I remember being extremely disappointed when the first screenshots were published. The game's inferior graphical fidelity was immediately noticeable and the concept of throwing so many characters into the game when they would just end up being clones of each other seemed stupid even to my 16 year old self.
I definitely didn't share your unenthusiasm. Seeing a return to the colorful aesthetics of the Genesis games, the return of Metal Sonic with an awesome¹ new design, the return of the goddamn Chaotix (hey where's Mighty?), the expansion of
Sonic 2 and
3&K's having Tails following you to include Knuckles following you - and both being playable, at that... It was like a fanboy wet dream. I could even gloss over how shitty the shiny latex everyone was suddenly wearing over their
entire bodies looked because everything
else looked awesome.
Too bad the execution was
awful, something that became quickly apparent to even a cursory playthrough.
I think I was really hyped for the game because some of the levels resembled the style of the Genesis games (Seaside Hill looking like a beach version of Green Hill for example) and CHAOTIX. Oh how naive I was...
Pretty much this.
forgettable music (save maybe Bingo Highway and the Bonus Stage BGM)
This is actually one thing I
don't feel
Heroes has a problem with. I remember most of the tracks to that game pretty damn well (except the two Rail Canyon stages; those mostly lack a melody and suck majorly). Both Seaside Hills, at least one of the Grand Metropolises, the first Casino stage (Bingo Highway sucked, honestly), Frog Forest (which sounded a lot like something Spencer Nilsen would compose; don't care so much for the jungle stage thereafter), both Mystic Mansion tunes (prefer the first one, though, for the cartoonier feel), both Egg Fleet ones (prefer the second one that sounds like
Mega Man 5's title screen), the non-Emerald Special Stages, a fair deal of the menu themes... Yeah, the game's got an
awesome soundtrack.
I have more difficulty remembering
Shadow's music, though. Only one that really comes to mind is that sky ruin stage, which I only know so well because of Melpontro posting a thousand videos of his
Generations version of it.
I wonder if the rumor that Sony twisted Sega's arm into porting the game to the PS2, and greatly diminishing their time and resources was true...
I'd put about as much faith into this claim as I would the claim that
Sonic 2K6 only sucks because Microsoft demanded a Christmas release for it (oh,
somebody demanded that, alright, but I'd wager it was internal to Sega, and not any external company making the demands).
There were changes to the radar system?
Yeah; in
SA1, you can go after any of the three emeralds you want, and the radar will clue you in to their location. In
SA2, it will lock out all but the first, then the second, then the third. You might stumble upon the others by accident, but the radar wouldn't have helped you to find it unless you found it in
that order.
(¹And by "awesome" I mean "looked awesome to 14/15-year-old me but looks really silly and had no real point now that I look back on it at 24".)
