangular area of the map, except that the areas I removed on my maps are completely empty. Under the lava and the visible blocks, there's empty space with the background showing and I preferred to simply removed them instead of filling it with something that's not there to begin with. Sonic the Hedgehog CD was much easier in this respect since almost all the stages with very few exceptions are perfectly rectangular.

Any other comment would be appreciated about anything, *except* the Special Stage headers . I wasn't able to come up with an iconic image that was small enough to fit my template and gave a good idea of what they're about, so I just resized a shot of the chaos emerald for each. Not happy with that, but it'll do.

[Maxim]

Well, for my 8-bit maps I took the rectangle but also did some "editorialising" of the parts you can never see to make them more coherent - filling in the sudden blanks and extending ridges to the edge, for example. In my more recent maps I tend to try to align everything to the game grid - 256x256 in this case - which often means extrapolating beyond what's visible by finding the matching block elsewhere on the map. (I wrote a tool to do that...) So I'd end up with maps that had width/height exact multiples of 256px.

[TerraEsperZ]

That's usually what I try to do too, but having an easily-accessed Debug Mode makes me uncomfortable adding anything to these maps. Completing areas that no one can ever access is one thing, but filling in parts that are known by many people to be empty makes me uncomfortable.

Anyway, I pretty much submitted these "as is" except for adding a map header since they've been considered finished for over a year so I'm probably going to revise them a bit. It's why I prefer to only submit completed projects, as I sometimes find things later on that make me change earlier maps.

*EDIT*

Just tried simply making every 256 x 256 pixels block fully visible and half the spikes in Green Hill Zone ended up floating 16 or 32 pixels away from the bottom of the screen! So for now, I'm keeping it to the area accessible without auto-scrolling kicking in.

[Maxim]

I just realised that the title screen grabs in your maps - and the game logo in the maps list - are from an emulator with sprite limiting turned off, so Sonic's belly shows in front of the banner.

Good: Bad: (lazy hotlinked images might not work)

[TerraEsperZ]

Weird, I never noticed that. But then again, I never suspected that sprite limiting might be intentionally used for effects like that. Damn it, now I'll have to correct every single map *and* force JonLeung to upload them all again...

Also, is it just me or am I the only one who messes up on his maps this much? Cause sometimes I can't seem to submit something that's completely free of mistakes or errors...

[Peardian]

Don't worry, I seem to make a mistake in almost every map I make, only to correct it less than a day later.

[Maxim]

The more well-known the game is, the more chance you'll get caught...

[JonLeung]

When you guys are doing Mario and Sonic games, of course someone's going to notice.  And because you guys are perfectionists, of course you're going to send in better versions of your maps.

Some weekends I'm almost putting up as many corrections as new submissions.  You two aren't the only ones who strive for perfection.