Why Did Sonic Origins Turn Out Buggy?
Reviewers of Sonic Origins, the highly anticipated remaster of the hog’s most classic titles, are not happy. While the overall presentation is nice, they’ve been pointing out the various glitches and bugs throughout the games that weren’t present in the originals. An outsider might ask how Sega could possibly mess this up, if all they had to do was dump some ROMs into a menu. The cynic would reply, “Sega always finds a way.”
But there’s a bit more to it than that. For one thing, Sonic Origins is NOT a ROM dump. It’s a legit rebuild of Sonic 1, 2, 3 and Knuckles from the ground up, using the Sonic Mania engine. The developers of that engine, Headcannon, also created this remaster and says they are aware of the bugs, but that not every single one is their fault. Developer Simon Thomley says they “asked to do major fixes near submission,” but they were denied the opportunity because of “submission and approval rules.” So it sounds like bugs were getting squashed up to deadline — which is typical of any game — but in this case, it goes beyond that…
Turns out when Headcannon saw the finished product, it had extra bugs they didn’t encounter in testing. Sega did some post-production work themselves, which tampered with the code and introduced more bugs. There’s the “Sega finds a way” at work.
Thomley says it is still possible to get a patch in the near future to fix the bugs (and why wouldn’t they, really) but they have yet to hear back from Sega. Maybe the company is just too busy doing damage control over the fact Yuji Naka casually tweeted a confirmation of Michael Jackson’s involvement in Sonic 3, then tried to walk it back with a nervous “uh, haha, did I say that?” This is the reason some tracks in Sonic 3 had to be redone, with tepid results.
June 27, 2022 @ 12:18 pm
June 27, 2022 @ 12:26 pm
June 27, 2022 @ 12:43 pm
June 27, 2022 @ 12:45 pm
June 28, 2022 @ 11:16 am