[DS] Sonic Classic Collection (Review) Options

[Sonic Club]

Hey everyone. Things have been quiet around here for a while now. I thought I would liven things up with my review of "Sonic Classic Collection" for Nintendo DS.

I bought Sonic Adventure 2 for Dreamcast when it was quite new. I think I had paid $40 at the time. I probably waited a bit though. This is one of the few games I have actually considered pre-ordering. Instead I decided to wait until the day and buy it in the store. I was too impatient to wait for how long it might take to ship. Amazon was saying it could ship weeks after. I decided that paying tax is better than having free shipping and waiting a few weeks. This game had me excited so I had to buy it. Today is March 3rd, but maybe it was in stores on the 2nd? I really don't know. Either way I am sure I am one of the first people to review it, if not the first.

My opinion of the game:

The game was a great idea. I don't care what anyone says. I've always wanted to see this sort of thing on GBA, but DS is the next best thing. Since we're talking about GBA, I want to unfortunately say that I wasn't very pleased with "Sonic The Hedgehog GENESIS" where they remade the game trying to be accurate. Sonic ran and jumped strangely. The physics were all messed up and made it near impossible to get to some of the places that were intended on the original, the game itself was ok, but a disappointment for most Sonic fans. They did a much better job on this DS release. They emulate the games instead. It's the first time the game was released intending to be used on.

If you think about it, there are two times that some of these games were on handheld. GameGear and Nomad. GameGear isn't a good example because though SOME of those games were available, they were the lower quality Master System version, which is good, but just can't be compared to the genesis Sonic game quality. Nomad is a handheld made to play Sega Genesis cartridges so I am sure you can imagine it was quite bulky. Everything was awesome about it. I didn't mind the bulkyness as all. Portable is nice, but to bring such great games with you in a time when only gameboy color could compete with it was amazing. My complaint is the LCD/whatever screens they used at the time didn't handle motion very well so the screen would get pretty blurry. It would have somewhat of a slow response time to changing pixels, which wasn't that bad, but a GBA or DS have screens capable of handling motion much better. I don't remember what they call the pixel response time on LCD's, but I am sure I made it clear what I am referring to.

I'm sure you were expecting this, but dreading it, but yes this game does have its flaws.

Flaws:

• Slightly laggy (it shouldn't be, DS has the power to handle it i'm sure, but wasn't ported as well as it could have been)
• Though on a plus side, the Sonic Jam music flaw isn't present (where when you get speed shoes it would start another sound file and lose its place in the track, unlike Genesis where the music starts playing faster from where it left off.) However, in this version, when you get speed shoes, their alternate way to deal with making Sonic faster seems to change the speed of the music rather than the tempo itself. I have yet to determine if this strange effect also means the game itself is speeding up (aka also speeding up enemies) but I highly doubt my theory would be true on that.. It is difficult to tell how it works with the slight lag.
• The graphics are scaled down. If you were avid about the Genesis Sonic games like I was then you would notice how obvious it is the moment you see the sega logo. Ther is slight pixel loss in this scaling. Aside from things looking a bit jagged and smaller, sometimes depending on your position in relation to things, you'll notice designs lose certain parts. For example some of the ring boxes in the game lose one of their edges circling the picture on the box. Scaling is to be expected when a game is ported like this, but I remember once seeing a type of filter someone came up with for an emulator that smoothed out the rough edges and did a bit of scaling. Something like that would've been great.
• Debug mode and Level Select, and other similar cheats aren't possible because the menu's have changed as well as the Start button not acting as it originally did. You can use the start button for some things, but the pause feature is gone using the Start button, so a simple cheat like Mushroom Hill in Sonic & Knuckles doesn't work. You can make it do the ring sound, but that's as far as it goes. HOWEVER, the level select and debug work on Sonic 1, but that's the only game any of those cheats seem to work on.
• No 2-player. They removed the modes and didn't add in a download play or wifi feature. Would've been nice, but I understand how hard it would have been. They did modify the game though so I would assume it would be possible, maybe. Probably too much of a deadline. It goes beyond just editing menu's and making the music work right. They actually threaded their interface into the game itself. What I mean by that is if you pay attention to the Save button on the bottom screen, it disables while you're in a place such as a special stage, or while the zone's name is up until it leaves.
• Layers are sometimes messed up, which was very suprising to me at first.. It's very noticable on levels where you might remember being on top or underneath something. In Sky Chase I believe the enemies sometimes went behind the clouds. Most noticable is in Wing Fortress Zone where you get blown out the door and hold onto the panel things on the side of the ship. You'll notice you're underneath unstead of on-top like the true Genesis version. Most of the flaws are small, but some are quite noticable.

