Sonic 2 HD

A Sonic the Hedgehog game which completely fills my screen, yet doesn't make me wish it didn't. Yep it's the alpha version of the fan-created Sonic 2 HD - what joy.

SAGE 2011: Part 2

The smell of fear.

A second batch of Sonic fangames, to enrich our lives no less.

SAGE 2011: Part 1

It's Sonic Amateur Games Expo time! This year it all seems to be about taking an open source engine and slapping levels onto it, though Sonic fangaming is always a nice topic to follow as often the results top the official works of Sega.

And so, here's a first batch of mini-reviews in Blog Squirrel's limited coverage of the event.

Streets of Rage Remake

You'd think, what with my stint as leader of a fangaming website, the topic of fangaming would pop up more often on this blog of mine. Well, your non-existent wishes have been granted.

...for this is Streets of Rage Remake, fangame extraordinaire. Born among us eight years ago, slaughtered at the hands of Sega's legal team, it stands as a figurehead of all things mighty in the world of fangaming. Oh and it's probably the greatest beat-'em-up of all time, but who cares about that?

Sonic Classic

If you too are feeling the need for a Sonic the Hedgehog 4 alternative, Sonic Classic might just float your boat. It's a glitchy, unpolished fangame with a questionable selection of music, but aside from that it does exactly what it says on the tin - it's a classic Sonic the Hedgehog game, free from poor voice acting, odd storylines and stupid ideas... well... aside from having two water levels. And most importantly, it's a complete game. What's not to like?

If I were to grade it, I'd give it a high C, but in a world where most fangames fail to hand their work in, it still stands as being pretty good.

Sonic Fan Remix

Hey I'm not too thrilled about saving it as a JPEG either, but this is indeed a playable Sonic Fan game running in real time on this computer. It's the talk of the town at the moment - a fangame designed by Sonic Retro users pelikan13 and Mercury which, even if you're not a massive fan of the strange art styles employed here, completely wipes the floor with Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Built with the Unity 3D engine, Sonic Fan Remix is a three level demo which surprisingly still looks great on slightly under-powered hardware. Things to note are an almost perfect physics engine and of course all those neat graphical effects. I can't say I agree with all the graphical and audio choices, but it's certainly the most impressive Sonic fan game I've ever seen... don't know about you.

The topic of discussion can be found here, though do note that thanks to the likes of Kotaku a lot of download mirrors have died hosting this thing. Nevertheless, fantastic stuff and certainly worth your while.

SAGE 2010: Part 2

SAGE Harder

Some games have shown up fashionably late at the SAGE 2010. Time to have a look at them (and some of the ones I didn't look at before).

SAGE 2010

Have you heard that Sonic Colours theme tune announced not too long ago? Do yourself a favour - conserve your brain cells and don't go hunting for it. You see, the problem with Sonic Team is that despite their name, they can't really make a good Sonic game anymore. My theory is they keep flushing out new experiments as they attempt to appeal to the Japanese (who have never really liked Sega or Sonic), rather than focus on the other, bigger markets that are quite happy with the design choices made back in the early 1990s.

But that's why we have the Sonic Ameteur Games Expo, or "SAGE". People come from all over the world to release Sonic the Hedgehog fangames, many of which like to trump Sega's efforts. Here's a run-down of the stuff Squirrel likes this year.

Mario's Brewery

You wouldn't want this on Nintendo

Forget the old record set by BROS, this unofficial Mario game is six years older and six times as worse. Developed by a guy called Jeremy Thorne in 1983 for the Commodore 64, Mario's Brewery could potentially be the first Mario fangame of all time, suffering from awful build quality and lacking official Nintendo endorsement. Clearly inspired by Donkey Kong, our good friend Mario has decided to move into beverage production for some reason. A bizarre pixellated contraption throws an endless supply of barrels down a series of girders and it's up to Mario to... jump over them. Mario's an odd chap.

There's no beginning, there's no end, there's just Mario struggling to avoid barrels in a bland world with repetitive music. Though the game is generous enough to allow Mario to jump over numerous barrels at once, the increased jump distance means you're more likely to be killed by barrels rolling about above. There's no title screen or high scores and a lack of animation clearly gives the impression it was made by a fan. After all, the Commodore 64 fanbase was filled with programmers wanting to design games for the system (as were most of the other computer fanbases at the time).

