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All the S@nics - the end

this is the place where lps are being talked about. it's important to talk about games being played on the internet.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure 2 (Battle) - Sayonara... Sega's Consoles.

Post by Peptobislawl »

I feel the need to point out that there's no way to get to the games from the hero and dark gardens, mainly they're just a way to hold more Chao but being in those gardens does nudge a chao's alignment in the appropriate direction slowly over time.
Also we got to see all 3 chaos Chao variants in today's video, and rao even probably unknowingly drew attention to the 2 we haven't seen yet. That bunny Chao was a Hero Chaos Chao and Satan was a Dark Chaos Chao, and photon seen breifly in the Chao select was a Neutral Chaos Chao like the ultimate rival. For those that don't know, a Chaos Chao is obtained by giving a Chao a happy life so it reencarnates instead of dies twice, then in it's third life giving it one of every animal, and making sure it's stat affinity points are ballanced which is kinda technical but not giving it any chaos drives or animals besides the 1 of each should do it unless you're unlucky, it'll turn into a Chaos Chao when it evolves.
After all that work you get a Chao that's immortal, can't mate, and never takes the appearance changes from animals.
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Re: All The S@nics - Adventure 2 (Battle) - Sayonara... Sega's Consoles.

Post by Grounder »

"since they share a birth date, I might return to sa2battle after this game to check on unique multiplayer stuff"

this is an intervention
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AND I'LL STEAL YOUR SOUL! :twisted:

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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Bean »

The original Sonic Advance is awesome. It's one of my favorite 2D Sonic games in a post-Genesis world, and it's because it's the only one from this developer that both tried something new while keeping it faithful to the old classics.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by DinnerSonic »

All the (Neo) Green Hill Zones - Third Party Edition:
  • 9 Green Hill Zones
  • 24 Green Hill Zone Acts total
  • 4 versions of the Nakamura GHZ theme
  • 9 versions of JP/EU Sonic CD's "You Can Do Anything" theme (Still invincibility theme!)
  • 13 (some kinda) Hill Zones total
  • 35 (some kinda) Hill Zone Acts total
  • 7 misc Hill-Type Zones(the Hill Top clause)
All the Robotnik's Bonker Crazy Make Great the Break The Thing Machines tally:
  • 3 Egg Mobile-H's(S1, S3k, Schoolhouse)
  • 1 Auto Hammer Hammer Barrel(Screensaver)
  • 1 Nameless Hammer Thing I Forgot About Until Today(Sonic Pocket Adventure)
  • 1 Egg Hammer Tank(Sonic Advance)
Fun fact: Neo Green Hill Zone is actually also the prototype name for Sonic 2's Aquatic Ruin Zone!

Fun fact: Sonic Advance had a few obscure ports! There was one to the N-Gage, called Sonic N, which has proper music but really bad sound effect quality. Then there was one for Android(as well as Java phones, I've got a dump of it!) as part of a Japanese subscription service, which used MIDI music and replaced the Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 callback songs with music from non-Nakamura Sonic OSTs due to licensing reasons. That invincibility theme you loved hearing gets replaced with a little remix of the Sonic Advance intro song.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Heavy Sigh »

Fun Sonic Facts!

In January 2001, Sega, having just barely avoided financial oblivion by the skin of its teeth (and with the impossible generosity of Isao Okawa) finally made the jump from first to third-party software publishing, focusing on the most popular consoles of the time with the PS2 and the Game Boy Advance to recoup their losses, (with a heavier focus on portable development as that would be cheaper and faster to profit from). A team of SEGA developers was thus formed to begin development on "Sonic the Hedgehog Advance" (later renamed Sonic Advance since that was snappier), a title for the GBA that would celebrate the series' 10th anniversary.

However, by this time Sonic Team had lost the 2D programming muscle to make the game, so a new development studio on the block, Dimps, (formed by several former SNK developers with funds from Sega, Sony, and Bandai) were brought in to develop the game under the eye of Sonic Team. Sonic Team would do the conceptual work, but all the programming would be left to Dimps. This actually worked out quite well, as several Dimps employees had previously worked on the rather charming Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure for the ill-fated Neo Geo Pocket Color.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Paragraph »

Advance is a surprisingly good game, which I think holds up very well and has excellent replay value. It's super polished and varied right out the gate, there's little obviously wrong with it imo.

