Busy busy
busy. But not too busy to sit down and knock another one of these out.
Green Hill
Chemical Plant
Sky Sanctuary
Green Hill and Chemical Plant were both shoe-ins. Sky Sanctuary came out of left field, but Sonic Team made its shaky concept work brilliantly and it filled a niche that none of the other level picks covered at the same time.
Speed Highway shouldn't be in this game. It has some historical notability as the level chosen to introduce SA1 to the world, but it was almost all style and no substance. When it wasn't on autopilot it suffered from some of the jankiest platforming in the game, and the few gameplay gimmicks it had were just boring. SA2's City Escape was already a guaranteed level to fill the urban trope, and there are so many other, better levels from SA1 they could've gone with that wouldn't have overlapped with it. Twinkle Park, Red Mountain, and Lost World all spring to mind, and after what they did with Sky Sanctuary even Sky Deck could've turned out something great.
Sky Sanctuary already proved that they can make a great level out of mediocre source material, but they also could've just chosen better source material.
Level Design
Kicking off with Act 2 from here on out, since the levels all hail from the 3D era.
Speed Highway in Generations isn't quite as heavy of an overhaul as Sky Sanctuary was, but it's a pretty significantly different level, for better or for worse. Most of the memorable bits of level design make a return: the big loop at the beginning, the camera-bending corkscrew, the enclosed tunnel, and the wall running. They work better with the modern gameplay model, though. The wall running bits in particular play much better as quickstep segments than they did in SA1, but in turn the throwback to Goin' Down is just a shadow of what it used to be. It was always filler, but at least before it was exciting filler, loaded with hazards and goodies. Generations axes all of the complexity it once had, leaving it as an unusually intrusive quickstep bit that isn't any more interesting than its counterparts in the same stage, much less across the rest of the game. It's novel the first time through, but gets in the way of the fun of replaying the stage.
Drifting makes the long stretches of road more interesting than they used to be (which is good because there're a lot more of them now too), but it also showcases how drifting can go wrong. In other levels, failing to drift around a turn can result in your momentum sending you careening off onto another route. There's a bit of that here, but then there's also quite a lot of slamming into walls and really awkward camera angles as a penalty instead.
Speed Highway never had a lot of real gimmicks, and they're handled better here. The rockets can't be missed, which is probably the single most positive change made in the entire game. For all of Generations' advancements in 3D platforming, there's almost none of it on display here as the loops of moving platforms are confined to the 2D segments where they constitute everything of interest that isn't a spike. That might be for the best, since the original's 3D platforming bits were all terrible until At Dawn. The copter rides, the bells, the direction changing devices, and the badniks are all as much inconsequential fluff as they ever were. Light dash chains make a few appearances, but the whole concept just doesn't play well in Generations and further complicates what is already a button-heavy control scheme. There's also one lonely set of balloons for reasons that escape me.
It does a better job of branching than some levels, featuring two distinct routes through most of it (Goin' Down unfortunately excluded) that you can hop between at various points. The speed of the level is such that it's hard to tell where some of the divergence points even are.
Oh, and the At Dawn segment is completely gone. It's remembered fondly for being a dense little platforming sandbox in the original level. I can understand why Generations cut it (as it's nearly a completely different level in terms of art and design and would've been a pain to fold into the rest of the map), but it's still a shame that the only remaining trace of it are the cars that populate the highway.
Speed Highway is a better level than it used to be, but it doesn't really manage to break away from being a spectacle first and foremost. It's almost all speed, all the time no matter how well you play, and that doesn't make for good pacing.
Art
I'm nearly certain that a big part of why Speed Highway was the first level they showed off is because the Dreamcast could actually render big boxy towers and highways in the sky pretty well. Light on geometry and light on unique textures. Slap one big texture in there for the skybox and you're good to go.
To that end, the biggest difference on display here is a density and depth of content that the Dreamcast couldn't dream of. Where 1998 featured a few token physically modeled buildings, 2011 has a full blown city; every inch of the backdrop is full of skyscrapers as far up, down, and all around as the eye can see. It gives the level a much stronger sense of
existence than it used to have, even if the highway still makes absolutely no sense.
