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All the S@nics - the end

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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Mata Hari »

Sonic doesn't give a fuck that Tails might be dead
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by KobaBeach »

oh my god i am so happy sonic adventure is up

i love this game so much it is my favorite sonic game
im so glad raocow is just fanboying over it, i share his hype
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Paragraph »

Mata Hari wrote: 4 years ago Sonic doesn't give a fuck that Tails might be dead
He knows Tails is immortal, duh
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Kleetus »

I can't be the only one who thinks that it's dumb that the start up cinematic

spoils the game's true final boss.


On a related not, water bursting out of skyscrapers, that is some serious plumbing back up.
Reecer7 wrote: this game must've been so much, and i just take it for granted. this is what sonic always has been to me, not "animals run through fun platforming environment and save smaller animals from robots"
They haven't phased this out in its entirety yet, they've just added civilization leveling primordial gods to the mix.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Razzling »

awh yeah! this is happenin'

You know I heard a lot of very very bad things about the PC port so I was very worried about raocow having a kinda poor first experience with the game, I'm glad someone pointed out the mod options to help fix a lot of that.

Also maybe this is nostalgia talking but I don't exactly mind some of the DX version models of the characters, though those were the first ones I saw as I owned a gamecube and not a dreamcast.

Also because I'm already thinking of SA2

If he plays the PC port of that too hopefully he gets the mod that fixes all the layering, transparency, lighting, and other technical issues in the cutscenes that porting it caused

:trans_pride:
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Piesonscreations »

The real La Mulana starts here.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by SAJewers »

Razzling wrote: 4 years ago Also because I'm already thinking of SA2

If he plays the PC port of that too hopefully he gets the mod that fixes all the layering, transparency, lighting, and other technical issues in the cutscenes that porting it caused

I was actually looking a few days ago to see if there was any list or collection of SA2 mods for the PC version similar to what I posted a few days ago about SA1 to make it more like the DC release, but couldn't find anything. Do you have some sort of list for him?

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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Razzling »

There's not a lot of Must Have mods for 2 because it's port was generally a bit better but here we go
https://gamebanana.com/gamefiles/9780 this is really the only "must have" mod, as the Battle port on the gamecube messed up a lot of things in the cutscenes, and porting it to the pc only made it worse

Less needed but still nice mods are ones that fix up the weird menu shenanigans, as they kinda get cluttered with random things that don't actually do anything added each port: https://gamebanana.com/guis/34471 and https://gamebanana.com/guis/34355

some more optional ones if raocow wants to make it more "dreamcasty" are https://gamebanana.com/wips/48797
There may be more but those are the ones I use
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Nast »

I too am very excited for this! This was one of my childhood games, and I played it so many times that I can literally recite all of the dialogue in Sonic's story from memory. "C'mon, ya big drip! Where ya goin'?"

That said, looking forward to a lot of jank
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

Well, this is it. The point that many people's Sonic fandom began, and the point that mine went on a long, long hiatus.
The moment he opened his mouth I was out.

I had avoided the Saturn and the Dreamcast because I'd tried them out at conventions/trade shows/game store booths and decided that they were absolutely not the machines for me. I ended up with PS1/N64 for the fifth gen (I owned the N64, my uncle the Playstation) and GCN/PS2 for the sixth (I had the PS2, uncle Gamecube). I never even picked up Sonic Adventure 2 because I was just... appalled at the direction Sega had taken away from the classic games and the Fleetway comics I was familiar with. I couldn't stand the human characters, the extended cast and especially not the voice acting as a young, moody pre-teen - at the time I was moving on from Pokémon and Sonic and into Final Fantasy, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Sim City... the PC and strategy games were my everything for a few years there, and Sonic was a cringeworthy relic of my childhood. As a result when I finally re-joined the Sonic community around the time of Generations, playing some Colours and Unleashed, 100%ing Lost World and yes, eventually taking a deliberate dive into 06, I was bewildered by all the constant references back to Adventure and people insisting that the franchise had "lost its way" after Heroes, or maybe Shadow, or 06, when to me it had always been Adventure itself that was the problem!

