[magnum12]

I'm guessing Shadow's gameplay is a combination of Sonic style speed speed and high intensity combat (just the kind of thing I would enjoy). That 4th hedgehog looks like a twisted, evil Shadow. I can clearly see his hands and feet, they just look like they have dark spikes jutting out, once again suggesting a hedgehog filled with evil power. I don't see him as being crystal like but that's just my take on it.

[CosmicFalcon]

To me that fourth hedgehog looks like an 'evil' Shadow... possibly Shadow's main nemesis in the game? I mean after all, it looks like Silver is after Sonic and Sonic is after Eggman... maybe Shadow's story is parallel to theirs but not interlinking.

With Shadow all red and Chaos Blast glowy, the other hedgehog looks very blue glowy, like Shadow with a full Chaos Control gauge. The way those screens look, all those robots would seem to be the fourth hedgehog's minions, with which Shadow is doing battle.

Heck, Silver came from the future, maybe that fourth hedgehog is like... Shadow. From the future.

In which case... maybe Silver is Sonic from the future!

Or maybe not the direct future, but a parallel future! Y'know, all that mumbo jumbo about time travel and alternate universes.

Or maybe Silver and fourthhedgehog are Sonic and Shadow's sons, respectively!

:o :o :o

Controvertial speculation!

[Bilan]

Or possibly something completely different!

<_<

[Marth]

nice observation Marth, thanks

It still looks great though. It definitely looks much better than Gamecube in any case.

What were you playing, Mario Kart? Really, this does not look that much better than, say,
Star Fox Adventures. (I would say Resident Evil 4. Going by what people say about it, it
might look better than this Sonic game, but because I haven't played it myself, I can't use it as an example.)
Again, I still think the graphics are good. It's just that I've seen models like this on GCN,
and overall, this still doesn't look that much better. (It's a leap over anything Sonic on GCN, though,
but mainly because there are no actual Sonic GCN games, unless you count the multiplatform Sonic Heroes,
which most of the time, looked the same as the upgraded Dreamcast ports, anyway.)

And now, these new pictures are just confirming that this doesn't look next-generation.
Sonic looks very different than he did on GameCube, but it's because of his new look,
not because he has way more polygons (because he doesn't).
The shadows are only about as good as they were in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle,
which was far from having the best shadows on GameCube.
The environments are good, but jagged edges are all over.

[eggFL]

But Star Fox Adventures is a really slow game and the environments are really small. This game has much larger environments, more draw distance, much faster speed, and still looks much better than Star Fox Adventures even in still screenshots.

[Marth]

Sorry I took so long to reply.

About SFA, it still had some pretty big areas (Walled City). I don't see how speed makes
such a huge difference here. Sonic would just go across the area in less time.
The draw distance was nearly perfect in SFA, and that's more than I can say for Sonic's earlier games.
SA had pop-up just a few feet away (maybe 15 feet for rings, and 200 feet for the worst mountains,
although I didn't actually measure the distance... anyway, it's bad).
SA2 and SH used pop-up in ways that it wasn't so easily visible, but it still happened a lot.
(Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean anything about this game.)
As for this new game, I haven't seen much of it, but it wouldn't be easy for it to beat SFA in draw distance.
Now, if you really care about size and speed, look at F-Zero GX. Some things faded in,
but the basic course and most of the buildings or mountains usually stayed visible from miles (or tens of miles) away.
The entire Emerald Coast stage could probably fit into the pit areas of the first track.
(Okay, that could be an exaggeration, but it would be interesting to see how true it is. Maybe it's even completely true!)

Even if you still insist that this next-gen Sonic game still looks much better than anything on GCN,
you can't say it's even nearly a full generation ahead of GameCube.
Remember how big of a difference that should be?
At first, there were just a few basic polygon shapes, with flat shading and few textures.
Everything about the graphics was bad (framerate, polygon counts, draw distance, everything).
Then, there were huge, fully-textured, 3-D worlds. There were still jagged edges and other flaws,
but it was much, much better than any SNES Super FX stuff.
And now (GCN), we have smooth models that can look almost perfect (except close-up),
crisp textures, high framerates, etc. This new generation should bring in models that
look perfect even close-up, as well as even better textures and all that stuff, but it doesn't.

[eggFL]

Sonic games have the character travel through environments at much faster speed. So the hardware would have to process these environments quickly as well as all the enemies and objects you are zipping past. Plus, since Sonic moves so quickly, the stages also have to be a lot larger than any of the environments than most games, including Star Fox Adventures.

Star Fox Adventures achieves good looking graphics, but it was an easy feat considering the type of game it was. It was like a copout. The environments are generally small and are appropriate for Nintendo 64. Fox moves very slowly in the game, and nothing really dynamic or impressive happens in any of the areas, so it's easy to throw some fur shading in, and random special effects since the hardware power wouldn't really have anywhere else to go.

