Sonic 2: Return of Shadow

I shall follow usual protocol and give you my pros and cons regarding the hack. Hold onto your hats, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Pros:

• Some of your music choices are very nice and I like the use of music I haven't heard before.
• Shadow's moveset is rather large and gives you plenty of choices.
• Layouts generally flow well and have minimal dick moments, which is nice to see.
• The art edits and modifications are quite well done and don't clash. Tweak the palette in a few areas to make them stand out.
• Ports of Sonic 1 objects work quite well in the levels they were used in.

Cons:

• Loops in Bayside Atoll don't work from a theoretical point of view. If one corner shows you going behind the loop, the other should have you in front of it. Act 1 has loops where you go behind the wall on both sides and Act 2 has you going in front of both. I also managed to fall through one and get stuck underground on the wrong path as I couldn't exit through either of the tunnels.
• The ramps in Bayside Atoll are very glitchy. Even standing on them causes you to jitter up and down.
• The camera snaps too quickly during a spindash or peel-out. It was rather jarring.
• The miniboss of Bayside Atoll has many issues. The background graphics flickered when I entered, there's too many objects all over the place, causing flicker and I got stuck inside him during a jump causing 6 hits at once. Also, it's just the Green Hill Boss with 2 wrecking balls. I actually *sighed* at how depressing it was.
• The wheel of feet animation starts way too early. It just looks wrong.
• Getting a shield and invincibility at the same time causes the graphics to swap between them.
• The bubble bounce doesn't bounce. it just drops you to the floor.
• I got stuck in the wall just before the boss of Bayside Atoll 2. I had to wait for time over.
• Royal Ruins has one of the most unfair beginnings to a level ever. I had no and rings jumped into a ghost (expectant behaviour from S3K and died). I tried again, dodged the ghost and got hit by a really fast arrow. Yeah... thanks. That was Game Over as well.
• Shadow's Chaos Control seems pointless at the moment. You can spam it to get an incredibly low time but apart from visually, I noticed no benefit. I know it's unfinished but I kept triggering it by accident after a combo attack.
• It's hard to tell the difference between foreground and background in Royal Ruins 1. Too much brown/orange.
• Shield graphics interfere with the boss hit count. Either behind or in front of it.
• Royal Ruins 2 has an issues with a red spring next to a 45 degree slope. The spring doesn't work.

Again, my apologies for the large list of issues but most of them are minor and can be fixed rather easily. I enjoyed playing it, for what it's worth. I just feel it needs a little polish in some areas.

 

Well looks like one person has made a video of a playthrough. All I can say is he is really good at ARZ act 1. lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWNLDz3ZI74[youtube/

 

link offline :/

 

I just tried to download it, and it worked fine. Maybe you tried to download it as a direct link, which isn't the case. You have to open the page, and follow the instructions, you literally only have to click on one button, but I can't tell you its caption because it depends on your language and I can't speak Brasilian Portuguese, it's probably like "descargar" or something like that.

 

Well, I'm brazilian and the link worked fine.

 

 

That's Razor Zenon, who pretty much does a tool-assisted run of 99% of the known Sonic-hacks out there. That's why it looks so flawless, but at the same time he might purposefully exploit any glitches or unintended layout problems in the process.

-I played it and D.A. Garden pointed out most of things I went through while playing. I like the concept, the multiple character options and the foreground layout choices, but the lag is just too hard to ignore and at times there feels like there's way too much going on in a given area that could be causing the lag.

-The Background palette in Royal Ruins Act 1 makes it very hard to tell what's going on in the foreground.

-Some object placement is too excessive or doesn't make sense, like there being a ton of shields near each other even to the point where there's a bubble shield just a few steps near another bubble shield. I think it's unnecessary to have so many enemies in a given area as well.

-Some checkpoints or special stage points need to have the enemies or nearby obstacles removed because you essentially get killed immediately after dying and restarting if you don't move instantly. For instance, in Bayside Atoll Act 2 there's one starpost with both a Coconuts enemy hurling stuff at you while at the same time a Buzzer enemy (who fires way faster than normal) comes up and shoots you. 