Of course, now, looking back I can easily see the seeds of Sega's downfall sown in my much-loved 32X itself, the rushed Saturn, the ambivalent maziness of 3D Blast, Chaotix, and the half-dozen handheld titles. Adventure doesn't really strike me as "the problem" like I once saw it, but it definitely displaced the old rule of "each region has its own lore and comics" with a heavy-handed and singular Narrative written and directed by Sega of Japan, and replaced the old formula of "cartoon animal vs mad scientist" with the new generation of Gods and Monsters. Perhaps for the long run that was best, but as we're about to see, it'll be a very long run indeed, even for Sonic's fast legs.
Reecer7 wrote: 4 years ago as someone born into a post sonic adventure world, i cannot ever comprehend how wild the tonal transition in this game is in terms of the whole series. you're adding 3d, cutscenes longer than "knuckles chuckles and sonic falls in a hole," voice acting, non-eggman humans, the fact that everyone lives in this random city, echidna lore, chaos and their garden, hub worlds, buttrock, lock-on air dash...

this game must've been so much, and i just take it for granted. this is what sonic always has been to me, not "animals run through fun platforming environment and save smaller animals from robots"
basically my experience is the complete inverse of this post: as someone born into a pre sonic adventure world, I experienced first-hand how wild the tonal transition in this game is in terms of the whole series, and it put me off for over a decade. This is what Sonic never was to me, and it displaced everything I knew about the series.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Crow »

Tails actually has a ring implanted in his brain so that he can never die. he just fakes his death so others won't feel bad when they die too
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Kshaard »

Adventure doesn't really strike me as "the problem" like I once saw it, but it definitely displaced the old rule of "each region has its own lore and comics" with a heavy-handed and singular Narrative [. . .]
Can't find the exact timestamp I'm looking for, but somewhere in this long-form video essay there's a pretty good expansion of Bob's point, from a UK perspective. (If you have a day to waste I would recommend giving the whole trilogy of them a watch.)

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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Leet »

I mean I get the perspective but also only in the context of being a kid who doesn't really know what the series is. Of course the developers are going to keep making their own work and not care about what random lore corporate foreign division made up for marketing.
Well it is a decent hack but sometime its just too repetitif there no level that actually pop in your face and your like oh yeah that level they all ressemble themselves and just monster along the way.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

Leet wrote: 4 years ago I mean I get the perspective but also only in the context of being a kid who doesn't really know what the series is. Of course the developers are going to keep making their own work and not care about what random lore corporate foreign division made up for marketing.
Yeah, naturally. It's just the fact that the lore was "devolved" to the different regions - it was a literal marketing strategy of Sega's to make sure the game had appeal in every single region, because "cool" has never been the same the world over. This is why people constantly say "oh, British Sonic's an asshole!", no, he's just 90s cool by the standards of 90s Britain - different regions had different lore, this was an accepted thing. It worked because at the time, action video games rarely contained story outside of those supporting media, and the core premise was usually so broad it could be applied any way localizers and comic producers saw fit.

Sonic Adventure was hugely different not just because of incremental changes in technology or the leap to 3D or the ability to fit more media on a disc (like voice acting and story) - it was literally pushed from the start as "Sonic RPG", with an emphasis on narrative almost completely absent from the series prior, and to totally disregard the directive established over the previous 7-8 years of each region having its own supporting media based on the vague story of the games. This left my demographic - avid consumers of the existing supporting media - largely out in the cold. I feel the same is true with a number of die-hard Archie readers, but they at least had their ongoing comic and its attempt at rolling the new storytelling into their own bizarre continuity.

On top of this, the redesigned characters with an emphasis on late 90s American-Japanese coolness (graffiti art and extreme sports) also moved the games visually away from then accepted root of the series, a transformation unlike Mario's relatively smooth transition of visual identity to 3D. Sega was now pushing a singular definition of cool, something that worked for many but definitely not for all.

