Yeah, the demo is here. Once we missed SAGE, we took our dear sweet time, but now it is here for you to finally experience. You can play two acts of Sunset Shore and that’s about it. However, the level is sprawling with branching paths, so it warrants a few playthroughs for you to see everything. Nexus truly illustrates what a person can do in the brand new Retro-Sonic interface, so we hope it is a clear too you indication that this summer was a long, time-consuming process on making a brand new iteration of the engine. We also felt that we should take our time in creating our ideal product, as a hasty release definitely will piss people off. It was time well spent.
Secondly, you can record your best time with screen capture software and upload it to YouTube for a chance win $15. Yes! All you have to do is post your time attack run as a video response to the contest “hub” video, WHICH IS RIGHT HERE!
Finally, I encourage everybody to read our Nexus website and development blog, as the team and I will be updating it frequently, Smash Bros. Dojo style! You’ll see new screenshots, features, gameplay videos, and updates at least once a week, if not more. New music will be added to the on-site player periodically, as well. The community has always been left in the dark when it comes to Nexus’ development, as I only have been shedding light on details around SAGE time, but now, you can read about it year round. The website is essentially the game’s manual, so it will have all the goods. The first feature on the site is “Meet That Badnik,” where we go in-depth on one of Robotnik’s mechanical mercenaries. You can expect articles of similar quality coming down the pipe.
Oh, and hello, I am writing for this front page now. I hope to contribute the same amount of news that I write for other Sonic blogs to Retro. I’ll try not to copy and paste too much.
In Stealth’s latest topic concerning his work (as mentioned earlier on this blog), a few rumblings were made concerning any sort of Sonic game on the Texas Instruments series of calculators. As it happens, there is (was?) development on a homebrew Sonic title for several different TI platforms by the folks at UnitedTI. There’s a mini-site that discusses progress made, though it’s quite outdated.
On the site’s forums, there’s been some more recent activity, with the lead developer coming back to at least put some work towards it. If you know anything about programming for TI calculators, you may want to stop by and help the guy out.
This year’s Sonic Amateur Games Expo has come to an end, with this year seeming to be one of the best. For those that don’t know about SAGE is an online gaming expo for fan game developers to show off their Sonic the Hedgehog based games.
Some highlights this year included interviews and workshops with various people tied to the Sonic franchise including Chris Senn, Eric Iwasaki, Lee Brotherton, Mike Pollock, Richard Jacques, and Ryan Drummond. You can find various content including chat logs and workshop documents here under the Chat Transcripts and Logs section.
As mentioned earlier the main point of SAGE is the Sonic-based games created by members of the Sonic Community. Some rather interesting ones included:
Stealth showed off a new version his E02 Game Engine and Sonic the Hedgehog: Project Mettrix this year. Project Mettrix uses the E02 Game Engine which some may be familiar with having seen the level export feature in SonEd. Sonic Rebirth is an interesting remake of Sonic 1 giving it updated graphics and a storyline to follow. For those of you interested in Sonic 2: HD or the Sonic 4 project this may catch your eye.
Saxman has made his first release for his long waited for project, ProSonic. It is still has much work to be done but it is definitely off to a great start.
There is also the final release of Sonic 1 Megamix by Retro’s Team Megamix. This is the last and final release we will see from Team Megamix with the game brought to the Sega CD.
Of course this is not all there was to SAGE, I invite you to take a look to see if there are any other projects and games that interested you.
When Sonic the Hedgehog was first released, Sega promised to release a version of the icon game for the Amiga. Obviously, this never happened, but that didn’t stop an enterprising guy simply known as “Rebel” from giving it a go.
The game, based on the Backbone engine, is still relatively rough, but shows the capacity of the engine. Along with the engine, Rebel released a level editor for people to make their own creations.
Let’s face it - there are a lot of bad Sonic fan games out there. Some of them are bad on purpose, but sadly many of them are not. Every so often though, someone will make a fan game or a hack that plays good, has a fun environment, uses good programming skills, and has nice graphics. I think I maybe have stumbled upon such a thing in the 3D Fangames department (for once).
Check past the break for more info and my thoughts.