Something else which maybe isn't so much a flaw, but something that I haven't been able to locate; According to the Sonic wiki on wikia. There was apparently supposed to be extra stuff besides just a gallery in the illustrations menu. The gallery has some pictures from the Sonic ScreenSaver (for people in north america this was included on the disc with Sonic & Knuckles Collection (PC), or the art could be found in a folder). Anyway, according to the Wiki there was going to be more than that, but it seems that there isn't. "The game also includes a video about the history of Sonic, a Sonic the Hedgehog image gallery, and a Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood trailer." It's disappointing that they don't have that, unless the US version somehow ended up without it and everywhere else does have it? It makes no sense why they would do that. I'll follow-up with an answer to that if I can find out anything. I have since beaten Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, and gotten all chaos emeralds in both before I beat it. You would think that would reward you something if there were unlockables. Well apparently no reward comes of beating the games even if you do well and get all emeralds, except a sense of accomplishment.

Sega mentions unlockables on their blog entry about the game (http://blogs.sega.com/usa/2009/12/01/sonic...sic-collection/), most specifically the "history of Sonic" video, but i'm trying to figure out if there's a way to go about it or they left it out.

The "save anywhere" feature isn't like the Save State many of you may be familiar with. It is nice though, it remembers you score, your lives, and the zone you were on, even if it was Act 2 or Act 3. I haven't exactly tried it on a boss, but i might work. Don't get your hopes up about using this for Sonic 3 and any game that already had it's own save feature. This type of save is only for the games that didn't have a save feature originally. They don't have the save and load buttons on the bottom screen while Sonic 3 based games are up. They do have it for Sonic & Knuckles though, which is obvious since that didn't have a save feature without Sonic 3. (Now that I am on the topic of Sonic 3 vs Sonic 3 & Knuckles... I am curious to go turn on my Genesis to see if it has a whole other set of saves. I am curious how it handles the saves during lock-on compared to no lock-on. I'll do that at a later time though.)

Even with all the flaws, it's exciting but i am slightly disappointed. I don't regret my purchase though. Any Sonic fan would like to have this in their collection. It is very playable.

They did learn from the flaws of the older attempts to port the game, but some sounds are not quite right, probably because of inaccurate sound emulation in a few ways, when you get hit and lose your rings it sounds different, same with passing the sign at the end of the level, and when it's counting down the points it sounds really choppy compared to the true genesis version. If you know how the original should sound you'll catch little things here and there.

They did more than just modify the menu. There is an interesting "screen shift" effect when the place you're in, such as fighting a boss, the screen does gradual camera shifts as you go towards the edge of the screen. I think it's cool in a way, but it shows that they tried not to smash the sprites with scaling too much. They weren't lazy and tried to atleast deal with some flaws. It looks a bit odd/interesting when you're in a game like Sonic 3 where it lets you move around while the Act 2 transition comes up. You can see the screen shift the level's name (it stays in place but moves when the shifting happens).

SEGA has my respect in this "classic collection". In all other collections that I can think of that feature these old Sonic games, the "lock-on" games like Sonic 2 & Knuckles and Sonic 3 & Knuckles were always neglected. I believe Sonic Gems Collection and Sonic Mega Collection failed to feature those. Then again I could be wrong.. but I am pretty sure they weren't there.

Conclusion:

The game does have it's flaws, but I really do like this game. Even if the flaws annoy me, i'm sure sega did just about as good as they could without having to create the games again, could've done a bit better. For me I don't regret paying $30 for the game..... if you're a true sonic fan it's worth it, it's probably better than any emulator would be able to do on ds (I haven't tried, but these days emulators don't seem that great from what I hear and have sound flaws and lag, and look bad scaled on systems).

I also am glad i was able to support SEGA with my purchase, with the gba sonic genesis they got the scaling right, because they pretty much rebuilt the game... but the physics were screwed up, jumping in that game was like jumping in one of those old fanmade sonic games, maybe even worse. This game is right in many ways, and wrong in others, but it is a good game in my opinion. So give it a chance. It's good enough to where you will feel the excitement of playing it, and re-live how great the games are. I would've loved the game even more had it not had the flaws I noticed. I think it's a good purchase even with that being said.


This is a technical review, not trying to be organized. I only played the game for over a half hour and gave my first impressions. I hope it helps anyone who reads this.

[BlueKnux]

Good review, I will probably end up getting the game sometime soon, it sounds like a good game to get.

So where ya been SC? I have not seen you online on anything in a long time, and I was getting a little worried when I kept checking the website and there were hosting issues going on.