I don't begrudge any of this beyond a wholly petty and self-interested level - I totally get why Sega did this, it was relatively sensible amongst their madcap ideas as they scrambled into decline. Sonic Adventure was absolutely one of the better products they put out there. But from my perspective, it essentially cleaved the fandom of the Classic Era from that of the Dreamcast/Advance Era, and is to this day why I say there is no singular Sonic fandom - only Sonic fandoms.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Heavy Sigh »

Fun Sonic Facts!

Though Naka and Ohshima were not so foolish as to believe they would never have to produce another Sonic title, the first inklings of what would become Sonic Adventure came unbidden from within Sonic Team. For it was Takashi Iizuka, Senior Game Designer for both Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, who began pushing the idea of a "Sonic RPG" to be the studio's next big game. Though work on Sonic Team's second non-Sonic property, Burning Rangers, was underway, the team still decided to begin planning for the next big Sonic game. Realizing that the majority of the team responsible for the classic games was still under Sega's employment, Iizuka hunted down and asked each of them what made Sonic so good, not just as a compelling character but as a compelling game series, not wanting to lose those essential elements in the jump to 3D.

Now, while Iizuka wasn't dead set on making a 'Sonic RPG', he knew that the generation's 3D-capable systems offered both the storage space and graphical power to tell stories far more visually complex than what had ever been possible before, and so decided that the game would have a much greater emphasis on plot, just as Sonic 3 & Knuckles had been so much more narratively than its predecessor, Sonic 2. Thus the idea of a Sonic RPG, as the mid 1990's were the golden age of RPGs, at least in the monetary sense.

However, before any work could be done on specific details, the team had to first figure out how to make Sonic work outside of a two-dimensional plane. Arguing for days over just how Sonic would even RUN, eventually a consensus was reached and a simple test level was put together to see if what they had worked out on paper would work in practice.

Their first test level lasted just over ten seconds.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by strongbadman »

What were the differences between the dreamcast and DX versions, and what all does this mod fix?
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by AlchemistHohenheim »

This isn't really something I thought about much previously, but coming off of Sonic R and Sonic Jam on the Saturn, the graphics and sheer spectacle of Adventure stand out a lot more.

I'm realizing that there may in fact have been a brief period of time where Sonic Adventure was the pinnacle of real-time video game graphics, and that feels...a bit weird, honestly.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The Next Frontier

Post by Awoo »

Is it just me, or did they totally re-use this engine for Phantasy Star Online? I can.... actually kinda see it now.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but, gosh darn it, it certainly has elements! :catplanet2:
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Reecer7 »

speaking of raocow's original 99 theses, if he had kept to the original plan of one act = one video, what would he be doing in this game (when he would play it in 2021)
would sonic speed through that cave entrance only for raocow to pause his windows 10 emulator to resume tomorrow?
call me reecer6, not reecer7, please! gotta maintain that same internet brand. actually i'm cro-iba now, it's cooler
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The Old Frontier

Post by Awoo »

AlchemistHohenheim wrote: 4 years ago This isn't really something I thought about much previously, but coming off of Sonic R and Sonic Jam on the Saturn, the graphics and sheer spectacle of Adventure stand out a lot more.

I'm realizing that there may in fact have been a brief period of time where Sonic Adventure was the pinnacle of real-time video game graphics, and that feels...a bit weird, honestly.
Welcome to 1999, or as I like to call it, "if you were born this year you can legally drink" :ehh:
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by FourteenthOrder »

strongbadman wrote: 4 years ago What were the differences between the dreamcast and DX versions, and what all does this mod fix?
A lot.

this site is pretty passionate about it
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Arctangent »

i don't remember how saves work with animals but i think rao just sentenced a bunch of bunnies to the dark aether of nonexistence and i cannot support this
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by CharlesSchulz »

This game is a nonstop barrage of jank, yet also really endearing. It's because it's utterly sincere without being self-serious. I've never liked it too much from a gameplay standpoint, but looking at it as the beginning of this new phase of the sonic franchise, it definitely has a goofy childlike personality to it that makes me way happier than the overwrought nonsense in the games that follow. Even generations and colors feel less fun than this, sure they're more technically competent and better written but they don't feel like they were designed by an actual kid the way adventure does.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure - The New Frontier

Post by Anad »