F-Zero GX is a good example, but in this case it's like the opposite of Star Fox Adventures. The gameplay is very, very fast, but the graphics the game produces are quite simple. The tracks are very flat and repetitive in appearance, and they float in mid air with the track generally winding around simple background objects. The cars are simple models and are no comparison to more elaborate looking character models which actually move like in Star Fox Adventures, or the detailed, rounded car models in Gran Turismo 3.

And speaking of Gran Turismo 3 -- the cars look good in it, but there is no damage modeling, and barely any speed. The backgrounds are extremely static and the bystanders are cardboard cut-outs. Would you compare the cars in Gran Turismo to the cars in Crisis City as a basis for why Sonic Next Gen has poor graphics?

Sonic The Hedgehog doesn't use the hardware of Xbox 360 to create better screenshots, but it does it to create more versatile and consistent graphics. It uses humans, expressive mascot characters, massive levels with a lot of detail and interaction, lots of objects, elaborate physics, and high speed action gameplay. It would have to look pretty terrible for me to mind that it doesn't look better enough in still screenshots compared to certain Gamecube games. The game /is/ taking advantage of new hardware. I'd say it's doing so to much more effective ways than any other game that sticks to just one of the many things the new Sonic game does, even if it does that one thing a little better.

[Marth]

-That probably would be harder on the CPU, but that's not really anything about graphics.
The environments in previous Sonic games haven't been that big. It's mostly that Sonic zips
through them in seconds, while Fox takes a long time to jog across about any area.

-What does this Sonic game do that is dynamic and impressive?

-F-Zero GX manages to look very good in screenshots and in most videos.
It only looks bad when the camera goes right up against a wall (or any object),
or when the draw distance (for certain objects) starts getting really bad
(Aeropolis and the first Green Plant really fail here.). Of course, this would look
really, really bad if there was a Sonic-style camera, but then, GX, with environments
that are many, many times bigger, is completely different, and so it doesn't really have
any advantage or disadvantage here. (A bug would see Sonic's worlds as being really
ugly, so then a bug game would look much better. But then, it would have even smaller worlds.)
The machine models are simple, but they still use quite a lot of polygons.
(Most of the F-Zero X machines are as blocky as ever, but some AX machines, like the
Cosmic Dolphin, are very smooth... at least where they are supposed to be smooth.)
Oh, and speaking of F-Zero GX, this is a game that almost never slows down.
(It can slow down at the end of a race if you do too many things at once, and for
a few other reasons like this, but in regular gameplay, it's a steady 60 fps.)
We still have to see about the Sonic game. (I'm guessing it'll tie here. It can't exactly win, anyway.)
Again, I'm not saying it looks as good as or better than the next-gen Sonic.
My point was and still is that there's just not a really big difference.

-No, of course not. Wasn't that for PS1, anyway? Games of that era often had one good feature,
but looked bad in other ways. Most GameCube games are much less like this.
I drew attention to the wheel mainly because I was showing that the graphics are simply flawed (not bad).

-Yes, the graphics seem to be consistent, and I can see that the game looks better than GCN.
I should look at the video again, but still I don't think it was really impressive in any way.
It has lots of stuff in the levels, but I don't think the speed has much to do with the graphics.
And again, it doesn't look like a full generation leap. (It's not that Sonic doesn't use the hardware.
It's that the hardware isn't as much of a leap up as it was the last few times.)

I'm trying to think of games I have that look consistent... the Sonic games
(SA2B and SH) were similar to the next-gen Sonic, except with lower quality overall.
If they had been done right (they obviously aren't pushing the hardware to its limits),
they probably could've looked pretty close to this. SA2B, at least, uses about the same
polygon counts on the models (at least for some characters, like Sonic and Shadow).

And then Metroid Prime has speed, framerate, draw distance, detail, and textures,
and it just has a bit of jaggedness. Oh, and it uses multiple light sources.
It still doesn't look as good as the Sonic game, but still again, I say that it's not too far.

Okay, I'm kind of tired of arguing (at least until Sunday or whenever :P).
Remember my main point so I don't have to repeat it so much. :P
Now I can finish arguing with F-Man about Sky Deck.

[eggFL]

-What does this Sonic game do that is dynamic and impressive?

It has real time collapsing objects, a relevant physics engine, expressive character models with a toon consistency to them, and high speed gameplay... among anything else I might have forgotten.

Again, I'm not saying it looks as good as or better than the next-gen Sonic.
My point was and still is that there's just not a really big difference.

I think there's a significant difference, because F-Zero GX is simply tracks + cars. Sonic attempts to put one or more moving characters and other moving objects and enemies into elaborate, believable stages.