It's also the first Sonic game where it really encourages you to go fast all the time. In previous entries, there were sections that had you go hard and fast but mostly as automatic sequences, setpieces to flex on Nintendo. In SA1, speed really is the name of the game, the main idea, and gameplay flow is emphasized, encouraged and central. That's one of the main reasons I like it so much. Further mobile titles will polish that idea to a mirror sheen (see: Rush, it's right in the title), but the roots are here already and you can really just go go go and not stop in most of the stages.

In fact, for a first playthrough I would heavily encourage to lean into that and just blast through the acts. Exploration is for when you've got a better grasp on the mechanics, try out different characters and so on. It might also be a good idea to ceck out the manual? There's a move list for each character, it's a surprising amount of additions for a platform with one less button than the Genesis (the shoulder buttons are unused in this game), and it's only going to become more complicated as the series advances, pun intended


Also n-thing the call for an Amy playthrough (or at least gameplay test), she's extremely fun to play as with a little practice.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Nast »

I have been very much looking forward to this one. It's the first Sonic game I ever owned physically, so it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

I love the progression in the first zone - you start out at the beach before transitioning to the standard Green Hill fare, then pass by the woods and end up at a bridge. So much variety in the first zone alone.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Crow »

w-what is this. where are the missions. the rap music. the rankings. the jank. this isn't sonic......
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Piesonscreations »

I really hope raocow does away with the color correction. Emulating the original non-existant backlight on the GBA I don't think is the greatest choice lol
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago I really hope raocow does away with the color correction. Emulating the original non-existant backlight on the GBA I don't think is the greatest choice lol
I'd disagree, since that's how the game is supposed to look, but that's just me.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-aQMUXKPM
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/commen ... ght_color/
https://github.com/mgba-emu/mgba/issues/1672
https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.p ... 0#p1346149
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Piesonscreations »

SAJewers wrote: 3 years ago I'd disagree, since that's how the game is supposed to look, but that's just me.
The lack of a backlight was, if anything, a cost cutting measure, and not a design decision. Plus, "the way it's supposed to look" would've depended a whole lot on how much light was in the room you were in- raocow could play the game with his monitor at 2% brightness with no contrast if he wanted the genuine GBA experience depending on how bad it could look.

That being said, after taking a look at those things you linked, I should address that I'm aware that many games were made with this limitation in mind, but SA1 doesn't lean so hard into it that I believe that it should look washed out. Any of the fixes made afterwards were made retroactively to compensate for the fact that games had already been made with this limitation in mind (like the example in the video with the GBA Micro, or the NDS), but none of these are absolute representations of what playing in the system would've been, which was to be frank, a poor image. Like, most of these things are just killing any contrast in the image which is a fairly good representation on how bad it was to use the OG GBA. Even the games that really leaned into it, like the Mario World re-release, look awful, no matter what color filter you use.

Also, we have the precedent with the Game.com and the lack of awful ghosting in emulation, so I think we can do without the colors being washed out. Not that it's wrong for you to prefer that look or anything like that.

I liked what Final Fantasy Tactics Advance did where it gave you a bunch of presets for how the colors would be displayed, and offered a TV mode that wasn't quite as pastel as the native GBA mode, but still a lot more colorful than this. Really avoids this whole debacle.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

Yeah, sorry, that's sorta what I meant. It's likely that SEGA, like many GBA developers, chose to compensate for the AGB-001's lack of in-hardware lighting by intentionally over-saturating the colours, and the raw image produced by GBA emulators without any sort of colour correction is likely not how the developers intended for the game to look.

I didn't link it in the other post, but someone over on the libretro has spent the last number of years documenting the colourspace of those handhelds, and attempting to create a set of shaders that, to the best if their ability, simulates how it should look for each piece of hardware, with comparisons

https://forums.libretro.com/t/real-gba- ... olors/1540

(If you scroll down a bit, there's even a comparison of the Mermaid Melody GBA game with various colour corrections vs the actual anime)
Piesonscreations wrote: Also, we have the precedent with the Game.com and the lack of awful ghosting in emulation, so I think we can do without the colors being washed out. Not that it's wrong for you to prefer that look or anything like that.

