Well looks like iceknight got the exclusive, after the winnders of the contest got theri prizes for makign thier badnkicks, he has finaly revealed the only piece of art showing genocide city, then known as cyber city zone, you can check out the pic as well as why it go scrapt on his page, the detail for just one section of this zon is amazing,sadly unlike the metroplis one, its not colored, enjoy, it will be under sonic 2 concept drawings. http://www.shadowsoft-games.com/sonicdatabase/
Woah, i've been waiting some time to see the concept art on it. I bet this will jumpstart fan projects to re-create the level.
Whatever you do, don't go to this site with firefox/mozilla. I think the front left quadrant of my brain exploded trying to read it. "When frontpage 98 attacks"...
That's so cool. We've dreaming about Genocity City for a long time. Its cool to see something finally surfacing! PD
I'm finally excited that something concrete about one of the lost Sonic 2 levels has surfaced, but it's still not enough to make me sign up to all those fan message boards or break out my copy of The Games Factory again. Why can't the "hangers-on" just accept that everybody else has grown up and grown out of their Sonic obsessions? Then again, my loss of faith in the series might not be down to community in-fighting or poorly made fan recreations, but more to do with Sonic's recent decline into mediocrity. Deep down inside, this revelation means more to me - a self confessed hardcore fanatic - than any of his latest games, and that includes the next generation update! P.S. Now if only Sonic Team would port their 16-bit classics onto the DS, complete with finished versions of all the lost levels (Hidden Palace, Dust Hill, Cyber City, etc.) and games (Crackers/Chaotix prototype?) then I might reconsider my negative stance on their current output...
It always suprises me the amount of new information that comes out 10+ years after a game was released . Kind of makes you wonder what lies in wait for us . We can only hope and pray, but hey, isn't that just every Sonic fan's dream
That's why a lot of us classic Sonic fans are the way we are - we've gotten disillusioned with the direction Sonic Team has taken the games, and so we tend to stick with the classics in terms of hacking efforts. Although I've heard good things about Sonic Rush, but I haven't played it myself. It's thanks to these fan efforts that the games have been disassembled to a usable form, and without that you wouldn't have things like Stealth's Knuckles in Sonic 1 hack, which is not the usual "fan recreation", but a fully working Genesis ROM that works just as good on real hardware as it does on emulation. And Stealth has also written a game engine for the PC that does a highly accurate simulation of the Sonic games' physics. Yeah, there's some cruft, but there's also lots of good stuff.
well the thing is teh scene itself has died out pretty much, their still the ocasional onlookers, but with this now, pretty much most questions about sonic 2 prototype have been answered, even naka in an interview with gamespy conducted by a sonic fan revealed that hidden palace was just meant to show where the chaos emeralds were at and that you would access it when you got all the emeralds similar to sonic and knuckles. As for cd he mentioned that he didnt have any involvment but admits alot of sonic games have stuff cut out of them, also told the intresting story of how he didnt know about the beta being on the internet and that he was shocked to find out so many have hacked and play it, as well as how the prototype most likely came to be dumped where it was stolen at a toy show in ny. Still from the looks of it i say the scene has been affected by the new games, though alot claim the new next gen sonic is suppose to be going back to its roots.
The interview with Yuji Naka came a long time after virtually everybody else had fled the Sonic fan scene (including myself), but due to his position it remains the closest thing we've ever had to closure on the whole Sonic 2 "lost levels" argument. Previous revelations from STI members filled some of the gaps in his comments, so really now all that's left to do is either remake these stages or find another prototype. Even the once mythical Sonic X-Treme is now seemingly within the reach of the few people still interested, though to be honest we've all come to learn now that its proverbial bare bones will never live up to the hype unless - once again - something more substantial is leaked. Considering the number of people who still give a damn about Sonic (especially after more recent titles), I fear we'll ever see anything worthwhile again... though a part of me would still love to know what else is locked away in a vault or the memory of a designer/programmer somebody has yet to ask!