F-Zero GX cars can look pretty good, but they're still quite simple. The tracks look good, but they're hardly ambitious. F-Zero GX gets away with looking good and being fast, but it was the least it can do considering the approach they took with the game.

-No, of course not. Wasn't that for PS1, anyway? Games of that era often had one good feature,
but looked bad in other ways. Most GameCube games are much less like this.
I drew attention to the wheel mainly because I was showing that the graphics are simply flawed (not bad).

Understood. Although Gran Turismo 3 is for Playstation 2.

-Yes, the graphics seem to be consistent, and I can see that the game looks better than GCN.
I should look at the video again, but still I don't think it was really impressive in any way.
It has lots of stuff in the levels, but I don't think the speed has much to do with the graphics.
And again, it doesn't look like a full generation leap. (It's not that Sonic doesn't use the hardware.
It's that the hardware isn't as much of a leap up as it was the last few times.)

Well isn't that expected? I thought it was with all games, not just Sonic06.

I'm trying to think of games I have that look consistent... the Sonic games
(SA2B and SH) were similar to the next-gen Sonic, except with lower quality overall.
If they had been done right (they obviously aren't pushing the hardware to its limits),
they probably could've looked pretty close to this.

They could have looked better, but I can't believe that they could look almost as good as Sonic06.

And then Metroid Prime has speed, framerate, draw distance, detail, and textures,
and it just has a bit of jaggedness. Oh, and it uses multiple light sources.
It still doesn't look as good as the Sonic game, but still again, I say that it's not too far.

Metroid Prime doesn't have a lot of speed. The game also has the benefit of not having to display a character model 99 percent of the time. Also, most of the environments are tight indoor spaces, with many opportunities to load.

[Marth]

It has real time collapsing objects, a relevant physics engine, expressive character models with a toon consistency to them, and high speed gameplay... among anything else I might have forgotten.

Most of that is pretty standard (with the exception of the physics engine,
which might be very good, although, knowing Sonic, I'm not expecting much).
Sonic Adventure had all that (especially the expressive characters... too expressive! :P).
There were many places where objects collapsed, one of them being Sky Deck 2,
where about a third of the Egg Carrier's wing broke up and fell.
And SA is 8 years older, plus it's on hardware that was already very
old and outdated even before the XBox 360 was released (and it was a launch game).
Oh, and again, there's a difference between physics and graphics.

F-Zero GX cars can look pretty good, but they're still quite simple. The tracks look good, but they're hardly ambitious. F-Zero GX gets away with looking good and being fast, but it was the least it can do considering the approach they took with the game.

It's not just "fast". You seem to be familiar with it, so you must know that
the machines can move at over 1000-3000 km/h, even when they aren't diving.
(The Space Dive trick would make that 9500+ km/h.)
And there's the size: roads hundreds of feet wide (a good part or
even most of an Action stage), "small" boost plates that are at least
60x25 feet, and pit lanes that could swallow long, narrow action stages whole.
F-Zero and Sonic can't be directly compared in graphic quality
(in detail and polygons) if the size and speed are so different.

Well isn't that expected? I thought it was with all games, not just Sonic06.

Exactly! I doubt that any of the three systems will
go more than half a generation ahead of the current ones.
Rolken blames it mostly on this game. I half-agree.
Sonic hasn't delivered good graphics since 2001, and this one
probably follows those more-recent games. Also, it probably follows
the original Sonic Adventure by relying on a new system to look good.
(SA was said to have good graphics just because it looked better than
what was already out (meaning N64 games, most of them still without
the Expansion Pak). It didn't use the system as efficiently as
some other games (I don't have a DC, so all I know is that SA looks
really bad compared to GCN, and I don't know about other DC games.), though.)
Mainly, I still blame it on this generation of systems just not being as
much of a step up as every other time since the NES or whenever.
Screenshots I've seen of Revolution (Wii) don't look much better.

They could have looked better, but I can't believe that they could look almost as good as Sonic06.

You agree with me at least on that the models in SA2B are
around the same smoothness as the models in Sonic06, right?
And even though SA2B mostly uses Dreamcast graphics (and doesn't
come close to pushing the GCN to its limits), some stages
(mainly non-metal stages) don't look that bad even on GameCube.
(On the other hand, the Kart racing stages and Sky Rail look pretty bad,
and the space stages are unimpressive, all of them partly because of pop-up.)

Metroid Prime doesn't have a lot of speed. The game also has the benefit of not having to display a character model 99 percent of the time. Also, most of the environments are tight indoor spaces, with many opportunities to load.