And it's a much more detailed city, too. Texture variety is way up, especially with regards to the signs and glowing advertisements that populate the city. A number of different colored lights add distinct mood and personality to the otherwise repetitive streets, and they work with an array of material shaders that bring the glass and asphalt of the city to life. Taking a cue from the end of the Goin' Down segment, the level also has a few gratuitously detailed interior sections on display which stand out all the more for their brevity.
As much as the game didn't need the level at all, the art team did a great job of making this city shine like no other level in the series.
Music
It's Speed Highway. I mean, it's literally Speed Highway. The instrumentation and mixing has been cleaned up from the SA1 original, but you have to listen to the two versions back to back to discern any differences and they're not obvious even then. It's still the same kinda catchy, kinda repetitive track you knew from 1998.
Goin' Down, on the other hand, only features the intro and some vocal samples in common with its original version. The new one's better.
Level Design
While converting 2D levels into 3D was no small feat, Sonic Team did a good job of keeping the feel of the levels intact through the transition. Going from 3D to 2D is a much taller order, mostly because there's just nothing about the 3D mechanics that translates back into 2D in a recognizable way. To that end, none of the classic levels from here on out really feel anything like their source material. That's not a bad thing in and of itself and I'm not at all certain it's even possible to do, but it's an interesting observation. The result is that they constitute an all new classic experience that isn't significantly based on anything else at all, barring some bits based on other classic zones that weren't formally represented.
Speed Highway kicks off with a 2D recreation of the long drop and loop from its 3D counterpart, but swiftly diverges from there. The rocket, chopper, and bells all make token appearances and contribute as little to the level as they ever did. The direction changing devices show up frequently and are somewhat more exciting than usual by virtue of how often they fling Sonic vertically. But most of the level consists of grand curves and carefully measured jumps between platforms moving in every possible direction, crumbling and stable alike. The mix reminds me somewhat of Starlight Zone, the franchise's first city. There's certainly more of it here than there is Speed Highway.
Also unlike either of its 3D incarnations is that it's a very thoroughly multi-tiered level, riddled with paths that go up, down, and
all around straight through the landscape. And unlike some levels, each branch offers some sort of unique experience; the fast route (which isn't necessarily always the high road) still requires some platforming chops and the slow routes don't all feel the same. It's pleasantly light on bottomless pits, though it's also guilty of having quite a few that aren't signed. But it does have its moments where taking the low path or falling off a cliff will net you some goodies for your trouble, a classic trick which not every Act 1 remembered.
I have to give the Cop Speeder badniks here a special mention. They're still completely ineffectual, but they tend to be positioned next to item monitors and if you don't smash them, they'll smash your items. To my knowledge they're the only badnik in the entire franchise capable of that.
Unsurprisingly, taking the emphasis off the highway made for a considerably more interesting level than its modern counterpart, and it holds up well in comparison to its Act 1 brethren besides. If you're after a solid blend of running and jumping with potential for both exploration and speedrunning, look no further.
Art
Freed from the constraints of a highway, classic Sonic gets the opportunity to really check the level out, and there's a lot to take in when you're not checking out asphalt all the time. The backdrop that is the city constitutes a parallax environment that would make Genesis-era artists weep tears of envy, but the buildings also get up close and personal in a way that they just didn't for modern Sonic. Large parts of the level take place inside, or at least directly in front of a building, so the environment keeps shifting from office complex to hotel to parking garage to construction site, leaving the highway to serve as the connecting bits between them. The great glowing signs and advertisements that litter the landscape loom large, some of them being the very platforms you run across. It's a very artistically diverse level, and as noted above, everything looks fantastic to boot.
Usually modern Sonic manages to showcase the art better, but classic really runs away with it here.
Music
Speed Highway: The Dance Mix. It's still fundamentally the same song, but with a lot of filtering, more synth, a stronger kick drum, and the classic snare for flavor. If you liked it before you'll probably still like it, and vice versa. This just isn't an easy song to remix. It comes off as a little intense for classic's usual tempo, but it matches the higher than normal speed of the level well enough.