I liked what Final Fantasy Tactics Advance did where it gave you a bunch of presets for how the colors would be displayed, and offered a TV mode that wasn't quite as pastel as the native GBA mode, but still a lot more colorful than this. Really avoids this whole debacle.
To be fair, the Game.com emulator didn't have any sort of option to reproduce ghosting, while mgba recently added it 🤷‍♀️. And I do agree, a brightness setting in-game would alleviate some of the issues.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Piesonscreations »

SAJewers wrote: 3 years ago [...]and the raw image produced by GBA emulators without any sort of colour correction is likely not how the developers intended for the game to look.

[...]And I do agree, a brightness setting in-game would alleviate some of the issues.
This is most likely the case, but at the same time, neither is the washed out look. Having to over-compensate your color choices is not so much the "intended" look, but rather, a necessity. What most of these filters fail to account for is art direction and color design which makes sense, since it's impossible to have a one size fits all solution for this sort of problem.

And this goes beyond just brightness. Really, the only way to ensure a proper color reproduction of the original developer's intentions would be to have the original developers go and alter every single pallette, individually, to what they truly intended for it to look like, like the FFTA example I gave- That game doesn't just put a filter on top of the screen, every color is changed to something else with a purpose. What they probably did is make the "TV" setting, so, the original colors, and then just bump saturation and brightness up for the other stuff and then correcting colors individually.

Pixel art is a very finnicky thing to have these broad strokes types of solutions, and I truly believe that the raw image is often prefered over these filters. Not always, of course, and there are some games that will always look awful like the Mario re-releases. But really, the only true solution is to play these games on the original hardware and deal with the shitty screen if you think that is the "optimal" experience.

Basically, there isn't a "supposed" look. There are approximations devs had to make, individually, to deal with a problem. I doubt they all tested the games in the same conditions, or that they had the same intentions.

And if we're looking at comparisons, if we take a look at promotional art of Sonic Advance, and Sonic's raw in-game sprite, you'll see that they are basically the same color, as opposed to the blue-ish teal color in raocow's filtered video.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by kitikami »

Is there a filter that makes the footage look like the AtS videos for the Tiger Electronics games? Those are the pinnacle of handheld console presentation.

The squishy spin dash is bothering more than it should.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago
SAJewers wrote: 3 years ago [...]and the raw image produced by GBA emulators without any sort of colour correction is likely not how the developers intended for the game to look.

[...]And I do agree, a brightness setting in-game would alleviate some of the issues.
This is most likely the case, but at the same time, neither is the washed out look. Having to over-compensate your color choices is not so much the "intended" look, but rather, a necessity. What most of these filters fail to account for is art direction and color design which makes sense, since it's impossible to have a one size fits all solution for this sort of problem.

And this goes beyond just brightness. Really, the only way to ensure a proper color reproduction of the original developer's intentions would be to have the original developers go and alter every single pallette, individually, to what they truly intended for it to look like, like the FFTA example I gave- That game doesn't just put a filter on top of the screen, every color is changed to something else with a purpose. What they probably did is make the "TV" setting, so, the original colors, and then just bump saturation and brightness up for the other stuff and then correcting colors individually.

Pixel art is a very finnicky thing to have these broad strokes types of solutions, and I truly believe that the raw image is often prefered over these filters. Not always, of course, and there are some games that will always look awful like the Mario re-releases. But really, the only true solution is to play these games on the original hardware and deal with the shitty screen if you think that is the "optimal" experience.

Basically, there isn't a "supposed" look. There are approximations devs had to make, individually, to deal with a problem. I doubt they all tested the games in the same conditions, or that they had the same intentions.

And if we're looking at comparisons, if we take a look at promotional art of Sonic Advance, and Sonic's raw in-game sprite, you'll see that they are basically the same color, as opposed to the blue-ish teal color in raocow's filtered video.
I fully disagree with that, but I'll leave it at that.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by thatguyif »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago Basically, there isn't a "supposed" look. There are approximations devs had to make, individually, to deal with a problem. I doubt they all tested the games in the same conditions, or that they had the same intentions.

