You persky hedgehog

Almost forgot to post about Sonic Rebirth, the late arrival to SAGE 2009. This game, along with Sonic Robo Blast 2, was heavily hyped at this year's expo, and why not? All of its screenshots and videos looked excellent, and it was promising to be a full release. You don't get many full releases at SAGE that aren't simple minigames or tripe.

There's still not many screenshots that can be taken that don't look good, but Sonic Rebirth turned out to be a bit sub-par overall. Yes it's still a Sonic fangame that outclasses the majority out there on the net, but when you bear in mind the engine was largely made by someone else, it has a lot to live up to. Rebirth attempts to re-create Sonic 1, improving it dramatically and adding features such as Tails and unlockable Sonic 1 8-bit levels. It's a good idea in theory, because Sonic 1 is probably the worst of the 16-bit platformers, but in practise it hasn't quite passed Sega's old standards yet.

The graphics are sexcellent in most places, though towards the end you do start seeing more and more tiles taken straight from Sonic 1 with no touchups at all. The OGG music (which started out broken) isn't too great and requires extra downloads, the collisions and level design, despite being based on the original Sonic 1, make the game significantly harder and frustrating than the MegaDrive original. I did not think it was possible to make Labyrinth Zone worse, but Rebirth managed to prove me wrong. The cutscenes are littered with poor English (yes the creator isn't English himself, but that just sounds to me like a reason not to put cutscenes in the game =P) and it just generally lacks polish. The game seems to have lacked any bug-testing, because some of these flaws are surely simple fixes.

To give Rebirth some credit though, it does generally look fantastic, and Tails is a plus. Not entirely sure why anyone would want to unlock the likes of Bridge and Jungle zone - they weren't exactly brilliant levels to begin with and Rebirth makes them a lot harder, but hey. Also kudos with those Scrap Brain Zone Act 2 spinny disc things - this is the first game I've played that handles those properly - even the original Sonic 1 is flawed. Also Tails' game is a bit more fun because he can fly over bosses.

So overall, Rebirth didn't live up to expectations, but I can't really criticize everything as there are a few things Rebirth does very well indeed. Here's hoping this game will be spiced up a bit in the months that follow.