Hey, it's me, that guy who posted that really stupidly-long essay on Sonic Adventure in the comments on the first video and then posted that very shouty, then calm, comment about why I so strongly object to the decision to play "betterSADX", an unofficial, fan-made mod of the 2004 PC version of Sonic Adventure DX instead of actually playing the real, official, original Sonic Adventure (1998) on a Dreamcast emulator. Well, I'm back, with more information and one-last plea for switching to the real Sonic Adventure.
First let me summarise all the reasons for not playing "betterSADX"
  • It's not even a real game let alone a licensed Sega product so it shouldn't be eligible for AtS in the first place.
  • The actual game it's using as a base didn't come out until 2004 so why are we playing in what is supposed to be 1998 in the AtS chronology.
  • Since it's based off a version of Sonic Adventure DX, it both looks and plays significantly different than the original; seriously, play the two beside each other and differences are more blaring than you'd think. Most notably in terms of the camera and the character mechanics and physics; they're fundamentally different games. The changes aren't just aesthetic! The Sonic Wiki has a list of many, but not all, of the changes.
  • The actual mods being used didn't exist until after 2006
  • The mods themselves do a very poor job of achieving their goal of accurately replicating the look of the original Dreamcast version:
    • This is most apparent in the geometry texturing with a couple of textures arbitrarily being reverted to their lower resolution, brighter, simpler, Dreamcast version while others are left as their SADX versions.
    • The actual world geometry is also similarly, arbitrarily, hit or miss in terms of some things being reverted and others not.
    • Likewise for animations.
    • The water rendering remains exactly the same as vanilla SADX, itself night-and-day different compared to the original.
    • New things are added which aren't present in any official version of Sonic Adventure, DX or otherwise, like the new code which tries, unsuccessfully, to recreate the LATERN lighting engine from the original and new graphical features, like mip-mapping and such.
    • The menus, camera, Chao garden, controls, extra content and physics changes, and anything else not specifically addressed by the "DC overhaul" mod, all remain completely unchanged from their SADX versions, which were themselves significantly different from their Dreamcast counterparts.
  • You're going to have to use a Dreamcast emulator, for Sonic Shuffle, anyway so you might as well get used to it now. Plus, with the DC emulator, you get to also see the cool animations that play on the VMU screen and play the original and completely different Chao Garden system. You really should also use it for showing off the original version of Sonic Adventure 2 instead of just skipping right to Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.
  • There is literally no reason to play this version over any other version.
I don't know who told raocow that Dreamcast emulators can't do transparency effects properly but they're dead wrong: DEmul has no such problems with transparency! I played the original, Dreamcast version today and was sincerely surprised to find that the versions were even more different than I had remembered. I played it in DEmul and it both looked and ran exquisitely! It was also far more representative of how the original Dreamcast version looked on real hardware than betterSADX and the "DC overhaul" mod.
Some screenshots of how the game looks in DEmul:
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As you can see, all of the "transparency effects" are present and accounted for and the game actually looks the way Sonic Adventure (1998) should. I've packed the exact version of DEmul, including config files, in an archive here. DEmul is free and open source software so I hope nobody has objections to be me sharing it this way; I only do so because the actual DEmul website hasn't been updated in ages. The only thing you need to do to get this archive working is to go to "Config -> Plugins and Paths" in demul.exe and set "Plugins Path" and "Nvram Path" to the accompanying "plugins" and "nvram" folders, respectively. After that, configure your controls and set the graphics settings however you like. Of course, you'll need a Dreamcast BIOS and a Sonic Adventure GDI ROM (neither are hard to find); I could provide those as well but since neither are free software, sharing them would be against this forum's "no warez" policy so I'm not linking to them here. I can give you the binary VMU file (a memory card file, essentially) I created when doing this test; I only cleared the Emerald Ocean as Sonic, meaning, it's synced exactly where the latest video left off. (I did also play around with the Chaos a tiny bit.)

So there we go, I've said everything I can about this and made it as easy for you to switch to emulating the Dreamcast version as I legally can. There is nothing else I can say or do now to get you to change course: the decision is entirely yours....
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