Sonic 2 HD fan remake
 

Something interesting I stumbled across, a HD fan remake of Sonic 2:

http://savygamer.blogspot.com/2008/0...ke-on-way.html

Interesting idea. It's good to see that they seem to be paying close attention to detail and that they're using a custom game engine. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

I saw this on Kotaku. It looks simply amazing. The sad thing is a majority of these bigger game companies hate well-done fangames... like they find them a threat or something. Joe Shmoe can make 400 crappy games that nobody cares about... but as soon as something incredible such as this starts getting cobbled together... the lawyers get dispatched.

You have to protect your copyrights, or risk losing them.

Yeah, it's just business, man. Nothing wrong with protecting what's rightfully yours.

Would you like it if every company sent you a cease-and-desist every time you drew fanart or wrote a fanfic? It's the same thing.

Not really.

It's looking pretty great so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was shut down. I remember the 3D Chrono Trigger remake that Square-Enix shut down and the 2D orcarina of time project.

I fail to see how it isn't.

Fanart and fanfics are merely lifting your own interpretation of the property, this is actually recreating the product in which the property was originally presented, without the consent of those who hold the rights to it. I'm not saying it's not a great idea, but it makes perfect sense that Sega might not be happy about this because it's taking their product out of their hands and they're not getting any revenue from it.

I could considerably see that, but what about the ones that are not enhanced remakes? I've seen some fangames that were not remakes get shut down.

Who the hell do you think I am, anyway? And like Doom said, it's not the same thing in the least.

And I have received cease-and-desist letters from companies. Differences being I know I was violating their copyrights and was ok with it.

Come again?

He's the God Damned Batman.

All right... can we just get back to the topic at hand? We're just going in circles and some of you are confusing the hell out of me.

Does anyone know how exactly high-definition sprites like these are made? Hand-drawn? Computer tablet? Photoshop? Magic?

Someone doesn't have a sense of humor.

... Why do I even bother...? :roll:

Here's a survival tip. Don't take anyone so seriously around here. We don't.

It would be funny if Sega sent them a C&D in a sick way. As if Sega could/would do any better. The best HD Hedgehog action they gave us was some blurry, upscaled garbage ports on Xbox Live Arcade.

At the forum, the guy running the project seems pretty abrasive about Sega and their potential lawyer stalking. He said he would move the server to Sweden if they pulled anything. I hope they have the balls to fight any inevitable shutdown attempts, because this looks to be better than anything Sega has put out since the Sammy takeover.

I hope this gets somewhere, because the work they have so far is amazing. The character art is better than the past 10 years of Sega's garbage combined. It's like official art from the 90s in motion. The best part though is the music. I haven't heard Sonic remixes that good....well, ever. Some of them outperform the originals (Casino Night, and Hill Top specifically).

It reminds me of the Retro Sonic engine to show up a while back.

I didn't even notice the soundtrack before. It's pretty interesting. Casino Night and Chemical Plant are 2 of my favoriet songs from the series, so I mainly just listened to them. The sax thing works very well on Casino Night, but I wish they would have picked somethign else on Chemical Plant, it sounds somewhat out of place there. Overall teh music sounds good though and is very faithful to the original. It's gotten me more excited about the potential of playing this.

Sonic was born onto 16-bit, but he was born on to very low-end 16-bit. So the question always lingered whether or not Sonic actually needed some high-quality remakes. If this turns out like it looks like it will turn out, it will effectively be the Super Mario All-Stars of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Super Mario All-Stars always felt like it was coloring in the blank spaces the original games left. The 8-bit games were like a rough copy, and All-Stars colored in all the blank spaces whilst preserving the style of the original games. The black backgrounds became snow-capped peaks. The empty blue skies became Goomba pillars and grassy fields, yet it all maintained the original vibe. The remake/upgrade worked because it was the same team fulfilling their original vision in a way 8-bit wouldn't let them. In that sense, I don't really play the NES versions anymore. I play the 16-bit remakes because they fulfilled the original intent of the creators to its maximum potential and preserved the style of the original game.

If Sega were to do something like this for Sonic 2, odds are it would turn out like trying to reproduce the original Super Mario Bros. in the style of New Super Mario Bros. It would be one generation's style overwriting another. A remake needs to preserve the style, feel, and overall mood of the original game. For Sega, that is now impossible because they've long ago forgotten why people liked Sonic in the first place. But these fans seem to fully understand what made the old Sonic games so great, and are proving it wasn't just nostalgia talking. The design was always solid, but now they are proving the style really was just that good.

I hope this turns out like Super Mario All-Stars did, in the sense that it turns out so good, it replaces the original. That's a lofty goal, but these people seem to have it in their sights.

We all understand the legality of the situation, but you all know you agree with what The S is saying. The second we get excited, it's going to be shut down. Like, I was piss-my-pants excited about the 2D OoT ****, but look what happened with that.



EDIT: Apparently, that was not shut down. Nevermind.

I don't know. Super Mario All-Stars didn't replace the originals for me. I still prefer the old NES version of SMB and SMB3. All-Stars, to me, felt...I could almost say soulless. It was like...stock design for every single character, item, enemy, background etc. etc. all carried over into 3(4) seperate games. Almost like the first instance of a stock Mario design in general, the same thing Nintendo have gone on to do with Mario games outside of the main franchise since the beginning of the Gamecube era.

The 'original' OoT2D never even existed. I know there's several of those projects but the guy behind the first one was nothing but a fraud.

Really? Could you elaborate?

I kind of remember this, it turned out he was faking the screen shots or something.

He'd set release dates for his 'demos' and then every time one'd approach his computer would mysteriously crash or his house would burn down or whatever excuse he could come up with. This went on for like three years, during which time the only material he'd release would be the same batch of old screenshots over and over again (which consistedly entirely of stolen/edited material). All the while asking for donations on his website.

I think he eventually got exposed or something, but in any case he's been quiet for years now.

I think there was a thing about it in EGM a few years back, but I can't seem to find the issue it was in. I have a large collection of older EGMs (2005 and down) so I may look again more later.

But I played the demos?

We must be talking about different ones then. There's been a few attempts at it I believe.

This is really disappointing. I hate everyone. :cry:

But we love you :(

There have been a TON of attempts at it. I know of four large ones.

The first the designer gave up on, which was the one that had demos coming out. The second was nothing but fake crap, probably the one Mecha is talking about. The third was a failure from the start, and I think ended up getting Zelda Classic created. The fourth is the most hilarious, as it was the one where the kid faked his own death in order to get out of all the "pressure" of creating a 2D OoT. That one got a ton of press, and eventually had people digging into the claims of his death, only to come across indisputable evidence again and again that it was all a lie.

The guy I'm talking about (Daniel Barras or something) was the first I believe; he did put out a couple of 'tech demos', but they showed nothing but crude movement and menu systems. The actual gameplay demo was the one that kept getting 'delayed'.

OoT ain't broken, don't fix it.