[Sonic Club]

Hey BlueKnux. I was wondering when you would come across this topic of mine.

Yes, there were hosting problems. They were bad ones too, very bad. They got sorted out though. A few things broke in the process but I made sure there was next to no data loss, and even if there were I had recent backups.

Even though not much is going on here at the moment, I make sure it's still running and I am constantly thinking up plans for the site. The dream isn't dead yet. If anything this site is withstanding the test of time. Ever since the beginning of 1999, all the way to 2010 through the economy problems. This site is a legacy, and it's going to take a lot to bring it down. As long as I live I will do what I can to make sure it's still running. That's saying a lot, but I know we need to get some of that new content up around here.

We need to talk and catch up again sometime. I am becoming more experienced in many areas that I previously didn't do so well at before. I'm programming my own things now, and i'm starting to do quite well independently. A staff will be formed of course, but I feel capable since i can accomplish a lot on my own.

When I get better at programming I had an idea for a Sonic Engine. You remember Sonic2k or whatever that fan game was that Sonic Club was developing? We'll probably still do something like that, but I want to make an engine that's very capable of handling Sonic-like physics and doing all the same actions from a Sonic game. I've seen some people in the Sonic community do quite well with this sort of thing. I want to make an engine with a level designer so that people can create expansion levels for our game, or maybe even create games of their own. That's probably still a ways off, but it was an exciting thing I invisioned. I have heard of a "hedgehog engine" now that I start thinking about it, and even though these Sonic based engines turn out well, they're usually created to make a single game and then abandoned.

Having all these plans is probably crazy of me at this point in time, I do have quite a few "lost years" where I had more than enough opportunity to rise my projects to the peak of success. There was a time when Sonic Club was being compared to other Sonic sites, those years have long passed now.

There are a few things I have now that I didn't have back then though. The newer technology and the resources (bandwidth, space and services) to host these things. In the past Sonic Club was quite limited in some ways. Having a high end server was very costly and those dang hotlinkers very often set us back. I gained a new ability though, if you can call it that. I don't totally know how it started but I am able to construct something in my mind, like for example a php script or some sort of application I want to make. I can plan out the entire process and how everything functions exactly, and then be able to output my logic to the computer to make that work. You might would argue that it's just because maybe I am so experienced but I don't think that's quite it.. It almost feels like some sort of natural thing that just happened. I don't know all the functions, but maybe I just strongly know what is and isn't possible? I really don't know. In any case it's going to be a very important asset to the future of Sonic Club because having that takes all the guess work out of programming. May I also add that I have become quite a bit better at graphic design too.

I can speak with confidence about a lot of those things, but I also realize I have let you down and maybe others who depended on me. I am really sorry if that's so. It's not that I let anyone done so much, but rather letting people down in the time frame. The "here and now" and the time for action and all that should've been 5 years ago. Maybe longer. We'll see if I still can pull it off and regain the respect of people who relied on me in the Sonic community.

I'm straying from the topic though, but I guess I just want you and others to know that I have some cool things to show for now, things that can still redeem our lost ground. I am still a Sonic fan, and even though it's not avidly my primary focus, it's still at the top of my priority list.

Life is a big thing and I hate to think of all the great people it has taken from us. I mean the people who have put a lot of effort into their work as a Sonic fan. I could name a lot of people who I wonder how they're doing and I need to check on. I will worry about that a bit later though. Anyway, things have become slightly more complicated, I do have my free time here and there, but it's become more of a situation where there's more obligation and responsibility.

We'll touch up on those topics later though, I just thought you'd want to know some of my ideas and that I have not just been letting my skills degrade to the point where I am incapable of running Sonic Club anymore. On the contrary. Not everything is going as planned, but no matter how delayed it has become, it will happen. The "unpredictable factor" is the thing I have to more accurately weigh in. Most of my plans fail because of that. Having an outlook into a clear future where you think you'll have free time or imagine such a perfect amount of time ahead of you to do something, and then suddenly having it taken away when someone asks you to do a long term job like watch their house or travel somewhere or someone comes to visit and really disrupts you life, any number of things. It's not an excuse, just failure to observe the possibilities or be able to push those problems away from me so I can get to work.

I am sorta at a rush for time as I type this so I will probably edit/add more to this later, or make another reply, who knows.

[BlueKnux]

Well you have a bit too much id like to comment about on the post, so ill just say, you should just get on MSN messenger sometime, if I'm at my computer, then its running, even during classes lol. Ihave some things to talk to you about, that possibly I could help with some of your ideas.

This post has been edited by BlueKnux: Mar 9 2010, 11:17 PM