A great day in Sonic Fangaming

The Sonic Amateur Games Expo (SAGE) hosted by SFGHQ comes around annually and is essentially a small E3 that's completely web-based. Now don't get me wrong, if you've got Ryan Drummond (The official voice of Sonic) doing a chat room session it's hardly a failure, but SAGE doesn't often have too many amazing games. One or two a year, if any. But SAGE this year had more amazing games than usual. Yeah that might be because it had Sonic 1 MegaMix, the greatest Sonic 1 hack ever, but it's also down because of the following two:

The first, pictured above is the brilliant Retro Sonic. Okay "brilliant" doesn't describe this properly. "Perfect" would be a better word. In fact, BETTER than perfect. And I'm not just taking the fanboy route here. Retro Sonic mimics the original Sonic physics almost exactly. In fact, unless I'm mistaken it uses the same coding. Or close to. But, since a standard PC nowadays isn't limited to the MegaDrive's low colour palette, memory, sound chip, processor etc. it's a hundred times better looking/sounding than the MegaDrive games. Well okay, I wouldn't have chosen all these graphics but still. There was a demo released in 2002 made in one of Clickteam's products and people loved it. This 2007 demo is made practically from scratch and is so much better.

Oh and the most amazing thing about Retro Sonic? IT WILL PLAY ANY MEGADRIVE SONIC LEVEL. Not this build, although this one does play Emerald Hill perfectly, but the final version. And you get to make your own. And lets not forget, this is being ported to the Dreamcast.

The second, Sonic XG. Not as hyped up as Retro, but still needs a mention. The above image doesn't give this game justice so take a look at their site. It's probably the nicest looking Sonic fangame out there at the moment, and it plays great too. Not perfect physics and will lag a bit on older machines but brilliant nonetheless. Music's better than Retro as well, and it follows on directly from Sonic 3 & Knuckles. This is a perfect example of what Sonic Team should be making, not wasting time with broken 3D engines, stupid story plots and useless characters. If Sega released this on the Wii, I'd buy it, even if it didn't push the system to it's limits (although a 3D bonus like the one in the Saturn Sonic 3D would be cool =P).

So yeah, download both now.