Leaked Sonic 4 mine cart footage is all yours

Adding to last week's leaked footage of Sonic 4's Splash Hill Zone is a new clip from the downloadable game's Lost Labyrinth Zone.

[CaliGamer]

What is this? Sonic has really fallen off, they just need to give it up.

[p0rtugalvii]

This is an interesting mechanic. However it seems really annoying. Sega!

[Mahr]

Mother of God.

[carreirabr]

Sega should have died 10 years ago together with their failed console project.
Go away Sega, leave us alone, pls.

[ChickeyCantor]

You know the concept isnt that bad, its the idiot who cant play for sh/t.

Of course it looks frustrating if some noob is playing it.

[Mahr]

sidar, with all due respect, that's the silliest argument I've ever seen you advance. They could fill an entire textbook of How Not To Develop Games with all the godawful design choices involved in this thing. The terrible player has nothing to do with the intentionally spotty collision detection, the inexplicable physics engine, the wall after wall of spring-jumps, the awkward loop-de-loops, the boosters, or that the game punishes the player for something that it should not even have allowed in the first place.

[ChickeyCantor]

Sure,

Granted not everything looks top-notch.
But there are moments in it that it actually works if done right( player wise). You can see the speed is right as it should be, but its the the player who messes up allot.

This player looks like a total noob, seriously.
Sure if its his first time playing, I cant blame him, but its still played horrible.

Im not saying this thing is done well, But Im not going to fully blame the level or mechanics. Ill stand my ground and say that the player could have done much better than that.

(and im not defending the game, there are lots of things i do not like about this number 4).

Edit:
Look at the first few seconds, he messed up his first moves. You cant say its a pro doing this.

[Mahr]

"Look at the first few seconds, he messed up his first moves. You cant say its a pro doing this."

Of course it's not a pro; pros don't illegally leak blurry off-screen camcorder playthroughs of copyrighted material to the masses. But that doesn't excuse the level for being unbelievably shoddy in design. A terrible player playing a terribly-made level is still playing a terribly-made level.

Did you see the part near the beginning where the cart hits a wall, the player tilts the screen down so that the force is pushing the cart forward, the player then jumps and *clears the wall by about seven feet*, but doesn't actually move forward because the physics engine is not programmed to recognize that? Did you see the part where Sonic is moving *straight down* in accordance with the tilt gravity that the whole level is based on, jumps, and then some sort of bizarre secondary gravity completely perpendicular to the first pulls the card to the right/left?

Or where the game allows the player to rotate the game to the point where it automatically triggers the controls to seize and the momentum in a *game revolving around momentum* to come to a grinding halt?

That's not how competent programmers design things.

[ChickeyCantor]

Obviously the level has been tested by people before it was even considered good or bad.

Like i said, its not perfect, but I honestly do not think its as horrible as this makes it out to be.
I do believe if you have the mechanism under control it will play out far better.

I assume you can only tilt left or right, but i can understand the mistake one could make once the screen rotates on its own, giving you the idea your tilt has gone off bounds.

So again, its not "great", but i also blame the player on this one.

My biggest problem with this game is that Sonic is so big on screen, the cam should have been zoomed out more.
I didnt notice the jump sign untill he crashed into the wall.

edit:
It looks like the cart wasnt moving downwards because of the slow drag and the constant collision with the wall. he took some space and then he went his way.

edit:
Ah wait...it says LT and RT...i thought it was done with the Wii mote..Yeah i can understand this could be total crap otherwise.
Tilting with the Wii-mote seemed more logical. Perhaps thats what the level was designed for.

[Mahr]

"I do believe if you have the mechanism under control it will play out far better"

The fact that it will play 'better' is immaterial because, as I pointed out, the level's has deeper problems, like being based entirely around a physics engine that *doesn't work*.

"So again, its not "great"

No, it's flawed at the basic programming level, which is about as far from great as one gets.

"I assume you can only tilt left or right, but i can understand the mistake one could make once the screen rotates on its own, giving you the idea your tilt has gone off bounds."

The reason it says at the beginning 'Don't tilt too steep' or whatever is because you can tilt the level to an extent that's too steep, as seen by the dozens of times that Sonic ends up upside down in the video because it's tilted at 110 degrees, or the full 180. Whenever the player does this, which is always by accident, the game punishes him by freezing Sonic in place. This leads to the full stop braking because it would break the game if Sonic could move while gravity pulled him down off the tracks.

So instead of doing the logical thing and just limiting the rotation so that Sonic never ends up upside down, they allow over-rotation with the caveat that it completely destroys the pace of the game. It's like having an option in Mario where if one accidentally presses too hard on the Dpad or the joystick during a jump, then Mario's movement immediately ceases and he drops straight down instead of actually clearing a pit.

"It looks like the cart wasnt moving downwards because of the slow drag and the constant collision with the wall."

When he jumps, there's no constant collision with the wall. The issue is in fact that there's nothing for him to collide with period.

http://img8.uploadhouse.com...

Notice how the screen is tilted down so he should be moving forward? Notice how gravity should be pulling him straight down? And how he's nowhere *close* touching the wall?

Yet the cart stops in mid air and then falls backwards diagonally. As in, it's falling *against* gravity. This is the textbook definition of a broken physics engine, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the player. The player could be the best gamer in the world, and the physics engine would still be woefully inadequate.

"he took some space and then he went his way."

Gravity doesn't work that way. If you're rolling down a hill and you hit a snag, and you can jump over the snag and clear it easily, you don't have to go back up the hill to get some sort of momentum going in order for gravity to function properly and stop pulling you *backwards up the hill*. That's absurd.

[ChickeyCantor]

Ah, i guess you are right, i wasnt looking at [that] part with the wall collision.

Didnt even notice it xD.

You make a good point, however in all honesty i thought this was played with the Wii-mote, so i couldnt understand how anyone could tilt the level left and right that bad. This is why i called the guy a noob.

It does look like crap in places.
Well at least they got the speed right =P XD

[Mahr]

"However in all honesty i thought this was played with the Wii-mote, so i couldnt understand how anyone could tilt the level left and right that bad."

Well, presumably the Wii and iPhone versions will have some kind of actual tilt functionality (although this is Sega we're dealing with, so who knows). The 360/PS3 versions... not so much.