It's barely playable, but it's interesting to see how far Mario fangames date back to. It was only a year after the "Mario" name had even been invented for the character.

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.

SAGE 2009

It's currently the 14th Sonic Ameteur Games Expo! Though I work at a Super Mario fangaming website, I often find myself drifting towards the hedgehog end because at the end of the day, I am a veteran Sega fan. You see, Nintendo are still hanging about producing games in the same vein as they were a decade or two ago (see: new Super Mario Bros Wii). But Sega? Sega stopped making Sonic games as I knew them in the late 90s, and though they've had a few hits with the Adventure series and the handheld titles, it's still not quite the Sonic I remember. SAGE often is.

I have more faith in the fangaming scene when it comes to producing quality Sonic games. Now granted, there's always some awful titles and many games are never finished, but SAGE is always a good place to go if you want to see some of the best games the fangaming scene has to offer. There's no Retro Sonic XG or Sonic Nexus this year, but there are others, such as...


Sonic Robo Blast 2 (again)

I find it difficult to believe a fangame can spend more than a decade in development and still not be finished, but then again when Sonic Robo Blast 2 started, there wasn't really much of a fangaming scene at all. SSNTails and the SRB2 gang have given us the first demo in three years dubbed the "marriage edition" (because SSNTails is so old he's getting married!), adding in a couple of new levels and fixing all sorts of problems. Aside from that 80MB download, this is probably the "biggest" SAGE release this year now.

Sonic: Time Twisted

I played this last year (or the year before) at SAGE and back then I would have classed it as "average" at best. This year, it's vastly improved and is actually worth mentioning. Don't really know what's going on with the whole "time travelling" thing - there's a lot of it and it doesn't really seem to serve any purpose yet except to get in the way, but nevertheless, another great demo. It's not a perfect match for my slow PC however (but it's a similar situation with all Game Maker games).

Sonic Zero Remastered

Another good game, though the fact it's using the Sonic Worlds engine probably gives that impression straight away. With only one level, there's not much to comment on, but it's still helping to fill that gap Sega left us, and it looks nice.

Sonic: Project Mettrix

Stealth seems to have his E02 engine up on display every SAGE nowadays, and with that comes Project Mettrix, the Sonic fangame that demonstrates the engine. Mettrix is about as close as you can come to having a perfect Sonic 3 & Knuckles engine, and it's always nice to see Shining Island Zone once more. The new level this year, Bronze Lake, does look a bit out of place though. Mettrix isn't exactly an artist's wet dream but this one doesn't really fit with the character sprites at all. If you don't care about graphics though, you'll have yourself a great game here, and let's not forget that not all great programmers are great artists.

Sonic Gemini

A co-operative platformer where you switch between Sonic and Metal Sonic. At a grand total of 13 frames per second, I can't really comment on this one much either, but it has the potential to be something special. It might lag a bit, but it's still nice to look at.

and there's a dozen more but I'm aware these blog posts take up quite a bit of room on the front page without condensed versions.

So check these games out sometime, especially if you're one of the many thousands of people longing for a return to the classic Sonic experience.

NCFC 2½: The smell of fear

There's absolutely no point in posting this because of the two places this blog is linked from, one is MFGG who are the biggest player in the Nintendo Community Fangame Convention (NCFC) and the other IS NCFC.

But it's still worth a look.

...or if you're not a games developer it'll be worth a look this October.

Also for the 2½ people who visit this blog, stuff did happen, and it was on MFGG, which is why I've yet to post anything big here.

NCFC

http://ncfc.taloncrossing.com/

Although really I don't know why I'm posting this since 99% of you will be from MFGG anyway.

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.

Fangames of pure perfection

Since this blog's kicked out my Player Adventure MFGG signature link probably would be wise to have it listed here. And hey, while I'm at it, lets list ALL the crappy games I've helped make over the last couple of years:

The First Five Player Adventure Games

Super Hyper Paper Deluxe Mario Bros. Galaxy World Land 4: Partners In Sunshine Superstar Island & Saga of Time Advance 64 DS

SHPDMBGWL4:PISSI&SOTA64DS 2

Super Paper Mario Hyper Combo Finish 2

Super MFGG War (Alright this one isn't by any means bad but I better list it anyway. Also it's not like I really did anything here, just put skins and maps into a pack).

And to think, there's people nearly half my age creating perfect Super Mario clones.