1. It's not that slow, and the Boost Ball is especially fast.
2. But it can display the model at any place in the game.
You can press X repeatedly, and there's also an Action Replay code to
make Samus's model stay in front of the visor and cannon at all times.
3. Almost every game (some exceptions being platformers with wide-open
stages (the Mario games) and any non-racing sport I can think of)
does that, but MP gets off easy by having so many tunnels and corridors.
Other games have to hide the pop-up behind corners.
SA2 and Sonic Heroes obviously do this. I didn't notice anything in Sonic06,
(I only watched the video once), but it must be happening,
even if it's hidden perfectly (which it probably isn't).
It doesn't really count as a huge environment when pieces of it
appear and disappear all the time, and especially when the stages
are broken into areas with load times between them
(didn't you complain about that being in Sonic06 a while ago?).

[eggFL]

You agree with me at least on that the models in SA2B are
around the same smoothness as the models in Sonic06, right?

I don't agree. That's an exaggeration.

Anyway, you make terrific points. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. BUT Sonic06 is still totally rad.

[Marth]

I don't agree. That's an exaggeration.

Anyway, you make terrific points. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. BUT Sonic06 is still totally rad.

1. You're right. The models in Sonic06 aren't that smooth. :P
Okay, but being serious, they both look near-perfect, except when the camera is super-close.
I would get some pictures of SA2B to remind everyone about the smooth models,
but my webcam probably isn't good enough (unless maybe I focused on a very small part of the TV).
Maybe you're right. I'll check again, and maybe I can get some pictures.
But don't forget:
- I'm not talking about the humans. That would be silly. I'm talking about Sonic and Shadow,
who had some of the best models in SA2B, and who are shown in most of the Sonic06 pictures.
- There are many different levels of quality. The lowest one, used for Action Stages in the Dreamcast version,
is very simple by GCN standards. It sometimes appears in SA2B's versus mode for some reason.
The FMA cutscene model isn't too bad, but edges are easily visible, especially around Sonic's eyes.
It seems that SEGA figured that the SA2 models were good enough and didn't need to be replaced for SA2B.
The model used in Action Stages in the GameCube version is very smooth, and flat edges are
very hard to see at the regular resolution, even when the camera is very close.
The main flaws are that Sonic has no mouth, and that his hands are a bit simple.
Finally, the model used in the intro to SA2B has a mouth and smooth hands, and
Sonic looks smooth all over (around his eyes). I haven't compared it directly to the Action Stage model.
Remember that I'm only talking about Sonic, especially in this case. The other models are probably from Dreamcast.

2. Thanks. And it does have good graphics (just unimpressive, considering that this is a new generation).
About the gameplay... I haven't seen much, and I don't want to look at it too much until it gets ported,
or until I somehow manage to get thousands of dollars of extra money (or until XB360 emulation
gets up to full speed in a few decades, but by then, the system will cost $20).

[F-Man]

Models in SA2 are horrible (in polygon count), please don't compare them to those in Sonic06. Or if you do, do it from all angles considered, not just X and Y like from a screenshot (pictures are 2D). But even then, I don't see how they can be comparable.

[Marth]

Models in SA2 are horrible (in polygon count), please don't compare them to those in Sonic06. Or if you do, do it from all angles considered, not just X and Y like from a screenshot (pictures are 2D). But even then, I don't see how they can be comparable.

We already talked about this a bit (or a lot) in the Chat, but I'm posting a more-organized reply.

I don't know what you meant there. I said in my last post that I'm talking about the highest-quality models
in Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. That means no Dreamcast or cutscene junk.
The best models are very smooth (pretty good even by GameCube standards),
and they appear to be perfect except in very close or clear pictures.
I put a picture of SA2B and a picture of Sonic06 up on the screen at the same time.
The models looked pretty close in quality, although there was a difference in quality between the screenshots.
Other than the bright blue shine of Sonic's fur in Sonic06 (which, as far as I can see, was
done much more nicely than the ugly white shine in SADX), and Sonic's new look,
the models were about the same. (I counted at least 5 polygons along the edge of
one of Sonic's spikes in SA2B, and 6 along the edge of the spike in Sonic06.
The eyes looked worse than usual in both pictures (bad angle), but they seem to be about the same.
Sonic's shoes are definitely better now, mainly because there isn't just a black bitmap
showing the hole where Sonic's ankle is supposed to go. The hands in Sonic06 are around
the same smoothness as the hands of the highest-quality SA2B models.)
I don't know about that picture taken at Chao World, though. I'd have to see if I can
make Sonic look that bad in my copy. Either he's a little blocky from the back,
or he somehow just looked bad in that picture. But then, I haven't seen Sonic in Sonic06 from the back like that.

Anyway, the SA2B models are definitely not blocky. Flawed, like everything, but not blocky.
And I say they are comparable to Sonic06, even if there might be slight differences in polygon counts.
(Pictures are attached. They're blurry, but you can get your GCN out and try close-ups like this yourself.)