After about a year and a half of absence, the Retrocast returns with monthly installments! In this month’s episode, discussion over Sonic 4: Episode 2 and Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed takes place.
The team consisting of Dario FF, Chimera and TwilightZoney have released the first act of the first stage of Sonic Unleashed, Windmill Isle, for the PC version of Sonic Generations. The purpose of this release is to test the mod on as many systems as possible. If it works on enough systems they’ll start to convert all of Unleashed’s stages. More details can be found in the following video and in the link that follows.
Here is the forum thread with details where it can be downloaded along with instructions on how to install it. Other credits go to JoeTE for ripping the songs, Korama for making CPKREDIR (which makes developing and using mods more efficient and easier) and MainMemory for making Generations Archive Editor (which does what the name implies). Like it was mentioned earlier, the intent for this release is to test it on as much hardware as possible. Meaning that you can help the development of the mod by posting the results of how it works on your set-up on the forums. Also post results if you mess around with it by doing stuff like combining it with other mods like Classic Sonic Adventures or some model swap you found on Youtube.
Character swaps aren’t exactly a rarity when it comes to Sonic hacks and mods. Especially recently with the PC version of Sonic Generations allowing modders to swap Sonic’s model with pretty much every other character in the game. But on the Xbox 360 and PS3 these mods don’t appear quite as often, mostly because hacking a console game means doing things Microsoft and Sony don’t want you to do which means you’d probably get banned from Xbox Live or Playstation Network for doing so. So it’s a good thing one of the people that actually bothered to hack Sonic 2006 made good use of it:
This video actually has been up since March 22nd, but… yeah, I don’t have an excuse for not covering this earlier. That doesn’t mean there’s not news about our favorite new playable Sonic character though. The video’s creator, Melpontro, has now started a show page for the videos starring Pelé the Beloved Dog, with there already being three more episodes. Be sure to read the descriptions:
Pelé the Beloved Dog in Dusty Desert
Hatsun the Pigeon in Wave Ocean
Pelé the Beloved Dog vs. Silver the Hedgehog
All this guy just needs to do now is to hack Sonic Unleashed and swap Sonic with Professor Pickle.
The PC version of Sonic Generations has already gotten a couple of mods in the past. First there was Classic Sonic Adventures which allowed you to play as Classic Sonic in Modern Sonic’s levels. Then we discovered we could import levels from Sonic Unleashed into the game. And now the Russian Sonic fan MrHelias94 has found out how to swap Sonic’s model in the game:
This basicly means that other characters in the game can be made playable, so if you ever wanted to play as Tails it’s possible now. How this can be done is shown in the video tutorial above. The results this delivers depends on if the character is about Sonic’s size, so if you’d try to play as a character like Eggman the outcome may not be what you expect, though this is not necessarily a bad thing. Videos of various characters being played like this can be found after the jump.
Sega’s been showing a lot of love to PC owners as of late with releases of Sonic Generations, Sonic 4: Episode 1 and Sonic CD to the platform. But what of Sonic Unleashed, the game which kicked off Modern Sonic’s current breakneck speed style (and included the highly divisive Werehog)? If anything, those Unleashed stages may soon be making their way as a patch to the PC version of the game.
Forum members Dario FF, Twilightzoney and Chimera have been hard at work trying to bring Unleashed‘s stages over to Generations’ engine. In one week, they went from bringing in the stages without any sort of collision and usage of Global Illumination Ambiance (GIA), the system used in both Unleashed and Generations to give some dynamic lighting to the levels, to the above video. So far, Windmill Isle Act 2, Dragon Road Act 1 and Cool Edge Act 1 have all made a partial conversion. The group admits that while progress is going well, there is still much work to be done.
In light of speculation that the popular Rom Hack Sonic Megamix might be cancelled due to recent events, the head of Team Megamix, Stealth, has opened a new thread for discussion on the game, and made a statement in regards to its progress.
So, Takashi Iizuka recently gave an interview to GamesReactor concerning the future of Sonic the Hedgehog, and I was personally fascinated by the following response:
But we want to reach the widest possible audience. So, you know, we will probably see Sonic going into other genres of games and also seeing Sonic in different media. So we will hopefully be able to have as many people as possible enjoy Sonic.
I am totally down for appealing to as wide an audience as possible, despite the mocking comments I read on that article. Wide appeal is good appeal. My question is this, though: can you appeal to both the three-year-old and six-year-old in all of us?
(Thanks to pkmnexplorer for this week’s “Sonic & Luigi” image, found in a recent Sears catalog.)
Sonic Retro News
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