Another instance is near the beginning of Royal Ruins Act 2 where there's a special stage ring near the top: If you come out of that without moving, you fall straight down into a swinging spike ball. Since SS rings also act as checkpoints, that means you can die from it immediately after restarting. Please be conscious of these types of things and remove the excessive obstacles.

-The upward diagonal slopes in Royal Ruins Act 2 need to be adjusted/fixed as you can hit a red spring right beforehand, but instead of going up the slope at a fast speed, you end up getting stopped up right at the beginning of the slope.

-With Tails, if you start flying and get tired, you can press the B button to do his tailspin move and then go right back into flight/swimming soon after. This essentially gives him infinite flight/swimming ability and kills the point of getting tired. 

-Shadow's Melee attacks seem to only hurt enemies because he's in the attacking animation, which means he could be right next to an enemy and not hurt them (but the fist/kick will visually be touching the enemy), or he could be above or under the enemy and kill them even though he's not actually punching or kicking the enemy. It looks off and could be resolved with some secondary collision like you have with his bullets.

-The loops in Utopian City need to be adjusted as sometimes you can get stopped up at the end of the loop during a high speed section and kill your momentum.

-The "Time" icon randomly appears behind the "Sonic Got through" text at the end of the stage sometimes. Also the title cards will sometimes have random graphics tiles loaded over the text.

-You probably already know this, but Shadow entering a special stage results in having Tails' SS sprite, Sonic's name icon and the ring total remains at zero, but you can still complete the special stages despite that.

I didn't want to have to point out so many issues, but I like where this is going and I think it could be a really good hack with more polish/fixing of the issues.

 

JoenickROS I was impressed. Played the first two levels and at that 2nd level got tough. Played all the characters, and to steal a line& A name change - SHADOW'S GOT A GUN - Also when playing knuckles I noticed after falling from a glide Knuckles can glide again. Also noticed a bug (unsure if noted already) where Knuckles as player 1 & Sonic as Player 2, Knuckles has a shield, Sonic gets hit, Knuckles looses shield. I just took it as another challenge, "it's a bug, so what" in mind.

 

trying to put the demo on another server.

mega or mediafire.

thanks

 

I can't seem to download the demo from Dropbox, can someone put the demo on another sever, if possible please?

 

Here's an alternate mirror.

 

Bump, but for a good reason.



Edit: I'm aware of some of the graphical glitches.

 

10/10

 

Can you give some criticism please, I know its not perfect, or some things you liked about it?

 

The music is great, but the speed shoes music felt a little odd to me.

The white bricks really conflict with the rest of the pallete; might I suggest a dark greyish orange color?

ARZs' leftover grass, while pallete swapped to fit the theme, looks a bit odd in an indoor setting, you might want to change it at some point

I love knux new "dig in wall" animation

Knuckles altered gliding abilities look great; I'd say they're overpowered, but this is clearly harder then the average sonic game, anyway, so it balances things out a little, which I like.

The boss is an altered ARZ boss. Not that it's bad, it's just that I feel you can accomplish more with this.

I hope this helps.

 

Okay, criticisms, sorry. 

I thought the digging could have a little more flair, maybe dust? I crunchier digging noise? Maybe.

Also, maybe the hitting animation is a bit jittery.

 

The music actually feels repetitive. The palette burns my eyes, and the underwater palette needs work. The layout seems pretty okay...

 

How can a palette that's dark burn your eyes? Or do you mean it's painful to look at because of what colors are used?


Edit: If the palette bugs anyone else let me know.

 

Found a giltch which I'm sure that was in S3&K./monthly_01_2015/post-3218-0-31564900-1420991205_thumb.png

 

Time for a bump to show you guys the website I made for the hack for my web design class. http://cis.oaklandcc.edu/s612 So its currently hosted on my community colleges server, might put it on a different server, if you guys have any recommendations let me know. Also if you see your name in the honorable mentions on the project members page, and you would like a full profile, let me know, but you have to tell me what you want it to say. I only talked about the people I knew the most about, which is why everyone doesn't have full info on themselves.

 

I played the hack. Loved to play as shadow. And yet it is a very nice palette levels. So thank you for the hack, keep doing.