And if we're looking at comparisons, if we take a look at promotional art of Sonic Advance, and Sonic's raw in-game sprite, you'll see that they are basically the same color, as opposed to the blue-ish teal color in raocow's filtered video.
Actually, depending on the game, there was a "supposed" look. The SNES and Genesis ports of games (which were highly common on the GBA) had an original reference of color to fall back on. And you can tell there were distinct differences made to account for something particular, probably the lack of lighting.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Piesonscreations »

thatguyif wrote: 3 years ago Actually, depending on the game, there was a "supposed" look. The SNES and Genesis ports of games (which were highly common on the GBA) had an original reference of color to fall back on. And you can tell there were distinct differences made to account for something particular, probably the lack of lighting.
This is true, but this also seems to imply that they do a succesful conversion, as in, the game when looked through an OG GBA screen will look identical to it's counterpart, which I don't think is true. But yes, these changes had to be made and I am not arguing that point, i'm only saying we don't know the original devs wishes 100% to make color decisions for them, and say that was their intention. Not that it really matters at this point.
SAJewers wrote: 3 years ago I fully disagree with that, but I'll leave it at that.
That's fair. Ultimately, I believe anyone should play the games in the way they deem most enjoyable, be it with filters, or without, or hey, even with the colors inverted for all I care. In this case, it's up to raocow to see what he likes best.

That being said, if we're going the filtered route, maybe you can recommend raocow some settings or other filters that might be better (if you're not fully satisfied with the one showcased, i guess), since you seem pretty knowledgeable about this stuff.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago

That being said, if we're going the filtered route, maybe you can recommend raocow some settings or other filters that might be better (if you're not fully satisfied with the one showcased, i guess), since you seem pretty knowledgeable about this stuff.
I'm not that knowledgeable, I've only done research recently on the subject, as GBA emulation isn't something I've done a lot of. I did link him to an updated/modification of the gba-color shader included with mgba, so maybe that'll be better. Unfortunately, mgba uses .fs for it's shaders, while the handheld color shader stuff is using libretro, which uses .cg, .glsl, and .slang for it's shaders.

He could also try the agb001 shader ("A glorious recreation of the original Game Boy Advance", per the description), which is what I would prefer personally (as I usually user a CRT shader when emulating old systems), though I'm not sure raocow would.

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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Grounder »

SAJewers wrote: 3 years ago I'm not that knowledgeable, I've only done research recently on the subject, as GBA emulation isn't something I've done a lot of. I did link him to an updated/modification of the gba-color shader included with mgba, so maybe that'll be better. Unfortunately, mgba uses .fs for it's shaders, while the handheld color shader stuff is using libretro, which uses .cg, .glsl, and .slang for it's shaders.

He could also try the agb001 shader ("A glorious recreation of the original Game Boy Advance", per the description), which is what I would prefer personally (as I usually user a CRT shader when emulating old systems), though I'm not sure raocow would.

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ngl, liking this is kind of giving off the impression your ideal sonic advance looks as shitty as possible to me
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Crow »

i don't really care if it looks "faithful" i just want it to look "good" that's my take
i've honestly never played a video game in my life
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Reecer7 »

agb001 looks incredible. that's not at all how a gba looks, that's how like, a camcorder lp of a gba looks. i love it.

i feel a bit privileged now because i had a backlighting peripheral for my advance for as long as i could remember, so this stuff was marginally less of a problem
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

Grounder wrote: 3 years ago ngl, liking this is kind of giving off the impression your ideal sonic advance looks as shitty as possible to me
Oh yeah, it's definitely 100% not for everyone. I just happen to like the look of LCD and CRT Shaders, and would use that myself if I were playing it.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by Bean »

I liked the way it looked in the first video personally. Doesn't have to be an 100% authentic recreation, and I'll be honest, don't even remember what the game looks like when played off of a GBA screen other than it's in 240x160 resolution. Ha-ha.
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by raocow »

dude this video *was* made with the shader you sent me
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Re: All The S@nics - Advance - Rebuild Of Pocket Adventure

Post by SAJewers »

no sorry i didn't mean you should use that other thing, i mis-worded myself there. I meant that that was the other option, which I figure you wouldn't want.

I still think the colour correction looks the best compared to not colour correcting it, but it appears to be mostly preference to people. My bad. :(
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